A Day in London (8.12.2022)

Last Saturday, my wife and I took the train from her parents’ house in Surrey to London. The weather was about how you’d expect London weather to be on a December afternoon: damp, gloomy, with an icy island wind that sliced into your bones; and dark, even at 2 p.m., dark like just before a storm, when the traffic lights are Rorschachs floating in the mist, when those old-tyme black taxis and the double-decker busses rumble through intersections with headlights throwing reflections, when the people stare and drift through the streets like spirits animated by some hidden underground force.

     The first place we went was to visit Bunhill Fields Burial Grounds.

     Bunhill Fields is a 4-acre plot of greenspace in central London. In it, or under it, 123,000 dead souls reside, all of them interred there between 1665 and 1854. Only a small number of them got a monument out of the deal; the rest were rolled into a hole and covered with earth.

   The tombstones at Bunhill Fields are tall and skinny and crumbling, their epitaphs mostly worn away. They stand in the dead leaves and grass at curious angles, victims of gravity and decades of rolling London seafog. No wonder so many of them are gated-in and inaccessible to the public – they look like one small nudge would topple them.

     But we hadn’t come to see those relics.

     We had come to visit my old friend William Blake whose tombstone was on a concrete pad outside the gates, not far from the monuments of John Bunyan and Daniel Defoe. Blake’s was the most modest of the three. It was a slab of about three feet high with his wife’s name on it too. On top of it, someone had left a handful of coins; a pot of orange flowers had been set on the ground in front of it. Blake himself was somewhere else on the grounds… behind one of the fences, lying in the mud with the others, but deeper underground, deeper than everyone else, deeper than the worms and the roots of the trees, deep as his imagination was deep…

                                       As I was walking among the fires of Hell,

                                      delighted with the enjoyments of Genius;

                                      which to angels look like torment and insanity…

     We had little time for all we wanted to get to that day, so unfortunately couldn’t stay long with Blake, nor with those two others I hadn’t yet read. We did however spend some minutes with the monument of a certain Mary Page. The epitaph on it read thus:

                                     HERE LYES DAME MARY PAGE

                                     RELICT OF SIR GREGORY PAGE BART

                                     SHE DEPARTED THIS LIFE MARCH 4 1728

                                     IN THE 56^th YEAR OF HER AGE

And on the other side:

                                     IN 67 MONTHS SHE WAS TAP’D 66 TIMES

                                     HAD TAKEN AWAY 240 GALLONS OF WATER

                                     WITHOUT EVER REPINING AT HER CASE

                                     OR EVER FEARING THE OPERATION

Alas, poor Mary!

                                                                              ****

After Bunhill’s, we’d planned to visit the National Gallery, but the line was so outrageously long, we said to hell with it and went for some ales. The pub was called The Harp, Covent Garden. The Harp is a cozy little locals hangout hung with varnished chandeliers and old oil paintings, nicotine-stained paintings that were probably older than the ones we would’ve seen at the National Gallery.  The Harp itself has been around for centuries, long enough that many of our dirt-covered friends at Bunhill’s Burial Grounds had probably drunk ales there. Blake might’ve even come to the Harp. And Mary Page, before she had been tap’d and dewatered, might’ve come…

     A person’s character doesn’t change, but tastes do. I used to hate ale. I used to think it tasted like muck scraped out of the exhaust manifold of a retired Jaguar. Now, after having spent the last 8 years with a British woman who has plied me with it on numerous occasions, I have grown to love it even more than those other things she’s plied me with: Cornish pasties, pork scratchings, Marmite… I still haven’t developed much taste for tea…

     We ordered two ales, lucked two seats near the entrance, and then they came. Watch Crunch. A meet-up group of watch enthusiasts. There were about 15 in total, all of them (except for the hostess) white British men between the ages of 40 and 70. The host was a white British woman in her early 40s. She was wearing a tight jacket and a shiny leather skirt and high heels. Very overdressed for the bar and occasion, but it didn’t seem to bother the 14 other enthusiasts. Any one of them would’ve loved to have a roll in the hay with her was my guess and my wife’s guess was that she’d set up the meet-up for that very purpose, or simply to find a husband.

