Justin Halpern - More Sh*t My Dad Says

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 meeting 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.