Synopsis: Cokehead - Volume 3: Euro-trashed. A real-life adventure spanning two continents, 'Cokehead' is a semi-regular pulp series chronicling one man’s journey to and from the depths of cocaine addiction including entanglements with Mexican drug police and a trio of knife-wielding pimps in Amsterdam, and life as a second-rate model in Milan, a bartender in Toronto and philanderer everywhere. (You may also be interested in reading Cokehead - Volume 2: Wham, Bam, Amsterdam!)
Glynn looked shell-shocked as he stumbled, beer still in hand, from the busy après-ski bar’s bathroom. “I just pissed blood,” he said.
Pete and I laughed. Dan, the Brit bloke we’d met the day before skiing on the Tyrolean slopes, seemed somewhat more concerned. “That’s not fucking funny,” he said.
In hindsight, it probably wasn’t.
By daybreak, Glynn could barely stand and, upon inspection, we were horrified to see that one of his testicles had swelled to the size of a baseball.
Pete and I sprang into action. Leaving Glynn groaning, curled up and clutching his nuts in bed, we raced downstairs, thankfully arriving in the pantry in time to enjoy our Austrian host’s inclusive continental breakfast, where, over an assortment of cold cuts and several cups of coffee, we decided to forgo skiing for the day in favor of driving Glynn to hospital in Innsbruck.
An hour later Glynn hobbled into emergency and was pumped full of penicillin for an unspecified infection – allegedly sparked by a tryst in a hot tub following a going-away party back home – for the next 10 days. The language barrier made it impossible to gauge the seriousness of his affliction, but, as an unscientific comparison, Erich would spend a week in the spinal unit back home the following year after a serious car accident shattered two vertebrae, an ankle, a cheek, ruptured his spleen and dislocated his spinal cord.
Of course, Erich’s rehab took months. Glynn, on the other hand, seemed eager to get his very lopsided balls back in the game by the time we picked him up from hospital, just a few short hours after we were scheduled to have arrived.
By early March the Banana was peeling towards Prague, a brilliant city that had, only a few years earlier, been under Soviet hammer and sickle and was, consequently, still emerging as a hip destination for travelers.
That meant ridiculously cheap beer. And the Czech authorities, reputed to have zero-tolerance for drunk driving, would do little to dissuade us from driving home every evening in varying degrees of inebriation. One night, on the way back to our deserted hostel from a boisterous beer hall, Glynn, who by now had demonstrated an aversion to narrow old-world streets, struggled to keep the van straight on the tricky cobblestone. And his Westernized weaving soon drew the attention of one of Prague’s Finest, who leapt from his Lada (it could have been a Skoda) and attempted to pull us over by holding up a hand-held stop sign.
(My thoughts immediately flashed back several years to a rowdy house party in Vancouver, where the host had attempted to stop police from storming into his place by holding a hand-held stop sign up at the front door. Needless to say, things did not end well for him.)
Clearly, the cop expected us to comply. This would explain the befuddled look on his face as we puttered past. But he quickly recovered, tossed his stop sign into the front seat and caught us several blocks later with Lada (or Skoda) rooftop lights ablaze.
This time we pulled over.
After some confusion, the discombobulated officer produced a pen and piece of paper and we soon established it was a shake down. He wrote a figure in Czech crowns on the paper and handed it to Glynn, who studied it for a moment before looking over at me in the front passenger seat with a smile plastered across his face. “That’s, like, ten bucks!” he exclaimed.
The next night it happened again. Only this time we had about a dozen people from various parts of the world hitching a ride in our van. This time the officer came armed with some kind of archaic-looking Breathalyzer-type device with a plastic bag attached to it and, in broken English, instructed Glynn to blow into it. Many of our passengers had, understandably, become tense, none more so that the pair of Czech girls in the very back of the van. So when Glynn failed the test and the cop told him the fine, it was one of the girls who converted it first.
“It is a hundred and forty American dollars,” she said.
Shocked at the high figure, Glynn quickly took up a collection from our passengers then climbed out of the van to count the cash. Feeling wobbly, he knelt down on the cobblestone and thumbed denominations into small piles onto the sidewalk. When the wind picked up and began blowing crowns into the air and down the street, Glynn looked like a contestant on a game show, frantically trying to collect as many bills as possible before the clock reached zero. When he finally caught up with all the money, he shuffled it into a deck and handed it to the cop, who by that point couldn’t wait to get the hell away from us. But before he did, he walked up to the driver’s door of the van and handed Pete, who’d slid over behind the wheel, a stick of gum.
“Drive slow,” he said.
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