Taki's Magazine

My Superjumbo Bad Time on the A380

2010-12-31T04:00:29Z

My first practical observation about the A380 Superjumbo:

It isn’t all that big.

Once you get inside it and have crouched your way claustrophobically through the economy-class cabin toward seat 89F, you soon realize that it’s no bigger than a Boeing 747. The only reason it can carry 555 people (or 853 in an all-economy configuration) is because it’s essentially one 747 stacked on top of another 747. Genius! In my naïveté, I had assumed that economy class on such an outwardly gross airplane might equate to, say, World Traveller Plus class on British Airways (i.e., more legroom, more comfortable seats), but the seating arrangement’s exactly the same as it always has been: three nearest the windows and four across the middle. Sadly, the Airbus designers haven’t rectified the problem facing many a misanthropic economy-class passenger—that of having to make close-proximity small talk for fourteen straight hours with the most boring person you’ve met in your life. Nor have they rectified the problem of finding yourself—as I did on my trip from London to Sydney on Singapore Airlines—squashed and arm-restless between a proud and enormous Nigerian grandmother on one side and a vicious trailer-trash mother of two squealing infants on the other. My last-minute plea to the woman at the check-in desk to give me a window seat had clearly fallen on deaf ears.

“Sadly, the Airbus designers haven’t rectified the problem facing many a misanthropic economy-class passenger—that of having to make close-proximity small talk for fourteen straight hours with the most boring person you’ve met in your life.”

Once the lights dimmed and I plugged into the flight’s entertainment system and was on about my third double Scotch on the rocks and had that warm feeling in my chest, I started thinking, “Oh, well, maybe it’s not so bad after all.” Then suddenly the wiry and terrifically strong old man in front of me reclined his seat with what seemed to be premeditated and unmerited aggression, and the 10x5-centimeter screen rammed itself against my forehead very painfully and with a dull cracking sound. My flight was immediately ruined. For the next twelve hours. The logical thing would have been to inflict the same punishment on the person behind me, but I didn’t have the heart to do it. I never do. I just sat there in a state of homicidal/suicidal rage with my knees pinned tightly to my chest while the screen flickered, hummed, and gently massaged my aching brow.

Wary of acquiring deep-vein thrombosis, and having promised my mother that I would “walk around a lot,” “not drink any alcohol,” and “drink lots of water,” I finished my fifth Scotch on the rocks, did a remarkably accomplished slow-motion pole vault over my Nigerian neighbor, walked around in the darkness for a bit, drank a quick cup of water, placed another order for a double Scotch on the rocks, and returned sheepishly to my seat.

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I don’t recall in excessive detail what happened during the following hours, but I’m certain it didn’t involve any sleep.

After a not-very-refreshing two-hour layover in Changi Airport’s sterile madness, it was time for my epic voyage’s second leg. I mercifully managed to secure a few hours’ sleep this time, but when I awoke—to searing white light—I ordered two more large Scotches and a couple of beers to accompany my rubbery breakfast omelette.

By the time the plane had landed, I felt as rotten and twisted as I had ever felt. My head had almost doubled in size, and my calf muscles were screaming with hysteria much like you get the second day of smack withdrawal. (The long-haul experience isn’t too dissimilar from the whole process of coming off smack.) As a writer, I sought to put into words how my head felt as we taxied off the runway. How did it feel? How did it feel? I wondered. Then I got it. My head: My head felt like bad breath. Bad breath! So did my breath, mind you, but that was it, by Jupiter! My head felt like bad breath!

On my way out, I caught a glimpse of some of the suites—yes, actual self-contained double bedrooms—that take up lower deck’s front half. A-ha, I thought, so here was another problem the A380 had failed to address: the grotesque disparity between rich and poor. For the rich, air travel—like life—must be one long, luxurious flattering of the ego; for the poor, air travel—like life—is an absolute fucking NIGHTMARE.

