I Suck at Girls

by Justin Halpern

  “Yes.”

  The three of us sat down at a table in the restaurant’s air-conditioned interior, and Ryan and I learned quickly that Joe’s English vocabulary was limited to about fifty words. Food was either “large delicious,” “delicious,” or “not delicious.” Temperatures were either “large hot” or “not hot.” Oddly, there was one full English sentence he could manage: “Second-year guard Ray Allen has a silky-smooth, NBA-ready game.” When Joe saw how entertained we were by this, he showed us the Ray Allen basketball card that he kept in his wallet, which bore this very sentence. Since Ryan and I knew not one word of Vietnamese, we tried to communicate with Joe using the English words he knew, so he wouldn’t feel left out.

  After dinner, and over the next couple days, Joe joined me and Ryan as we explored Florence. He was up for any activity, especially if it involved going somewhere near to a leather goods shop. He loved leather, insisted on browsing through any store that sold it, and at one point purchased a pair of burgundy leather shorts, which he later tried on for us at the hostel before pronouncing them “unstoppable” (another word he’d found on the Ray Allen card). Joe was good-natured, a fun guy to have around, and he seemed to have traveled to Europe for the same reasons we had. A couple days after meeting him, the three of us sat down for lunch at a small café near our hostel and Ryan broke down our plan.

  “Ibiza,” Ryan said, pointing at a picture of one of the island’s many nightclubs in a Spanish travel guidebook he’d bought that day.

  “You, me, Ryan, Ibiza?” I said to Joe.

  “Large hot?” Joe said, looking at the picture.

  “Everywhere is large hot, Joe. There’s a heat wave in Europe,” Ryan responded.

  Joe sat back for a moment thinking as he picked up his glass of ice water and ran it against his forehead.

  “Large girls?” Joe asked.

  “Oh, dude. Tons of large girls. This is why we’re here, Joe. We’ve waited the whole trip to meet girls in Ibiza and start partying,” Ryan said.

  “Hmmmm,” Joe said.

  “Joe. You will like Ibiza. Silky-smooth guard Ray Allen and his NBA-ready game would like Ibiza.”

  Joe laughed. “Second-year guard Ray Allen has a silky-smooth, NBA-ready game.”

  “I think that’s a yes,” Ryan said to me.

  The three of us walked to the train station and bought tickets for the following day to Barcelona, where we’d catch the ferry to Ibiza. We must have looked like one of those movies where three animals that would never get along in the wild join forces to find their way back home.

  I figured the next couple days were going to be a total blackout, so I decided to give my parents a call that evening. After I chatted with my mom for a few minutes, she put my dad on the line.

  “So, how’s it going? You seeing some art and history or you too busy trying to slap your pecker against anything with a wet spot?”

  “No, I saw some art. We spent like two hours in the Louvre.”

  “Nice. Two thousand years of priceless works of art and you bust through it in two hours. Eat shit, da Vinci,” he said. “Where you heading next?”

  “An island called Ibiza,” I said.

  “It’s pronounced Ibitha,” he replied.

  “You’ve heard of it?”

  “I hate to shit on your preconceived notions of me, but I’m pretty goddamn worldly.”

  “Well, that’s where we’re going,” I said, looking at my watch to make sure I hadn’t used up too much of my prepaid calling card.

  “Feel free to tell me to piss off, but why in the hell are you going to some shit stain in the middle of the ocean?”

  “It’s supposed to be one big party, twenty-four hours a day.”

  “Sounds like the worst place on earth. Woulda thought you hated shit like that.”

  “Well, I don’t,” I said.

  “Whatever floats your boat. Well, anyway, have fun and don’t screw a woman if she’s on drugs.”

  It’s not often that a sane human being thinks, “I’ll show my dad I can party,” but that phrase reverberated in my head for the next couple hours.

  The next day, Ryan, Joe, and I boarded a train to Barcelona. Our train car looked and smelled like it had once been used to transport slaughtered livestock. There was no air-conditioning on board, and each train car was filled with sweaty travelers. By the time we found seats, Joe had already broken into a full body sweat that was threatening to seep through his denim jacket.

