A thousand miles ago and already half forgotten, as he watches the world pass by his window and tries to remember. How can anyone forget New York he asks the passing clouds. He is beginning to develop a habit of talking to himself. He looks around the thin skinned, steel tube that he and his fellow travelers believe will actually fly them across the slowly widening Atlantic Ocean, the distance between the old world and the new growing by a few centimeters every year. Or is it every century? Outside his window the sun shining into his eyes must be shining from the west, unless the plane has turned round. Soon it will be sunset. Or is it sunrise? Too much travel addles the brain; New Zealand, Hawaii, Los Angeles and lastly New York. Bang, bang, bang. He ticks them off on his fingers. This is the final leg of his famous ‘round the world’ adventure. And what has he learned? He has learnt that a ‘Walkman’ uses an awful lot of batteries if you play it all the time. It’s the winding back that does the damage. That and the outback dust which is still ingrained into his soul. He has learnt that he is stronger than he ever thought he was but unfortunately he is no further down the road to making sense of it all. He has been a homeless drifter but now he is going home. ‘First time I saw the boll-weevil he was sitting on a square’ he sings quietly to himself. The woman across the aisle glances up from her magazine. Everybody gotta have a home unless they are ‘Gentleman John Huddie Leadbetter’ or living on the street. It’s the same the whole world over. You are what you own. In which case, his granite house in Cornwall means he is surely a ‘somebody’? But then everybody is a ‘somebody’ sometime to someone, even if they do end up a ‘nobody’ dying on a bench and already conveniently wrapped in plastic. Like the shabby New Yorkers he saw sitting about in the city parks while all around the money roared. He remembers the red dust thirsty canyons and the hot springs and the day he arrived at the not-so-red centre after the first rains in years, to find it green everywhere. He remembers the bubbling mud on North Island, the reek of sulphur and the crazy flight to Hawaii where he landed quarter of an hour before he took off and then had to persuade the American customs not to cut open his sun bleached cricket ball, a souvenir of some outback asbestos ghost town that he found at the side of a dirt road. Customs thought it was full of cocaine or something. He remembers Pearl Harbour, a sobering experience. Imagine dying before you even know you are at war? Then on to LA, where an American psychiatric nurse had warned him to beware the pickpockets at Venice Beach and yet ,when they got to the bar, the nurse found it was his own wallet that had gone missing. And he remembers the guy at the hotel who had been so amused by his reference to the La Brea tar pits being ‘about a three quarter walk’ away. ‘Three quarters of what?’ the guy had asked. ‘On the way there you’ll be asked for a quarter three times’. And the guy knew, more or less exactly, how far he had meant. The actual distance for a three quarter walk varies from city to city. It seems to be at its shortest in downtown New York but this was in ‘the late eighties’ before the big clean up that no-one ever asks any questions about. Despite all this our weary traveler found he quite liked Americans. Individually they were manageable. En masse they were insane. He glances up at the screen. The in-flight movie is about a serial killer who kills on certain dates on the calendar in order to spell out a musical score. He saw it on the way out to Australia a lifetime ago last year. Talking of serial killers he remembers how, back in New York he had been firmly warned, by the effeminate young receptionist at his downtown hotel not to open his door to anyone. ‘If we need to come in to you we will ring first’ the receptionist had emphasized over and over and several times. The traveler had duly noted this information but in truth, his mind was elsewhere. As was his luggage. ‘Vancouver’, they said when he landed at New York and heard himself being paged in a country where no-one knew him or where he was. The straight-faced airline person had told him baldly that they had sent his luggage to Vancouver and then tried to imply it was possibly all his fault. For the luggage existing in the first place presumably? They assured him that they would get his luggage back before he left New York for England. So he went about his touring and was soon busy learning that New York in the eighties was not an easy place to visit alone. Taxi drivers refused to take him where he wanted to go. ‘For ya own safety buddy’. And then one evening there came a knock at his hotel room door. He had been out ‘arting’ with MOMA and was now just relaxing with a brown paper bag full of beer. He slid off the bed and walked to the door. It wasn’t far. He opened the door, just as he remembered never to open the door. And there stood six foot five of lean mean black machismo, diamond crucifix through his ear, chains, the