     “What do you think they talk about besides the time?” I asked my wife, looking the group over. Whereupon one of the members unveiled a small box of watches of various styles.

     “Huh? Huh?” he said, as his companions stood there fawning.

     I ordered two more ales at the bar.

     When I came back, my wife was talking to the host who was telling her about how her watch was the very one Arnold Schwarzenegger had worn in the Terminator. She’d gotten it in an auction, I think. I asked her if she knew a friend of mine who was from London and was also a watch enthusiast but had brain cancer and upcoming surgery (back in 2017) and one day simply vanished. She didn’t know him.

     “What about Mary Page?” I asked. “Did you know that in 67 months she was tap’d 66 times and had taken away 240 gallons of water without ever repining at her case…etc., etc..”

     She didn’t know that either.

     I drank, ordered more ales at the bar…

Alas, poor Mary!

                                                                                ****

The last place we went that day was to Jack the Ripper’s old stomping grounds, Brick Lane, where all the Bangladeshi curry houses are located. I love a good curry. That’s another thing my wife has gotten me into. And Brick Lane has some of the best curry houses I’ve ever been to, all of them with well-dressed Bangladeshis flailing menus outside them, vying for your business when you walk past.

     “Try our vindaloos… our Rogan josh… our Joe Rogans… come…it’s cheap… & spicy enough to set your bunghole quivering…”

     The place we went to we’d picked out beforehand because of its high rating on Google. It was a tiny place, very narrow and sparsely decorated, with a downstairs bathroom and a painting of a Bengali tiger on the wall. It was loud and chaotic and jammed with people, but we luckily managed to score a two-person table that was between two other two-person tables. The tables were so close you could hear your neighbors’ conversation if you wanted to. I didn’t pay much attention. Not until the hair and makeup wench sitting to the left of me registered a complaint to the waiter.

     “This dish is bloody awful,” she was saying. “I bet you put it in the microwave…you did… “

     “Uhm, I’m sorry, ma’am,” said the waiter. “I’m so sorry… so sorry… I’ll take it off your bill…. I’ll… I’ll do whatever it takes… I’ll… ”

     “I wouldn’t feed this to my dog,” she went on, grimacing with her fake eyelashes and those puffy fake lips.

     My wife and I then switched to German and started talking about her.

     “Was für eine zänkische Frau,“ I said. She sucks.

      Meanwhile, at the table on the other side of us, a couple in their 20s sat without talking. They were looking at their phones, scrolling endlessly. Even when their food came, they would eat and scroll, eat and scroll, saying nothing to each other. But the rest of the restaurant was still noisy and chaotic, the waiters scampering about balancing their sizzling hot plates, white tablecloths flying, clanging bottles and shouting and laughter, mad groups of tourists coming and going, the walls folding in on the drunken air.

     It was London on a Saturday night; London in December of 2022 and the fog was crystal, and the Thames was a dream, and the Queen had croaked, and Jack the Ripper was a Polish Jew named Kosminski, and Mary Page had been reincarnated as an overflowing crapper at King’s Cross Station. London, and everything was exactly as it was supposed to be, as it had to be, not a second in that city would ever be lost, nor gained; the Watch Crunch people were right; Big Ben and the London Eye and the flowers of Kensington Gardens were right; Blake was right: eternity is in love with the productions of time.

 

A Welsh Wedding (or Atonement with the Father)…

It was 36° (96.8° Fahrenheit), the hottest day of the year in the UK, and I was there for a Wedding in Wales, but stayed the first night at Erica’s parents’ house in a town called Staines-upon-Thames. The town is just outside London, and the house, like most on that continent, had no air conditioning, which I knew would be a problem for me when it came to sleeping. I’m one of those people who needs perfect conditions re: light, temperature & sound to be able to fall asleep, so I prepared by drinking gin and tonic, taking a Xanax and setting up a fan in Erica’s bedroom. We couldn’t open the windows because there was a semi-busy street out front and the sounds of Heathrow overhead.

