Spanish Barbecue

To many Americans, the term “Barbecue” conjures up images of Dad in the back yard, grilling hot dogs and burgers. However, to young Brits, enjoying cheap vacations on the Spanish costas during the ‘70s and ‘80s, a barbecue meant a bus trip up into the mountains where for a paltry sum you’d be fed mounds of roast beef, chicken and pork. All washed down with lashings of low quality beer and wine. Traditional Spanish entertainment would be laid on, with singing and dancing into the wee hours, before you were poured back onto the buses for the journey back to your respective resorts.

Having vacationed in Spain several times with my parents, I was something of a veteran of the Spanish barbecue, although this was the first time I’d attended one as a grown up. (I use the term loosely – I was only a little past my 17th birthday). Still, I was able to fill my friends Steve and Graeme in on the routine.

“All the drinks are included in the price.” I told them, “So you can get totally wasted and it costs virtually nothing!” This was our kind of night out and we signed up for the trip with enthusiasm. Now we weren’t without street smarts and realized it wouldn’t be smart to go with no money whatsoever. We each took along a healthy sum, perhaps the equivalent of about $2. You know, for emergencies. We were on the bus and listening to the spiel from the courier before we learned of my misunderstanding. He explained that all the drinks during the meal were free. After that you were on your own. This was a blow.

“Not to worry,” I reasoned, “we’ll simply drink as much as we can get our hands on while they’re serving the food; and that should keep us nicely pickled through the rest of the evening.” This sounded like a plan and as the waitress filled our plates, I did my best to Hoover up any alcohol that came within arms reach. Being around 10 months older than me, both Steve and Graeme displayed a level of maturity I wasn’t to enjoy for another decade or so and while knocking back a fair few themselves, weren’t going over the top at anywhere near the same rate as me.

Even at this tender age, I was an old hand at the art of drinking too much and I felt little concern as glass after glass made its way down my throat. Red wine, white wine, beer, are you going to finish that, course after course, drink after drink, we’re almost onto dessert, port, champagne, sure I’ll have some more, that’s it, fill the glass, good man. Finally the meal came to an end but I was quietly confident I’d imbibed enough during this limited time to keep me comfortable for the remaining four hours ‘till night’s end. If I’d given little thought to the effects such a large volume of mixed drinks would have on my young system, I’d given even less consideration to how it would react when mixed with a healthy dose of beef, chicken and (probably undercooked) pork.

It was maybe twenty minutes before I first received signals that all was not well below decks. “You know,” I announced to the world, “I have a feeling I might need to puke fairly soon.” I decided it would be good tactics to make my way to the bathroom and simply hang out there for a while. That way, if the worst happened I wouldn’t suffer the embarrassment of a Technicolor yawn in public. I found myself a small but serviceable bathroom, took a whiz and observed with a note of smugness that some lightweight was already passed out in the single stall. I washed my hands, took a step back to check my appearance in the mirror, and promptly let loose with a deluge of projectile vomit that would have looked clichéd in a horror movie.

It was the beginning of one of the longest evenings of my life.

Looking back, it was the sheer volume I find most astonishing. We’re not just talking about a couple of heaves here, but wave after wave of semi-digested food and unprocessed alcohol. I knew I’d put away a lot but still can’t comprehend how that translated into the gallons of waste my body was now expelling. In no time the tiny bathroom was awash in chunder and while my body was doing its best to reject the poisons, enough had made their way into my bloodstream that despite my best efforts, standing up was simple impossible. Over and over I would use the sink to drag myself gasping and weeping to my feet, only to slip and fall once more into the mire. Great pools of barf covered the floor, the walls and even to my bemused astonishment, the ceiling, hanging in grotesque stalactites some six inches long. It simply went on for hours.

Finally, after eons of this torment, I was able to pull myself upright. I wiped the crud off the mirror and blearily stared at the circus freak looking back. It was in my hair, all over my face and my clothes were simply coated in the stuff. What a mess. Throughout the whole ordeal my bathroom companion lay in the stall, completely comatose, even though he, like everything else in the room, was bathed in my bulimic symphony. Curiously, nobody else had attempted to enter the bathroom the whole time I’d been in there. Until now. Slowly, the door opened and a middle aged guy took two steps inside before stopping to stare in horror at the nightmare facing him.

“Pretty bad, huh?” I mumbled. He simply stared.

“It wasn’t me!”

Amazingly, his faced cleared in understanding, as if I could be standing here, covered from head to foot in the contents of my own stomach, yet have nothing to do with the gallons of vomit adorning the room. I pushed past him and out into the main hall where Steve and Graeme met me with relief. They’d spent the entire evening trying to find me and had scoured the building without managing to find the one bathroom where I’d been trapped for almost four hours.

Over the years there were many more nights when grain and grape colluded to make a fool of me. Thankfully, I never quite replicated that performance. Yet for me, the word “barbecue” will never invoke an image of Dad with a spatula in his hand. Pity, really.