Murphis

Oh, you KNOW it's going to be a good update now.

So here’s the deal: After making the last update, wherein I said I was going to be really busy for a week working on a script, I went and wrote the entire 30 Rock script within about two days, which I’m now scrubbing and preparing for submission (I’m going to try and send it well in advance of the deadline, because who knows? Maybe it’s a race.) Tomorrow I’m shooting my video interview, and I’m too psyched up to sleep on a Sunday night.

And the thing is, last night I wound up going to a British karaoke bar with my housemate, my host sister, and her boyfriend in celebration of the completion of my script, and the whole night all I could think was, “Oh, man! I can’t wait to put this on my blog so everyone can read about this totally wacky experience!”

And, of course, I could’ve just sent this out as an email to my parents and Trevor Jones and had the same effect as putting it here without going back on my promise to not update, but hey – I’ve got a reputation to keep up.

So anyway…

My host sister, Karen, has this boyfriend, Jonathan, who’s usually here a few nights a week and eats dinner with the family. Saturday night, my housemate Tom and I were getting ready to go to a pub and, bumping into Jonathan in the hallway, we invited him along. He wasn’t able to make it, but he did us one better and invited us to a surprise party he was throwing for Karen at a karaoke bar in central London called Murphis.

Now, of course, karaoke isn’t really my thing, but I certainly didn’t come to London to tell people that I wasn’t going to try things, so Tom and I both agreed to meet them at the bar at 9:00. We left Harrow at 7:00 on the Underground, taking three different trains to London, only to find out that the Underground station closest to Murphis, the one from which we had the directions to get there, was closed. However, an Underground employee told us that we could get off at the next closest stop and make the walk in 10 to 15 minutes.

At the time, I thought this information was helpful. Now, I would say it was probably harmful, unless the information was somehow meant to teach Tom and I a valuable lesson about ourselves by showing how much rainwater we could absorb, in which case it was highly valuable.

We spent an hour and 20 minutes parading up and down different winding streets in the pouring rain, receiving contradictory directions from bartenders and maitre’dis and genuinely wondering if Jonathan had given us the name of a fake bar in order to get us out of the house long enough to steal our computers. At some point, our trek became less about going to a party and more about proving that in fact a bar named Murphis did exist – because about half of the people we asked, sometimes within a few blocks of Murphis, vehemently denied that there was such a place. Others, though, would say, “Oh, yeah – it’s right down the block, on the corner!”, pointing us in the wrong direction down an alley toward a Laundromat that was definitely not a karaoke bar.

When we finally found Murphis, we entered to find two piss-drunk English guys onstage, screaming the words to ‘Easy Lover’ by Phil Collins into the microphone.* This, we knew, was going to be a good night – because while there were a couple of assholes loudly butchering a great song, they were both no older than 25, and neither one of them was grinding on me, which made it a real improvement over the last time we went out.

*Incidentally, the video for Easy Lover is a spot-on accurate depiction of my time in London so far.

We went downstairs and found Karen, Jonathan, and their friends, almost all of them prolifically drunk. Karen explained to me throughout a variety of enthusiastic hugs and cheek kisses that her college friends had thrown her this party because they’d more or less skipped her last two birthdays in college because they had always fallen during final exams. Then, she began introducing me to her friends.

I didn’t catch the name of the first girl Karen introduced me to because somebody was blaring the lyrics to ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ (the first of many that night), but we struck up a pretty interesting conversation about television when she heard that I liked the British version of The Office.

“I hear the American one is quite different.” She said.

“Yeah.” I replied. “The receptionist and the paper salesman are married with a baby now in ours.”

This shocked and impressed her, as though I had brought news of a victory in some foreign war. Then again, if somebody told me that in the Nigerian version of Battlestar Galactica the Colonial military forms a glee club and starts singing 80s pop tunes, I’d be shocked too. And angry.

Then Karen introduced me to her friend Vicki, who instantly dove into my hair with both hands, running them through it and yelling to her friends, “Look at this American’s hair!”

All I’m saying is, in my country, strangers ask before they start rubbing their hands all over your head. But I’m also not complaining.

At some point, I was passing by the bar when Karen grabbed me and dragged me over to another group of friends to have a jagerbomb with them.

I love England and English culture, but in this regard they are savages: The jagerbombs that Karen bought for us consisted of a short tumbler with a shot glass full of jager placed in the center, and then Red Bull poured in around it. They mix when you drink it.

This is not how you make a jagerbomb. In a jagerbomb you drop the shot of jager into a beer stein full of Red Bull, much as you would drop, I don’t know, a fucking bomb. Maybe England is still sensitive about dropping bombs after the Blitz. Regardless, what I had was not a jagerbomb. It was more of a jagerfart, if anything. It’s still a disgusting drink I don’t like, but the least they could do is make it the way God intended.

Jonathan’s friend James was a good conversation partner, mainly because he appreciated American football and was an Arrested Development fan. Hearing someone saying, “Illusions, Michael!” really makes you feel at home, even if they’re saying it with a British accent.

As it got later, more and more of their friends were eager to know if I was going to do karaoke. I suppose their reasoning was that many of them had never hung out with an American before, and they were trying to see what kind of cool tricks it could do. I suppose if I was having a few drinks with a chimpanzee I’d try to get it to fling its poop at something, so I can’t blame them.

I looked through the karaoke songbook for Pink Floyd’s ‘The Great Gig In The Sky’, because there’s no better ‘fuck you’ to the karaoke bar patrons than four minutes of melodic wailing, but it turned out that the British karaoke bar didn’t have any Pink Floyd songs, so I declined to do any singing. I suppose Pink Floyd isn’t really a good soundtrack for having a good time with your friends, what with the songs about mortality and insanity and all that.

In the taxi back to Harrow, while Karen, Jonathan, and Tom slept off their beers in the backseat, one of Karen’s more sober friends asked me if I missed America.

“Yeah,” I said. “There’s a lot of stuff I miss. Big cars and strip malls. I guess I miss the familiarity, y’know?”

“What do you mean, ‘strip malls’?” Karen’s friend asked.

“Oh,” I said. “Well, I mean, it’s not like I really like strip malls or anything, but I grew up around them, so…”

“No,” she interjected. “I mean, what is a strip mall?”

I was not aware that there were people in first-world countries who did not know the blight of strip malls. Explaining a strip mall to someone who’s never seen one is like explaining orange to a blind man. But, I gave it my best shot.

And so, from the left hand front seat of a British taxi driving through outer London at 3:00 AM, I explained to an Irish girl what a strip mall was, and I felt like I understood at that point what this study abroad business is really all about.

Truman Capps appreciated this brief opportunity to think about England, and will now return to constantly obsessing about his internship.<