Britical

 

 

A fat woman sidles out of the bathroom with a long ream of filthy toilet paper stuck to her left shoe. It drags along the carpet behind her, and though a few people clearly notice this, none of us says anything. There is nary even a snigger.

 

Thirty years ago we’d all have been called jetsetters. Not anymore. It’s a plane in 2008, we’re in coach, and, five hours into a transatlantic redeye flight - two and a half of them spent loitering on the runway - no one cares anymore. Not about the hapless fat lady, nor the economy, nor how they look nor how anyone else looks for that matter. They just want it to be over. Like camping, but more expensive and tiring. And lacking all that virtuous fresh air and smell of fires burning. Although there’s still time for that, isn’t there? I would just prefer it not be right after take-off, even if it’s both more likely and more survivable. How ignominous it would be, after all, to have it reported that you breathed your last breath in Queens or Long Island as opposed to the dramatic icy waters off Greenland, say, or picturesque Scotland. It makes me think of those ageing Hollywood starlets who would take poorly calculated drug overdoses. Carefully arranging themselves on satin sheets while dressed all way up in some awful nylon negligee, they were, I suppose, a peculiar hybrid of leaving a beautiful corpse and "He’ll be sorry when I’m gone!" type reasoning. They would inevitably be found by the maid the next day, facedown in a vomity toilet. Which all goes to show one simply cannot ever count on a glamourous demise, however well-planned, or a mid-air explosion over somewhere exotic. So with that in mind, I have counted the seatbacks, as I always do, to the exits fore and aft, just in case I need to bail out as we skid off the runway. I have also reacquainted myself with the protocols for yanking open the doors and getting the hell off this particular plane (one of my faves, a 777 - 200 ER) in sturdily soled boots perfect for sprinting through burning jet fuel. This is why I am in the exit row right next to the door. Yes, you may laugh nervously at my precaution taking - but I’m used to it. Tomorrow, though, it will be the 20th anniversary of the crash of PanAm flight 103. And the day after that it could be your turn to make history.
 
Meanwhile, though not dead yet, we are certainly all past caring - especially the air hosts and hostesses. They’ve had enough of us and don’t care who knows it. The males push past, flouncing in exaggerated fashion up and down the aisles hissing like ornery camels at a stray passenger foot or elbow, bad runway models all. The females just roll their eyes at them like teenagers, or smile their tight little smiles, like wives trying to keep the peace. And I, having basked in the paltry sense of cleverness that comes with snagging said exit row seat, I too now wish for death. I have fallen victim to an incessantly screeching couple from some former Soviet satellite country. One of them smells ever so slightly homeless and eats like it, too, her mouth a sticky, yawping maw of "chicken or beef": "Myap, myapp, myappp!".(She is probably reading this right now as I write. Do I care? Like I said….) It’s like the 6 train at rush hour in here, but the 6 train as if, pulling out of 14th Street, it suddenly jumped the track to the ‘Twilight Zone’ and careening down past the pipes and tunnels and sewers and alligators is making a beeline for hell.

Hell, but in this case (and Queens notwithstanding) at least 35,000 feet higher up: here we are, the coughers, the sneezers, the snorers, and the wankers in headphones laughing uproariously at their seatbacks. It’s 4am and it feels like it. Everyone appears pasty, overweight*, and cluelessly dressed.* (*The pound sterling lost value recently, so guess whose citizens are keen to cross the pond at the moment?) The luckier ones flopped down in their seats five hours ago and went straight to sleep. Oblivious bastards.

And then there’s the toilet. It’s inconveniently nearby, and is attended by a silent gaggle of people doing vague foot rolling and attempted toe touching to ward off the in-flight death by Deep Vein Thrombosis as explained to us all in the helpful inflight video. Some of their nylon arses bob in and out of my face. Every time the door folds open a foul aroma whooshes out, eau de airline - a potent blend of sickly sweet chemicals and poo. It’s a discouraging sort of smell, it occurs to me, if your sad little goal tonight was to join the rather quaint sounding ‘Mile High Club’. Heard of it? That’s right, dear readers, it used to be terribly outré and fashionable, upon alighting the plane, to fuck someone in the toilet. Preferably a stranger. Really. Nowadays, entering the average airline bathroom (let alone a stranger inside one) - even in international First Class, I’m afraid, despite the Molton Brown soap - is tinged with repulsion and cholera. People exit the toilet hurriedly with squares of tissue between their hands and the door handle. Nobody wants to touch anything in there let alone each other. So, for my younger readers, and to understand this strange, olde Mile High Club custom, we must briefly traverse the ages and look at a bit of flight history.

