midfuckepiphany

last sunday was not a high point in my life. in fact it may have been the lowest of the lows. im still not sure what to make of it, but as i sit here and reflect upon it in the context of the week as a whole, im reminded that at least times like sunday make other things less bad things more appreciated in comparison.

it all started when my flight out of DC got delayed. not just delayed stranded on the runway for FOUR HOURS. it was maddening. they wouldn't let us off the plane. i felt like a prisoner. the situation was putting me in danger of missing my connecting flight to brussels in newark. if that happened, i knew i would probably not be able to get another flight out for 24 hours, which would seriously screw up my work plans. others on the plane were in the same predicament. as the hours passed, anger grew. there was nearly a riot on board. to try to pacify customers, they began to distribute free alcohol. big mistake.

when we finally got to newark, i found out that, sure enough, i'd missed my connection to brussels by like five minutes. the guy who told me this was a dick, and by this time i was mean, drunk and full of rage, and, man, i went right the fuck off on this mother fucker. it involved my punching the counter, nearly breaking my hand, and firing off a storm of expletive-filled fuck-offs that turned the other passengers faces white and made mothers clutch their children to their chest.

as i suspected, the only other flight they could get me on was one 24 hours later. AND they said they couldnt give me my luggage back for some fucked up reason! fuckers. they were breeding a monster.

so the airline (Continental) puts me up in this beat-ass hotel near the airport, and im full of rage, and im drunk, and all i want is a fucking beer. so I check in, go to the restaurant, ask for a beer, and the restaurant tells me they dont have any.

Let me repeat: A HOTEL WITH NO BEER OR ALCOHOL OF ANY KIND.

WHAT-THE-FUUUUUUUCK?!!!!!!!!!11

in my drunken, rage-filled mind, this means that first the airline imprisons me on the runway, screws up my business, spits in my face when they tell me they screwed up my business, steals all my belongings and then puts me in a prison with no alcohol. IN GODDAMN NEWARK NO LESS!!!!11!

so i go back to the front desk, and i say, are you telling me there is no fucking alcohol in this entire hotel?

so what does the guy do? try to calm down the customer? find out how he can help perhaps? at least inform the customer of the situation politely?

NO!

this asshole immediately picks up the phone and threatens to call security on me!

do it, asshole! i yelled, and stormed off to my room, where i proceeded to kick the fuck out of a wall while yelling again and again FUCK YOU! at the top of my lungs.

i caught my breath for a minute. then i heard a knock on the door.

Security.

oh fuck. now there was plaster all over the floor from the wall that id beaten the shit out of. i tried ignoring the door, while i made some vain attempt to hide the plaster. outside the door, i heard some lady babbling something to the security guy in a thick Spanish accent. i got the impression she was complaining about me.

he knocked again. Hello. Security.

well, as it turned out, the security guy was actually an amicable enough fellow. and i calmed down a bit. he told me there was a hotel down the street with a bar.


* * *

the whole day was filled with so many if-onlys. if only the plane out of DC hadnt been delayed. if only they didnt give us alcohol. if only the guy at the desk in Newark hadnt been such a dick. and especially, if only that fucking hotel just had one or two beers, i could have just gone to my room, calmed down, passed out and tried to get shit together the next day. instead, i was about to have one of the ugliest experiences of my life.

i set out for the other hotel. i was in the middle of shitsville. there werent even any sidewalks; i was walking in the middle of a highway, basically. it was raining and freezing, and i was on the warpath. cars were speeding by me, and i was trying to pick fights with them. i was walking rage.

finally i saw the hotel the security guy was talking about on the other side of a parking lot. i headed straight for it. there was a fence, about six feet tall, blocking my way. no fence was going to stop me. i hoisted myself up, threw one leg over, and was about to throw the other one over when I lost my balance and fell down to the ground like a sack of potatoes.

