What do you get when you combine three college kids with an unholy tolerance for idiocy with a 15 year old who pours testosterone on his cornflakes? If you manage to avoid the glaring issues with such a decision, I'd warrant to say you could get a pretty fucking good time.
I'd like to start, as I often do, with a moment of contemplation. Self-reflection, if you will. I don't like to think of myself as a bad person, unless the definition of bad person is someone who buys drugs for teenagers and pays someone 50 Euros to drink urine. I personally think that I fall more into the enabler category of human being. I merely find out what you want to do, deep inside, and respectfully peer pressure you into taking it out of you and showing it to the world. This is a bad approach to take with the 15 year old who, I'd like to mention, is my younger brother.
The first discovery an enabler makes when enabling a teenager is that teenagers are in many ways like a water balloon filled with cum; profoundly disgusting, uncomfortably textured, and filled with pure hormonal energy. This brings me to the moral of my upcoming story: don't take your younger brother to Malia. For those of you that don't know: Crete is one of those few beautiful places in the world shared by historical wonders the likes of which are rarely seen, and raging drunk British tourists. Malia, a town in Crete, is populated almost exclusively by the latter.
It is at this point that I think I should introduce you to the group that managed to somehow avoid persecution for criminal stupidity. There's Gesus, a man with such weirdly large fingers that it is no wonder that he has the approximate speed and streetsmarts of roadkill. It's an issue of blood-flow, you see. On the topic of blood flow, Machbro, the 15 year old, has only one organ which experiences blood flow, partially as a function of hormones but mostly because he's a bastard. Milky, a man who thinks that shame is the brand of window-cleaner, and that overconfidence is something that only other people suffer from. And finally, of course, me: enabler, mocker, and all-around bad-decision maker.
We should have known things would be properly fucked when on the first night we got totally pissed, showed each other our testicles as some sort of strange mystic bonding ritual, and Machbro lost his glasses in the sea. He had to wear sunglasses for the entire rest of the Cretan Cretin Adventure. After a few days we achieved our Final Forms: a giant shaggy haired man with the personality of a mildly neurotic sloth wearing a bucket hat with blue flowers on it, an overgrown shaved meerkat in a Hawaiian shirt with toucans on it (and the aura of confidence necessary to willingly put such a thing on your body), Jesus but if he was bullied at school, and a younger, uglier, Tom Holland perpetually wearing sunglasses with a cigarette in his nose.
It was not good.
It was through this appearance and demeanor that we convinced an entirely unwilling Gesus to go to Malia. After some drinks of course. Being assholes, we drank before, on, and after the bus. We had to ask the driver to stop the entire cross-island journey so Milky and I wouldn't piss the bus. I am still surprised that it didn't ditch us, considering the scowls that we got. We also convinced Milky to ask out a girl who was sitting with her mother and younger sister on a date to Malia. She refused. She was also sitting in the seats right next to us for the rest of the two hour bus ride. After a longer-than-average film composed exclusively of glares and mild Gaussian Blur we arrived to the third or fourth regional capital of British fuckery: Malia.
Malia is an amazing place. It is about 15 kilometers of free range drunks from all around the British Isles (mostly) getting drunker in their ideal environment: no cars, no criticisms, loud shitty music, and droves of drunk food, all under endless strips of pink and purple neon light. It's an artists paradise, provided the artist's medium of choice is vomit on pavement.
Immediately upon exiting the bus we were offered 5 shots, 5 drinks, and a fishbowl of liquor for 10 euros by various establishments. We were shepherded into a variety of bars and entered the club area with the approximate alcohol content of a small German village. Instead of being human beings and making some sort of return plan, we immediately scattered. This wouldn't be a problem if any of us had functional telephones or if one of us wasn't fifteen years old.
It was almost half an hour before I noticed something amiss, and a further half hour before I realized that what was amiss was my brother. If you've ever wondered about the quickest way you can get sober, I can tell you without a doubt that coffee doesn't hold a candle next to discovering that your younger brother is lost among a smattering of wasted Brits and African men selling "watches".
I cannot easily describe to you the gut-wrenching panic I felt upon losing Machbro in Malia, but I'll try. It was a slow realization. I started searching in the club which we'd started in and it was about 15 minutes of denial before it dawned on me that he wasn't there. That's when the fear set in. I felt as though my heart was grabbed through my throat and was stretched all the way up to my uvula, while my stomach felt like it was attempting to trade places with my rectum . I looked left and right in a futile attempt to scan the club before one thought came to mind clear and cold as ice: "I'm going to have to go home without my brother and my parents are going to actually kill me."This was followed with, "I'm going to have to explain to my parents that I permanently lost my brother in a club while drunk and getting him drunk." And was concluded by "I permanently lost my little brother."
