Mmm, she’s crazy hot, purred my sleazy drunken brain. Across the table, Friend’s droopy eyes looked over at me, disapproving, telling me not to be quite so obvious in my admiration. We were sitting down on the bar’s comfy seats, her bottom and legs were cutting and thrusting and swooping around at my eye-line. I couldn’t help admiring and didn’t care.
From there the evening became blurry, and remains so now. Virtually no words remain; only faint outlines. Trying to remember is like visiting a gallery where the paintings become gradually soiled and obscured to the point that all you see are the frames, the parts around the edges. Memory is like that of a silent film I half dozed through.
We’d had a good night up until then across a number of different central venues. Friend had done his usual painfully tortured ‘oh I really shouldn’t..’ – although we both knew what was on the cards when he unexpectedly called in on my flat at 6pm. It was Saturday night, his fiancée had gone out with a friend who was visiting. He was free and notoriously weak where alcohol was concerned. Opportunities to go out like this are rare for me now, chances to behave like a drunken idiot who’s perhaps a little younger than I am. I fed Friend a couple of tantalising beers at the flat before suggesting we go the pub. We hadn’t played any Xbox at all, which must have meant we were growing up.
After attending the birthday party of another friend’s friend in an upstairs function room – a place populated almost exclusively by well dressed, enviably good looking, shiny-faced homosexual men – we made our way back across town into the mainstream district. We stopped in two pubs before coming to our final destination: a highly swanky looking late-night bar.
We’ve intermittently enjoyed nights like this, here in this city for over ten years; impromptu, long, fuelled to the point of memory blackouts. While I knew they wouldn’t happen as often as in our early twenties, the chance of them, even if only now and again, incentivised my decision to move back here.
“Five quid entry,” a doorman said as we walked enquiringly towards him.
“Or is it four?” his female colleague asked.
“Three!” I interjected, charged by several large whiskies. “Two fifty, one pound ten?! Let’s barter!” Friend glared disgusted, what-the-fuck-are-you-doing? daggers at me.
But something incredible happened. They laughed, relented and simply waved us through. “Go on., before I change my mind,” she said. We walked in, giggling incredulously.
Memory holds reasonably firmly for an hour or so, before the dancing girl with the body. Then she’s sitting next to me and we’re chatting.
How did you do that, you genius?
Not a clue. And I have absolutely no recollection of our conversation. She’s German and has a German accent. That’s it. No memory of her face either. A loose recollection of her outline and basic, impressive dancing shape, dark wavy hair, but my memory stubbornly refuses to colour in a face of any kind. There’s only fuzziness around the edges.
Friend is around, maybe chatting to her friends, or sitting on his own in a drunken stupor. Both are plausible. She stands up to dance again and there's a time lapse before she prepares to leave. Her handful of friends (could have been three, could have been seven), male and female, look all set and mingle around the top of the stairs. I’m sad she’s leaving. She approaches me again to say goodbye and I stand, smile, possibly leer, disappointed. Words must be exchanged but I have no idea what they are. (I'd guess "nice to meet you"). I kiss one cheek and pause, then decide to go continental and kiss the other, and pause. Something must happen in this pause: a raise of her chin, a smile or a look in her eye. Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe I’m just drunk and fearless. Either way, we’re suddenly kissing properly.
Me! Dowdy loner bloke! In a hip late night bar on a Saturday night, drunk, snogging a German female who I’m positive is really quite attractive! She’s kissing me back! Quick, someone take a picture to show to my Grandchil.. um, well: Great Niece or Nephew! (See, I wasn't always like this). This might never happen again!
We must break off and smile coyly, no numbers or details exchanged. Why the hell not? Did she say she had a boyfriend? Was she just visiting friends here? So what? What was her name?
ANYTHING, brain? Anything at all? One slender grain of detail?
Nada, zilch, a big long flatline bastard.
She follows her friends down the stairs and presumably out of the bar. I make no attempt to follow. (Again, WHY? Prick.) I sit back down with Friend, who’s talking to new people. My intoxication means I’m now riding the crest of legal chemicals and temporary confidence; I’m surprisingly not dumbstruck. I enter this new conversation with a cocksure gusto, like nothing just happened and I’d forgotten it already.
From here even the edges of memory start to blur.
*
Knowing that I don’t have a clue what she looks like annoys the hell out of me. I privately pride myself on being good at remembering faces, being able to quickly identify people even if I only see them for a second. Earlier that evening a Swashbuckled follower sat behind me in a pub and, not having too many followers, I felt curiously smug. Then strange and uncomfortable. I tried explaining this to Friend, who I don’t believe has ever visited a Twitter page. I couldn’t argue with his deduction, “..fucking weird mate.”
Point is I enjoy my ability to tell immediately who someone is with a half second glance at their mug. And I’m a decent listener, attentive, and will remember the key details of a conversation and usually more besides – especially if the interlocutor happens to be an attractive female. I don’t forget. And I imagine I came across as attentive and interested and not a complete moron, or she wouldn’t have come over to say goodbye.
But it’s academic. Despite plaintively scrolling through my phone numbers more than once (why are you doing this, you wanker) the upshot is that I have nothing at all. We must have spoken for a while and were attached at the face for several seconds. Yet she could plausibly pass me in the street and I wouldn’t have a clue.
This irks me.
Thursday, 20 January 2011
Monday, 17 January 2011
whatever that means
“I wanted to fuck you the moment I saw you,” she murmured into my ear. Shit, really? Nobody’s ever said that before. And this city’s been slicing my face into scabby pieces lately. Not wanting to alter the atmosphere in any way, I kept quiet and kissed her.
Conversely, I hadn’t wanted to fuck her straight away. It was the Alice Band: an immediate issue which made me annoyed by my own fussiness with jewellery and accessories. Back home Alice Bands were exclusively the staple of 12 year old girls or girly-haired European footballers. Not women.
