That being said, some of my friends are even less equipped to deal with the random ebbs and flows that fuck with your life from time to time. What I mean to say is that most of my friends are about as street smart as roadkill. One dear friend of mine, Gesus, is the worst offender. I don't want to say that he's about as capable of dealing with challenging situations as a horse is at playing table tennis, but I will. He's about as capable at dealing with challenging situations as a horse is at playing table tennis. I love you Gesus, we've been friends since the third grade, but you're dumb as shit sometimes. Now, ordinary circumstances are one thing. Trying to deal with life as is may very well be a difficult endeavour, but Gesus and my lack of street-smarts becomes a far less tolerable quality when we're presented with extraordinary circumstances. Such as trying to buy drugs.
I don't like buying drugs. This is an issue because I like drugs and have no botanical aptitude. I've recently failed at keeping a cactus alive. I'm therefore presented with a situation wherein I must either deal with more drug dealers than I'd like, or less drugs than I'd like. At the time, I made the former choice. This would have been ordinarily an ordeal, but we decided to take it one step further. We decided to do it in Budapest. We were in Budapest as a part of a group trip with some friends. We were seven people in total and only Gesus and I were somehow dumb enough to think "hey, we should try to score some weed in a completely foreign country where we have no grasp of the language or anybody to bail us out if we fuck it up." As I said, dumb motherfuckers.
Being the sheltered little shitstains that we were, we decided to consult the Internet as a source of where to locate marijuana. Not the Dark Web or some spooky shit like that, mind you, just Google. We searched "where to find weed Hungary", then decided to be more discreet and changed it to "where to find ganja Hungary." Needless to say, our results left something to be desired. The results in question referred us to go to Keleti train station, find a gang of Moroccans and take it from there. The issue with this plan would be the fact that both Gesus and I are mentally challenged in the streets department, each in his own unique way. I am totally oblivious and highly suggestible, and Gesus has an overactive sketch detector. To put it in layman's terms; he freaks out, which freaks me out.
And so we headed to Keleti with the misplaced enthusiasm of those whose encounters with weed can be counted on one hand. At our arrival Keleti suddenly seemed to be swarming with police officers who just so happened to be questioning anyone who was around the wrong shade of brown and had a backpack. In hindsight, I think there was probably only one policeman and he may have been buying drugs. At this point Gesus' sketch detector began to go wild. I'd like to point out that Keleti the train station happens to be a very nice building. surrounded on all sides by the kind of area that's just poor enough to be severely uncomfortable. Fortunately I was not alone. Unfortunately my only company was the human equivalent of a bad trip.
Paranoia is like fine wine, it gets better with time. By the time the police cleared out of the area we had played on each other's nerves till we reached an ultimatum: hit it or quit it. We went for the former. That's when some random crotchety old fuck comes into the equation. Out of the corner of my vision, coming out of the metro, I spied a hunched over, skinny old man with a limp. He had one functional eye, a big black dufflebag, and looked like he handed some other old dude with a ponytail a little baggie and took some cash. The keywords are "looked like." This was a time long ago, before I discovered that most drug dealers are not elderly men going into a major train station with a bag.
After 10 minutes of attempting to understand what he wanted (which was for us to lower our voices), he took us to the back of the station and motioned towards a pretty young woman with sunglasses who was speaking on the phone. Being the polite people we are, Gesus and I waited for her phone call to end, not paying attention to the fact that staring at a random woman in a train station while next to a crotchety old fuck with a big black dufflebag is generally frowned upon in polite society.
After about five minutes of staring directly at her right cheek, I decided to take action. Action, in this case, refers to walking the length of the platform and staring at her left cheek instead, for a further five minutes. Gesus, now spurred forward by my total chickenitude, took initiative by walking us back to our original position. Rinse and repeat this about four more times, with the two of us orbiting her like extremely creepy moons, and you get the basic picture.
I hope to never again see the expression of pure disdain that this woman flashed us. Where a moment before I was a strong, confidant man with nothing to lose, I was now a slug. Less than a slug. I was particularly cowardly snail with a bad taste in shells and I, as her expression made perfectly clear, should not even consider considering answering yes to the soon to following question.
"Can I help you"
Can I Help You is never unfriendlier then when it is uttered by an irate Hungarian woman who has been leered at by two idiot tourists for half an hour. It is impossible for me today to unhear the cadence of, not even fear or hatred, but raw distaste that this woman justifiably had towards us. We shot two quick apologies and promptly fucked off.
In retrospect she was probably a drug dealer.