12 a.m.

We shed our clothes, turn the lights off and get in her small, double bed. I am a little too tall for the bed, that’s the first problem. My feet are jammed into the rails at the foot, so I angle myself as best I can, trying not to touch or be touched by Erica. Her body feels like plutonian fire against mine, but that doesn’t seem to bother her, nor does the clammy air. She falls asleep right away (as usual), and I (as usual) am wide awake, eyes agape, mapping light and shadow on the ceiling. It’s as if the Xanax had the reverse effect. My mind is buzzing like a malfunctioning toaster oven, there’s a strange and powerful energy in the center of me, and the sheets under me are pooling with sweat. I grab the water glass off the nightstand, tilt the cold water onto my chest and belly and spread it around with my hands. It cools me down for a few minutes, but then it evaporates and I’m sweating my balls off again, worried about being up all night and the whole next day being trashed.

2 a.m.

I am still awake. It’s like lying on the inside of a sardine can, and the fan hasn’t done any good. It just blows around hot air. If I can just get 4 hours of sleep, I tell myself, I’ll be okay for the trip to Wales and all the wedding stuff tomorrow. 4 hours. 6 a.m. Wake up time’s about 8. I have time. I consider my last, desperate resort – jerking off. It works when nothing else does, usually. It has sleep-inducing qualities. But I’d have to do it very quietly and with as little movement as possible, even at the point of orgasm. I don’t want to shake the bed too much and wake up Erica. I think about what to think about for a while gathering  old material, then I reconsider. It’s no good. All masturbating will do is raise my body temperature, I tell myself. So I anoint myself with more water and sometime after that I slip into dreaming about Cadillac Eldorados and Michelangelo.

Wales

It took about 3.5 hours to get there from Staines. We drove with Erica’s parents, and stayed at a B & B in a little village called Porthyrhyd. Don’t ask me how that’s pronounced. Wales is a marvel for towns and villages you can’t pronounce. Cwmisfael, Penrhiwgoch & Mynydd Cerrig were a few of the ones nearby, and Erica’s cousin’s reception was to be held in a place called Llanddarog. The hotel we stayed at was a stone structure with a restaurant and bar on the ground floor and rooms on the floor above. It was built in 1785, and the walls were very thin, almost non-existent. From the bathroom, you could hear your neighbor on the toilet, and vice versa. But at least it was cool. It was cloudy when we arrived, and the temp had plunged to 20° (68° Fahrenheit). We unpacked, relaxed on the bed for a while, and about a half hour before dinner, went out to see what the village was all about. There wasn’t much to it. There was a road going up a hill. There were stone houses and grassy knolls and farms of grazing cattle and sheep. There was a beautiful little stony creek, fields of high yellow grass divided by clumps of dark-green trees, an occasional blackbird, and the green rolling hills in the distance. It was exactly how I’d pictured Wales and I found it charming in a way, but in another way, as we walked up the hill, it made me want to die. The country does that to me sometimes. The vast open spaces, empty roads heading off to nowhere, the sound of the wind, dust clouds, the beautiful monotonous landscape gaping back at you and saying nothing. I wanted to go out into it and die right then, but instead we walked to the top and stood there for a while. What would you do if you lived here besides drink ale in the pub? I asked Erica as we were on our way back. She didn’t know either, so we went to a pub and drank ale.