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An Excerpt From ‘The Wrong Stuff’: Part II

2010-02-26T05:00:43Z

My instinctive reaction to what had just happened and indeed to the events of the day itself, was, of course, to head straight for the minibar. I found it lurking underneath the T.V on the right hand side of the room, a small brown camouflaged fridge between two sets of drawers. I squatted down and flung it open.
      “Okey-dokey,” I said out loud, “what have we here?”
      The two main shelves didn’t have anything of any use to anyone as far as I was concerned. On the top shelf there were two bottles of Heineken and two bottles of Coke while underneath it there were two bottles of Fanta and two bottles of water. “I think not,” I said disgustedly and turned my attention to the inside of the door. Bingo. I took out two miniature bottles of Scotch and two miniature bottles of brandy and emptied them into a glass. Then I took off my jacket, kicked off my shoes, and flopped onto the bed. “At last,” I groaned indulgently before tipping the entire contents of the glass down my throat. Unexpectedly, however, this oft-rehearsed routine suddenly produced an alarming retch which had to be followed up with an immediate yet well-judged swallow. I waited for a few seconds then got hit with another alarming retch which had to be followed up with another immediate yet even better-judged swallow. ‘Go easy there partner,’ I cajoled myself good naturedly but with a real feeling of fear. At length, the struggle came to an end I was able to lower myself, more cautiously this time, into a bolt upright position on the bed. I wiped the tears from my eyes with the back of my hand and stared out of the window.
      Given the hotel’s proximity to the sea, I had been hoping for, nay, counting on, some kind of sea view. A beach front panorama perhaps, or the hypnotic tilting this way and that of ships’ masts in the gentle Mediterranean breeze. Instead I seemed to have secured a room on the bum side of the hotel; the only view I had was of a brick wall and somebody else’s dirty air conditioning unit.
      I checked my watch: there was still an hour and a half left to go. The question was: what could I do in that time? I could go for a swim, I suppose. I had brought my swimming trunks and in a hotel like this there was bound to be a pool. Or I could fix myself another drink……actually on second thoughts, maybe not. There wasn’t really enough time to go to sleep, so then, what to do? I was pondering all of this when, as if by luck, I happened to notice a laminated brochure next to the T.V. ‘Adult Entertainment Direct to your Room,’ it said on it, and next to the words was the image of a well-endowed and exceptionally sluttish woman staring right at me. The answer immediately became clear: I would celebrate my first day in my new job with an expensive, high quality wank. What could possibly be better?
      As if working on a sub-conscious level, my arm had already snaked its way over to the bedside table and located the remote control. I had a quick flick through the channels and soon found exactly what I was looking for: 12 Hour Adult Zone, $34.99. Bargain. With a tremendous feeling of excitement churning in my stomach and a frenzied disregard for any possible consequences, I punched my room number into the remote control: Three……… Nine………… Six………

