Frenchman down!

MUNICH – After a week of simulations and videos of all the bad things that can happen to me in Iraq and Afghanistan and how to bandage my hemorrhaging wounds, I felt like a few beers, preferably one liter at a time. So I called up your friend and mine, Guilhem, the unofficial French ambassador to the U.S. and southern France’s most eligible bachelor.

Guilhem was on a business trip relatively close by, so he drove over my way and we head to Munich for Oktoberfest. Every hotel, campsite, halfway house and homeless shelter in the city books up six months before the festival so, naturally, we showed up with no reservations and no plans — and kicked Oktoberfest’s ass.

With 100,000 rowdy drunks it’s like MADD’s worst nightmare — the world’s biggest AA meeting, without the treatment. It also means the lines are ridiculous.

You only get served beer if you get seated in one of the tents. People lined up at 5 a.m. to get a seat (they only start serving at noon) — we showed up at noon. We had to wait for an hour but when things were looking their grimmest Guilhem said something so charming or so unintelligible that the security guard let us in.

Inside the smoke-filled tent a brass band played a mix of Bavarian music and puzzling American choices. Lederhosen and traditional Bavarian frocks were the dress of choice. I felt underdressed. Eventually we found to seats at a picnic bench full of hammered teenagers. They were all between 14 and 16, smoking, hammered and still speaking better English than most Americans, despite being five liters deep.

We prosted our way through several liters of delicious Paulaner helles as the crowd disintegrated into drunken chaos. At one point a 250-pound skinhead sitting at an nearby decided he couldn’t be bothered to get up and started pissing under the table with dozens of people around him.

Guilhem, meanwhile, drank more beer that day than he probably has in the past year combined (He likes cider – typical.) As we walked home, Guilhem did not look well. We made a pit stop at a restaurant and he exorcised his demons in the bathroom. He came out looking like he had just added to the growing list of French defeats at the hands of the Germans and he urged me to stop drinking my beer because the site of it made him ill.

Having no reservations we made a go at sleeping in the Frenchman’s car, but his tiny Euro econobox proved a problematic bed. Guilhem went on a scouting mission and found a patch in a city park hidden by a square of hedges, where he pitched a tent and we probably slept better than everyone paying $50 a night to stay in a filthy hostel.