The history of the Atomic Wave
The history of the Atomic Wave.
When I was living in Holland, I was a member of a heavy metal fraternity at the University of Enschede, a city near the German border.
Mind you, I never went to school there, I was just enrolled because a friend of mine was the founder of the thing. We had a bar on campus that served as the scene for many a night of debauchery. I would often embark on the 2 1/2 hour train journey from Rotterdam to Enschede on Friday afternoon and then wake up back in Rotterdam on Monday morning with little, if any, recollection of what had happened in between.
These were fun times.
Quite often, while we were listening to bands with names like Cannibal Corpse, Napalm Death and Severe Torture, we would get bored of just drinking regular stuff like beer and vodka and come up with home made inventions like whisky-infused beer, store brand vermouth mixed with beer and, the Holy Grail of getting seriously hammered, the Atomic Wave.
The Atomic Wave was a concoction invented by a guy who had already graduated and gotten a job, but was still living in one of the dorms on campus. He would often come back from work and find his on-campus friends already a six pack deep into celebrations. In order to catch up (This is a process that doesn’t necessarily leads to a happy end) he started experimenting with different types of cocktails or straight up liquor. After some boozy nights, he finally stumbled on the solution, and cause for many embarrassing nights over the years: the Atomic Wave. Where the name came from is shrouded in the mists of time, but it’s not really important.
To make an Atomic Wave cocktail, here’s what you do:
Like this one.
In this glass, you pour a shot of Martini Bianco or, if you’re really aiming for the bottom of the barrel, a store brand variety from Lidl or Aldi. Then add a shot of vodka. Again, you can use a known brand like Absolut or Smirnoff but, if you want to go out in style, use some knock off, bottom shelf brand like Popov or Rachmaninoff.
Now, to finish off this sure fire ticket to oblivion, get a bottle of Duvel ale.
For those of you not intimately familiar with the landscape of Belgian beer- it is a strong golden ale that clocks in at 8.5%.
4 bottles of this stuff alone will get you a good way to seeing double, but mixed with vermouth and vodka it’s real dynamite.
Open the bottle and carefully pour it on top of the vermouth and vodka in your tulip glass. (It’s very foamy)
Congratulations, you have an Atomic Wave in front of you.
Now drink it.
The first problem is the smell. This drink smells vaguely like your morning pee after you’ve spent the evening drinking bathtub gin. It has a certain chemical edge to it that you can’t really place, apart from the fact that it isn’t pleasant.
Then comes the taste. The first, and last, time I tried it, it made me gag. It most closely resembles that stuff you find after all night house parties when someone, desperate to keep their buzz going, decides to take the leftovers of all the booze in the kitchen at 6AM, and mixes it with the gas cloud that emanated from the Union Carbid factory in Bhopal, India, in December 1984. It really isn’t pleasant.
Over time, it became sort of a challenge in the fraternity bar for people to announce they were going to attempt The Record.
The Record, you see, was 2 1/2 glasses of Atomic Wave. Nobody ever drank more than that. The chemical composition of the drink, vermouth, vodka and Very Strong Beer, made it impossible, even to the most hardened of drinkers, to clear 3 of them.
One night in particular stands out in the long and storied history of the Atomic Wave. We started off at my friend’s house. It was a dilapidated house, about a 5 minute walk from Enschede Central Station. It had taken structural damage from the 2000 Enschede Fireworks disaster, more of which you can read about here.
But if the fireworks disaster wasn’t enough, a gang of drunk students sure did enough to push the house in disrepair.
We once came back from a heavy metal festival in Germany, stopped off in Enschede to drop my friend off at his home (he was also one of the founders of the fraternity) and, even though I had not showered or changed my underwear for close to a week, my first impression was “Bloody hell, it stinks in here”.
Don’t get me wrong, it was a great party house but it was also the filthiest place inhabited by humans I probably ever went to.
But it was great fun.
We would often congregate at the house on Friday afternoon, drink cheap liquor, and then head for campus and our bar.
The one night I want to shine a light on today took place sometime in the early 2000s. One of the guys living in the house announced his intention to challenge the Atomic Wave record. There were 4 guys living on the top two floors of the house, with an ever-suffering couple living on the ground floor, always coming home to loud music, 24/7 partying and a building-wide carpet of broken bottles and empty beer cans. One of the guys living in the house, let’s call him Rik because that is his name, came into the bar about an hour after we had arrived.
He sat down at the bar, ordered a beer and then, halfway through it, announced that he was going to attempt The Record.
Everyone present put down their drinks, looked in the direction of the bar and considered the situation.