It was in 1958 that the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC)  started up the first civilian passenger service across the Atlantic. I know this because the magazine in my seat pocket says so and being British, this rather pleases me while leaving me distinctly unsurprised for the same smug reason. The piece also mentions the publicity concerning the décor of the cabin on these weekly flights; that is, ‘quietly elegant’ with ‘oyster blue ceilings’. Can this be true?? The casual airline passenger cannot help, upon reading this, but gawk and compare, non-plussed and newly appalled at the dribbling babies and drab, grey plastic. "It wasn’t cheap", declares the airline magazine, rather huffily. Oh, so what! I grew up watching footage of the famous war criminal Henry Kissinger on TV getting endlessly on and off planes via white rolling staircases. (I fear his days of carefree international travel are now somewhat over, but for other reasons.) But where are they now, those gleaming staircases? Ditto the glamourous air waitress sluts of the 60’s in their go-go boots and itchy orange "Space Age" outfits, and their occasional male counterparts, dressed like gay(er) ice skaters? Did they exist? Except for Aeroflot, by the time I managed to finagle my way onto a plane, entry and exit was already via giant, carpeted tubes. No Hollywood moments to be had there. Did passengers really used to dress up in their Sunday best to get on a plane? Neat little suits and perhaps a natty hat for the gentleman? According to the black & white photo of the first BOAC transatlantic flight, that’s exactly what one wore. Crossing the ocean, then, in 1958, was a grand Adventure not at all on a par with the weirdly fraught tedium we find ourselves lumbered with in 2008.

And so, come the 1970’s, especially since everyone was thinner, it is easy to imagine that the toilets were cavernous, fuckworthy powder rooms in which it was almost de riguer, dahling, to have fucked a stranger, a naughty badge of pride to be bandied about at dinner parties for weeks afterwards. I suspect it was around then that the word "jetsetter", a distinctly 70’s sounding term, was created. And although it sounds to me like a mere precursor to "Eurotrash", at the time it possessed enormous cachet. Bianca Jagger and Jackie Kennedy and all the rest, smiling, waving, and pausing in their giant sunglasses at the tippy-top step to have their photo taken. This back when Jackie’s husband, JFK, was just a future dead president and the name of the airport that would be consequently renamed for him still perfectly captured the sheer romance of flight and travel: ‘Idlewild’.

Even the poor Concorde is no more, undone by a 16 inch metal strip that fell off another plane. That and the looming shadow of Hubbert’s Peak. Mind you, it’s an interesting and rare example of something that moves us faster actually vanishing by the 21st Century, leaving us all ample time - as we watch ourselves on our tiny screens inch torturously up the Eastern Seaboard, past Boston, over Maine, across Newfoundland…..to ponder in astonishment the good old days when, for the price of a twelve bedroom Florida McMortgaged mansion today, you could get from New York to London and back again in time for a late lunch at Le Bernadin with perhaps a bit of Mile High hanky-panky in between.

No wonder that to us it now all seems a cruel myth from a bygone age as we endure ludicrous "security" checks where ugly peoples’ big, grubby sneakers bump along a conveyor belt with one’s rather nice bag. And no wonder that, trapped on a fair approximation of an airborne Greyhound bus, a person might try to stanch the mounting dismay by finding a sense of excitement, romance and adventure elsewhere. Even if that entails tasteless epic disaster scenarios and elaborate escape plans, up to and not limited to the sensational book deal they would undoubtedly secure during their fifteen minutes of, say, ‘Sole Survivor of World’s Worst Plane Crash!’ newspaper headline fame. Which might in turn make them wonder if the more impressive ‘Heroic Rescuer in World’s Worst Air Crash!!!’ might snag them very own talk show. That way they could fly their own private jet, carbon footprint be damned. So I peer once more into the former ‘quiet elegance’ of the flourescent gloom, now just a hot, stinky, snoring, tube bumping unceremoniously through the cold night sky. Seatbacks to exits: 0 fore, 12 aft. Check.

Copyright Britical, 2008. All Rights Reserved.

 

 

 

Even the rich, famous and gorgeous are not immune to the inevitable and slyly encroaching tedium of marriage. Any gossip mag will tell you that. Still, it’s interesting to observe it close up in all its banal splendour in people other than one’s friends. But more on that later (others, not friends).

 

The wretched entropy inherent in marriage is self-evident, and unfortunately has been scientifically proven to be unavoidable (sorry, kids, but it has. http://britical.blogsome.com/2007/05/24/sexless/). Some of you know this. And for those of you who don’t, or don’t want to, just look around. Or be patient. Right. Because one day, married-with-kids always wakes up and realises this is definitely not where they wanted to be. This sad fact is examined in Sam Mendes’ new production, ‘Revolutionary Road’. It stars, of all people, his own wife Kate Winslet (with Leonardo DiCaprio playing the husband). To me at least, this implies a shocking and deliciously intriguing possibility that Mendes and his wife have made an autobiographical film about marriage that is actually rather frank - which is to say, not too pretty.