  Just before the train took off, a group of three girls in their late teens wearing summery dresses and carrying backpacks embroidered with the Mexican flag sat down in the row ahead of us. Joe looked at us, then the girls, then back at us. Then he gave us a thumbs-up.

  “It’s a super-long train ride. We should talk to these girls. Try and get them to go to Ibiza with us,” Ry whispered.

  “Totally,” I whispered back.

  “Maybe we wait until they get up to go to the bathroom or something, then start up a conversation. Ask them what the weirdest house they’ve ever seen is, or something,” Ry said.

  “I don’t think that’s a good opener,” I whispered.

  “What? Yes it is. It’s not a yes-or-no question. They have to talk about the house and why it’s weird, and that starts a conversation.”

  Before we could argue, Joe was tapping the girl in front of him on the shoulder. She turned around.

  “Train large hot, yes?” Joe said to her.

  “It is really hot. Our whole trip, everywhere has been hot,” the girl said with a thick Spanish accent.

  “Vietnam Joe,” he said, sticking his hand out to shake.

  “Abelena,” she said, shaking his hand. “Where are you going to?”

  “Hey, we’re Joe’s friends. You guys are from Mexico, huh? What’s the weirdest house you’ve ever seen there?” Ryan interrupted.

  “We’re going to Ibiza,” I quickly added.

  “Fiesta,” Joe said, smiling and nodding his head, causing all the girls to laugh.

  “That’s funny,” Abelena said to Joe.

  Within twenty minutes the three girls had turned around in their seats and were focusing intensely on Joe, who was showing them detailed pencil drawings of motorcycles he had sketched in a journal.

  “For Joe,” he said, pointing at one specific drawing of an aerodynamic-looking motorcycle.

  “That is definitely the best one. I can see why you like it,” Abelena said to him.

  “Which one is for me?” her friend asked, smiling at Joe like he was a celebrity she had waited in line to meet.

  Ryan turned to me in disbelief.

  “Dude. I don’t even know what’s going on right now, but it is super awesome,” Ryan said.

  By the time we reached Barcelona, not only had Joe invited Abelena to sit next to him, where she now slept with her head on his shoulder, but he had gotten her travel companions warmed up to us. Ryan and I spent most of the ten-hour ride chatting with Eloisa and Anetta, who, we learned, were freshmen in college and lived in Mexico City. The weirdest house they’d ever seen, they told us, was a house in Tijuana that looked like a giant naked woman. At about four in the morning, when almost everyone else on the train was sleeping, I asked Eloisa if she and her friends wanted to come to Ibiza with us. She said yes.

  The next morning, my eyes opened just as we were pulling into the Barcelona train station. Ryan, Joe, the three girls, and I grabbed our packs and walked down to the ferry building in the Barcelona harbor to purchase our tickets for a ship leaving that night. Just as we were about to get in line, Joe pulled Ryan and me aside.

  “I no Ibiza,” Joe said.

  “What? Do you need to borrow money?” I asked, grabbing my wallet and showing him a few Euros to make my point.

  “No. Money I own.”

  “Then what’s the problem?” Ryan asked.

  Abelena approached with her bag.

  “Joe and I are going to go to San Sebastián together. It was very nice meeti
ng you guys,” she said. Then she walked back to her friends, exchanged a few sentences in Spanish with them, and hugged them good-bye.

  “Wow,” Ryan said.

  “Yes,” Joe said.

  “Well, it was really great meeting you, Joe,” I said.

  “Yes. I want fun time for Justin. Fun time for Ryan,” he replied.

  “Thanks, man.”

  “I own sad,” he added.

  “We own it, too, man,” I said.

  I gave Joe my e-mail address. Then Ryan and I watched as he and Abelena walked out of the ferry station together.

  After bumming around on the beach all day, Ryan, Eloisa, Anetta, and I boarded a dilapidated ship whose rusted exterior and cracked floorboards made it look like it should have been setting sail for Ellis Island in the summer of 1925. As we pulled away from the harbor, Ryan and I stood out on the bow.