* * *

      I felt it was important to arrive early for my rendez-vous with the Captain so I allowed myself a good twenty minutes in order to negotiate the labyrinth from my room back to the lifts. To my surprise, I managed only a handful of wrong turns and found myself back in the lobby with a full ten minutes to spare.
      I also felt it was important to pay for the adult entertainment channel while it was still fresh in my mind, so to speak, and thereby preclude any unnecessary embarrassment when the time came to check out the following day with the Chief Pilot standing next to me. We weren’t due to leave until the following afternoon, but still, it never pays to leave these things to the last minute.
      Being aware, as I was, of the delicate nature of my predicament, I was smart enough not to head straight for the check-in desk but rather to loiter inconspicuously in the middle of the lobby until a suitable receptionist became available. There was no way I was going to have any further dealings with the same person who had checked us in when we arrived, nor was there any way I was going to suffer the humiliation of being tended to by a female employee whom I might otherwise have recourse to importune at a later stage in the evening. No. What was called for in a difficult situation like this was some level of sympathy or, ideally, complicity on their part which would hopefully be offset by a certain roguish, fun-loving approach on mine. I was mature enough to know that honesty was, as it always is, the best policy, nor was I about to debase myself any further than I already had by getting involved in a web of intrigue and deceit. Boys will be boys after all, I reminded myself philosophically, and besides, these people were professionals; they’d seen it all before and they’d probably seen every trick in the book.
      As far as I could make out, there were seven employees to choose from. They were well spaced out, which was good, but the desk itself curved round in a gentle arc and stretched so far into the distance that I couldn’t clearly make out what most of them looked like. I felt fairly confident that I didn’t recognize any of them from earlier, which was also good, but there was, on the other hand, a number of doors set back from the desk itself through which any member of staff could suddenly appear at any moment.
      The receptionist nearest me was obscured by two American tourists I’d seen earlier coming out of the lift, but when they moved away to reveal a regular looking Spanish male in his early twenties, I knew I’d more or less found what I was looking for. He was slightly thinner and nerdier than I would have liked but he definitely wasn’t female and, more importantly, he probably wasn’t gay. I glanced down at my watch: 19:55: five minutes to go. Right. It was now or never. I took a deep breath and, smiling broadly, set off in a swashbuckling swagger towards the desk.
      “Hello there amigo!” I called out when I was still some distance away, “como estas?”
      “Good evening sir,” he replied in a more subdued fashion once I had closed the gap between us to just a few meters. “How are you?”
      “Me? Couldn’t be better. Couldn’t be better.” I was now standing in front of him. I placed the palms of my hands on the marble counter either side of his computer screen and did a drum roll with them for a few seconds until he felt it necessary to ask:
      “And how can I help you, sir?”
      His English was encouragingly good with only the faintest trace of a Spanish accent. Fingers crossed this whole sordid business would be taken care of in no time.
      “Oh, I don’t know,” I began vaguely, “I was just wondering what time breakfast starts tomorrow morning.”
      “Breakfast is from six until eleven o’clock.”
      “Perfect!” I exclaimed and made as if to leave then clicked my fingers and turned back. “Oh and one more thing, it’s nothing really, I just need to pay for the adult entertainment channel now before I forget. I’m in room 396. Cheers.”
      “Sir?”
      “The adult entertainment channel, you know how it is,” I winked at him, “I‘d like very much to pay for it now if that’s O.K with you.”
      “The adult……I don’t think we……”
      “Yes you do,” I corrected him. “You have it upstairs. In the rooms. In my room. I put it on and now I would like to pay for it. Thank you.”
      “But all of our rooms are adult rooms.”
      “No, no, no. Listen to me very carefully.” I could tell that a queue was beginning to form behind me. I lent over the counter towards him so that our faces were nearly touching and hissed at him:
      “The porn channel O.K? Do I have to spell it out for you? Sex, T.V, money, capeesh? You. Me. Pay now. NOW!!!”
      I stayed where I was and fixed him imploringly with mad, bulging eyes. He started to back away from me with a look of terror on his face, feeling his way carefully for the handle of the door behind him.
      “No, wait!” I reached out towards him. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. Please don’t go!”
      But just like that he was gone, and I stood there trying to work out what had caused the young man so much obvious distress. I looked at my watch: 19:58, time to go. I waited half a minute longer then turned to leave but as I did so, the door opened and in front of me appeared the attractive blonde woman whose eye I had been trying to catch when I first arrived, flanked on both sides, however, by two burly, quite scary-looking security guards.
      I couldn’t believe what was happening. My first thought was that there had been some mistake so I raised my hands palms facing outwards in a gesture of pretend surrender and said jokingly:
      “Whoa! What’s all this?”
      “Sir. Please calm down,” said the woman, who was altogether more attractive than I had first thought.
      “Calm down? I am calm!” I roared back at her. At that point I saw the two men drop their arms to their sides as if they were limbering up for a fight.
      “Sir, please. I must inform you that one of our members of staff has made a complaint against you.”
      “A complaint? What kind of complaint?”
      “Sir, if you do not lower your voice, we will be forced to exit you from the premises.”