*POW* Arghhh

i tried again, and succeeded. then i went to the bar.

what happened there was bad. real bad. im not talking like cool-bad, or funny-bad, or I-might-look-back-at-this-in-twenty-years-and-laugh-bad. it was just bad. it should not have happened. fortunately, i dont remember much of it. just blurry images. i wound up on the floor at one point. then some people hoisted me up and asked me where i was staying. i told them. they brought me outside, pointed me in the direction of my hotel, and said, good luck.

i think i made it about 50 feet. then my legs gave out on me. i was that drunk. i couldnt move. i was rolling around on the asphalt in the parking lot like a carp. eventually i gave up. i lay there.

some time passed, then a security guy pulled up. i was able to get up and go to his window. he basically said i had to leave. i remember him being decent enough. i started to stagger off again. i made it to a side road with a side walk. he was following me slowly in his truck.

then I stopped. and screamed. yup, screamed. i screamed at the top of my lungs.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! the open night sky didnt even have the decency to provide an echo. it just sucked it up. it was futility. like trying to plant a rose in a concrete overpass.

then i walked a few more steps, and i did it again.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i screamed until my throat felt like it had been sandpapered. i was an animal. i was no longer human. i was howling at the moon. my darkest core was exposed, and what came forth was an expression of pure rage.

i fell. i remember crawling along this sidewalk in the rain on my elbows. i couldnt move my legs. i looked over my shoulder. the security truck was still there.

i brought myself to my feet again. i made it about three steps and then careened over and fell into some bushes.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I screamed from my new home in the bushes.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i was a raw nerve, a pure animal. and i should have been put down like an animal. the cops would have been well within their rights.

the cops, yes. i remember the car pulling up, lights flashing.

Newark is a tough city, and cops are trained a certain way, and when they see someone behaving like i was, they have to take as their operating assumption that the person could be dangerous. so i was yanked out of the bushes pretty violently, and then remember being face down in the gutter and being frisked.

now i was laughing maniacally.

then they stood me up and yelled at me to get up against this chainlink fence. i was cooperative. i gripped it with my fingers with both arms outstretched like Newarks own Jesus.

they fired a lot of questions at me: where are you from? where do you live? how did you get here? i was honest in my answers, but they kept thinking i was being inconsistent. i guess its kind of understandable given the jumble of facts: i was born in new york, live in DC, my drivers license is from florida, and my passport reads like a world map. when thats the situation, and you try to give quick answers to the kinds of questions they were asking, it can sound to Joe Cop like youre full of shit.

but i was drunk off my ass and didnt give a flying fuck about a flying fuck. they ran my license, which probably turned up that ive never had so much as a parking ticket. eventually they mellowed out, and we shot the shit, and they took some time to sober me up a bit. i think they actually started to like me by the end of the ordeal. all things considered, they were amazingly cool. they probably could have jailed me.

they dropped me off in front of my hotel, much to the consternation of the front desk guy who id clashed with earlier. i sneered at him as i stumbled by.

* * *

the next day, i was a human disgrace: i looked like Sid Vicious on a bad day and smelled worse than homeless person in a manure factory from all my rolling around in the gutter. i was too sick to shower, i had no toothbrush, and at some point during the night had acquired a massive welt on my forehead.

despite this, i managed to get on my flight to brussels and finally got over there. (the flight was pretty empty, and I wound up with a row to myself, which helped mitigate the reek factor.)

but, of course, seeing as how god hates me and all cmon, you can guess it hell, I practically knew it was going to happen myself thats right, i arrive to find that THEY LOST MY @#&% LUGGAGE!!!1!!

well, they sent it to Paris, actually, for some unfathomable reason, i soon found out. i didnt give anyone a hard time though. i had no fight in me. i was sheepish because of the night before, and i was still fucking hung over. all i could do was get the airlines lost-luggage departments contact information, give them information about where I was staying, and wait until they corrected the problem.

so i finally arrived at my hotel in brussels 24 hours after I was supposed to. it put me there at about 9am tuesday just as Day 1 of the meeting i was supposed to cover was getting underway. i had no choice but to blow it off. i know the guy well who is president of the organization sponsoring the meeting, and hes very cool, but one thing he is very insistent about is that everyone wear a suit. if it was just a question of me wearing my travel gear (jeans, Adios, t-shirt, hoodie) he MIGHT have let me slide given the fact that my luggage was lost. but there was no way i could be in that room smelling the way i did.

my only choice was to go up to my room, strip completely, send my cloths to the hotel laundry to be disinfected, and then try to smooth things over with the organizations president later. (after all, they were paying for my room.) so thats what i did.