Wedding Day

It hadn’t rained in 2 months in the UK but started pissing it down (as the Brits say) just when it was time to go to the church for the ceremony. When we arrived, it was hailing and raining, and we sat in the car watching it pelt the windshield, waiting for it to let up. Erica’s cousin was the groom, by the way. His name was James and the bride’s was Laura, and the reason they were getting married at that church in far-off Wales was because Laura’s father had been interred there in 1990, a few months before she was born. Not sure how he died, but it was probably the most emotional wedding I’ve ever been to. Laura was weeping from the moment she entered the church and could barely make it through her vows without choking up. I almost choked up too, truth be told. Strange considering I didn’t know Laura, I’d only met James a few times, and I’d always thought weddings were kind of ridiculous. Not strange considering it wasn’t just a wedding between James and Laura, but a spiritual wedding in deep Wales between a father and daughter who were never lucky enough to get to know each other. This was probably the closest thing to it, and the hail, and the rain – that too seemed like a gift – not so much to us wedding-goers, but to the parched grass in churchyard. Nourishment for the dead.

Ale, Pork Scratchings and Juvenal

Erica had given me £10 and directions to a bar I could go to while she rang church bells for an hour. The bar was just off Brick Lane in London, and when I got there I ordered a large ale and a package of pork scratchings. The bar was crowded, but I managed to get a table at the front. I sat down, got out the copy of Juvenal’s The Sixteen Satires I’d just bought at a second-hand bookstore and started to read. I was kind of reading. Mostly I was drinking my ale and eating my pork scratchings and eavesdropping on the three Americans sitting at the table to my left. The bar was loud, so I could only hear dribs and drabs of what they were saying, usually something accompanied by the term ‘like’ or ‘Oh my God,’ or ‘No way.’ They were two young women and a young man and I suspected they were grad students, and that their parents were paying their way to be in London. They started talking about Family Guy, and then some other TV show, getting into all the details of a certain episode. What ever happened to real life? I thought. Must everyone live through their TV screens and iPhones? Facebook was the next subject brought up. Feeds, unfriending people, sharing, all that. I closed my ears to them and went back to my book, still only kind of reading. I was mostly thinking about a machine that needs to be invented. A Rube Goldberg-style chute that a man slides into and every twenty feet or so he’d fall in a room where he’d be drugged and clubbed and brainwashed by public opinion, current events, social media, sitcoms with laugh tracks, gossip pages, political rhetoric, Hollywood movies with guns and violence and crass Harvey Weinstein gross-out humor, and so on, and so forth. It would only take about a half hour to make it through all the rooms and chutes, but the drugging and clubbing and brainwashing would be so thorough, it would be as though he’d spent several years in it. And everyone would turn out just like the people to my left.

Yes, the idea seems pretty goofy now, but as I sat there drinking my ale and munching my pork scratchings it felt like I was onto something. I guess the main point is that people nowadays seem so far-removed from the earth, and nature, and so contaminated by mass communication that they’re not even themselves anymore. They never even had a chance to be. And yet they talk about authenticity – so many of them do – as if they have it, when really they’re just like every other Justin, Zach & Sally, cogs in some big promotional money wheel, spinning round and round, crushing every earthworm and flower that springs up in front of it.

“Posterity can add
No more, or worse, to our ways.” ~ Juvenal

Later, after I’d finished my beer and got another, a fat white bar cat with a brown spot on its back crept across the floor and jumped up on the chair on the other side of my table. I reached across and started stroking its coat. Then one of the girls from the table to my left came over to pet it, and we started talking. She was from Boston and her friends were from New York. I said I was from Florida and the other girl laughed and said she felt sorry for me. Then she told me about all the Applebee’s that were in my state that transformed into nightclubs afterhours. They’d been talking about it among themselves earlier, and then I started talking about some of the craziness that goes on in Florida.

I said: “If you read a newspaper article about a life insurance salesman on meth grocery shopping in nothing but lime green tube socks, you know it happened in Florida.”

They all laughed and soon we were talking about the sad state of things in the US, and I started realizing I kind of liked them all. I didn’t want that. It was too easy. It was much better seething about them, hating them, shoving them through my imaginary Rube Goldberg Contraption. Luckily, before I could get to know them too well, Erica showed up and we headed out. I blew the cat a kiss goodbye.