 
I thought about the family thing this Thanksgiving, which holiday I spent with someone I barely knew, drinking lots of wine, walking by the river, eating cookies baked specially for me, and generally doing whatever we felt like doing the whole time. It turned out to be a very Happy Thanksgiving indeed. Who am I then, to have so often complained about having no set place to go or be expected at during holidays typically reserved for family (of which I am somewhat lacking)? Since after the fact - talking to friends who actually do have places to go and are expected to be in order to share the ordeal of complex family arguments and unpleasant in-laws - I always feel a bit guilty. Oh, and I do think I should add here, by way of clarity, that my occasional self-pity about family is limited to a big, jolly, posh family who gave birth to me and who live in some large country pile in New England. Like in the movies. That is, not a family I have had to create myself. Either way, the upshot is that I always have a conspicuously better time than any of the above put together: with friends, with strangers, perhaps in a foreign country or somewhere else entirely new and interesting. Without the ties of a spouse and children, after all, you’re free to do whatever the hell you want, however you want, whenever you want and with whoever you want. Which I do. And what’s not to like about that? Apparently not much, since despite the (deadly) comfort & convenience of the institution, these are the things that married people most often come to yearn for and envy in others not so unfortunate as themselves.

 

Even if they never knew what they wanted in the first place, that they usually discover that this, this {insert own nightmare reality or scenario here} is definitely it. And so they might privately dream that as a solo flyer there would be constant options and opportunities. Maybe spending Christmasses sailing with friends round the Poor Knights Islands of New Zealand, snorkeling through clammering dolphins, standing with amazed strangers on a monastery roof as hundreds of bells and thousands fireworks ring in the New Year in Florence, on expedition with your small brigade and sixteen dogs in a million acre snowy wilderness with not a bird, animal, or other human to be seen. Then alone there with just the wolves howling in the distance. Or wandering through inexplicable piles of dinosaur size driftwood on a beach of the Tasman Sea, then utterly lost in a wintry Venice. And the best things, goes their thinking, would be of the unplanned, adventurous variety, incompatible with having to "check-in" with or get permission from someone else - or several someones, actually, each of whom will whine in their own special way. And they would be right.

As I think about the depressing yet blindingly obvious implications of ‘Revolutionary Road’ given that marriage is still held up as the ideal state in our society (the Emperor decked out in his finery), I appreciated anew my own life. But just to check, as I walked along the street, I played a little thought experiment with myself: As I live now, and if I was completely honest with myself, could I think of anyone in this world, married or not, that I would swap lives with if given the chance? It took only a couple of blocks to cross all the names off my long list. Zero candidates.

O.K., so turning onto my street, and on to the rich and famous list. You know how it is. And I started to cross them off, too. The dopey New York socialite heiress and her Reputation spread all over YouTube? The young TV actress and her grinning, cult-bound older husband? Bill Gates? Oprah? Ed Witten? The Nazi Pope? Nope, nope, and…nope…yawn…..I looked up just then, and noticed a man staggering towards me. He was tugging a loudly fretful little kid alongside him. Ah, I thought, another poor married UES schmuck. Except, I then noticed, the poor married UES schmuck was none other than soon-to-be-divorced ‘Fox Mulder’ from ‘The X-Files’; more properly the actor David Duchovny, the current star of Showtime’’s hugely popular ‘Californication’.

 

Oh yes. In ‘Californication’ he plays Hank Moody, a "toxic bachelor", if you will. He has an uncontrollable jones for fornication with pretty much everything at least once, and, as they say, if it moves under its own steam, twice. But here on my street, dressed in naff looking jeans and an old anorak, the actor himself looked irritated and worn down. Had David Duchovny had ever gone through his own list of names and if so, had he paused at the name ‘Hank Moody’? Apparently he had. He recently checked himself into a rehab clinic for so-called "sex addiction" - or as Joe Sixpack might say, cheatin’ on the missus. And although we hear she may also have cheated, we can always assume the said sex addiction was not to her. Because he, like she, probably woke up one morning, and asked themselves, just like every other poor sod, the most ordinary thing in the world: what the fuck am I doing here?? And furthermore, who is this gorgeous person lying next to me that (to paraphrase Chris Rock) I am however sick of fucking?

 

Yes, et tu, Fox Mulder of ‘The X-Files’, who would nobly declare, "The truth is out there". He turned into Hank "The pussy is out there" Moody - and now the line has blurred between Hank and plain old David Duchovny himself, whose attitude seems to be, "The pussy is out there…and there…and there, and oh look! there’s some more! Show me the pussy!!" Sad, sure …but how satisfying to actually see its implications right in front of me - and to hear it, in its joyless mundanity as I hurried past him that night - as the child’s mewling noises grew fainter and fainter, like the Doppler of a receding ambulance siren - only much, much louder.
 
