Carrying Things

Peter Sullivan carried a picture of his brother smoking a joint in Amsterdam. While the rest of us took our afternoon naps, sometimes I would look over and see him in his bunk staring at the canal and the smoke and the messy hair. Peter never took naps and he barely ever slept. He didn’t want to miss a second of Europe.

The things we carried were not based on necessity. Everything necessary could be bought. This was the first world. There were shopping centers and running water. We carried the things we wanted to carry. Jeff carried needles for knitting while the rest of us twiddled our thumbs on long train rides. Tony carried a knife and a corkscrew because at one time or another we all carried wine. Rachel and Kelsey carried birth control pills and flowery diaries. I carried an ivory sculpture of a polar bear in the bottom of my backpack. I wasn’t an Inuit and had only seen bears in zoos, and I never even took the little thing out.

We carried the things we didn’t want to buy. Peter had a deck of cards, wet with beer stains from games of King’s Cup. We all carried condoms; the girls kept theirs in the very bottom of their packs. Everyone carried a sleeping bag, except for me because this was Europe and we could damn well find beds. Everyone had painkillers too except Jeff who didn’t believe in pills. We had flip-flops and swimsuits, which didn’t seem very useful when it rained torrents over Belgium and northern Germany.

Rachel had 5 dresses while Kelsey had 6. Peter had three shirts with a collar, but the rest of us only had one. Kelsey only carried 4 thongs while Rachel had 9, but then again Rachel was skipping her period. I carried less T-shirts and boxers than the other guys because I didn’t smell, but I regretted that when the drier broke in Prague and our clothes started to reek of mildew.

When the hostels seemed safe enough, we left our big backpacks inside and carried miniature versions out. Rachel carried hers on her stomach. She walked like a duck, the pregnant duck we called her. In his bag, Peter carried a pack of rolling tobacco, matches, and a lighter. When he could find it there’d be hashish in his hand-rolled cigarettes too. I carried an extra roll of toilet paper for emergencies. Tony carried rubbing alcohol that he shared with the girls because they all got piercings when we were drunk in Budapest. Jeff usually had a couple beers in his bag, because, as he put it when we were drinking under dripping trees in a park in Bruges, “What, would you rather have an umbrella for 5 euros, or two beers?”

We took turns carrying our one meal a day of bread and cheese. We tried to save money for carrying things like Heineken mini-kegs that we spilled all over the streets of Amsterdam, because we were all too high to open it correctly. At night when near-starvation, multiple hangovers and lack of sleep finally caught up with us, we would buy Turkish gyros or microwaved hamburgers. Peter used my emergency toilet paper when these late night snacks acted up on him in a park at midnight in Zagreb.

Back at our hostels we all climbed back into our sleeping bags, except for me; I wrapped myself in a sheet cursing my luck. And we dozed off ready to carry our bags to the train station in the morning to make it to Rome in time to meet my sister. And Peter lay awake, clinically insane with bloodshot eyes, staring at his brother and the billowing smoke.