“Don’t talk to strangers” is a neat little morsel of wisdom that is supposedly the only thing keeping you from 15 minutes of fame with an age-progressed picture on the side of a milk carton, but it’s never served me well. For one, I’ve learned that it is the well-dressed, wholesome-looking, “really quite harmless” strangers that turn out to be the most morally reprehensible, depraved, despicable individuals. They have cunningly learned to play life’s game to the point where even the most intuitive, street-smart person would fall prey to their machinations.
The other main issue is that, although assholes permeate the world, the average human being is a compassionate, caring, lively individual that is repulsed by the idea of hurting someone. This means you will be at a loss for not meeting this person. Just like with any group that has a bad reputation: the few creepy strangers fuck it up for the rest of them.
Now let’s get this straight. Strangers are not all equal. A college kid from Oregon that you meet in France is a different stranger than the shifty-eyed one in a trench coat on the street corner. And I am notoriously bad at noticing these red flags until I’m already balls deep in a situation (and to try to get out then would mean losing my balls).
Jolly London is not so jolly.
One of the most storyworthy evenings I have spent with a stranger was in a hostel in London. I was at the end of a 9 week trip, and every time I opened my wallet, flies didn’t buzz out, they roared because they were dying from starvation and had long since resorted to cannibalism. The cheapest place to stay was literally a pub with rooms above it, where a night’s stay got you a free pint. By virtue of tightening my belt till I made it to the flight the next morning, this is where I would have to spend the night.
Although this setup might seem outlandish, it’s really quite natural. The inns of medieval Europe and the saloons of the Wild West were all places where you could get a hot meal, drown your sorrows, and sleep it off on a straw-filled mattress upstairs. Yet they were also places where you could gamble away a few silver coins while saving a cut to spend some time with one of the resident “ladies” and debts were resolved at the end of a rusty hunter’s knife. AKA I was going to get into some shit.
Ahhh, that famous, famous locale
As soon as I walk in, the stench of varnished wood marinated for 80 years in stale beer and warm urine punched me uncomfortably in the nostrils. Several barflies hovered at either end of the bar in various stages of slumber. The one who was mildly awake had a variety of tattoos covering his forearms in that strange blue color, apparently the only one available before 2001, the far-from-masterpieces-of-body-art doing a poor job of masking his skin complexion, that characteristic pinkish hue of the British Isles which I can only describe as “sickly salmon”.
The bartender checked me in and after seeing my last name, said “Are you Portuguese?” I said, “Yea my parents are from Portugal.” This seemingly innocuous exchange quickly animated the narcoleptic drunk, with an outburst of “Portuguese, eh? We used to pal up with the lot of you back in my navy days. There’s a pub just down the way where a Portuguese is pourin’ the pints!” I shrugged this off and thought that was that.
Apparently it was not. “Why don’t you come down there with me and meet him?” A strange, old man had just asked me to come to a nondescript location and drink with some randoms. This is where the red flag should be flapping like the one raised at Iwo Jima, it’s majestic fluttering less so a patriotic symbol and more so a speed and trajectory indicator of the next mortar trained directly on my person.
Well, it was going to be my last night in Europe for some time and he offered to buy me a beer, so my response: kinda sketchy but what the hell? I’ll go for it.
An hour later I was buzzed sitting at the corner of the bar with my new friend and two Englishmen in newsboy hats, sweater vests, and brown coats, rollicking over pints of Bass Ale, where every comment provoked bouts of dense laughter and the shouts of, “Ah ya fockin’ cunt!” sailing over our little thunderstorm of obscenity. This was a true English experience.
English pub fare….about the only edible thing there.
The Portuguese bartender was my age (about 30/40 years younger than any of these guys), and had a sarcastic streak. His favorite pastime was apparently calling these guys on their bullshit, and within half an hour, he was making fun of my new friend’s knuckle tattoos.