works and smiling the way only psycho killers smile. ‘I am now dead’ he thought, hoping death would be quick and relatively painless. The psycho killer looked him over and then said in a voice so camp it regularly went on holiday with the famous five. ‘You left your key in the door, man. You know that’s not a very good idea round here’. His would be gay nemesis coyly held out the offending item. ‘Oh, yeah er thanks, thanks a lot’ he flustered taking the key and sweating. ‘Please, don’t mention it and I love the accent’ fluttered his saviour. Why do Americans do that ‘love the accent’ thing? He could not get the door shut again quickly enough. Then he only started wondering if he should have tipped him or not? Like that broken automaton that he had successfully repaired with a five-dollar bill. The barman had been taciturn and sullen to the point of unfriendliness until the magic five dollars hit the bottom of the tray. Then he was a man transformed. ‘Hi there buddy where you from?’ asks his new found very best friend. The barman chatted away happily until the traveller asked casually if the bar had such a thing as ‘a fag machine’. The look on the barman’s face was well worth five dollars. Luckily someone translated his request so he was back in Marlboro Country instead of out on his donkey, as the Americans say. Now he gazes, entranced at the clouds all in perpetual motion and this time tomorrow where will he be? His mind wanders, he thinks he sees things in the cloud shapes, faces, horses and then something emerging, like a ghost ship, from the cloudbank below, a sort of steel tube thing with windows and writing on it, steel wings with jet engines on them. And even as he realises that this is not some optical illusion caused by refraction through the water droplets in the clouds, he also realises that the two aircraft are definitely going to collide and very soon then there will be a crashing and tearing and ripping of metal and there will be screams, perhaps an explosion and then two broken tubes of shattered holes spiralling down spewing out passengers and baggage all the way to the sea so far below. He is going to die for sure this time. And for some ‘reason’ all he can think of is a pub he never went into somewhere on the North Circular Road. At which moment he feels his metal tube begin to rise as it veers away from the other aircraft, then he hears the multiple roar of the engines and somewhere below the terminal din he hears the collective gasps and sighs of relief of the other passengers as the other aircraft levels out and now he can see the white faces of the passengers at the other windows and wonder if his face is just as white looking back. He can hear his pulse. The endless skyway pilot is all reassurance and calm but everyone knows a proper job near miss when they see one. It was definitely brown trousers all round, the fixed grin stewardess looks plastic and sickly. A ‘No Mr Bond I expect you to die’ moment that was and no mistake and yet here he is still going strong. Is life trying to tell me something, he wonders. Just recently he has fallen in a river full of crocodiles, been lost in the outback, survived a car crash in Queensland then left his key in a hotel door, more or less next to a neon sign saying ‘Please murder me’, and now this? He begins to wonder if he has become somehow indestructible like Captain Scarlet but before he gets too carried away and after some consideration he mutters, ‘I bet I get off the plane and walk straight under a fucking bus’. Death will find him in his, or her, own good time no doubt. If nothing else he is a survivor. Now the pilot says his bit and the safety belt light goes on and another 747 descends through the fluffy stuff and into the haze above London town and there is ‘the river’ and down and down and down and down and down and down we go, hurry now darling we mustn’t be late for the bump trundle, trundle and on and on until the airplane has become just a curiously shaped bus once again. Everybody is scrabbling for bags, coats, outback cricket balls, and so on. And he is home. And nobody cares. And because he is crazy, he feels like a character in a sci-fi story he read long ago. ‘Just call me Joe Vargo’ he tells the broken baggage carousel. America where are you now? Gone, gone and the damage done. He had been only seconds from death but now it felt as if he was back from the stars and the big apple only to find himself stuck on an island watching the planes fly overhead, the ships pass him by en route to the distant lights of the city. ‘Just call me Joe Vargo’ he tells the Piccadilly Line ticket machine but the machine says nothing. It just takes his money and gives him nothing in return. Now he knows for sure that he is really back home where he belongs and not stranded on some island waiting to die alone and forgotten. There will be more near misses somewhere down the line no doubt. There is always death, just like there is always hope. © David Rowland All Rights Reserved millionstories.net |
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