Warning: This column contains references to hookers, violence, binge-drinking, binge-smoking, drugs, hot and spicy barbecue and grown men sleeping together. So for the love of God don’t look away now!

In 1992, I road tripped to New Orleans with my nasty English roommate Simon (who held his liquor as well as the average 14-year-old American girl) and my friend Corey, the most persnickety fuss-budget I’ve known since grade school. The guy had a way of holding a good time hostage until he got what he wanted.

Simon’s friend Mike came over from Yorkshire for the trip. Something had to give; this trip had all the foreshadowing of an Irwin Allen movie.

We left Ames at 6 p.m. on Friday with The Cult’s “Born To Be Wild” blaring from the tape deck. Simon drove, pumping the gas for hundreds of miles like the muscles in his narrow ankles couldn’t keep the pedal down. It was as relaxing as being randomly hit in the head by a kindergarten class.

We drove all night, and in Tennessee we stopped for breakfast because Corey kept whining about this great place called Shoney’s.

Theoretically, it sounded good, a big breakfast after driving all night. Everything was salted to death except the grits — but they were grits, so who cared? After two plates of saltlick, I left a Jackson Pollock in the toilet that is probably still there.

Mike drove into Nashville through heavy morning traffic. He didn’t own a car in England and had little driving experience. The right/left thing messed him up, and he nearly ran head-on into a semi the first time off the interstate.

In Alabama, Corey wanted barbecue, and his pout was deadly. We roamed aimlessly through Birmingham without asking for directions. By sheer chance, we found a place, but we were too pissed to enjoy it. Corey smiled like a fat, happy baby. It made us all want to kick him silly-like.

By sundown Saturday, I must have smoked three packs of cigarettes.

On the Franz Kafka National Interstate in Mississippi, we had been awake for 35 hours, and the hallucinations became unbearable. We pulled over at a “rest area,” which was a gravel parking lot with an oil drum garbage can. The woods smelled of smoke, and we could see lights nearby in a small “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” shack. That was the fastest international effort ever undertaken.

Back on the road, Simon hit some kind of animal or small, mutant child. Under the strain, he began weeping uncontrollably like Ned Beatty in “Deliverance.” He’d never taken the life of anything that wasn’t his roommate before.

We finally got to the Big Easy at 9:30 p.m. We were exhausted. I forced myself into the shower, and by 10:30 p.m., we were on Bourbon Street ready for anything … almost.

Having never been anywhere more exotic than Minneapolis, everything I saw made my head light. This was aided by the rum-filled hurricanes we drank on empty stomachs. Each contained four shots of rum and the phone number of the nearest poison control center.

Bourbon Street is like Adventureland with bare ass. People drink in the streets of the French Quarter and strippers, street performers and drug-dealers walk around soliciting everyone. Every 10 feet, a man would whisper to me: “Smoke, smoke.” I would say, “Excuse me?” and he would bolt away.

In a takeout beer joint, a man in a suit told me the toilet was only for customers. I bought a $4 beer and he said it was OK.

I came out, and about 15 really hot women lined up in front of me blocking my path. I said, “Excuse me, ma’am” like a polite Iowan, and they let me by. The bartender told us it would cost us $10 if we wanted to just sit there. Only then did it occur to us we were in a whorehouse.

Three hours later, it was time for karaoke across the street, where a junkie asked me for a buck. I said no, and he threatened to cut me with his two-inch pocket knife. Unaccustomed to violent confrontations, I didn’t know whether to be scared or laugh my ass off; so I pretended I couldn’t speak English.

In a strip joint, the hurricanes caught up with Simey the Limey, and he puked all over himself, a red gusher. Time to call it a night; the female strippers were so ugly, we wanted the men to come back on.

Back in the room, I washed the puke out of my roommate’s jeans while he wept uncontrollably and screamed insults at me.

I passed out in the bed I shared with Corey, and we all slept until 3 Sunday afternoon.

After big plates of garlic pasta, we hit the road again. Unaccustomed to anything but English food, the garlic oozed from Mike’s pores like pure evil all the way to Galveston. But that is another story.

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Greg Jerrett is a graduate student in English from Council Bluffs. He is opinion editor of the Daily.