“Love…..Hate? Why would you put something like that?” asking for clarity on the silliness of the diametrically-opposed constructs, the blue letters leaking away into the pink canvas with time. “I fockin’ hate it,” he said dejectedly looking like he wanted to spit into his beer with disgust. This sounded a tad absurd, so the bartender asked him to repeat it. He declared that he hated his tattoos, more annoyed than anything this time. Of course, this provided for confused laughter, and prodding for more details.
Being pretty sauced by now, his mood was prime for some full disclosure, and he proceeded to launch into a nostalgic tale of his youth…..which included drinking and dicks. What a shocker.
Apparently, as a seriously bored sailor in the Royal Navy, and surrounded by the horny youths, percolated with machismo that are the bread and butter of any armed services population, they would plan exciting dares/challenges that were to unfold when they put into port for some R & R. And each challenge, of course, was precipitated by stints of heavy drinking.
Wasn’t forcing all of China to buy opium from you and creating a nation of addicts enough? Now you decorate your buildings with these racist statues?
Eventually they learned that one challenge stood out from them all, a perfect blend of boldness, comedy, and love for country. Since ships of many nations would put in to the same ports, the goal was to identify foreign sailors (mostly Australian and American), get them hammered, and once they were surely sufficiently at a loss for memory, bring them to a tattoo parlor to commemorate that night for eternity. Without their knowledge, of course.
According to my friend, his markings were an act of revenge by his rival sailors, once they had caught on to this British game and had enough casualties of the conflict to prove the strategy’s existence. He himself related the humiliation of waking up to a pounding headache, searing pain and blood where the needles had gone to work and the shame of an American drinking him under the table.
Not to be fazed, he merrily declared he had only continued the cycle of violence, smiling through a grin of teeth that had seen a lot of wear over the years and whose seeming gaps were really dark brown, evenly-spaced stains, the color of a dried tobacco leaf. He seemed to recline in the imaginary back of his bar stool. As he told it, one time he had really gotten someone good, and it was a black guy, a fact which he for some reason, seemed to relish.
These stone-surrounded coffins look pretty zombie-proof.
Maybe he was being descriptive or maybe outright racist, but strangely, he acted as if he believed that one race of people was less gullible than the other and getting this guy should get him extra points. Apparently the Royal sailors had learned that blacks were the most skeptical of British friendship and generosity. Given the Anglophone world’s general good-will to Africa’s descendants (I’m being totally facetious), his poor victim’s wariness was merited. Who knows why his defenses were down, but it was clear this American sailor was my drinking buddy’s prize, and I soon found out why.
The night so many decades ago had progressed as any other. Boastful talk, macho posturing, and gallons of drink. It started to seem, as the story continued that although he was certainly getting drunk that night, the rose-skinned Brit was always lying in wait. I just imagined him sipping slowly or pouring out drinks under the table, laughing with perfect timing but always keeping his eyes trained on his prey. Waiting for the perfect moment.
Eventually the time had come and they suggested a stop at the tattoo parlor. Sailors tend to be tatted up, so this might not have been the sinister smoking gun, the clear proof your companions were gonna fuck with you that I knew it to be in hindsight. To them, maybe it was just a casual way to commemorate the rager in Saigon or the shit-facement at Macau.
The Thames River
One can only guess when the fatal strike was made or how. The circumstances must have been odd, to say the least. Maybe there was a jolly war of stereotypical banter, some sort of manhood-checking going on, some discussion of who could endure the most pain, or maybe just crude jokes. Let’s cut to the chase: whatever the situation, the black guy went to sleep that night with a fresh tattoo of a spider on his dick.
To this, we froze in disbelief for a split second, and then erupted into crazed, air-sucking, gaspy laughter. When we had calmed down a bit after what could have been a whole half an hour, our supposedly tough protagonist looked at us with a face that was concurrently sheepish and mischievous, adding, “And then I stayed on base the whole weekend because I knew he was looking for me! Without that I wouldn’t be alive to tell you chaps wha’ I done!”
Lesson learned: Take a chance to talk to a stranger for a good story. Just beware if they’re a Navy vet wanting to commemorate the night.
–Marcelo (32), Providence, RI, having second thoughts about needles in London