But by the time she breathed those words into my ear, the next morning, naked in my hotel bed, I did want to fuck her, very much. And I even liked her too.
She’d entered the bar and sat down next to me, wearing that Alice Band – worn to hold curly red hair. She seemed nice, chatty, human and smart; neither of us perturbed by the unorthodox meeting, the loose online acquaintance but not actually knowing the first thing about each other.
We drank pints and ate burgers, drank more, conversation flowing easily. She spoke amusingly and with the manner of a charismatic, obviously homosexual man: lots of back and forth shoulder tilting, flappy hand gestures and much use of air quotation marks, which I teased her about. I was enjoying having company, conversing. She was fun, the bar was cool and low key, the music good. Although I wasn’t sure if this was just a pleasant couple of hours and we should be getting back: me to my hotel a few blocks east, her to her small flat a short train ride north. It was more of a date than I’d anticipated when I suggested meeting up. But that was fine, and became better than fine.
“Well.. I’m having a fun time,” she said, leadingly, so we moved on elsewhere. In the next dark sports bar we had tequila and further strong liquors, discussing drinking, local politics, religion and family. An hour later we tired of that bar and headed out, considering a next venue but not knowing where. On the street it was bitterly cold. She shivered and I put an arm around her.
Despite being the local, she was unsure where to go next. “Nothing.. funny, but we could just go back to mine, or..” she trailed away. I suggested we go back to my hotel, a shorter distance away, just a few blocks. Nothing.. funny either, I added, chuckling in my head. She agreed. In the room I generously poured from the bottle of Sour Mash bourbon bought from Moe’s Liquor Store in Sheboygan Falls earlier that week.
She flopped down onto the near-side of the bed. I made to leap over and rest the other side of her, louche and athletic: a poor idea made worse by a misjudged leap and bounce off the far side of the bed and onto the floor. It was clearly unintended and less than smooth. She laughed. We were both drunk and fuzzy. I clambered back on the bed
and lay next to her, embarrassed and flustered, any cool I had extinguished in that moment.
We breathed and sipped at the bourbon. What now?
“We could get naked and get in bed?” she nonchalantly suggested.
“But what would my wife say?” I whispered straightfaced.
A nervous giggle, a pregnant pause for thought.
My turn to laugh. I assured her, agreed to her suggestion and hoped she’d take off the Alice Band.
*
Around midmorning, that stupendously filthy murmur suggested her headache had eased. These were times of therapy for a man of fragile ego.
Midday saw glaring Chicago sunlight punish the curtains. She rested warmly against me, now freshly showered and slowly preparing to leave. No great urgency. I played with her hair. The night before had been made easier by the transience of the situation: the time-sensitive One Night Only Offer. Nothing had mattered all that much, nothing had any real consequence. In two days’ time I’d be gone, a long way away, unlikely to ever return.
That’s unless feeling develops, if there’s any sense of mutual feeling, if raw is courage acted upon. This is less likely with sober, pragmatic characters already encroached on their thirties. Those who know they should stop playing games and start being serious, whatever that means.
Let it go. Frivolously skim back across the ocean and remember it fondly. Accept it for what it was: a night with someone you found you liked, albeit for a brief period, someone you had a good time with. Be content to smile at the memory: that spectacular death of your cool; that you were both naked in bed before you’d even kissed; the quirky unorthodoxy of it all. Be grateful for her unknowing illumination of your ridiculously unsuitable previous female hope.
Use the knowledge to go forward and hope that these type of meetings – for this isn’t entirely without precedent – isn’t as good as you can ever hope for. Hope that you stop being so pathetically grateful for attention from any female with a combination of looks and intelligence. Learn to stop excitedly sledgehammering square shapes into round holes like an overzealous recruitment consultant. It’ll be fine, it can work, IT WILL WORK!
Move on now.
Let it go when you kiss her for the last time and smile and say something meaningless and she leaves the room and the heavy hotel door clunks shut behind her. Let it slide and blur and fade. Just like that. Easy.
Lying there together in those final minutes, absently twirling one of her curls around a forefinger, perhaps it was because nothing mattered all that much, because nothing had any consequence: perhaps that made it sadder.
Conversely, I hadn’t wanted to fuck her straight away. It was the Alice Band: an immediate issue which made me annoyed by my own fussiness with jewellery and accessories. Back home Alice Bands were exclusively the staple of 12 year old girls or girly-haired European footballers. Not women.
But by the time she breathed those words into my ear, the next morning, naked in my hotel bed, I did want to fuck her, very much. And I even liked her too.
She’d entered the bar and sat down next to me, wearing that Alice Band – worn to hold curly red hair. She seemed nice, chatty, human and smart; neither of us perturbed by the unorthodox meeting, the loose online acquaintance but not actually knowing the first thing about each other.
We drank pints and ate burgers, drank more, conversation flowing easily. She spoke amusingly and with the manner of a charismatic, obviously homosexual man: lots of back and forth shoulder tilting, flappy hand gestures and much use of air quotation marks, which I teased her about. I was enjoying having company, conversing. She was fun, the bar was cool and low key, the music good. Although I wasn’t sure if this was just a pleasant couple of hours and we should be getting back: me to my hotel a few blocks east, her to her small flat a short train ride north. It was more of a date than I’d anticipated when I suggested meeting up. But that was fine, and became better than fine.
“Well.. I’m having a fun time,” she said, leadingly, so we moved on elsewhere. In the next dark sports bar we had tequila and further strong liquors, discussing drinking, local politics, religion and family. An hour later we tired of that bar and headed out, considering a next venue but not knowing where. On the street it was bitterly cold. She shivered and I put an arm around her.