 
 
 
 Copyright Britical, 2008. All Rights Reserved.

 

Ooop, oh, there you are! Look, I really don’t know how it happened but I just destroyed half your bathroom. Even though I have lived in NYC for years and all the toilets look pretty much the same, I apparently thought that thin, delicate chain hanging from the ceiling that’s obviously the light pull was actually the flush. And I pulled it. Real hard. Yes, I guess it is odd seeing as I would have had to pull it to put the light on or I’d have peed in the dark. Huh. I can’t really explain that. I don’t remember….anyway…that really antique looking porcelain bit? And half the rest of it? It just…came off in my hand. Yes, I know, it’s strange that that old glass lightshade, though quite separately attached, as you say, came somehow unhooked from its moorings on the ceiling and fell with a deafening crash into the toilet and shattered into tiny pieces, and now there is glass everywhere. It’s not old, it’s Art Deco, you say? Oh. Well, it’s not like I’m drunk. Really. I’m really not. I know you didn’t invite me to this small dinner for just a very few close friends and that I showed up pretty much uninvited, but did I say I’m not drunk? Do you want me to pay for this? You say No, don’t be silly. O.K. phew, great! I expect that means no flowers or note of apology or e-mail or any sign of contrition tomorrow either. Or the day after that. Cool. So I’ll just go back into the other room now and eat all the dessert and keep talking loudly about my astrological sign and my past life experiences, shall I? Oh, by the way, do you have any more champagne? Yes, more champagne.

 

…You say wait just a minute. What? Now I am not sure… I think you say I could "perhaps at least offer to fucking hang myself from what’s left of the light pull"? I am not understanding. You are smiling at me in peculiar way that you have since you walk into bathroom and the glass make that crunch-crunch noise under your heels. Now you have face like FSB man from my country. Why are you close door? Oh, be careful, don’t cut yourself on that big piece of……. glass. Wait! Niet! What are you doing?? помощь! HELP! I’m…I tell you…I’m.. really….. not…… dru..nnn…nnn…n

Copyright Britical, 2008. All Rights Reserved.

 

 

On CNN yesterday, there was a long, awkward segment devoted to the "wonderful" opportunities to be had in the current economic downturn. The anchors flashed strained smiles, and it was obvious this was a lot of desperate whistling in the dark - a.k.a. bollocks, if you want to be technical. However, it later struck me that the piece also ignored certain other resourceful if intangible upsides…

Let’s get the boring but important stuff over first: to briefly recap, the week ending November 16th produced a stunning 16 year high of new jobless claims filed. And while November job losses were expected to be around 200,000, the Fed was forced to announce its economic growth outlook through 2009 to be at virtually stagnant levels. Thus, things will get worse before they get worser. But, unless you were busy stampeding WalMart this week, you knew that, didn’t you? - and likely, you have started to cut back on your expenses. And whether that means no more "$$$$" Zagat rated restaurants, firing your trainer, resisting pedicures, or moving to Queens - you might be wondering, like CNN, what’s in it for me?

Now let me say right here that I do not at ALL refer to the terrible, terrible stereotype of rich, male trolls with nothing to recommend them except their wallets, and the vaguely decorous female goldiggers who adore them. But in a society, and city where (as we have discussed here ad nauseum) many men expect and are expected to provide lavish dinners plus their most recent tax return to win the dubious affections of certain sorts of ladies, are these men cutting back at all vis-a-vis their dating habits? Because if so, I have another "upside" for CNN, and one word for my suffering male friends: Sluts. Because I cannot believe some men are not quietly taking advantage of the vast plethora of accomplished sluts galloping about the city who will show up at your very door and quite happily provide only slightly drunken and inept services free of charge - or if you’re keen to avoid that chewed-off arm look, at least for the price of a 3am cab back to where she came from.

So this weekend I asked a few guys about this and the unsurprising answer may be summed up as a resounding if somewhat shamefaced, "Yeah, actually, thinking about it…yes..". After a few more beers, I was also able to extract some fairly gleeful recent anecdotes involving the Meatpacking District and such-and-such girl from Jersey, and so on. The other men, the ones who said things like "No! Of course not!", etc., did nevertheless look awfully thoughtful…and who can blame them? I also spoke to a few self-professed sluts who confirmed that, yes, they’d had a damned good couple of months, even if they couldn’t remember bits of it.

Of course, as rampant strumpets of both sexes rejoice, this does leave all the goldiggers, women who truly couldn’t give a toss about anyone’s income, and anyone else (hookers), rather in the lurch - but there you go. I suggest staying home with a good book, taking pleasure in the knowledge that at least someone’s stock, along with a few other things, is rising fast. Just like the good folks at CNN (didn’t) say.

Copyright Britical 2008,. All Rights Reserved.