  “This is it, dude. We’re going to the party capital of the world. We have girls with us. Stuff is going to get crazy, and we have to get crazy with it. No excuses,” Ryan said.

  “Totally,” I agreed.

  We didn’t have enough money for a room on board, so the four of us slept in lounge chairs on the observation deck. Thirteen hours later, the sun smacked us across the face, waking us up just as we were approaching the island. Ibiza looked to be a series of hills, covered in small white Mediterranean homes, plunging down to a sandy beach lined with grand resorts and the turquoise ocean below. When we disembarked from the boat, we realized we had no idea where to go. All the other tourists grabbed taxis and drove off toward the resorts, but we couldn’t afford those rates, and we weren’t about to waste money on a cab. The streets were deserted and it was horror-movie quiet. We shrugged our shoulders, chose a direction almost at random, and started walking down a narrow street when suddenly a voice from behind us said, “You guys lost?”

  Standing behind us was a bronzed American man in his late twenties, wearing baggy white pants, a pair of bright red shoes covered in sparkles, an electric-blue short-sleeve T-shirt that seemed to be made of Lycra, and a pair of Oakley-style sunglasses with fluorescent yellow lenses. He reminded me of an animal you’d see in a nature special about how the most dangerous species in the Amazon use their colorful markings as a warning to other animals.

  “I can show you around. I need to walk off this E. I’m rolling balls so fucking hard right now,” he said, running his hands through his spiked hair, then popping his pinkie in his mouth and tugging on his cheek like a fish that’d been hooked.

  With no real idea where we were going, we took him up on his offer, and headed off in the exact opposite direction from the one we’d chosen. As we walked, he explained that he lived on the island and worked as a promoter for a few different clubs.

  “It’s my job to make sure the party is super-hot. If it’s not hot enough, I make it hotter,” he said as we walked down the boardwalk.

  “So what’s the hottest party to go to in Ibiza?” Ryan asked.

  “You can’t handle that party. If you touched that party, it would burn you.”

  “Okay. Well, what about the second hottest party?” I asked.

  “Still too hot for you,” he said.

  “Just tell us a party that’s appropriately hot for us,” Ryan snapped.

  He looked us up and down. “Club Pacha,” he said.

  He led us to a hostel that sat at the end of a small alley, above an auto shop, and was on his way.

  As soon as we got into our tiny single room, Eloisa and Anetta went into the bathroom together and threw on skirts and bikini tops. Then the four of us headed down to the beach. We spent the day lounging on the sand in front of a hotel and swigging from a small bottle of vodka we’d brought with us from Barcelona. Everything was going just as I’d hoped; even things I was normally self-conscious about seemed unimportant.

  “So, I kinda have weird chest hair,” I said, as I removed my shirt.

  “I like it. It looks like an eagle that’s grabbing another eagle,” Anetta said.

  “Fuck yeah. It totally looks like a crazy eagle fight,” Ryan chimed in.

  We knew we weren’t going to be able to afford drinks at the club, so that evening Ryan and I walked to a nearby liquor store, bought a couple dozen airplane-sized bottles of Skyy Vodka, Captain Morgan’s, and Jack Daniels, and stuffed them in our pants pockets so that it looked like we were wearing football pads. By the time our taxi arrived at Pacha, the four of us had downed several bottles each and my tongue was starting to feel numb. Before us was a big white building, with two large palm trees flanking the entrance and a wash of purple floodlights over the whole facade.

  As other people gathered in front of the club, though, we started feeling out of place. Ryan and I were both wearing khaki slacks and I was wearing New Balance sneakers, whereas almost everyone around us was dressed in all-white clothing so skin-tight it looked like they were heading to a speed-skating competition. Standing next to them, I looked like an old man on the way to his grandson’s third-grade play.

  “Man. Everyone looks like they’re from the future,” Ryan said.

  We pushed past the front door and into a cavernous open room where the techno music’s pulsing bass smacked me in the face and vibrated through my body. The walls were twenty feet high and draped in white fabric; all around us, purple and white spotlights chased each other fast enough to give you motion sickness. In the middle of the room was a concrete dance floor packed with hundreds of sweaty bodies writhing around like they were going through heroin withdrawal. Sitting above the dancers in the DJ booth was a middle-aged bald man wearing a cape who periodically grabbed a strobe light and flashed it over the crowd. Even though we were standing on the outskirts of the dance floor, arms and legs flailed wildly and knocked into us every few seconds.