Despite being the local, she was unsure where to go next. “Nothing.. funny, but we could just go back to mine, or..” she trailed away. I suggested we go back to my hotel, a shorter distance away, just a few blocks. Nothing.. funny either, I added, chuckling in my head. She agreed. In the room I generously poured from the bottle of Sour Mash bourbon bought from Moe’s Liquor Store in Sheboygan Falls earlier that week.
She flopped down onto the near-side of the bed. I made to leap over and rest the other side of her, louche and athletic: a poor idea made worse by a misjudged leap and bounce off the far side of the bed and onto the floor. It was clearly unintended and less than smooth. She laughed. We were both drunk and fuzzy. I clambered back on the bed
and lay next to her, embarrassed and flustered, any cool I had extinguished in that moment.
We breathed and sipped at the bourbon. What now?
“We could get naked and get in bed?” she nonchalantly suggested.
“But what would my wife say?” I whispered straightfaced.
A nervous giggle, a pregnant pause for thought.
My turn to laugh. I assured her, agreed to her suggestion and hoped she’d take off the Alice Band.
*
Around midmorning, that stupendously filthy murmur suggested her headache had eased. These were times of therapy for a man of fragile ego.
Midday saw glaring Chicago sunlight punish the curtains. She rested warmly against me, now freshly showered and slowly preparing to leave. No great urgency. I played with her hair. The night before had been made easier by the transience of the situation: the time-sensitive One Night Only Offer. Nothing had mattered all that much, nothing had any real consequence. In two days’ time I’d be gone, a long way away, unlikely to ever return.
That’s unless feeling develops, if there’s any sense of mutual feeling, if raw is courage acted upon. This is less likely with sober, pragmatic characters already encroached on their thirties. Those who know they should stop playing games and start being serious, whatever that means.
Let it go. Frivolously skim back across the ocean and remember it fondly. Accept it for what it was: a night with someone you found you liked, albeit for a brief period, someone you had a good time with. Be content to smile at the memory: that spectacular death of your cool; that you were both naked in bed before you’d even kissed; the quirky unorthodoxy of it all. Be grateful for her unknowing illumination of your ridiculously unsuitable previous female hope.
Use the knowledge to go forward and hope that these type of meetings – for this isn’t entirely without precedent – isn’t as good as you can ever hope for. Hope that you stop being so pathetically grateful for attention from any female with a combination of looks and intelligence. Learn to stop excitedly sledgehammering square shapes into round holes like an overzealous recruitment consultant. It’ll be fine, it can work, IT WILL WORK!
Move on now.
Let it go when you kiss her for the last time and smile and say something meaningless and she leaves the room and the heavy hotel door clunks shut behind her. Let it slide and blur and fade. Just like that. Easy.
Lying there together in those final minutes, absently twirling one of her curls around a forefinger, perhaps it was because nothing mattered all that much, because nothing had any consequence: perhaps that made it sadder.
Saturday, 15 January 2011
unfinished books and a nice excerpt
I've been starting too many books lately with only a faint commitment to finishing, or even reading much of them. This has been born from completing but only enjoying two thirds of my book before last (Emma Donoghue's rightly acclaimed 'Room' – doesn't it essentially end two-thirds of the way through? Isn’t the rest filler?) And only around a third of my last book (Catherine O’Flynn’s ‘The News Where You Are’ – quite saggy, scant momentum). Both of these were Christmas gifts bought for me at my request, so there was an obligation to finish them. Another request, Paul Auster’s latest, ‘Sunset Park,’ is now waiting. I’m nervous after hearing mixed reviews.
Wanting a short break from feeling obliged to finish everything, I frivolously binged from the library – albeit not successfully. A Costa shortlisted book of poetry, a serious looking Emile Zola novel I’m unlikely to get too far into but felt like a worthy idea at the time, a Graham Swift novel I’d never heard of, and an Alan Sillitoe book of short stories entitled and containing “The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner” – partly selected after loving the film, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, which Sillitoe wrote.
Our excellent new library sits squarely on the quickest route from my flat into the city centre, so I often fail to resist a quick scan of their New Books or Quick Picks sections.
Today, neither needing nor wanting new material, yet knowing I wasn’t being grabbed by anything I had, my feet wandered in there again. My hand selected a book called “Travel Writing – A Story,” by Peter Ferry. My brain was attracted by the simplicity of the title and cover, and was won by a cover quote from Dave Eggers and a compelling inside sleeve.
I spent an hour or so with the book and a coffee, and a band called Pepper Rabbit playing in my headphones, occasionally glancing out onto a high street bulging with Saturday afternoon shoppers. I grew more committed to this book than I had to anything else I’d read in a while. I particularly enjoyed the following.
“…I became interested in what we do and where we go to give our lives meaning when we don’t or can’t find it at home, when life there becomes too staid and certain and we have to create challenges – even dilemmas – for ourselves because problems are interesting and important and life without them is neither. It is the reason that people join the circus, I think, drink too much, drive too fast, jump off things, jump into things, climb things, run away from home, and paddle into the wilderness. It is also the reason they tell stories.”
Peter Ferry – Travel Writing: Chatto & Winduss 2008
I thought this was quite neat. Of course, there’s no guarantee I’ll finish it.
Wanting a short break from feeling obliged to finish everything, I frivolously binged from the library – albeit not successfully. A Costa shortlisted book of poetry, a serious looking Emile Zola novel I’m unlikely to get too far into but felt like a worthy idea at the time, a Graham Swift novel I’d never heard of, and an Alan Sillitoe book of short stories entitled and containing “The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner” – partly selected after loving the film, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, which Sillitoe wrote.
Our excellent new library sits squarely on the quickest route from my flat into the city centre, so I often fail to resist a quick scan of their New Books or Quick Picks sections.
