Part One
Time for some more reminiscences. This time we’re going back to the Summer of 2004. And some actual travel features; rather than simply some ghastly antics in not-so-far-off Buckinghamshire.
I had recently moved house for the third time. This was, of course, still the era in which one sat on a house and it magically accrued additional value and you made a few quid every time you moved. I had just completed this process, and siphoned off some of that money into a touring holiday with my best friend Swaggers. His ex-girlfriend (at the time) had been working at a travel agency and had cut us a good deal on a fortnight of being bussed ‘round some of the highlights of Central America. Principally Guatemala, but with some nice big sploshes of Honduras, Belize and Mexico into the bargain. One day I will tell tales of Twisted Tania’s, in Copan Ruinas, where we got drunk with the Honduran army.
We were a long, long way from all of these excitements, the day we met Gorgeous George.
We’d mustered in Harlesden the night before (in the never-ending corridor of a flat that Swaggers shared at that time – much like a lighthouse that had fallen on its side), and made our way out to Heathrow for an initial flight to Atlanta. First time in the US of A, for me, and only an overnight job before we were to fly onwards to the City of Antigua, in the West of Guatemala, to meet up with a parade of teachers, librarians, and other largely ‘right thinking’ middle class professionals (although there was a lad who looked like Prince William and behaved like a complete lunatic throughout, but he was something of an outlier – we’ll gloss over him – his shorts were filthy by the end of the holiday – oh, yes, there was also the Swedish couple who tried to get out of paying for a group meal in Cancun; we had to chase those devils down the street ‘or ‘strip’ as it’s called there).
I digress, as ever. Sorry. To Heathrow and to our plane we went, bedecked with all we would need. I had the dossier, considering Swaggers to be quite the loose cannon when it came to the preservation of significant paperwork. Ask SWK, ask my ex-wife (who’ll feature later in this re-telling of my travels past), ask my family members – hell, ask anyone, I love a good dossier when it comes to holidaymaking. That feeling of a seamless sequence of documents and maps, set out in an order to chime with the coming events, growing gradually thinner as one discards the unnecessary, before arriving at the final boarding card and so the return to Blighty. So lovely, so warming, somehow? I think it’s just me, but I don’t really care. I’m not getting on a plane again until January 2015, and I already have a couple of pieces of paperwork squirreled away for when I can legitimately start work on a plastic folder for the trip.
Wine and beer was served on the flight. Freely, and in seemingly bottomless vessels; you can see how these celeb types finish up being led away down the steps in irons, can’t you? And so we took our first missteps. Films were watched. Curious plastic trays of food were eaten. Time passed, as the libations went down. Eventually the Georgian tarmac was reached, but not before I had passed Swaggers his folder of tickets, so as to make use of the stub from the outward leg, to complete his Green Card (even through a fug of airline Merlot, I remember licking my lips at the prospect of a spot of form-filling).
He dutifully did as he was bade, and we began to queue to enter the United States. A process that was as unfriendly, circuitous and irritating as anything I can remember. Bearing in mind I am someone who seems to find almost everything irritating, don’t please underestimate that statement. It took the small matter of three hours, in total, and was more or less continuously undertaken at gunpoint. The country was, like the UK, at WAR, and seemed to be quite prickly about the fact that anyone wanted to go there. After an aeon, I finally passed muster for entry, and may, I think, have made the sort of glib comment to the sidearm-toting woman on the desk that can tend to get me in a spot of bother, but not on this occasion, thankfully. I look back now and think of that lost afternoon, and how little fun it would have been for any poor souls who didn’t have much English and had to go through translators and be asked searching questions about their motivation for crossing the border. It would not have been a cakewalk.