Was this wiry, chain smoking kid really going to go for it? Was he really going to challenge the record that had brought the hardest drinkers in town to their knees?
Only time would tell.
The bar man, with a sense of decorum, set up the drinks on the bar, a bottle of cheap vermouth, a bottle of vodka and a bottle of Duvel ale.
He polished a large tulip glass, put it down in front of Rik and asked him, just to make sure people heard that he entered this lunatic rabbit hole of disaster of his own volition, if he *really* wanted to do this?
“Yes”, Rik said.
And so started one of the more memorable stories in the fraternity’s history.
He carefully poured the first Atomic Wave. Duvel beer normally already foams a lot when poured, but on top of the vermouth and vodka you have to be especially careful.
The drink was put in front of Rik and the barman said “Good luck”.
Rik took his first sip as the bar looked on and immediately started to cough.
We went back to our conversations, keeping a close eye on the progress of the record attempt.
Halfway through his first glass, our hero had to pee, so he got off his bar stool and went for the toilet. He was already unsteady on his feet.
When he came back from the toilet, he had some trouble getting back on his bar stool. When he tried to roll a cigarette, he dropped his pouch of tobacco and had trouble getting it off the floor.
When he at long last finished his first Atomic Wave, he looked like he didn’t notice anything around him anymore.
He waved over the bartender and ordered his second. Shit was about to get serious.
The bartender again asked him if he was really, really sure that he wanted to go through with this lunatic mission.
“Yes” the answer was again.
The assembled crowd fell silent. With a strange mix of anxiety about what was happening and the giddy anticipation that this was going to be very entertaining, we looked on.
He took a few sips and started to cough again. But he kept on target.
Sometime around him being a third of his glass in, someone at our table (we were sitting to the right and about 5 feet behind him) asked him “How are you feeling, Rik?”
He turned to answer and fell head-first off his bar stool.
At this point, the bartender and his friends (us) should have intervened and tell him to take a taxi home and go to sleep, but we were having fun and we were young and stupid so we just laughed.
“I’m fine” he said with the slurred tongue of someone who knows he should abort the mission and go to bed, but insists on pushing forward to inevitable disaster.
He managed to crawl back onto his bar stool in the fashion of someone who has fallen into an Amsterdam canal after one joint and a few beers too many, but he managed to get back in position.
While we continued drinking beer and listening to heavy metal, Rik ploughed on through his second glass and fell increasingly silent. This was most likely because he had lost the ability to speak.
When he neared the end of his second glass, he had to go to the toilet again. He just about managed to get off his stool without falling over, but his route to the toilet was circuitous and slow. He had to hold on to every table, chair and wall he passed and when he got to the entrance to the toilet he suddenly fell sharply to the left, as if someone yanked on a long rope attached to his wrist.
He returned minutes later, looking like a ghost. Someone asked him how he was doing but he didn’t seem to notice anything around him.
Back on his stool, he finished his second Atomic Wave and immediately waved over the barman. He pointed at his glass and lifted his index finger.
The barman was now looking seriously worried. Should he really serve this guy any more booze?
Ofcourse.
Pretty much everyone in the bar raised their eyebrows. Was this really happening?
“I’m fine” he said with the slurred tongue of someone who knows he should abort the mission and go to bed, but insists on pushing forward to inevitable disaster.
He managed to crawl back onto his bar stool in the fashion of someone who has fallen into an Amsterdam canal after one joint and a few beers too many, but he managed to get back in position.
While we continued drinking beer and listening to heavy metal, Rik ploughed on through his second glass and fell increasingly silent. This was most likely because he had lost the ability to speak.
When he neared the end of his second glass, he had to go to the toilet again. He just about managed to get off his stool without falling over, but his route to the toilet was circuitous and slow. He had to hold on to every table, chair and wall he passed and when he got to the entrance to the toilet he suddenly fell sharply to the left, as if someone yanked on a long rope attached to his wrist.
He returned minutes later, looking like a ghost. Someone asked him how he was doing but he didn’t seem to notice anything around him.
Back on his stool, he finished his second Atomic Wave and immediately waved over the barman. He pointed at his glass and lifted his index finger.
The barman was now looking seriously worried. Should he really serve this guy any more booze?
Ofcourse.
Pretty much everyone in the bar raised their eyebrows. Was this really happening?
Our hero was by now living in a vacuum, completely oblivious of what happened around him. The barman put his third Atomic Wave in front of him. He had the attention of the entire bar. He just didn’t realise it.
He took 2 small sips of his drink and put down his glass.
This, as it would transpire, was the beginning of the end.