Today, neither needing nor wanting new material, yet knowing I wasn’t being grabbed by anything I had, my feet wandered in there again. My hand selected a book called “Travel Writing – A Story,” by Peter Ferry. My brain was attracted by the simplicity of the title and cover, and was won by a cover quote from Dave Eggers and a compelling inside sleeve.
I spent an hour or so with the book and a coffee, and a band called Pepper Rabbit playing in my headphones, occasionally glancing out onto a high street bulging with Saturday afternoon shoppers. I grew more committed to this book than I had to anything else I’d read in a while. I particularly enjoyed the following.
“…I became interested in what we do and where we go to give our lives meaning when we don’t or can’t find it at home, when life there becomes too staid and certain and we have to create challenges – even dilemmas – for ourselves because problems are interesting and important and life without them is neither. It is the reason that people join the circus, I think, drink too much, drive too fast, jump off things, jump into things, climb things, run away from home, and paddle into the wilderness. It is also the reason they tell stories.”
Peter Ferry – Travel Writing: Chatto & Winduss 2008
I thought this was quite neat. Of course, there’s no guarantee I’ll finish it.
Monday, 10 January 2011
Wisconsin Wander: Day 2
Grey mist and drizzle met me as I pulled apart the curtains the next morning, any remnant snow finally dribbled away. Having plotted a loose south-easterly diagonal return, I trailed the westerly edge of Lake Winnebago before pressing further south.
Around mid-morning I stopped at the town of West Bend. (It seemed to me from the map that the river bore East at this point, but who was I to quibble?) This place reminded me of an hour spent in Fort William, Scotland. It was based next to a river, there was a lingering grey mist, the size of the place was small and there was almost nobody else on the streets. However, there were no surrounding mountains here. The place was ghostly but part of what these trips are about: the missable in between places as well as the big, swaggering ones. I took a coffee and read my book in a small diner where I was served by a Hispanic waitress. She wrongfooted me with a “gracias” when I handed over the money. “Cheers” was my charmless reply.
Several wrong turns and U-turns alongside large fields finally put me on the freeway back south towards Milwaukee. Driving with only a loose sense of direction means you tend to make plenty of quick decisions. You beat yourself up for taking a wrong turn, before finding that you weren’t wrong in the first place and in trying to correct a perceived error you’d totally screwed yourself. Then you go momentarily mad and angry, which never helps anything. Darkness unavoidably invokes a greater sense of jeopardy, panic and uncertainty, as it did during my previous evening’s acquaintance with the suburbs of Oshkosh.
The freeways were simpler. I let myself be sucked into the heart of a misty downtown Milwaukee over the freeways, not a little smug that I was reading all the signs correctly here and everything was going smoothly. You just need to be cool and focused, I pompously applauded myself, entirely forgetting the numerous U-turns and frustrated wails while sitting stationary next to desolate fields the previous evening. The large freeways better signposted, more intuitive.
I parked at the lake-front art museum with little intention of going inside the museum. Has the internet killed museums? There’s a sense of stumble-upon discovery which perhaps isn’t as possible when browsing online, but it’s not like you can touch anything and the exhibits are often predictably samey. Narrow, inhospitable stone corridors led me up from the car park, offering a sense of the forbidden, and up towards the museum entrance. I walked past it, marvelling at an impressive white bridge structure which turned into a walkway above the road, and led into downtown.
With its clutch of tall tower buildings, Milwaukee had the sense of a scaled down Chicago, and was also bisected by a fat, Lake Michigan-fed river. Big but not that big. I paced round awhile, took pictures, took a coffee, then headed back to the car, wanting to give myself at least two hours to make it back to Chicago. And I needed to top up on gas in order to ensure I returned the vehicle with a full tank. Stress was simmering.
The ride back in was fraught, the density of the rush hour traffic immense. After avoiding the tolled routes by taking smaller roads, I headed back towards the freeway, laboriously programming the SatNav system with my final address. It delivered the route, but not before further stress and panic. The car was due for return at 5pm. At 4.40 I was still some way out of the city, and still needing to get gas.
I exited the slow, by now almost bumper-to-bumper freeway, which erased my route from the SatNav, found a gas station in a suburb and failed to figure out the prepay credit card system. I wanted to ask a customer on the other side of my pump but he seemed to be chatting, possibly flirting with the woman in the vehicle behind him. I finally secured his attention; he looked and shrugged. Ask inside. Thanks. I asked inside the kiosk and a guy swiped my card, before realising it wouldn’t work because the petrol nozzle wasn’t in its holster. I went to return the nozzle into the holster and the payment went through, allowing me to buy the ten bucks’ worth of gas. I felt stupid and panicked.
Having re-found the freeway, I painstakingly re-programmed my route: C-H-I-C-A – while weaving between traffic. Yes SatNav, it was the passenger at the controls, not the driver. As if. Once finally programmed (about four minutes which felt like an hour) I repetitively tapped its View button to reassure me I was heading in the right direction.
Gradually the city loomed up through the darkness around me, a gigantic, sparkling, throbbing, beautiful, terrifying urban monster. Its dazzling scale made me feel proud of humans, as if approaching a space station. Wow. Look what we’ve done!
Lulled by my reverie, I grew confident. SatNav lady seemed sure everything would work out, it’d all be ok. It was only 4.50. It might be ok. I hit downtown proper at about 4.57. As the crow flies it would’ve taken two minutes from there. As the traffic moved, jerked, honked and crept, it took about thirty.
“The tank full?” asked a young girl at the Hertz desk who I hadn’t encountered before. She didn’t mention I was half hour late. I said yes and she wished me a good night.
‘Stoked’ by my success, not dying or crashing or having too many people beep me, I paced off back down Michigan Avenue, ever-teeming with shoppers and tourists.
Pictures from the trip can be viewed by clicking these words.