      I knew that if I didn’t change tack and fast, then an already bad situation was about to get a whole lot worse. I breathed in deeply before continuing: “O.K, I’m sorry. It’s just that I think there’s been some terrible mistake. Why don’t you tell me what this so-called complaint is and then maybe I can convince you that it has nothing whatsoever to do with me.”
      “Sir. Rodrigo has informed us that you have been harassing him.”
      “Harassing him? Harassing him how?”
      “Sexually, I’m afraid, sir. He says you tried to pay him to have sex with you.”
      “Are we ready?” Captain Johnson asked light-heartedly as he slapped his room key down on the counter. He looked first at me then at the three people behind the desk with an amused expression as if he was trying to fathom what was going on. “Not giving you any trouble, is he? You’ve got to watch it with these English pilots!” He looked back at me: “See you in the bar, O.K?” And just like that, he was gone. It had all happened so quickly and had been so terrible, so unprecedentedly nightmarish, that I hadn’t even had time to formulate a response. The moment had come and the moment had gone seemingly with no beginning, no middle, and no end; a glitch from a parallel dimension on the otherwise normal passage of time. I found myself looking at the woman, except that I wasn’t looking at her, I was looking through her at an imaginary object set some distance away on the other side of her head. I found I was supporting myself with one hand on the computer screen and that my whole body was gently pulsing to the rhythm of my heart. I snapped out of it:
      “So anyway. Where were we? Oh that’s right: sexual harassment. Of course.” I suddenly felt more in control of a situation than I had ever felt in my life. “Let me put it to you this way, sweetheart. What Gonzalez or Tonto or whatever his name is thinks I said, O.K? I didn’t say it. Whatever he thinks I did? I didn’t do it. Whatever he thinks I am, or whatever you think I am? I’m not. It’s all one big misunderstanding.”
      She turned slowly to the two security guards, said something to them in Spanish, and they backed away through the door, eyeing me stonily as they went. I felt like getting in a last word, something delivered in high-camp to really piss them off, but I thought better of it. I had already succeeded in extricating myself from an impossible situation as it was and besides, to pretend to be gay now after everything that had just happened would be in extremely poor taste. I simply said:
      “Sorry about all that.”
      “I’m sorry too, sir. You have to understand that here at the Hotel Palma we take all complaints, especially of a sexual nature, very seriously indeed.”
      I smiled. “Of course. I wouldn’t expect anything less.”
      “Is there anything else I can help you with?”
      “Help me with?” I glanced over in the direction of the bar where I could see Captain Johnson safely ordering a beer. “Well yes, as a matter of fact there is. Something rather unfortunate happened a couple of hours ago when I checked into my room.”
      “Unfortunate?”
      “Yes, I’m afraid so. You see, I thought it would be nice to watch one of the films on the Pay T.V channels, you know, the one with, uh, Brad Pitt in it, so I……”
      “Brad Pitt?” she frowned.
      “Yeah, I think it was him. O.K maybe it wasn’t him but it was someone like him,” I improvised cleverly. “Anyway that’s not important. What is important is that I entered the number for the film on the remote control but instead of getting Brad Pitt……” I turned around to check that the sizeable queue of people behind me wasn’t able to hear what I was saying, then I ducked my head down towards her and she, in turn, brought her face up close to mine as if we were about to kiss, then I whispered to her conspiratorially: “……I found myself watching the adult entertainment channel!”
      I pushed myself back from the desk and let the full weight of what I had said sink into her. I was now wearing an expression of great disappointment tinged with genuine concern, the kind of look you might have got at school from the cool teacher after he had been the only one to trust in you but you had ended up letting him down badly, while the woman, who, to give her credit, might not have been out of place on the adult entertainment channel herself, was staring at me with an expression of wide-eyed disbelief.
      “I know,” I agreed with her.
      “Would sir like me to deduct it from his bill?”
      “No, no. Well O.K, yes, he would. The thing is, I don’t mind paying for it – that’s not the point. My main concern is for the children.”
      “The children?”
      “Of course. Imagine if you’re a parent and your two children are in the next room. Let’s say one of them wants to watch, I don’t know,” I twirled my hand loosely in the air trying to come up with something, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, right? Little Katie enters the number for what she thinks is going to be a Walt Disney cartoon but instead she ends up with, oh I don’t know, White Girls Love Black Cock instead. Trust me, you’d rather have me complaining about it than some little girl’s dad.”
      “Yes sir. I am terribly sorry.”
      I was beginning to feel well pleased with the level of respect I was getting not to mention the fact that I’d managed to pull off what I considered to be one of the great escape stunts of all time.
      “It’s O.K,” I said sadly, “I’m just relieved it was me who discovered the fault and not somebody else.” I had got so far involved in my own lie by this stage that I had ended up believing in it myself. I went on: “What I do suggest, however, is that you get maintenance to go up and sort it out.” Then I quickly added: “Not now. I mean do it tomorrow after I’ve gone.”
      “Yes sir. I will certainly do that for you.”
      “And another thing: it doesn’t matter too much but make sure it doesn’t appear on my company bill whatever happens, is that understood?”
      “Yes sir. It is.”
      “Good.” I turned to leave but something else occurred to me: “Oh and one more thing; I probably won’t need to use it but……”
      “The minibar, sir?”
      “Yes!” I replied, both surprised and impressed that I had been second-guessed so accurately.
      “Don’t worry - that won’t appear on your company bill either.”
      “Fantastic! See you later then.” And with that I headed off in high spirits to join the Captain who was waiting for me obliviously at the bar.

