Commissioning Editor, London: 8

Posted on March 14, 2010 in Uncategorized

So they sent me on a conference abroad. It’s a big one, and it happens each year. Something like 3000 attendees. I was sat at my desk figuring out the flights a long time ago. I filled out some useless online form for the US immigration people being as they make you do it on the plane anyway. And now it’s real and I actually feel a little ill. The energy inspired by movement. Dorothy is basically ignoring me and so I keep getting up to get a refill from the coffee pot and giving myself stomach cramps from too much filter. At one point I go the toilets thinking I’m going to throw up but when I get there I don’t but I take a shit so that it’s not a completely wasted trip. The days are long and I click through my emails with an air of detachment that I haven’t had to work on. I’m not a hipster. I just don’t care.

I fly from T4, on Delta. It’s smarter than some of the other terminals but it’s not great. There’s the ubiquitous sports car that you can win if you enter a raffle. At first blush I think it’s a Ferrari and excitedly pull out my camera phone. It turns out to be a red Audi. It’s a similar story with the breakfast I order – it clocks in at nearly seven quid, and its tiny and doesn’t even come with toast. I feel especially angry but there’s little I can do and I realise that this is a trope for a lot of my anger in a lot of my life. I settle down with Twitter but it’s full of inane shit condensed into 140 characters or less and so I switch it off and concentrate on my fried egg. The waitress is flirting with me or I am flirting with the waitress and in the end it is the same thing: it’s nothing.

The flight is long. Everything is so long and drawn out about flying these days. The endless security, the idiot who keeps us all waiting because he hasn’t taken out his wallet or taken off his watch. The blatant profiling at the US departures gate. On the flight I watch three whole films and drink about a bottle and a half of cheap white wine. That I make it through passport control is amazing; I’m angry again, and I hadn’t even filled out the right forms. We wait an inordinate amount of time and I’m fingerprint scanned on both hands, all four fingers, my thumbs, too. I can’t remember Dorothy much. Distant makes the heart grown bleak and weary. I can just about make out her face. My eyes are tired and my legs are buckling from the wine. I stink of wine. A man ahead of me keeps pacing the six or seven feet available to him, sighing. I am trying to read my book but the words are blurry. Then, they make us recheck our luggage and go through security again. And catch a train to baggage re-reclaim. It’s Kafkaesque although I’d readily admit to not having read any Kafka and using that phrase because it’s the done thing. And then they misadvertise which carousel it is to appear on. I hurriedly eat some fries from Wendy’s and look around at the US soldiers wandering the airport in desert camo. I think about why they haven’t changed. Is that Iraqi desert dust on their boots? Is someone going to blast me in the face with a souvenir AK? It takes me a long time to find the taxi rank. I am already tired of this place.

The hotel is luxurious in a way that four star UK hotels are not. The huge LCD panel and deep mahogany colour fittings are set off by a large bathroom. I’m too exhausted to do much else apart from order room service. I eat some fish and chips (fish nuggets and fries) and then I knock one out, making sure to draw the curtains because there’s a huge office block across the road. I get to bed.

The first day of the conference sets the tone for the four days ahead. The stand is large, and our books look good, but no-one is enthused by the prospect we should and could share between us – of publishing genuinely ground breaking books if we so choose. Proposals roll in, tentative, for monographs, that will turn up 20,000 words over length and written in a language that makes legalese look like primary school readers. I stare at the middle of the room and then count off the publishers. ______ and _____ are here in force and we begin to mill about making plans for later. We size each other up. And that’s good, although I never find myself in the driving seat. I know I’m not from around here, and some of these publishers are, but I’m gripping onto other’s plans like I did at school. The periphery is a place that inspires discomfort. A deep melancholy descends and the only way to get rid of it is to give myself a ridiculous hangover, which I do with aplomb. We get some dinner, cab there, cab back, cab to the pub, the cabbie is all lost and we hook up his sat nav that I swear he digs out of a blue carrier bag full of other random assorted shit. It’s telling him to make a ‘legal u-turn’ but he swerves across an intersection anyway and we nearly crash and it’s because we’re a little toasted that we don’t realise how close we came to the right side of the car getting absolutely crunched by the huge fender on the approaching car. As we waited for a cab from the restaurant to the pub I pick up two Negra Modela Especiales at the bar and we pocket them. It’s probably illegal to drink on the street but no-one’s around and I total the beers on the way to the microbrew place which is actually pulling last orders at 10:30. Downtown closing time. Time for one Max Red brew in their odd 0.5 ‘pint’ glasses and then onwards to somewhere else. In fact, to an Irish pub that doesn’t appear to close at any hour and is almost entirely full of slightly worn people wearing slightly jacked up beige slacks. The barmaid is square shaped with huge breasts in a crop top that’s struggling to cope. We concentrate on the Sam Adams and Guinness – I concentrate too hard and end up overreaching. By the time we’re at the karaoke place it’s all a blur. I can’t cope with conversation very well and the stupid, drunk girl on the table next to us pitches into the table face down, dead to the world. It’s time to head back and do the usual five hour kip in my clothes before the start of the next day. Because the pain is something real to focus on and that way the conference takes a back seat. This is the best way, or at least, the only way I know. Dorothy is aghast as I explain this to her over breakfast at Balaans after a late night that turned into a very early morning. My shoes and socks were wet.