Around mid-morning I stopped at the town of West Bend. (It seemed to me from the map that the river bore East at this point, but who was I to quibble?) This place reminded me of an hour spent in Fort William, Scotland. It was based next to a river, there was a lingering grey mist, the size of the place was small and there was almost nobody else on the streets. However, there were no surrounding mountains here. The place was ghostly but part of what these trips are about: the missable in between places as well as the big, swaggering ones. I took a coffee and read my book in a small diner where I was served by a Hispanic waitress. She wrongfooted me with a “gracias” when I handed over the money. “Cheers” was my charmless reply.
Several wrong turns and U-turns alongside large fields finally put me on the freeway back south towards Milwaukee. Driving with only a loose sense of direction means you tend to make plenty of quick decisions. You beat yourself up for taking a wrong turn, before finding that you weren’t wrong in the first place and in trying to correct a perceived error you’d totally screwed yourself. Then you go momentarily mad and angry, which never helps anything. Darkness unavoidably invokes a greater sense of jeopardy, panic and uncertainty, as it did during my previous evening’s acquaintance with the suburbs of Oshkosh.
The freeways were simpler. I let myself be sucked into the heart of a misty downtown Milwaukee over the freeways, not a little smug that I was reading all the signs correctly here and everything was going smoothly. You just need to be cool and focused, I pompously applauded myself, entirely forgetting the numerous U-turns and frustrated wails while sitting stationary next to desolate fields the previous evening. The large freeways better signposted, more intuitive.
I parked at the lake-front art museum with little intention of going inside the museum. Has the internet killed museums? There’s a sense of stumble-upon discovery which perhaps isn’t as possible when browsing online, but it’s not like you can touch anything and the exhibits are often predictably samey. Narrow, inhospitable stone corridors led me up from the car park, offering a sense of the forbidden, and up towards the museum entrance. I walked past it, marvelling at an impressive white bridge structure which turned into a walkway above the road, and led into downtown.
With its clutch of tall tower buildings, Milwaukee had the sense of a scaled down Chicago, and was also bisected by a fat, Lake Michigan-fed river. Big but not that big. I paced round awhile, took pictures, took a coffee, then headed back to the car, wanting to give myself at least two hours to make it back to Chicago. And I needed to top up on gas in order to ensure I returned the vehicle with a full tank. Stress was simmering.
The ride back in was fraught, the density of the rush hour traffic immense. After avoiding the tolled routes by taking smaller roads, I headed back towards the freeway, laboriously programming the SatNav system with my final address. It delivered the route, but not before further stress and panic. The car was due for return at 5pm. At 4.40 I was still some way out of the city, and still needing to get gas.
I exited the slow, by now almost bumper-to-bumper freeway, which erased my route from the SatNav, found a gas station in a suburb and failed to figure out the prepay credit card system. I wanted to ask a customer on the other side of my pump but he seemed to be chatting, possibly flirting with the woman in the vehicle behind him. I finally secured his attention; he looked and shrugged. Ask inside. Thanks. I asked inside the kiosk and a guy swiped my card, before realising it wouldn’t work because the petrol nozzle wasn’t in its holster. I went to return the nozzle into the holster and the payment went through, allowing me to buy the ten bucks’ worth of gas. I felt stupid and panicked.
Having re-found the freeway, I painstakingly re-programmed my route: C-H-I-C-A – while weaving between traffic. Yes SatNav, it was the passenger at the controls, not the driver. As if. Once finally programmed (about four minutes which felt like an hour) I repetitively tapped its View button to reassure me I was heading in the right direction.
Gradually the city loomed up through the darkness around me, a gigantic, sparkling, throbbing, beautiful, terrifying urban monster. Its dazzling scale made me feel proud of humans, as if approaching a space station. Wow. Look what we’ve done!
Lulled by my reverie, I grew confident. SatNav lady seemed sure everything would work out, it’d all be ok. It was only 4.50. It might be ok. I hit downtown proper at about 4.57. As the crow flies it would’ve taken two minutes from there. As the traffic moved, jerked, honked and crept, it took about thirty.
“The tank full?” asked a young girl at the Hertz desk who I hadn’t encountered before. She didn’t mention I was half hour late. I said yes and she wished me a good night.
‘Stoked’ by my success, not dying or crashing or having too many people beep me, I paced off back down Michigan Avenue, ever-teeming with shoppers and tourists.
Pictures from the trip can be viewed by clicking these words.
Sunday, 9 January 2011
Wisconsin Wander: Day 1
As on the previous day, when I’d visited the large hotel to check my reservation, the Hertz car rental desk was unmanned. A young black guy joined me to form a two person queue. He mentioned out loud, to himself but not really to himself that he really needed to move to a warmer climate when he graduated. I was happy enough to nibble at the conversation bait and he told me about his study in Chicago, a general degree which would allow him to teach. He ultimately wanted to build his own school for under-privileged kids in Central America and strongly believed in a hands-on method of teaching employing music and touch.
A harried Hertz man returned to the desk and with minimal fuss, printed out forms for me to sign and told me to go wait outside for the car. This was the quickest, least paperwork-intensive car hire I’d ever experienced. So much so that when the Hertz man’s colleague brought down a small red Toyota Yaris from the car park, I just got in. Then I realised I didn’t know what any of the main controls meant, never having driven an automatic vehicle before. I beckoned a parking attendant over for a quick overview. Drive, Reverse, Park – was apparently all I needed to know. Don’t worry about the rest. With that I pushed the stick into drive and took my foot off the brake, which itself seemed to roll the car forward, gently easing myself into downtown Chicago traffic.
It was fine, all fine, keep on the right, it was all going to be fine, just concentrate, keep on the right, head for the Lake, hug it and head up the one side, simple, easy, cool. I gripped the steering wheel tighter than necessary.
