I have this friend.

He works for Computer Associates.

He travels a lot for work.

His most recent business trip led him to the Czech Republic.

He could've spent his time in Prague or Ostrava or Tábor, but no, CA sends him to freakin' Plzen.

For the uninitiated, Plzen is a sort of Holy Land of beer. It is the town in which the Pilsner style of beer originated… or at least is most famously associated.

So this friend, this really, really good friend, imports first-hand a great whopping load of Czech and Slovak beers of various styles.

Then he implores my wife to impart the tenuous magnitude of his situation to me: He has a whopping load of Czech and Slovak beer, some of which was bottled fresh by a brewery/hotel in a big plastic bottle intended for immediate consumption. In other words, he doesn't like to drink alone and he needs someone to help him work his way through this magic cache of brew before it goes stale.

Life being what it is, I carpe the diem and call him immediately. In less than a minute, despite not confirming arrangements with our Keepers of the Schedule, we decide to meet at his place on a Saturday night, this Saturday night. My Keeper of the Schedule is also assumed to be the Designated Driver. It would've worked well if he could've traveled to my place, as his wife is pregnant and makes an obvious choice for DD. Alas, he's allergic to our cats.

So my friend calls a group of guys who appreciate beer and, after confirming with our loving Keepers of the Schedule, the date is set. Poker is mentioned.

Tonight my lovely wife and I gathered the kids together and headed off.

I wasn't too sure what to expect, other than lots of good beer.

I don't have much experience with the getting-together-for-some-manly-drinking thing. I'm not particularly good at any form of poker. I decided to fall back on that old maxim: with enough beer, everyone can be your best friend.

As it turns out, the other two guys flaked off, enabling a perfect evening featuring:

1. Two tolerant and loving wives who know each other better than the husbands know each other. All they had to do was chat, snack, and keep tabs on the kids and beer-drinking men.
2. Two kids, one boy and one girl, who are nearly exactly the same age and play wonderfully well together. All they had to do was keep themselves occupied with an apartment full of toys and videos, and two sets of parents who get the biggest kick out of watching them play together.
3. Two guys with cheese, chips, salsa, pizza, and many liters of transcendentally spectacular brew. Some of the stuff only came over in one bottle, so it was especially convenient that there were only two folks consuming.

As a matter of form, I brought a couple six-packs, one of a Belgian-style black ale and another of New Zealand's Steinlager, a nod to my heritage. The black ale was heavenly and the Steinlager ended up being a few hairy-footed steps up from Hobbit piss, but passable.

I guess the point is that we talked about trying to find the reverse gear in our rental car (he in a rural front yard near Munich and me in crowded side street in Istanbul), the flaws of mutual funds, and how to tell intensely dirty parables in Russian, and we made our way through all the Czech beer and into Kiwi, Belgian, and English beers.

And that's why I'm headed off to bed now.

One should think thrice before starting a column completely blitzed from a surfeit of stimulating conversation fueled by liters and liters of Czech beer.

Pakeha

Columns by Pakeha