The Hotel Europa in Belfast was an apparently classy hotel, even luxurious according to the standards we in TAD enjoyed back in the early '90's--that is, if we were lucky enough to stay in a hotel at all; on many occasions I can remember imposing on the kindness of strangers, who often generously allowed us to sleep in their houses or apartments; once I can even recall sleeping under a white coverlet on a toy-like bed in a room where children usually slept, but where we were permitted to bunk down for the night--and so we were happy to have rooms booked at the Hotel Europa, at least initially: there was a fairly decent restaurant on the main floor and an all-night bar upstairs where you could drink after-hours, and we did. In Europe especially we were used to cramped, dilapidated establishments, the kind where the bathrooms are located out in the corridor and where, more often than not, you have to climb several flights of stairs to reach the oddly-shaped rooms, some of which have slanted floors and crooked walls, your heavy bags slung over your shoulders, because there were no elevators. Hell, we didn't usually care, but we were tired that trip, and we were delighted to stay in what seemed like a better place for once. A little wary about the unexpected quality of the accommodations, I asked our tour manager, a treacherous Dutchman named Edwin, about the place, but he only smiled maliciously and shrugged his shoulders and said, "You can sleep in the van if you don't like it, man." It seemed like he was holding something back, for there was an evil glint of mischief in his eyes, but I wasn't up to challenging him, so I let it slide, much to my regret later on. Needless to say, I didn't sleep in the van, nor did anyone else, though as things turned out, it might not have been such a bad idea.

That night we'd come to Belfast during a Spring tour of Europe promoting 8-Way Santa, and Therapy?, an excellent band we'd never met until then opened for us (they would later open for TAD during the first US tour for Inhaler), and we hung out after the show, drinking and exchanging stories. After the gig, we came back to the Hotel Europa and drank with business people from around the world, all of whom seemed bent on telling rambling drunken stories about their travels, and many of them were as drunk as I was. I can barely recall making it back to the room, where I passed out with the curtains closed, only to wake up the next morning at about 8:00 a.m. to find that Gary, our guitar player, with whom I was sharing the room that night, was absent, though the rumpled state of his bed made it clear that it had been slept in. His bags were still there, but they were unpacked. It was too early for breakfast, so where was Gary? My head ached, and my mouth felt like the inside of a wool slipper. I was thirsty, so I knocked on the bathroom door, expecting to find Gary in there, but there was no answer. I looked inside: it was empty. That's odd, I thought, and I took a long drink of cool water from the tap that tasted like dirty pennies. When I called down to the lobby via the telephone, I got a dial tone that sounded like it was coming up the phone line from the bottom of the Atlantic, which seemed very eerie indeed, so I opened the room door to check the hallway for any activity and saw running towards me a hurriedly dressed and small but plump old man, his green tie undone and hanging free and streaming like filaments of seaweed around his bunched neck, his round face as wet and red as a raw roast. He ran past my door, continuing down the white-walled hall towards the elevator past lines of shut green doors shouting in a high ragged voice, spit flying, "Run for your life, laddie, there's been a bomb!" He was carrying his shoes, one in each fat hand.
 
Astonished to have seen that terrified apparition and even more surprised to have heard what it had said, I kept expecting some kind of explanation to come following like a shadow after the frightened old man--maybe a dancing bear that could tell riddles or a troop of traveling Leprechauns that had lost their ringleader after a brawl over their last bottle of whiskey. But after the panting and seemingly desperate old man had disappeared, the hallway remained vacant. It was like a set from the Overlook Hotel in Kubrick's version of The Shining. There was no explanation, unless I wanted to take the old duffer seriously, and for some reason--maybe I was still drunk--it didn't seem plausible. This unnerving episode mystified me even more than the enigmatic dial tone at the front desk had, because I'd slept the deep and vividly dreamless sleep of someone who had drunk too much straight vodka the night before, and that room had been as silent as the inside of a glacier the entire time: there had been no explosions; I could have sworn it, and I would have, given the chance.

