Story Time #1
The London Rickshaw Incident of 2013
The other day at work, an executive said that in the new year, we’re going to prioritize velocity over volume. Well, for my own personal business (the business we call writing!) I want to prioritize velocity and volume. As for quality—we’ll see. So in an effort to churn out more words, I’m trying a new series: Regular installments of quick-hit stories, musings, and chunks of word vomit (foreshadowing) that I hope at the very least will be momentarily entertaining. And if they’re not, well I guess I’ll just walk into traffic.
Whenever I feel stuck at the start of a blank page, I think of the old adage: Write what you know. And what I know, mostly, is a lot of stories about late nights and sticky shot glasses and the fleeting feeling of being Young, Wild, n Free (“So what we get drunk, so what we smoke weed” - Wiz Khalifa). And when someone asks me to tell one of those stories, the first one I think of is this.
The London Rickshaw Incident of 2013
(names have been removed to protect the innocent and the guilty)
I studied abroad in Barcelona during the fall semester of my Junior year. And while there are plenty of sordid tales from just my time in that city—including the reason I couldn’t drink tequila for more than five years after—there was a particular weekend abroad that made it into the annals of our shared history.
The year before Study Abroad, I lived in a 6-person dorm suite with five girls that were essentially strangers to me when we moved in together. By the end of the year, we had become one of those college friend groups I thought only happened in movies: Saturday mornings sitting cross-legged on someone’s bed smoking out of a makeshift bong and regaling each other with what we had gotten up to the night before; Friday nights blasting house music, trading going out tops, and contouring each other’s cleavage with bronzer. [Sometimes I still miss those nights, and the mornings coming home in my skirt and heels to someone gleefully screaming, “You slut!”]
But Junior year separated us. Half of us were scattered across Europe in the fall, the other half had graduated early or stayed on campus. And everyone who was in our school’s business program—which included most of the guys we were friends with at the time—was expected to study in London. So, an idea quickly formed: What if we all met up in London for Thanksgiving weekend?
I couldn’t say now who made the plans. But we ended up staying in a 24-person mixed-gender hostel room above a pub in Paddington that had the radiators turned up to the maximum temperature, and three-tier bunk beds stuffed with all manner of luggage and international travelers.
The first night was tame for our standards. Dinner, club on the Thames, lots of glitter, neon green shots, back home via the bus in one piece, thank the lord.
Night two was a different story.
I will admit that I am an unreliable narrator here. But this is what I remember: We met up with our guy friends at their shared apartment, drank Bacardi 151, smoked something that could have been weed or anything else, and then went out to a tourist bar in Piccadilly Circus. I don’t remember the bar much, besides the fact that it was two stories, because I spent the entire time in the bathroom. There’s evidence of this somewhere, a photo of me collapsed over the toilet under fluorescent lighting in a stall with peeling paint. I’m in tight black low-rise pants and a borrowed corset top, and my straightened hair has been pulled back into a ponytail. In the picture, you can see that I’ve already lost one of my hoop earrings.
The exorcism must have gone on for quite some time, because the next thing I knew the bathroom attendant was yelling at me.
“You need to get it together!” she said in a rough British accent. “I’m gonna have to kick you out if you’re not up in two minutes. You’ve got to get her out of here,” she told my friends.
I remember thinking that felt really unfair, because if I could control the incessant, violent projection of vomit, I obviously would have done that already. But I dutifully stumbled to my feet, splashed some water on my face, and gave myself a stern talking to: It’s time to be sober now. We don’t have a choice!
The bar was dark and moderately crowded. I took a few deep breaths, trying to focus on just standing straight and hoping some of the poison might sweat its way out of my body. Things were good for about three minutes. And then I felt it: Yup, despite the chastisement of Madame President Bathroom, I’m going to throw up again—right now. In a stroke of genius, I reached for an empty beer pitcher on a nearby table and shouted into it.
At that point, I was ready to admit defeat. Luckily, one of my old roommates J also wanted to go back to our brothel of a hostel, and we stepped outside to start the journey home.
Now, this was pre-Uber, so we planned to catch a taxi or get the bus, since the Tube had closed at midnight. We waited on the high street for 10, 15, and finally going on 30 minutes. No buses were running in our direction. Not a single taxi was open. It was a 20-minute car ride back to our Paddington pub—easily 45 minutes or an hour’s walk. I was leaning my full body weight on J, who was almost half my size, and beginning to think we might have to sleep in the street or just go back into the bar and try and white-knuckle the rest of the night.
We kept telling each other: the next taxi that turns the corner will be empty. The next bus that comes will be ours. The only transport that regularly came our way was the light-up pedicabs that cycled past us playing music and trying to upcharge tourists.
The minutes on the street seemed to stretch into an impossibly long night. I could smell the puke on my fleece jacket and taste it in my mouth, and my head was starting to pound something fierce.
Finally, J and I looked at each other, eyes bloodshot and resigned. Without exchanging a word, we knew exactly what we had to do.
She flagged down the next pedicab that rounded the corner, ignored his protests of how long the ride would be, and piled us into the backseat, exhausted. The cold air felt good as we rode through London’s main thoroughfare, and my eyes began to get heavy.
When I opened them, what felt like an hour later, we were on a quiet side street, still in the rickshaw, barely moving. Our driver was biking slower than I thought was humanly possible. His entire back was drenched in sweat.
“How much further?” he begged us.
“Keep going,” J insisted, sounding like the Jillian Michaels workout videos we used to do in our dorm room. “We’re almost there, I promise!”
I woke up on the top bunk in an 80F room with the sun shining in my eyes and strange men snoring. And I clambered down the ladder, into the shared bathroom in the hallway, and threw up again.
We were due to leave that morning. On the stomach-curdling Underground ride to the airport, I checked my wallet only to find it completely empty of cash. I looked at J sitting across from me.
“I could have sworn I had more money left over?”
“Oh,” she said. “You gave all your cash to the pedicab guy last night. It was for the best, though.” I had a momentary flashback of him bent over his bike, nearly weeping. “He was really hurting.”
I used to tell this story at the dinner table when I was home from college, knowing that my parents liked hearing some of the PG-13 happenings that reminded them of their own experiences and cemented their relief that I wasn’t a completely hopeless loser. But I had to edit this one. I didn’t want them to worry that I had been blacked out in another country, unable to even get myself home from the bar. So I changed the narrative slightly: In it, I was sober and tired, and J had been sloppy drunk, needing me to come to the rescue. “God, she was wasted,” I would say. “She fell asleep the entire ride home.” I don’t know that they ever believed me.