Previously: An Excerpt From ‘The Wrong Stuff’

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An Excerpt From ‘The Wrong Stuff’

2010-02-12T05:00:51Z

            I was impressed. In less than five minutes, Magda here had managed to check us in, book us our wake-up calls, add our Ibis points onto our Ibis Elite Members Club Cards, and all that while being practically shot at through the hotel window. That’s a damned sight better than I could have done, let me tell you. I had a job as a receptionist myself, once. I did. It was while I was working in a hotel in a ski resort in Colorado for a few months during that period of my life when I was game to try any new job with half an eye on the possibility of pursuing it as a career. However, it soon became apparent to me and to my work colleagues that I was astonishingly inept at it. While the free hotel guest wine must be held accountable for my overall poor performance to a certain extent, I suppose, nevertheless some of the blunders I used to make are as follows: often, when someone would ring up the hotel, I would pick up the phone (I was under the illusion I was capable of doing this part of the job) and say: “Aspen Highland Inn, this is Patrick speaking, how may I help?” and when they’d ask to be put through to so and so or such and such a room, I would chirpily reply: “No problem sir……putting you through!” Then all I had to do was press the HOLD button, then the TRANS button, enter the room number on the key pad, then as soon as I heard a ringing tone at the other end, simply put down the phone. And yet it never failed to amaze me that I wasn’t able to get even that right. Roughly thirty seconds later, the same person would call up again, I’d go through the same routine: “Aspen Highland Inn, this is Patrick speaking, how may I help?” and a familiar voice would say: “Yeah Patrick, I think something may have gone wrong there. Do you think you could try that number again for me, please? Thanks.” To which I would reply: “Oh, I’m sorry about that sir, let me try that number again for you……putting you through!” And I’d go through the same process – all the time thinking ‘I know I’m doing this right’ – HOLD, TRANS, 105, ring tone, hang up. Good. Thirty seconds later the phone would ring again: “Aspen Highland Inn, this is……” and to my great disgust, the guy who had already rung up twice before would be on the other end of the line again, and he’d interrupt me, usually in quite an irritable tone of voice: “Yeah, look Pat. Whatever you’re doing, it doesn’t seem to be working. Let’s try it one more time and if it doesn’t go through, could you leave a message for Larry saying ‘could he urgently call Bill because his wife and children have been taken to hospital and could he call me back on my cell as soon as he can.’” Genuinely worried by this stage, I would stammer: “I really am very sorry about this, sir, but I’m sure that won’t be necessary. Sometimes up here in the mountains, we get what’s called a bad high altitude connection. Let’s try it one more time” (for the sake of tact, I would tend to omit the ‘putting you through’ bit at this critical stage of proceedings): HOLD, TRANS, 105, but this time I’d wait until the guy in the hotel room physically picked up the phone at the other end, then I’d say to him: “Hey, how are you doing? This is Patrick down at the front desk……yeah, fine thanks. Look, I’m sorry to bother you but I’ve got a call from a friend of your’s and he says it’s urgent……O.K great……putting you through!” Then I’d put the phone down and, appalled, sit there praying that that would be the end of it. Thirty seconds later, the phone would ring again and I’d grab the handset and sob into it: “Oh God! I’m so sorry about this, I don’t……” but this time it would be the guy in the hotel room and he’d say something like: “No, no, this is Larry in room 105, we seem to have got disconnected there……” That kind of thing. Do you get the general idea?