literally being without a stitch of clothing is one of those things that you dont realize how gimped it makes you until youre actually in that predicament. i was naked, but i had to interact with a bunch of hotel employees (first the laundry person, then a food person [i was starving] then a person who brought up a complementary shaving kit and toothbrush). i asked them to send up a bathrobe, but it never came, so i had to fashion sort of a toga out of the bedspread in order to deal with people. i felt ridiculous. i made feeble attempts to explain why i looked the way i did. each person responded differently, but they spoke little english, and none of the responses exactly screamed, youre normal.

i slept a long time, and finally got my cloths back at 6:30pm. thank the fuck christ. no more gutter smell. i showered for a second time, and went down to the hotel business center to try to email my editor. i had been two stories short on my deadline when i left DC, and this was the first time i was able to communicate to him about what happened with the plane. i told him sorry about everything getting fucked up, and if he still wants the stories, i can still get them to him. (although i was secretly hoping hed say, dont worry about it, because the last thing i wanted to be dealing with now was more deadline stress.)

later, at about 11, i went to the hotel bar hoping to find a bunch of the meeting people there so i could explain what happened. sure enough, everyone was there, and they were all pretty loaded, and they were actually extremely cool about everything, even the president guy. he even gave me permission to attend the next days meeting looking like my punk-ass self (although he promised to take the mickey out of me, which he did. it was funny though).

overall, that night at the brussels hotel bar, and the next day at the meeting, turned out to be extremely productive work-wise, and i picked up many stories probably more than i ever had from that organization before. the lost-luggage story actually turned out to be a pretty good conversation starter, and i think the fact that i looked so casual had a relaxing effect on people. i think i may have come across to a businessman like a non-threat, from a business perspective. to someone looking at the situation from the outside though, i imagined that it might look pretty surreal: thirty or forty dark-suited, distinguished european businessmen engaged in very serious, technical conversation with someone who looked like one of the cast of Jackass. haha.

things wrapped up nicely meeting-wise, and on wednesday afternoon i checked into a different, cheaper hotel in brussels, for reasons i wont bore you with. there, i checked my email to see that my editor after expressing his sympathies about my predicament still wanted his stories. shit. so for the next two hours i busted out a mad amount of wordage on this primitive hotel computer that you needed a rub-off card to re-activate every thirty minutes, and which had no word processing program. despite this, the stories came out pretty well, and i even busted out four short stories for our email alert. what a pro.

AND, best of all, while i was doing all this, the concierge came into the business center to tell me that MY LUGGAGE HAD JUST BEEN DELIVERED. Halle-fucking-lujah. (get this: rather than just sending my luggage from paris to brussels, the retarded airline sent it BACK to newark, and THEN to Brussels. )

the next day, i flew to london.

* * *

MEET SOPHIA!

man, i really love london. ive got to move back there. thursday night, i got together for drinks with one of my best friends ralph. it was awesome. we had a great time.

friday lunchtime, i got together with my work crew. its good for everybody to be able to see each other fact to face, since im usually just communicating with them via email and phone. many of us go back years, and i consider them some of my best friends in the world. it also gave me a chance to meet personally the new reporter on staff joanne.

we went to our usual haunt the Bricklayers Pub, a really cool, unpretentious, grungy hole-in-the-wall joint in Shoreditch with a great jukebox. we had a few rounds upstairs with some food, then headed downstairs to the main bar.

there, we encountered the lovely Sophia. she was this great, crazy chick that i immediately hit it off with. she was completely fucking hammered. she was just there by herself, for some strange reason, roaming around, drunkenly harassing various patrons. she was screaming things about how many people she fucks and that she is a bisexual, and that shes hoping to get her period soon. just one of those great, weird, random people that you meet every so often in life if youre lucky. she was wearing this really small miniskirt that hid little, and kept showing everyone her ass. thats my kind of woman.

she was Bangladeshi, she said. beyond that, it was hard to figure out an exact picture about her, between her slurring and her barely-sensical testimony: first she said she lived in Bangladesh, then she said she lived with friends in london who were millionaires. then she said she lived in a flat up the street. she said she was a stripper. she said she was waiting for her friend, who works in an office across the street to get off work. then there was a lot of other gibberish about how shed been up for three days partying. that perhaps explained her unwashed aroma, which was powerful. she smelled like I did on the freaking plane.