Into the bowels of Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport we did go. A little dusty, and very much in need of fresh air. Consultation of the dossier revealed that transit to our hotel would be a matter of simplicity; a local train/subway from under the airport. First we had to collect our bags. As I had the dossier to hand, I asked the fateful question, “Swaggers, can I have those tickets back? I’ll hold on to them with mine, shall I?” Time slowed down, fellow travellers moved at a snail’s pace across the concourse, as the words came back.. “What tickets?” God love the fellow, he’d assumed the book of tickets, all of them we would need, was just a stub, and he’d unthinkingly binned the lot, together with his beer cans, back on the plane. I told you he was a loose cannon, didn’t I? Suddenly my dossier-world looks rather more of a cosy place to be, doesn’t it?
We were on our way across interminable transit tubes to Concourse B. A nasal auto-announcer just said the word CAAAN-CORRRS again and again and again. I had visions of us being late for the carousel and losing our luggage, as well as the fucking tickets. I bit my lip. Hard. Cruelly, we arrived at a better-lit station of the airport. Outside the sunshine and vitality of the open air mocked us, and our ticketless funk. Inside, unable to oblige my best and oldest friend with an argument, for it would have been a fruitless endeavour, I silently pondered just abandoning the bastard. He’d not have had a clue where we were meant to be staying. I could forge on, free, in a private bubble of pleasant order and calm. Yes..
Nope, abandon such thoughts, I told myself. Friendship means more than that, and you never know, he might be a good match for a kidney one day. As much as airline tickets even only ten years ago appeared to be one-offs, and irreplaceable, I concluded that Delta would somehow have magic machines and records and printers and all would, in the end, be well.
Against the prevailingly tragic tide, our bags arrived without incident, and we began our next three laps of the airport in pursuit of the Delta Desk. Helpfully, its presence was marked by another enormous queue. In which I left Swaggers, very much sans dossier, mostly in case he accidentally made paper planes out of it, or used it as a sketch pad, and went off to ponder life on the porcelain.
Which was my next error. I had imagined America to be, down to every corner and crevice, a land of sparkle and pizazz. Surfaces would be white and shiny like the teeth of their film stars. No – this was the rough stateside equivalent of that scene in Trainspotting. The bog was bogging. There was no roster of signatures on the back of the cubicle door. I’ve never been in an abattoir, but I imagine the smell would not be dissimilar to that which I experienced that sorry and woe begotten afternoon. As motions go, I have only known worse on St. Stephen’s Green in Dublin, where my trousers puddled in a carpet of torn-out pages of pornographic magazines and used hypodermics.
I scuttled back to Swaggers, yearning for deodorant, soap and a glass of water. He had gained access to a member of staff. To George. Gorgeous George. And, somehow, even without my dossier, Swaggers was winning. The paperless, passport-less, greenback-less, jug-eared administrative Black Hole was talking his way into a set of replacement tickets, without me. I hated him all the more for this, of course (I can be a right sour old git) but somehow had never loved him more either. All of those years of him regularly being three hours late when vising me as a student. The time he stayed in my room with an infected in-growing toenail that smelled so bad it would actually wrest one from sleep. The chaos and disorder and Olympic Class levels of mess he would poor down upon me. All of it, all of it would be forgiven forever, and certainly never blogged about once they invented blogging, if he could get replacement tickets.
Mine was a bit part, in honesty. Barely a credit at the end of the final scene. I think I probably called Gorgeous George (and he was a modern Saint, people – I recall we offered to buy him some beers that evening – he didn’t show, but he was probably pulling children out of burning buildings downtown – I bet he has a statue up somewhere by now) ‘old boy’ a couple of times, to add a bit of British Colour and Eccentricity, in the vague imagining that Americans (all 292 million of them at the time) lapped that sort of stuff up. He just smiled beatifically, made more phone calls, and called ladies on the other end of the line ‘doll’ and gradually, things were taking shape. Stuff got printed. In the final reckoning, $60 changed hands and we walked away smiling, to the train. The theme to The Great Escape formed an earworm I would be humming in the back of my mind until the end of that day.
I thanked Swaggers for his hard work and his charm in rectifying the situation, and getting us back on track. And plucked the tickets from his grotesquely hairy paw and put them back in the bloody dossier.
Come back soon, for more of the Good Deeds of Swaggers, as he saves my life in the jungle. Sort of.
suggzy 