         What else? Oh yes – how could I forget? Listen to this: on more then one occasion, I would find myself having booked people into entirely the wrong room. The finest example would have to be the time I gave the wrong set of keys to a couple of newly weds who had got married earlier that day and had arrived for their honeymoon in the middle of the night. Bleary-eyed and half-drunk (me, not them, I mean), I gave them my warmest congratulations before handing them the keys to the Honeymoon Suite along with a complimentary box of chocolates and a bouquet of flowers for the bride. As they turned to leave, full of the first flush of love (them, not me, I mean), I gave the groom a knowing wink that was as if to say: “Good luck buddy. And remember- don’t fuck it up!” and he smiled back at me in that knowing kind of way that was as if to say: “Yeah, we’ll talk about it in the morning, dude……” It was a beautiful moment. Then, my work finished for the night, and feeling that for once in my life I had done something truly good, I retired to the office and went back to sleep on the sofa. Five minutes later, I awoke as if from a bad dream to the sound of shouting and screaming coming from the direction of the front desk. Totally disorientated and wondering if perhaps the hotel had caught fire or a grizzly bear had found its way into one of the rooms, I rounded the corner to be confronted by four of the angriest people I have ever seen in my life. I couldn’t understand it: the two newly weds were there, which was a pity, but so too was a couple I had checked-in the day before. The man was a Hells Angels-type with a long grey beard like the lead singer from ZZ Top, and his girlfriend was thin and muscly and blond and vicious. They were both standing there completely naked demanding to know why they had been burst-in upon half way through having sex. Can you imagine? It’s an experience I never wish to repeat. Never. Mind you, I did end up making the same mistake a few more times after that, just not with the same catastrophic results.
         Another lamentable incident that occurred during my sojourn at the hotel (this won’t take long, by the way) was the time I was working the night shift and was rudely awakened at the crack of dawn by a queue of about fifty German tourists wanting to know why they had each been charged four dollars for drinking the bottled water in the rooms. They had all paid their bills the night before and were about to leave on a coach that was waiting outside, when one of them had noticed that they had been charged for something that they had expressly been told they would not be charged for (oh no!). They weren’t angry, they assured me - they had very much enjoyed their stay at The Aspen Highland Inn - but would I mind simply deducting it from their credit cards then reissuing them with new invoices and new receipts. Now, the main problem I had with this, aside from the fact that there were fifty of them lined up in front of me, was that not once during my grueling and protracted training period (which never formally ended, come to think of it), had I shown the slightest proficiency at operating the credit card machine, much less the computer invoicing program. Yes, I had worked out early on how to access pornography on the internet and yes, I suppose I had fluked the odd transaction here and there, but generally speaking, the whole system baffled me. So anyway, to cut a long story short, I did what I usually did in such situations which was to act all professional, tap a few keys, move the mouse around a bit, frown, tap a few more keys, move the mouse around a bit more, frown some more, and then say: “Oh no. It’s done it again. I’m really sorry about this but the whole system’s crashed.” What I expected to happen at that point was what usually happened, ie. for them to go: “Don’t worry about it. It doesn’t matter. We leave now anyway. Goodbye!” But what happened instead was a dialogue probably much like this:
         “But vee must have zee correct bill. Zis is outrageous!” “I know. I agree with you but there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m very sorry.”
         “Every year vee come here and always vee pay zee correct bill.”
         “Yeah, I understand. I heard you the first time.”
         “I want to speak viss zee manager. Now!”
         “Look. I’ve been trying to call her but she’s not answering her fucking phone, alright?”
         “You have been drinking, yah?”
         “No of course I haven’t.”
         “Vee refuse to leave until vee speak viss zee manager!”
         “It’s only four dollars, for fuck’s sake! Does it really matter?”
         “Yah of course it matters! Always zeese zings matter!”
         You get the picture. After about twenty minutes of this kind of to-ing and fro-ing, I eventually stood up and announced to the heaving throng:
         “I tell you what. I’ve just had a good idea. Hopefully this should sort everything out. Wait here for five minutes and I’ll be back.”