i figured she was a prostitute. she certainly seemed like one. man she was wasted.

cmere sweetie, i said, patting my thigh. have a seat.

oh noooo, i cant, she demurred. im too heavy.

ill be the judge of that, i replied. and with that, she ground herself into my crotch and joined our group and proceeded to blow everyone away.

most of the people i work with are super cool, but there are one or two a couple of the newer ones who are kind of snobbish, and it was funny because i mean, my editor is totally cool, and he and i have done all sorts of crazy shit together, but i think a couple of people there who hadnt met me before were thinking this get-together was kind of an official, formal business lunch, and they saw this crazy hooker in the place yelling at everybody, and they were kind of looking down their noses at her, and wanting her to go away. so i think they were kind of freaked and disturbed when i brought her over. haha. it was awesome.

she babbled endlessly about sex. she was all attitude. she and i were riffing off one another seamlessly. id found a soul mate. we got into a shouting match over who had had more threesomes. everyone at the bar was looking at our table. then she started pulling up her skirt and showing everyone her pussy. haha. beautiful. it was really freaking people out.

i asked my boss if he wanted me to get rid of her, but i think he was enjoying the fact that she was freaking people out too, and he said no, so i kept the whole thing going. then she started making out with me. yes i made out with a skank Bangladeshi hooker in front of my uptight colleagues. she kept asking me to come back with her to her flat and fuck her. but i said no, im hanging out with my friends today. then she flashed Sarah her tits. haha. awesome.

she kept trying to take my bosss cigarettes, but i would have none of it. you can do anything but that, i told her firmly. look, see that guy over there in the corner? go ask him for a cigarette, he likes you. she stumbled off and came back a minute later with one of the guys cigarettes. i felt like her pimp. my colleagues looked scared.

yeah, bitch.

eventually her friend did show up, and sophia scattered like the wind. *sigh*


later, at another bar, i overheard some of the people talking smack about sophia. i jumped in and defended her. so did Sarah. i dont like people who talk smack about people like sophia. theyre cowards. they fear life.


* * *

saturday, i flew back to brussels to spend one more night before heading back to DC. it simply had to be that way for flight-scheduling reasons. paranoid about missing my early flight, i got a 5am wakeup call. i wanted to eat before i left, but breakfast wasnt going to be available until 6am, but that would have been too late. so i wound up ordering some big, weird anchovy pasta thing that i didnt want. it was really the coffee i was after.

as lame as it sounds, i made an attempt to look un-weird for the room service person: the hotel i was staying at, the Radisson SAS, was the same hotel the conference had been in on Tuesday and Wednesday. its kind of a nice place, and, for my job, i need to stay there semi-regularly, so i make a feeble attempt to behave myself there because its the kind of place that could conceivably refuse you further reservations if youre blacklisted for being an undesirable.

the knock at the door came. i checked my look in the mirror. i was wearing jeans, and a long-sleeve black t-shirt with three skulls across the chest. no matter, i thought. theyll probably just think its a band t-shirt or something. so i let the room service dude in, and he sets the tray on the desk, and im being very polite and on my best behavior, and we conduct the transaction and i thank him in French, and i thought it all went smoothly enough. but the whole time, he had this weird sort of look on his face.

so i show him out the door, close it, turn around to head towards the tray, and i suddenly see that the whole time he was there, THERE WAS HARDCORE PORN PLAYING ON THE TV. haha. i was so focused on my t-shirt, that i totally forgot to turn it off. im such a retard.

i laughed my ass off. i could just imagine the conversation in the employee breakroom:

get this, that guy in 609 just took delivery of his room service order and signed for it and everything, and he seemed completely ambivalent to the fact that there was close-up, greasy anal sex playing on his tv set.

oh, that guy. yeah, he was here a few nights ago too and he kept answering the door in a toga.

oh boy.

* * *

that night, under the Newark sky, as i lay there on the stinking asphalt looking up, watching the raindrops materialize out of the gloom and float down and sprinkle across my face, i thought about a lot of things: i thought about this sorry state of affairs. and i thought about my dad, whose absence i already feel deeply. and i thought about Her, whoever Her is. and i thought about The End. so unglamorous. and my tears mixed with the rain.




me and ralph solving the problems of the world, green man pub, near bank tube station, london