                “Why do you think like that?” she asked.
                “I have tried. It’s like default wiring or something,” I replied, weakly.
                “You’re sad,” she said, and she meant it, I think.

_____ is odd. Downtown is dead. Hardly anyone on the streets. If you do go out, you get accosted, by people asking for money, for food, for something. The office blocks rise like Lego cubes, like the kind of building a child thinks of when you say, go on, make a big building, here’s some Meccano. A square, a rectangle, a square, a rivet, and then another rectangle. There’s no relation to the curve of the human body. There’s no relation of the curve of the earth or history or classicism or anything gone by, just concrete, glass and steel in cubes and cubes within the cubes, within floors, divided by partitions, with flat screens, as rectangles, projecting a vision of the past, present and future onto 1024 by 768 pixels, themselves cubes, just a square future of clean lines and no history. It re-invents itself every second; it has to, because here the past becomes a myth the next day.

I’m hungover after our big night out and I spent the day keeping myself to myself. I nearly pass out a few times and feel incredibly dizzy all day, I end the day with a slice of soggy pizza and some crackers and cheese. I look over at the bed and go to sleep early. The next day, I’m still hung over. Is this jetlag? I hope it’s jetlag. I feel dizzy in the morning still so I go for a run and hope that I don’t collapse onto the treadmill. In the end, I make it through and I gulp down about three litres of cold water. It sits in my belly like a fluid brick. The dynamic with Dorothy is such that I’m not sure it can go any further but I really do want to go further. I think I have reached that point where I know that I’d like for it work out between us. I asked Frank what he thought but I couldn’t make him out over the music in the Zoo Bar that Thursday night before I left. He was dancing, on the spot, doing something approaching the ‘Running Man’. He was gurning a little too. I can’t speak about this to my US college at the stand because US folks are either cool, too smaltzy or button-down closet psychos and I’m not sure where she falls but it’s not in the first or second categories and I begin to say “you do the math” but I stop myself before I vom in my mouth and have to go the Accident and Emergency or whatever it is called here. I might end up with Hugh Laurie doing his awful US accent and pumping my stomach. I listen to a lot of “Screamadelica”. I like the snaking rhythms. I do some dancing in the mornings because no one is watching. I walk up to the peephole completely naked, sometimes with a semi, just because I can. This is freedom. I chose between ‘Made of Stone’ and ‘Waterfall’ on a whim.