         And with one finger still raised in the air, I hurriedly vacated the front desk area, grabbed my jacket and keys, opened the back door, and charged up the road behind the hotel. Up and up I went, all the way to the top of the mountain that overlooks the town, where I perched myself on a rocky crag and gazed out at the snow-covered valley below. The sun was just starting to appear over the Eastern ridge and the cloudless sky was turning from grey to pink to blue. The air was crisp and, as I exhaled great plumes of steam, I knew then what it must be like to be a bald eagle surveying his mighty kingdom. A long way underneath me, I could see where the hotel was; I could even make out the coach that was still waiting outside, and at that moment I experienced a feeling of giddy exhilaration as I considered the pandaemonium that was going on in that building below and that I myself had caused. What exactly was going on right now, I wondered? Had they managed to summon the manager or had they taken it upon themselves to raze the building to the ground? Ha! None of that mattered any more. My God yes, there were more important things in life than money and jobs and bottles of water and German tourists and anything else you could care to think of as long as it wasn’t right here, right now, where I was at the top of the world! I stood up carefully and hoisted my arms high above my head and let out an ululation towards space, towards where the blue sky turned black, towards the very face of God Himself. Unsteady on my feet, I looked down and just at that moment, I caught sight of the coach, as small as a pin prick, moving slowly away from the hotel.
         That was the first time I got fired. I managed to sweet-talk my way out of it, though, somehow, incredibly, thanks to the sheer comic brilliance and audacity of my opening line as I strode back into the hotel some hours later (“Well I guess I won’t be getting employee of the month, then!”) and secondly to the fact that it was the staff party that night and, what with my skills as a guitar player and a prodigious consumer of alcohol, I was considered central to the planned festivities. Plus the lesser known but equally valid fact that my boss, who was a woman (theoretically), had taken quite a shine to me. Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: ‘Hey. Not bad! He gets to do whatever he wants while he’s at work and he can’t get fired because he’s having sex with the boss! Lucky bastard! Why can’t I ever do something like that etc, etc……?” NO: no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, NO. Alright? No. Why not? Because Sally was what you might call an almost unrealistically obese woman. She really was. Platonically, I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for fat people but there’s only so far I’m prepared to go. I’m not prepared to go anywhere near the bedroom, for example. Her constant flirting with me when I was trying to concentrate on doing my job (to the best of my abilities, I might add) eventually wore me down so much that my life became a living hell. I mean, there were only so many times I could lean back in my chair and squint at her all the way up and down and left and right before agreeing with her: “yes, you know what, I think you have lost quite a lot of weight!” Or making out one day that I never dated anyone I worked with, the next day that I had a girlfriend back in England, the next day that I was gay (all of these became virtually impossible to justify when I did end up going out with one of the maids who worked in the hotel). One night, she cornered me when I was drunk in one of the local bars and compelled to me to snog her. Before I took the plunge, I remember thinking: ‘Fuck it. I’ve watched the Jerry Springer Show. There are loads of guys who live in trailer parks who actually enjoy this kind of shit. Maybe I’m one of them and I just don’t know it yet. Here goes……!” I hoped that the experience would be maternal somehow, a symbolic regression to the womb perhaps, at least a legendary story for my friends down the pub, but it turned out to be none of these things. It turned out to be so unpleasant that it managed to put me off women for a while. Hell, it even put me off going out of the house for a while! (O.K maybe I’m exaggerating a bit.) No, but the thing is, I don’t want to be too nasty about her because she did have a beautiful personality and let’s face it, she did let me off about a hundred serious misdemeanors at work without so much as once carrying through with her numerous threats to give me the slip. And that goes a long way with me, let me tell you. Also, to be fair, she did have quite a pretty face, and bizarrely – get this - months after I had fled the hotel, I ended up involving her in some of my dirtiest lesbian fantasies (would you believe it?!), but that’s a story for another time.

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