He took another small sip, put down his glass on the bar again and, a few seconds later, fell off his stool backwards and on to the floor. He lay there, motionless, for some 10 seconds. Just when people were starting to wonder if they should get him some help, or maybe call an ambulance, he stirred to life again.
Walking was obviously out of the question, so he started to sort of crawl across the room in the same way Gollem does in The Lord of the Rings, when he is sneaking up on the hobbits.
He made it as far as the nearest wall, where he tried to drag himself up by using a radiator as a stepping stone. He didn’t get very far. One of our group had hung his jacket over that radiator to dry it after walking through the rain for some time while getting to the bar.
After a short while, Rik gave up and slumped to the radiator. He then grabbed our friend’s jacket, rolled it into a ball and used it as a pillow as he passed out on the floor.
We checked every few minutes, to see if he was still breathing, which he was, so we continued drinking while Rik was laying there, black out drunk and in his own little 7th circle of Atomic Wave Hell.
A while later, someone noticed that Rik started to convulse and make noises not unlike a cat coughing up a hairball.
A few seconds later, he unleashed an ever flowing stream of his dinner, the few beers he’d had and the Atomic Waves, on the floor, the radiator, my friend’s jacket and himself.
After he passed out again, laying in his own vomit, the barman got out a mop bucket, cleaned the floor around him and went back to serving drinks to those of us who were still conscious.
We should, by now, realistically, have called the emergency services but, again, we were young and stupid so we continued partying while Rik was so braindead that we might as well just have gone ahead and bury him.
Without any thought as to how we might get him home, we kept ordering rounds while Rik was a living, though only just, testimony to why you should tell your children not to drink explosive cocktails on university campuses.
Suddenly, he stirred to life.
He tried to drag himself up by way of the radiator that had been his home for the past hour, and miserably failed.
He then started to crawl his way to the front door like a commando (a very, very, ridiculously drunk commando) on an obstacle course. When he reached the door, his momentum suddenly abandoned him and he sat there, slumped over and unable to move. He did have to pee though, so he opened up his zipper and just let go, peeing all over himself, the door and the floor.
(Illustration)
We dragged him to the terrace area outside and put him in a chair so that he could get some fresh air, dry up, and not spread the smell of the cocktail of pee and vomit inside.
It was around this time that we, even in our drunken state, started to realise that we really needed to get him home.
We called a taxi company, who duly sent over a van to get us home.
When the taxi arrived we went outside and, to our consternation, found that Rik was no longer in the chair we had put him in, half an hour earlier.
We sent out a search party and found our guy some 30 yards away, passed out under a picknick table.
We dragged him back to HQ, still unconscious, and approached the taxi.
After looking at him for about a second, the taxi driver said that, under no circumstances, would he allow this leftover of a human being, who smelled like he had been living under a bridge in Mumbai for the past decade, into his vehicle.
Eventually, he accepted our bribe of a crisp 20 Euro note to have his van fumigated and cleaned of any vomit bits left in his car and he drove us home.
We managed to drag Rick up the stairs and dropped him on the floor in his room. He had a high bed, with room for his desk underneath it, but we couldn’t be bothered to drag him up there and, in any case, he would be safer on the floor because, if he ever stirred back to life, he would probably fall out of his bed and break his arms or neck.
We retreated to the kitchen, which was as filthy as the rest of the house, full of pots and pans with weeks old food leftovers covered in mould, broken bottles and a stove and walls that had years worth of oil and other grease stuck to it.
We turned up the music to eleven and drank through the night.
The next morning, while we were having some hangover beers, Rik emerged from his room.
He looked like he had died twice. And then once more.
His bloodshot eyes were mere slants behind his wire frame glasses. He didn’t talk and would only occasionally take small sips of water. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone this hungover.
I stayed in Enschede for another day and went back to Rotterdam on Sunday.
About 6 months after I moved to Ireland, I received an invite to the goodbye party for the house. The owner had hired an architect to investigate what it would cost to repair the house after the fireworks disaster and the wear and tear of a decade of drunk students using the house as their personal trampoline, and came to the conclusion that it would be easier to just tear down the whole building and start from scratch.
That goodbye party is a whole story on its own, and I will get to that some time soon.
The fraternity was dissolved a few years ago because, like with so many clubs these days, membership was dwindling and it was no longer viable to keep it going.
It now exists as a foundation that occasionally organizes heavy metal gigs in the city.
I haven’t been back to Enschede since the house goodbye party in 2007, but I have many fond memories of the parties and concerts on campus and at the house.
We were young and stupid, and we had a blast. And a shitload of alcohol.
Enjoy your day.
He took 2 small sips of his drink and put down his glass.
This, as it would transpire, was the beginning of the end.