I slowly grew into to the Yaris and understood that driving it was easy; boring in fact. Automatics neuter the driving experience; they do everything for you and give you less control, like holidaying with a tour guide. Not once did I go to depress an imaginary clutch, although I did flap my left hand into the door from time to time, flailing for an imaginary gear stick. I also kept approaching the vehicle from the wrong side, expecting the driver’s door to be where the passenger door was, which didn’t make me look too clever. On a freeway I was momentarily alarmed to be overtaken by someone casually reading a newspaper, before realising it was a passenger.
With the assurance of an appropriate section of map spread haphazardly out across my lap, I covered minor roads skirting Lake Michigan, up through suburbs with Scottish names, Highland and Glencoe – where I stopped for a coffee and to applaud myself that I wasn’t dead. This Glencoe wasn’t much like the Western Highland mountain range where I’d driven a couple of years ago. Like much of the drive over the two days, it was a flat and unremarkable landscape. The later plains of Wisconsin mimicked this and chided me, as if I’d landed in London and decided to take a trip round East Anglia.
Still it was experience and the towns were interesting, many with a makeshift retail park feel to them, quirky stores like the dogs’ hairdresser ‘Canine Coiffeurs.’ The welcome signs also amused with their exact population figure: CITY OF NEENAH, Population 56,723. (That one isn’t accurate). They made me want to add a few tally marks to the sign or run to the Police station screaming I’VE FOUND ANOTHER ONE!!
Priority at open crossroads without traffic lights also foxed me. It often seemed that nobody moved at all, so I did.
Next stop was a small park on a tip of Lake Michigan near the city of Kenosha. Thick snow still lay on the ground and the closest edge of the water speckled with mini icebergs, as had been the case all the way down in the city. When the tide swept in, lapping sounds twined with the clinkling of ice, like rippling shattered glass or a wind chime.
From here I found the highway and ignored numerous junctions to drill on through Milwaukee, an impressive cityscape not on a par with Chicago but still not inconsiderable, before eventually stopping again at the small Wisconsin town of Sheboygan Falls. This was a very small town, replete with a Simpsons-esque Moe’s Liquor Store, where I bought a bottle of bourbon. Moe wasn’t very chatty when I complimented him on his strong range of liquor, or he didn’t understand my accent. A middle-aged lady assistant in a neighbouring gas station where I took a leak and got a cup of tea was much perkier.
It was hit or miss whether people understood my accent or not. Earlier in the trip I had to say ‘beer’ to an American air stewardess three times. She looked at me like I was retarded. I don’t have any strong regional English accent and don’t know how else to pronounce the word.
Now the light was beginning to fade beautifully. It had been a clear, cold, blue-skied day despite constant radio warnings that cloud was heading in. The radio stations had offered a strong sense of the locals, particularly a warm, mumsy DJ improbably named Robin Rock. She kept thanking her listeners for “working with” her and spoke a lot about her teenage daughters and how they’d do backflips if they won the station’s big competition prize of a trip to Disneyworld.
This reminded me of the chatty old lady sitting one seat along from me on the short connecting flight from Minneapolis to Chicago. She’d been excited to tell me and the girl sitting next to me how she was going back there soon, this time to see ‘the adult things’ which the kids don’t like. Interest piqued, I had bitten my lower lip slightly and enquired further about what exactly ‘the adult things’ at Disneyworld were. Apparently reading descriptions in the galleries and things like that.
The radio songs didn’t range too widely: old classics to Americana, with edgier stations going for tracks with indulgent, rapidly boring guitar solos.
Fearing darkness, and the distance I had to cover the next day, I impulsively decided not to go as far as the next big city, Green Bay. Instead I took an A-road to chase the dipping golden sun across a wide expanse of plains towards Appleton, on the other side of Lake Winnebago. Although I missed out Appleton itself and found a couple of small, hospitable seeming towns with a pleasant buzz of life about them: first Menasha and then Neenah, where I stopped. Disappointingly no motels or any places of accommodation other than a Holiday Inn could be found. So, after a brief stroll I headed on. Growing faintly edgy about a final destination with the draping darkness, I flicked on an internal light in the car and studied the map to see Oshkosh was the next large looking town. There was bound to be something there.
By this point I was tired and not thinking straight. I spent about ten minutes finding the correct direction out of Neenah, then at least twenty more getting lost in the suburbs of Oshkosh, eventually finding its downtown area and only hotel. It was more than I had wanted to pay for a room but my will to look further had evaporated.
Later in the trip it was explained to me that the place-names had connections with the native Indian past and weren’t, as I had suspected, made up by drunken infants. You often forget about the historical significance of the Indians to these parts. Or at least I did. There’s a theory that the word “Chicago” has native Indian origins, while the overtones in Milwaukee are even more obvious.
An evening stroll up an icy, sludgy Oshkosh Main Street suggested more life than I’d imagined from my route into the downtown area: plenty of samey dark bars with neon signs advertising the same drinks. One dumping of snow seemed to have lingered for days across a vast global latitude. I stopped in one and chatted to a welcoming barmaid who served me a small bottle of Newcastle Brown of the type they don’t serve at home. A symptom of the tipping culture is that it makes you think naturally friendly people are just playing for their tip, even when they might just be naturally friendly. Young guys sat round watching sport. I intermittently chatted to the barmaid, watched the American Football and Basketball playing on the screens, (however much I tried, I was unable to cultivate any genuine interest), and flicked through a Harry Hill jokebook app on my iPod.
Another bar further down the street had more people and a faux urban kind of buzz about it. I took a Guinness and again sat at the bar, this time with a music fanzine – it seemed the area had a vibrant scene. I spoke to nobody and shortly after headed back, nothing challenging my suspicion that I was one of about four guests in the large, deeply uninspiring hotel.
Pictures from the trip can be viewed by clicking these words.