But then again, I recalled, shutting the door, I was passed out. Perhaps there really was a bomb, and I simply slept, blacked-out like a fool, through the explosion. Was the old man telling the truth? I wondered.

In the end, I simply couldn't accept it, even if it made the most sense. Convinced that there had to be a logical explanation other than an actual bomb for these early-morning conundrums, I decided to go downstairs and investigate. I didn't know it then, but I was in for a nasty surprise.

My nerves were jangled; I was unnaturally excited, probably because of my hangover, and though I sensed a  suspicious tension in the air, I was nevertheless completely ignorant of the facts. And so, increasingly paranoid, I ran out of my room, my adrenalin rising to dangerously high levels, wishing like hell that I had a few Bloody Mary's, and I forgot to put on my boots or even to grab my coat in my frenzied hurry. All the halls were empty, and there was nobody near the elevator on my floor. I stabbed the button, and when it arrived, I took the otherwise empty elevator down to the lobby, wondering just where everyone was and what the old man had been talking about.

A bomb? I asked myself, still incredulous, still wishing I could get a quick drink somewhere, as the elevator sank slowly down its shaft. Maybe, I speculated, I could get a Bloody Mary in the restaurant downstairs, even if it was only 8:00. I forgot about the bomb just for a moment as the image of a tall cold drink passed again through my feverish mind, and suddenly I felt a little better, but not much, and not for long.

This was IRA country, after all, I pondered, a weird sensation rising in my gut, but then again, I reminded myself, I heard nothing, nothing at all, and if a bomb had gone off, wouldn't I have heard it, even if I had been passed out? I just couldn't believe what the old man had said. Mulling all of this over, my head aching as if it were itself about to detonate, I looked up from staring distractedly at my toes wriggling in their socks, as if they'd been, at that moment, attached to someone else's feet, and the elevator lurched to a stop in the lobby. All the adrenalin in my body seemed to have drained down into my abdomen to collect in the pit of my stomach.

I intently watched the doors as they opened wide to reveal a cluster of automatic weapons poking their long barrels into the elevator, like the spiny limbs of a giant black metallic insect, and a loud authoritative voice with a marked British accent commanded, "Put your hands behind your head and proceed to walk slowly out of the lift!"

Stunned, I stumbled forward, amazed and baffled, not feeling too well and wishing I'd never gotten out of bed, and the machine gun barrels raked across my path and followed me, swiveling like gun barrels on a turret, and I saw that the lobby was filled with British soldiers that milled loosely around the high-ceilinged room beyond the bristly knot of soldiers that surrounded the open door of my elevator, all of them dressed in dark green fatigues and full battle regalia.

Sunlight filtered through rainclouds flooded in through tall windows, and a dream-like calm settled on me, and a shift of perception occurred: it suddenly seemed as if I were viewing it from a distance, a psychological remove, and though I was appalled by this military invasion, it took on the aspect of a masquerade. Gazing down at myself, I noted with horror that my torso was polka-dotted with red dots of laser light, a rash of electric acne: British soldiers had their laser sights trained on me as I emerged, and the soldiers patted me down expertly with their free hands as they searched me for weapons and explosives. When I tried to explain who I was, I was told to shut up. I shut up. They found my wallet--which I'd miraculously left in my back pocket the night before--and ascertained my identity for themselves. They had a stack of passports that they'd taken from the front desk, and they compared the name on my driver's license with that in my passport. Satisfied that I wasn't behind the bombing--for their presence told me immediately that indeed there had been a bombing, just as the old man had said--the British voice resounded again, telling me that the hotel was being evacuated, but that no one was allowed to leave, which was just a little too much like that line in "The Hotel California" by the Eagles ("you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave"--or something like that).

I picked my way through the crowd of soldiers that had shifted their attention to my right: another elevator had descended, and the green lights above indicated that its doors were about to open. The knot of soldiers tightened around the elevator doors, machine guns bristling, and the red laser sites pitted the stainless steel doors.

