Paul the Norway
It’s summer here in Bulgaria. I’ve been working a few hours per day at this hostel just outside of Varna, a nice tourist city by the Black Sea, and there is a Norwegian alcoholic named Paul who has spent most of the past year sitting here and getting drunk all day, every day.
I met him last summer while we were both guests and got to know him pretty well. He’s pushing fifty years old, has two sons and a daughter from a woman whom he dated for seven years, and was a former skinhead neo-nazi in his younger, wilder days. Although he has come a long way since those times, he’s still a conspiracy theorist who buys into historical revisionism because he distrusts conventional wisdom so much. His stances have improved significantly since the nineties. While he doesn't believe that whites are genetically superior, he is still a conspiracy theorist who doesn’t brush his teeth because of the fluoride found in toothpaste.
He’s also a little too skeptical about historical claims that challenge his preconceived worldviews. He doesn’t deny that the Holocaust happened, but he does believe that the number of deaths has been inflated. If you present him with facts about a topic, he will say that nobody can really know for sure. He also fully acknowledges most of the conspiracies for which he argues so fervently lack evidence or common sense.
Less than a decade earlier, he convinced the government that it would be easier for them to offer him a pension totaling around 3,000 euros per month because he was too crazy to work but not crazy enough to be institutionalized.
I still haven’t decided if the dipsomaniac told the truth or just wanted to get out of working for the rest of his life. Either way, he figured out how to beat the system, which I can respect in an anti-establishment kind of way. He doesn’t exactly show the signs of someone who is crazy, though. Lazy, yes. Anyone who sits at a table and sucks out raw eggs from the shells because cooking them takes too much effort is quite lazy in my opinion.
The guy drinks excessively almost every day and hardly eats any food. His internal organs have shut down twice because each time he kept drinking and didn’t eat anything for a week. Smokes hand-rolled cigarettes when he’s not taking swigs of rakia, a stout liquor popular throughout the Balkans. His hand shakes as he tries opening a can of cider first thing after waking up, and rolling a cigarette before a few drinks of rakia ends up a mashed and twisted mess that’s barely smokable. It’s sad watching someone commit slow suicide from a drug addiction, even if they insist on doing it.
Yet he’s always in good spirits and never complains about being hungover even though he obviously is. He claims he’s lived a full life and is apparently just going to ride it out floating his liver in a sea of Balkan liquor. I once asked him how long it had been since he’s gone to bed without drinking, and it took him a few seconds before answering that he went home for Christmas three years ago.
It almost seems like it’s been that long since he’s showered. Baths are anathema to him. Sometimes he does bathe in water, but mostly he’s content with occasionally rubbing himself down with baby wipes. Today, he finally took off the shirt he’s been wearing for a week straight. He used to have some size on him but his muscles are so atrophied and liquor-soaked at this point that they are essentially useless.
It’s quite irritating seeing someone who could travel the world for free choosing to sit in the same place every day and piss it all away. I’m at this hostel to save money so I can continue traveling. If I had a third of that guaranteed in my bank account every month, I’d be out by tomorrow.
I can’t bring myself to feel bad for him since he has no desire to even think about quitting. It’s like he’s actively trying to push his body to the limit just to see how much it can handle. He beat cancer once and got his organs working again twice, so I think he looks at the rest of his time here on earth as borrowed. What a way to spend it.