A harried Hertz man returned to the desk and with minimal fuss, printed out forms for me to sign and told me to go wait outside for the car. This was the quickest, least paperwork-intensive car hire I’d ever experienced. So much so that when the Hertz man’s colleague brought down a small red Toyota Yaris from the car park, I just got in. Then I realised I didn’t know what any of the main controls meant, never having driven an automatic vehicle before. I beckoned a parking attendant over for a quick overview. Drive, Reverse, Park – was apparently all I needed to know. Don’t worry about the rest. With that I pushed the stick into drive and took my foot off the brake, which itself seemed to roll the car forward, gently easing myself into downtown Chicago traffic.
It was fine, all fine, keep on the right, it was all going to be fine, just concentrate, keep on the right, head for the Lake, hug it and head up the one side, simple, easy, cool. I gripped the steering wheel tighter than necessary.
I slowly grew into to the Yaris and understood that driving it was easy; boring in fact. Automatics neuter the driving experience; they do everything for you and give you less control, like holidaying with a tour guide. Not once did I go to depress an imaginary clutch, although I did flap my left hand into the door from time to time, flailing for an imaginary gear stick. I also kept approaching the vehicle from the wrong side, expecting the driver’s door to be where the passenger door was, which didn’t make me look too clever. On a freeway I was momentarily alarmed to be overtaken by someone casually reading a newspaper, before realising it was a passenger.
With the assurance of an appropriate section of map spread haphazardly out across my lap, I covered minor roads skirting Lake Michigan, up through suburbs with Scottish names, Highland and Glencoe – where I stopped for a coffee and to applaud myself that I wasn’t dead. This Glencoe wasn’t much like the Western Highland mountain range where I’d driven a couple of years ago. Like much of the drive over the two days, it was a flat and unremarkable landscape. The later plains of Wisconsin mimicked this and chided me, as if I’d landed in London and decided to take a trip round East Anglia.
Still it was experience and the towns were interesting, many with a makeshift retail park feel to them, quirky stores like the dogs’ hairdresser ‘Canine Coiffeurs.’ The welcome signs also amused with their exact population figure: CITY OF NEENAH, Population 56,723. (That one isn’t accurate). They made me want to add a few tally marks to the sign or run to the Police station screaming I’VE FOUND ANOTHER ONE!!
Priority at open crossroads without traffic lights also foxed me. It often seemed that nobody moved at all, so I did.
Next stop was a small park on a tip of Lake Michigan near the city of Kenosha. Thick snow still lay on the ground and the closest edge of the water speckled with mini icebergs, as had been the case all the way down in the city. When the tide swept in, lapping sounds twined with the clinkling of ice, like rippling shattered glass or a wind chime.
From here I found the highway and ignored numerous junctions to drill on through Milwaukee, an impressive cityscape not on a par with Chicago but still not inconsiderable, before eventually stopping again at the small Wisconsin town of Sheboygan Falls. This was a very small town, replete with a Simpsons-esque Moe’s Liquor Store, where I bought a bottle of bourbon. Moe wasn’t very chatty when I complimented him on his strong range of liquor, or he didn’t understand my accent. A middle-aged lady assistant in a neighbouring gas station where I took a leak and got a cup of tea was much perkier.
It was hit or miss whether people understood my accent or not. Earlier in the trip I had to say ‘beer’ to an American air stewardess three times. She looked at me like I was retarded. I don’t have any strong regional English accent and don’t know how else to pronounce the word.
Now the light was beginning to fade beautifully. It had been a clear, cold, blue-skied day despite constant radio warnings that cloud was heading in. The radio stations had offered a strong sense of the locals, particularly a warm, mumsy DJ improbably named Robin Rock. She kept thanking her listeners for “working with” her and spoke a lot about her teenage daughters and how they’d do backflips if they won the station’s big competition prize of a trip to Disneyworld.
This reminded me of the chatty old lady sitting one seat along from me on the short connecting flight from Minneapolis to Chicago. She’d been excited to tell me and the girl sitting next to me how she was going back there soon, this time to see ‘the adult things’ which the kids don’t like. Interest piqued, I had bitten my lower lip slightly and enquired further about what exactly ‘the adult things’ at Disneyworld were. Apparently reading descriptions in the galleries and things like that.
The radio songs didn’t range too widely: old classics to Americana, with edgier stations going for tracks with indulgent, rapidly boring guitar solos.
Fearing darkness, and the distance I had to cover the next day, I impulsively decided not to go as far as the next big city, Green Bay. Instead I took an A-road to chase the dipping golden sun across a wide expanse of plains towards Appleton, on the other side of Lake Winnebago. Although I missed out Appleton itself and found a couple of small, hospitable seeming towns with a pleasant buzz of life about them: first Menasha and then Neenah, where I stopped. Disappointingly no motels or any places of accommodation other than a Holiday Inn could be found. So, after a brief stroll I headed on. Growing faintly edgy about a final destination with the draping darkness, I flicked on an internal light in the car and studied the map to see Oshkosh was the next large looking town. There was bound to be something there.
By this point I was tired and not thinking straight. I spent about ten minutes finding the correct direction out of Neenah, then at least twenty more getting lost in the suburbs of Oshkosh, eventually finding its downtown area and only hotel. It was more than I had wanted to pay for a room but my will to look further had evaporated.
Later in the trip it was explained to me that the place-names had connections with the native Indian past and weren’t, as I had suspected, made up by drunken infants. You often forget about the historical significance of the Indians to these parts. Or at least I did. There’s a theory that the word “Chicago” has native Indian origins, while the overtones in Milwaukee are even more obvious.
