This is a long one, maybe it’s not worth the read.
I’ve worked on and off through my life as a musician (trumpet) and at the height of my career I was getting called to fill in for anyone that was sick or had double booked themselves. As I was a pretty good sight reader and can play jazz standards, after a couple of years I was pretty much in the scene and was picking up gigs with all kinds of different bands.
A guy called me once and asked if I could replace him for 3 weeks playing in a dance band on a RoRo ferry between Sweden and Finnland. As the pay was good I grabbed my horn, packed some clothes and jumped on a train to Stockholm.
When I got to the ship I was surprised to discover that this was THE party ship to top all others. The reason lays in the taxes placed on alcoholic beverages in Sweden, and on this ship you could buy duty free booze as soon as it left the dock. The Swedes like to drink and there was a line of about 100 people in front of the DF shop an hour before we shoved off.
The job was great and the band was hot! I just had to play some standards for dinner music and during the dance sets we were playing stuff like Earth Wind & Fire and shaking our butts. There were lots of single Swedish girls (always dancing together) on the ferry and I flirted with every one of them.
The band had the right to use the passengers disco, so after we got off we hit the floor and tried to finalize anything that had looked promising. As the ferry was only a overnighter it was a case of the fast and the furious, and it was the best 2 weeks of my life. As the token American on board I made lots of friends and had a lucky hand with the ladies.
Whats so stupid about that? Wait.
The ferry had a crew mess which was open 24/7 and you could chow down even at 4 am. One morning as I sat there trying to force down a couple of sandwiches, a giant of a man sat down beside me and started to work on what looked like a side of beef. After a while we started chatting and I learned he was Finnish, had a Harly, and worked as a machinist mate. In a short time we had a pretty good rapport going.
He noticed that I was pretty much still smashed and asked me if I would like to come to the crews bar when I got off work the next night. Well it actually sounded something like this:
“You drink vodka? OK us drink vodka 'gether. Crew bar have good women.”
What the hell. I could use a break from the drinks with umbrellas and perfectly formed Swedish girls, so I told “Hulk” (I gave him that name and he loved it) that I’d meet him in the crew bar the next night.
The bar was basically in the bilge and had a 25 watt light, a table and some chairs, and a refrigerator. Some kind of shitty Finnish music was playing on a radio with a cracked speaker and there was about 20 crew members trying their damnedest to sing louder than the engines which couldn’t have been more than 15 feet away. Perfect.
Hulk jumped up when he saw me, put me in a headlock and screamed at his friends “My American friend here! We drink Vodka!” Everyone started screaming and hollering something in Finn, and I don’t think there was one person under 6’ in the room except me. Some amazon chick walked over to the fridge grabbed 2 bottles of smooth and a couple of filthy 12oz tumblers. For these people a 12oz tumbler full of vodka was a “drink”. I was in trouble, but I didn’t know it yet.
About an hour later I was singing perfect Finnish at the top of my lungs when a arm about the size of Jay Cutler’s thigh wrapped itself around my shoulders and pulled me like an octopus to the side. Hulk laughed and said “Meet sister! Nice woman!” I looked at her and because it was so dark I’ll be nice and say she was between a 1 and a 1.5 on the beauty scala or a 9.5 on the ugly scale. I asked her her name and she answered “Tonka”. I shit you not her name was Tonka.
I don’t know how it happened, but Tonka had fallen in love with me.
I also don’t know why I attract women two or three times my size, but Godzilla wanted to play and the night was young. Now I knew that I was in trouble. After she had frisked me in the corner for about an hour she wanted me to go with her, and not wanting to offend everybody at the same time I sucked it up and we left. Behind us I could hear things like “Little man die now!” and “Tonka no eat u”…basically some pretty unsettling shit.
Whats so stupid about that? Wait.
I refuse to write about what happened in that tiny 10X15 cabin that night, but I was happy when it was over. After she/it fell asleep I got dressed and tiptoed out of the cabin, went to mine and passed out like a mule had kicked me between the eyes.
The next evening I did the gig (not too much ass-shakin’ that night) and afterwards went to the mess to grab a bite. Who’s sitting there? You got it…Tonka, her brother “Hulk” and about 5 of their cronies. Just waiting for me. Tonka jumps up, stomps over to me and as she wraps her arms around my headache whispers in my ear…“Love u.”
OH MY GOD, was I fucked. Only 6 days to go…
So the stupidity of this whole thing is:
I went from drinking Pina Coladas with beautiful Swedish girls in a fancy ships bar, to drinking rot gut vodka with a female brontosaurus in the bilge. All within less than 24 hours.