The closing night features a reception. I had a nightmare while I was sleeping that someone I knew asked everyone I knew what they thought about me and that a few people wrote back with particularly scathing comments. I can remember who they were and I thought about taking them off my Facebook because of it but realised that they’ d done nothing. Or had they? I think that, in real life, they might have done something by lack, something by absence, something real that was tangible but that couldn’t be put into very clear words to a disinterested third party in a neutral location. And so I let it go, mostly because the iPhone Facebook app doesn’t let you delete friends easily. The reception is drinks token based but as far as I know, none of the publishers have been given one, even the ones that paid some exorbitant sum towards sponsorship. I find a few pills in my left pocket that day but I put them down the toilet. I think they were Advils. I am angry because of the nightmare and I’ve eaten a Gyro wrap so I’m not hungry and I tried a grape soda and someone gave me a drink ticket so I’m with a Bud Light and I sit down and people are going to dinner and I go with them and it’s okay and actually its really nice and we try some amazing wine from 2003 and I even have desert. We head to the Irish pub again because it’s easy. I drink too much again but not way too much because the next night I have to fly at 11pm and that means getting up at 8 and working a day and flying through the night and getting from T4 to the Piccadilly line and all the million stops home with no sleep and in my mind it approaches some kind of purgatory. In the end, it’s not so bad. I find a companion and we banter back and forth, pleasantly creating back story as improbable people flit past our field of view. I picture myself living in _____. I’m 45 and I’ve let my gut go and I work in a cubicle office with a percolator. I end the days with two stamps on my Starbucks loyalty card and some days four when I collect for the guys at 3pm. We go to the microbrew place most days and Frank Snr the American gets a platter in and we’re all wearing beige slacks with creases and tucked in shirts and those belts with the stitching and the rounded buckles. It smells of dry cleaning sometimes because all my shirts are pre-pressed. I wear undershirts. The thin arm on the belt buckle strains against the second hole, the belt itself creating a line of stress from which the shirt makes a lazy semicircle over my beer belly. I pass the time, I shoot some pool and I go home to my wife, driving well over the limit but there are no cops on the 10 minute drive to Five Oaks Hill and it’s downtown and I drink with the Sergeant some weeks anyway so it’s cool. I’m a known quantity here. I’m not a number. It’s a life of plenty and I stop whenever I want to get food, in a tray, or beers, cold ones, and I stopped smoking but I get through a 20 carton on a big night at Jimmy’s with the lads taking theirs out of mine and we stop at the strip joint and eat messy ribs and then get sixty dollar private dances and once I fucked on in the parking lot when it was past closing and drove her home and then I drove home too and I picture the family house and the garage and the laundry room and my study and I realise it’s a dream what happened with the stripper and I’m actually now 50 and I have brewer’s droop from all the Sam Adams and its okay and I look inside and it’s okay but really there’s a second where the whole thing is one horrific nightmare and I hate my US wife and her vacuous callow ways and our massive yard and the endless barbeques in the hot humid summer and all the soul food has given me high blood pressure and I go to the gym and it’s coming back around and I might have a second change and I think about London less and less. There it is, in a nutshell. And you scream into your hands clasped tightly round your mouth.

I board the flight and get some wine and by the time I get to Heathrow I am so tired that the tingling over my body has become semi-erotic. I am in a Zen state of tiredness. The passport queue is mercifully brief after the full half-hour taxi to the gate, because this is Heathrow and it’s shit. Our carousel breaks down just as the luggage comes onto it and for 20 long minutes men come round and prod at the emergency stop buttons displaying a huge lack of urgency. A man complains and two useless beat bobbies look at him like he’s a criminal. Eventually they run the luggage onto another carousel and then the original one starts just seconds after and people who are literally jet lagged out of their minds now start staring and flipping their broken attention spans between two adjacent carousels, our luggage mixed in with some from the Eastern Bloc that’s nearly all coated in cling film because it’s been totally butt fucked by the baggage search guys. Finally, it arrives. My companion and I are divested of the will to live and we go our separate ways, he heading onto a connecting train, and me towards the Piccadilly line with further tests my commitment to living by waiting the full 8 minutes at T4. I inch home on the Tube through a full thirty stops or more. We pass through London’s strata, the nannies and children at South Ken, the workers from Heathrow already off the train at the Hounslow suburbs. The tourists clamber on, the school kids in blazers, some outings. Someone from the Zoo, probably. We head through, we work through, this city, this London and I can see Dorothy again and I realise that the energy I need to live something that isn’t a smash and grab of food and beer and coffee and land and SUVs is the electricity that the metropolis lends me and as I get out into the air near home I realise it’s old and Georgian and the bricks are red and crumbling but the history here is impacted onto the pavements and the myths of those that have gone before are floating in the air and not consigned to a clinical museum in the endless guilty greenbelt conversions. This is not the Interstate. I feel the energy that the stories give me and I can’t wait to see Frank and buy him a chaser. It’s that much of a moment I cry as I’ve been away for nearly 48 hours and I stand for a long time in the shower thinking about love and the places in between and on the way that all find their own kind of stasis and inertia.