Repulsed by the display put on by these gun-toting mannequins, I didn't wait to watch, but walked out through the revolving doors of the main entrance and into a silver sheet of rain that was falling in anemic gray light on the concrete plaza between the entrance and the street, where a large crowd of hotel guests were milling about groggily like homeless people in the rain. Beyond them several army trucks were pulled up along the curb, along with several fire trucks and a couple of ambulances. Soldiers patrolled about out here too, and once in a while you'd see a red laser site playfully deployed on the forehead of a fellow guest. Before long, I found Gary and Tad and the others. It turned out that Rey, our drummer at the time, had fortuitously brought his bag along, and in it was an extra pair of shoes. By this time, my feet were soaked and very cold, so I gratefully accepted Rey's offer. The shoes were a little small, it's true, but I wore them anyhow.

Tad said that he'd been awakened by the explosion, which to him had sounded like an empty metal dumpster hitting the pavement after having been dropped from the roof. We later learned that the bomb, which had allegedly been intended for an IBM executive supposedly staying on the 11th floor (we'd been staying in rooms on the 5th), had not detonated properly due to a malfunction in the detonator itself. It was unknown whether the malfunction had been deliberate or not, but the fact remained that the bombers--allegedly the IRA--had succeeded, even without bloodshed (nobody had been killed or seriously wounded, though several rooms on the 11th floor had reportedly been destroyed), in terrorizing most everyone in the hotel. Oddly, however, all the members of our party retained a bizarre sense of detachment, despite the initial ultra-disconcerting jolt to the nerves some of us experienced, myself not excluded. Maybe we'd seen too many weird scenes, or maybe we were still drunk enough not to care; who knows?

But then again, so what? We were still alive, after all, and that's what counts. We were eager to get back on the road, for a rock show was and is the best medicine for freak scenes of this kind. Much to our displeasure, however, we were not allowed to re-enter the hotel to retrieve our baggage (and, more importantly, our passports) until it had not only been evacuated but searched thoroughly as well, a process that might take all day. After being served a nominal breakfast for free in the dining room of a neighboring hotel that was much nicer than even the Europa, we wandered across the street to the Crown, an ancient pub, a move that made me very happy, for immediately I ordered 3 Bloody Mary's, and soon after that I was feeling much better indeed. We drank there all day until being ejected for getting too wild some time during the afternoon, and we spent the rest of the day wandering around Belfast in the rain. The gig that night in Bristol was canceled because the search lasted beyond the last ferry we were supposed to catch in order to get back to England, so we had to stay at the Europa one more night, but it turned out to be uneventful.

Waking up in those rooms again the next morning, we found that they looked almost as they had the morning before, when I'd ridden the elevator down to the lobby deep in the throes of a near-epileptic adrenalin jag triggered by that terrible hangover, which was the result of a heavy case of alcohol poisoning. Though the soldiers had torn our rooms to pieces during their search for evidence related to the bombing and also for more possible bombs, we had by that time had enough time to repack our bags, and so almost all traces of that frightening morning had been erased or smoothed over by either the hotel staff or ourselves, though you had to ignore the broken and slashed walls to really preserve the illusion (our clothes and other belongings had been strewn crazily around the rooms, the bedding torn off the beds, the mattresses upended, the pillows slashed by case knives and emptied, the closet doors buckled, many walls punctured and kicked in, the curtains torn off their rods and laid like shrouds on the gashed furniture, and the bathroom pipes detached, as if the place had been gutted and gouged by a PCP-crazed herd of spastic rhinos clad in suits of iron armor, their horns dipped in molten steel).

As we climbed back into the van in order to catch the ferry that morning, Edwin said, "Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you guys: it turns out that the Hotel Europa's the most bombed hotel in Europe; that's probably why we were able to get such an affordable rate." I could've strangled him, inferring from his leering grin that he'd known this little bit of trivia all along, but I restrained myself, realizing that it was just another day in the life, and nothing more.

Despite all the inconvenience, it was the nicest hotel we stayed in during that particular trip.