What followed for the next hour was the most frantic search of my life. I located and recruited Milky and Gesus in asking every watch-seller, bouncer, and semi-sober person we could find if they'd seen an obviously under-aged boy in yellow wearing sunglasses. I paid the entrance for every single club on the Malia strip and ran the 5 kilometers twice all the while hoping from the bottom of my heart that he was anywhere to be found. I found him in a bar directly across from the first club, chatting up a *much* older woman. He had been pretending to be a 21 year old med student (despite all logic and appearance), and hadn't been in much of a mood to make us aware of his continued survival. I bummed the most satisfying cigarette of my life, told the girl he was fifteen, and left.
Machbro met me about 30 seconds later to angrily tell him that I'd crimped his style. The woman still winked at him. It was weird. We then made an actual plan like human beings and followed that up by peeing on a random wall. A random wall that led to a door, which Machbro drunkenly peed on. A few seconds later we heard Greek screaming coming from the door (possibly from under the crack which was, at the time, experiencing a torrent of urine) and we all started sprinting, dicks out, competing for Best Non-Stationary Pee'er. I still feel slightly guilty. Now suddenly sober, we needed a new distraction and it seemed prudent, at the time, to locate some marijuana.
The quest for Marijuana is one that has preoccupied young people for generations. From the time of the Pharaohs, the unifiers of the two cigarettes, to the present day my people have struggled. Malia was no exception. There are two ways to search for marijuana: the idiot way, and the Sanad way. The idiot way is one which I have, I'm ashamed to say, done many times in the past. Ask tourists and go on the internet like a spaz. The smart way, which I accidentally developed, is very simple. It requires minimal effort, but many years of patience. First, cultivate a style of clothing that suggests that if you were to fall asleep wherever you may be, changing clothes would be a mere formality when you wake up. Next, grow long hair. I would suggest keeping it clean, but that is by no means a requirement. Lastly, if you can create the vibe that you do not shower, go for it. If not, just stop showering. Once you've developed an approximately Post Malone appearance you'll find that Amsterdam has suddenly gone from being in the Netherlands, to being in a 1 meter radius around you at all times. You'll get offered weed literally all the fucking time.
In any case: Milky and Machbro took the idiot route and asked the English Horde for recommendations. They walked among the Horde betwixt the neon lights of the clubs for a few hours, ended up on the beach, and managed to acquire a bottle of champagne. Apparently Machbro did this by assuring a member of the Horde that he would fight on his behalf. Presumably, the Brit, enamoured by the loyalty of his new bannerman, presented him with the Royal Blessing of alcohol. As you do when encountering a 15 year old in Greece. In any case, in about three hours of effort they failed to procure anything of illegal status (unless you count Machbros existence).
"you wanna buy a watch?"
I responded the only way one could respond to such a question,
"no, but I wanna buy some ganja"
He, in turn, rather unexpectedly answered,
I would like to now note that by that time I'd never bought drugs from an actual dealer before. This was pure inebriation up to the point that it actually worked.
I would also like to take a moment to point out for any younger readers that you should not, under any circumstances, do what I did and meet an African counterfeit watch seller/drug dealer at a graveyard at 2:30 in the morning. It is not good for your health. If you've gotten that far though, always haggle. We agreed on 35 Euros for a mysterious chunk of weed.
In true European fashion the dealer Vespa'd over to me, we agreed on a price, we traded goods, and he told me to get on his Vespa so he could take me to McDonald's and give me my change. I told him that there was absolutely no way I was getting on his Vespa and that I would meet him at McDonald's. This is due to a simple and oft quoted statistic: getting on a stranger's Vespa in the middle of the night in a graveyard gives you a 400% higher chance of waking up in a bathtub of ice without kidneys.
I met the drug watch man outside McDonald's where he, true to fashion shortchanged me and I, exceedingly stupidly, yelled out "I NEED ANOTHER 10 EUROS FOR FRIES, BRO" thereby getting myself blacklisted from the Cretan drug community for life, but gaining 10 euros.
So, with a pocket full of weed and an order or magnitude increase in the mass of my balls, I went off to try and find my friends. I found Gesus half an hour later on the side of the road with a plastic bag full of ice on his knee. Apparently he'd fallen off a stripper pole onto Milky, and injured himself. He'd got the ice from a bar and the bag from a donair place, thus forever infusing his knee with the scent of Greek fast-food. I figured he wasn't going anywhere so I went off to try and find the other two stooges. I found them next to a long line of taxis, handed Milky the weed (to his utter disbelief), hailed a cab, remembered at the last second to get Gesus, and ditched Malia just in time to see the sun rise over this place of truly sublime beauty.
Gesus called his mom in the cab and later had to go to the hospital because he's got the grace of a wrecking ball.
God Bless Greece.