  “Man, people dance really weird here,” I shouted as loud as I could, so that Ryan could hear me over the music.

  “Come outside for a sec,” Ryan yelled back at me, then held his hand up to Eloisa’s ear and said something to her.

  We walked away from the dance floor and up some stairs to a rooftop lounge where the music was quieter. A group of young people were smoking cigarettes in a huddle; in a booth nearby sat an obese man with a hairline that started at his eyebrows, with one incredibly attractive woman on his lap and two others on either side of him.

  “We can’t start making excuses not to party,” Ryan said, insistently.

  “What are you talking about? I’m here. I’m ready to party.”

  “No. You just said, ‘People dance really weird here,’” he replied.

  “They do. I’m just making an observation. Here’s another one: That fat guy has a lot of hot girls around him. Just an observation,” I said.

  “That fat guy is partying. You stand around talking about how weird people are, and you’ll end up doing that the whole night. I do it, too. But we can’t do that shit,” Ryan said, his eyes growing wilder as he talked.

  “What are you, my coach? I don’t need you to give me a speech, dude.”

  “Yes, you do! Because I spent all my money to come to this place, dude. Did you know I was saving up to buy a dune buggy? But I didn’t buy one. Instead I came here. To party.”

  “Why were you saving up to buy a dune buggy? Where would you even ride that?”

  “I was gonna ride it to school or something. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter because I can’t buy one now. But what I can do is fucking party, in the partiest party place in the world. Vietnam Joe is off somewhere in Spain and he speaks like two words of English and he’s making sweet love to women and shit.”

  Ryan removed three minibottles of vodka from his pockets and unscrewed their caps. “Let’s do this,” he said, then tilted his head back and poured all three down his throat one after the other. I took out three bottles of Captain Morgan’s and did the same, fighting the urge to throw them back up.

  “Also, everyone here seems like they’re into rich guys. So, if anyone asks you,
I’m telling people my dad invented the calculator watch, and my name is Brian Waters,” he said as he tossed the empty bottles into a trash can. “Who are you?” he asked.

  “Hmm. I don’t know.”

  “I like the name Robert C. Manufas. I mean, it’s your call, but I’m just saying I like that one.”

  “How about this: I’m Robert C. Manufas and I own an Internet company that helps people find tax loopholes?”

  “Hell, yeah,” he said giving me a high five.

  We each downed one more tiny bottle of liquor and strode confidently back into the club. Ryan grabbed Eloisa, who was standing where we’d left her, and walked out onto the dance floor. I spotted Anetta out on the floor, making out with a tall guy in a white jumpsuit with the zipper opened down to his belly button, revealing his shaved chest. I stood on the periphery of the dance floor for a few moments. I have never been what you would call “a good dancer.” I have one move: reaching my arms out wide, leaning back, and lurching my chest forward to the rhythm of the music, like a guy being shot repeatedly in the back. But that night, I pushed that move to its absolute limits.

  The only way I could even keep track of time passing was that every so often a giant cloud of freezing vapor would blast from the corner of the room, making it impossible to see your hand in front of your face for a few seconds. Ryan drank all of his tiny bottles of liquor, and most of mine, and spent what felt like several hours carrying Eloisa on his shoulders and challenging other couples to chicken fights until security insisted he stop. I danced till seven in the morning with anyone who made the mistake of making eye contact with me.

  Toward the end of the night, I was dancing with a tall, rangy blond woman who looked like she was in her late twenties. After an extended grinding session, she pulled me outside onto the upstairs balcony, where I noticed that the sky was becoming light.

  “You’re fucking intense,” she said, then pounded an entire bottle of water, most of which ran down her chin and chest and onto her white tank top.

  “Just dancing,” I replied.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Robert C. Manufas,” I said, sticking to my script, then realizing no one ever says his full name and middle initial when answering that question.