An evening stroll up an icy, sludgy Oshkosh Main Street suggested more life than I’d imagined from my route into the downtown area: plenty of samey dark bars with neon signs advertising the same drinks. One dumping of snow seemed to have lingered for days across a vast global latitude. I stopped in one and chatted to a welcoming barmaid who served me a small bottle of Newcastle Brown of the type they don’t serve at home. A symptom of the tipping culture is that it makes you think naturally friendly people are just playing for their tip, even when they might just be naturally friendly. Young guys sat round watching sport. I intermittently chatted to the barmaid, watched the American Football and Basketball playing on the screens, (however much I tried, I was unable to cultivate any genuine interest), and flicked through a Harry Hill jokebook app on my iPod.
Another bar further down the street had more people and a faux urban kind of buzz about it. I took a Guinness and again sat at the bar, this time with a music fanzine – it seemed the area had a vibrant scene. I spoke to nobody and shortly after headed back, nothing challenging my suspicion that I was one of about four guests in the large, deeply uninspiring hotel.
Pictures from the trip can be viewed by clicking these words.
Wednesday, 5 January 2011
departures
Don found himself in the low-ceilinged check-in area, shuffling forwards towards a desk with other blank-faced people.
”Can I see your documents, Sir?”
Don puts some papers which were in his hand onto the desk in front of him,
“Do have any further emotional baggage to check-in, Sir? Or is it just the one bag?”
“Just this,” Don hears himself say.
“Did you pack it yourself, Sir? Do you know what’s in it? No sharp regrets or painful confessions to anyone?”
Don pauses for a moment before shaking his head unconvincingly.
“Very good, Sir.” She efficiently labels the package and places it on a conveyor belt. “Is it just that with you as hand luggage today?”
In his right hand Don sees a plastic yellow bath duck. He nods, dumbly. She smiles at him, endeared by the object.
“Well you take care now, won’t you? Enjoy your flight.”
Don mumbles his thanks before moving aside, following arrows to the security gateway.
“Everything on the trays here please,” a faceless person in a white all-in-one outfit says.
Don places his yellow bath duck on the tray, finds a tube of female lip gloss in his pocket and puts that on there too. He goes to take off his shoes before realising that he isn’t wearing any. The conveyor belt accepts the tray and pulls it through a scanning box. He walks through a narrow doorway. Two faceless men nod their assenting and he passes on to collect the duck out the other side.
A seemingly endless white corridor greets him, stores selling with mostly indistinct and non-utilitarian items lining the sides: memory sticks and adaptors are two items Don can make out, so he buys one of each. A faceless person’s eyes crinkle towards him as he takes them to the counter.
Don flushes with panic, fearing that he might have to give up the duck as payment. The faceless person holds out their arm and swishes the memory stick in front of Don’s left nipple. A bleeping sound echoes from the vicinity of the fingers and the person nods, then repeats the process with the adaptor. Don feels violated and confused and amused. It finishes by saying “Thank you Sir, enjoy your flight.”
Between the stores are instructional screens with banks of numbers and destinations. Hell, Heaven and Limbo occur the most frequently. Don was told his destination was Heaven. The screen says the next departure is in 47 minutes from Gate F.
He walks aimlessly up and down the white corridor, past departure gates where faceless people crowd, clamour and squeal against an invisible screen. He sits down near Gate F to inspect his adaptor and memory card: small items which don’t look capable of much.
The 47 minutes tick down and a small flurry of faceless people join Don. He shyly nods and smiles in their direction, wondering if he too is faceless. They don’t return his gesture and sit down. Two faceless people stand behind a desk, waiting, the doorway behind them sealed shut.
”Can I see your documents, Sir?”
Don puts some papers which were in his hand onto the desk in front of him,
“Do have any further emotional baggage to check-in, Sir? Or is it just the one bag?”
“Just this,” Don hears himself say.
“Did you pack it yourself, Sir? Do you know what’s in it? No sharp regrets or painful confessions to anyone?”
Don pauses for a moment before shaking his head unconvincingly.
“Very good, Sir.” She efficiently labels the package and places it on a conveyor belt. “Is it just that with you as hand luggage today?”
In his right hand Don sees a plastic yellow bath duck. He nods, dumbly. She smiles at him, endeared by the object.
“Well you take care now, won’t you? Enjoy your flight.”
Don mumbles his thanks before moving aside, following arrows to the security gateway.
“Everything on the trays here please,” a faceless person in a white all-in-one outfit says.
Don places his yellow bath duck on the tray, finds a tube of female lip gloss in his pocket and puts that on there too. He goes to take off his shoes before realising that he isn’t wearing any. The conveyor belt accepts the tray and pulls it through a scanning box. He walks through a narrow doorway. Two faceless men nod their assenting and he passes on to collect the duck out the other side.
A seemingly endless white corridor greets him, stores selling with mostly indistinct and non-utilitarian items lining the sides: memory sticks and adaptors are two items Don can make out, so he buys one of each. A faceless person’s eyes crinkle towards him as he takes them to the counter.
Don flushes with panic, fearing that he might have to give up the duck as payment. The faceless person holds out their arm and swishes the memory stick in front of Don’s left nipple. A bleeping sound echoes from the vicinity of the fingers and the person nods, then repeats the process with the adaptor. Don feels violated and confused and amused. It finishes by saying “Thank you Sir, enjoy your flight.”
Between the stores are instructional screens with banks of numbers and destinations. Hell, Heaven and Limbo occur the most frequently. Don was told his destination was Heaven. The screen says the next departure is in 47 minutes from Gate F.
He walks aimlessly up and down the white corridor, past departure gates where faceless people crowd, clamour and squeal against an invisible screen. He sits down near Gate F to inspect his adaptor and memory card: small items which don’t look capable of much.
The 47 minutes tick down and a small flurry of faceless people join Don. He shyly nods and smiles in their direction, wondering if he too is faceless. They don’t return his gesture and sit down. Two faceless people stand behind a desk, waiting, the doorway behind them sealed shut.
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