He took another small sip, put down his glass on the bar again and, a few seconds later, fell off his stool backwards and on to the floor. He lay there, motionless, for some 10 seconds. Just when people were starting to wonder if they should get him some help, or maybe call an ambulance, he stirred to life again.
Walking was obviously out of the question, so he started to sort of crawl across the room in the same way Gollem does in The Lord of the Rings, when he is sneaking up on the hobbits.
He made it as far as the nearest wall, where he tried to drag himself up by using a radiator as a stepping stone. He didn’t get very far. One of our group had hung his jacket over that radiator to dry it after walking through the rain for some time while getting to the bar.
After a short while, Rik gave up and slumped to the radiator. He then grabbed our friend’s jacket, rolled it into a ball and used it as a pillow as he passed out on the floor.
We checked every few minutes, to see if he was still breathing, which he was, so we continued drinking while Rik was laying there, black out drunk and in his own little 7th circle of Atomic Wave Hell.
A while later, someone noticed that Rik started to convulse and make noises not unlike a cat coughing up a hairball.
A few seconds later, he unleashed an ever flowing stream of his dinner, the few beers he’d had and the Atomic Waves, on the floor, the radiator, my friend’s jacket and himself.
After he passed out again, laying in his own vomit, the barman got out a mop bucket, cleaned the floor around him and went back to serving drinks to those of us who were still conscious.
We should, by now, realistically, have called the emergency services but, again, we were young and stupid so we continued partying while Rik was so braindead that we might as well just have gone ahead and bury him.
Without any thought as to how we might get him home, we kept ordering rounds while Rik was a living, though only just, testimony to why you should tell your children not to drink explosive cocktails on university campuses.
Suddenly, he stirred to life.
He tried to drag himself up by way of the radiator that had been his home for the past hour, and miserably failed.
He then started to crawl his way to the front door like a commando (a very, very, ridiculously drunk commando) on an obstacle course. When he reached the door, his momentum suddenly abandoned him and he sat there, slumped over and unable to move. He did have to pee though, so he opened up his zipper and just let go, peeing all over himself, the door and the floor.
We dragged him to the terrace area outside and put him in a chair so that he could get some fresh air, dry up, and not spread the smell of the cocktail of pee and vomit inside.
It was around this time that we, even in our drunken state, started to realise that we really needed to get him home.
We called a taxi company, who duly sent over a van to get us home.
When the taxi arrived we went outside and, to our consternation, found that Rik was no longer in the chair we had put him in, half an hour earlier.
We sent out a search party and found our guy some 30 yards away, passed out under a picknick table.
We dragged him back to HQ, still unconscious, and approached the taxi.
After looking at him for about a second, the taxi driver said that, under no circumstances, would he allow this leftover of a human being, who smelled like he had been living under a bridge in Mumbai for the past decade, into his vehicle.
Eventually, he accepted our bribe of a crisp 20 Euro note to have his van fumigated and cleaned of any vomit bits left in his car and he drove us home.
We managed to drag Rick up the stairs and dropped him on the floor in his room. He had a high bed, with room for his desk underneath it, but we couldn’t be bothered to drag him up there and, in any case, he would be safer on the floor because, if he ever stirred back to life, he would probably fall out of his bed and break his arms or neck.
We retreated to the kitchen, which was as filthy as the rest of the house, full of pots and pans with weeks old food leftovers covered in mould, broken bottles and a stove and walls that had years worth of oil and other grease stuck to it.
We turned up the music to eleven and drank through the night.
The next morning, while we were having some hangover beers, Rik emerged from his room.
He looked like he had died twice. And then once more.
His bloodshot eyes were mere slants behind his wire frame glasses. He didn’t talk and would only occasionally take small sips of water. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone this hungover.
I stayed in Enschede for another day and went back to Rotterdam on Sunday.
About 6 months after I moved to Ireland, I received an invite to the goodbye party for the house. The owner had hired an architect to investigate what it would cost to repair the house after the fireworks disaster and the wear and tear of a decade of drunk students using the house as their personal trampoline, and came to the conclusion that it would be easier to just tear down the whole building and start from scratch.
That goodbye party is a whole story on its own, and I will get to that some time soon.
The fraternity was dissolved a few years ago because, like with so many clubs these days, membership was dwindling and it was no longer viable to keep it going.
It now exists as a foundation that occasionally organizes heavy metal gigs in the city.
I haven’t been back to Enschede since the house goodbye party in 2007, but I have many fond memories of the parties and concerts on campus and at the house.
We were young and stupid, and we had a blast. And a shitload of alcohol.
Enjoy your day.
Great read, Bokkie! Tears in my eyes reading it through
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