Travel: My Berlin to London Story

It wasn’t that I was being particularly nosey. The petite young woman in front of me in the security checkpoint line was holding her iPhone right up to her face, and I had a clear shot over her shoulder. The text jumped out at me. She was reading a long block of blue text she’d just gotten from someone who was telling her how he was toxic to himself, and there was talk of therapy and self-help books and so forth. And then came the accusations. Trust had been broken. She’d stabbed him in the back. She was a wretched, terrible, depraved human being and Karma – it would get her. I stood there reading, thinking about how cute and innocent she looked compared to what the text was asserting. And then she got called to the other checkpoint and I threw my stuff on the conveyer belt and went on through.

I sat down in the boarding area and faced the tarmac. Standing in front of me just to my left were two middle-aged American businessmen, both with cropped hairdos and scientifically manicured goatees, talking about investments and global strategy, using terms like ‘bang for your buck,’ and ‘paradigm shift,’ and ‘drinking the Kool-aid,’ and ‘come to Jesus moment.’ Their conversation had a very sane and reasonable tone. They were talking about what they knew about, what they felt a womb-like comfort with, what titillated the will and fed the bone marrow and intestines: money. There was a raw power and elemental force in the thing. Standing there with their loafers flat on the floor, their soft white hands fluttering about, the subject never wavering. “As if,” I said to myself, “they’re going to start talking about tulips or Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (pictured above).”

It was now time to board.

I got in front of the line, got checked through and made it to my row before anyone else. I threw my backpack in the overhead. I sat down in the middle seat, put my seatbelt on and opened Sherwood Anderson’s The Egg and Other Stories, wondering who’d be squeezed in around me. I didn’t want to look up to see whoever it was approaching. They might read the dread or disappointment of seeing them in my features. Or vice versa. No, best to keep your head buried in Mister Anderson, I thought.

Sometimes he pounded his fists on the table in the chop suey joint. A string of oaths flowed from his lips. Sometimes tears came into his eyes.

 “How ya doin, man?”

It was an American in his fifties with glasses and long blond hair pulled back into a ponytail. I said hello and he eased into the aisle seat next to me. Then I thought about his greeting. It seemed rather casual considering that he had no idea if I even spoke English. Well, I thought, we are going to London, and we are flying British Airways, and all the attendants on the plane are speaking English. He’s probably just reveling in the fact that now, after having spent too long on German soil wrestling with the German language and feeling inferior because of it, he’s in a place where English once again reigns supreme. It means he too reigns supreme.

Someone behind us was saying something to someone about buying vodka tonics and my co-traveler spoke up. “I’ll take one,” he said. He then lifted his little leather case on his lap and began fumbling through it. I thought again about his greeting. He’d addressed me as man. Is that not very American? I know a German whose English is poor, but he always uses the catch-phrase ‘Hey maaaaan,” which he said he learned from some American servicemen living in Berlin before the wall came down. Man. I think the word actually puts a wall up, implying unspoken societal norms and expectations, especially when two men who don’t know each other well use it on each other.

In my twenties, I lived for a while in a small apartment with a friend from high school who’d recently become a cop. Let’s call him Frank. Frank had a flattop and a mustache, like most cops. And he loved the word man. Not only did he use it as a form of address quite often, the items he’d purchase always seemed to have the word man in them. He had an Ironman watch. He ate Hungry-man frozen TV dinners and Manwich Sloppy Joe sauce and had an assortment of Craftsman tools. And if he didn’t love the band Manfred Mann, he should’ve. Frank was a good-hearted fellow, but if you ask me, he was too hung up on proving he was a man. Was it because he was homosexual, latent or otherwise? I liked to think so, even if it wasn’t true. He was more interesting that way. It made him somehow better.

All the seats on the plane seemed to be occupied except for the window seat to my left, so I undid my seatbelt and told the American next to me I was going to move into it and stretch out a little.

“Go for it,” he said. “You’re not offending me.”

The plane took off, ascending out of misty Berlin, through the clouds and up into the clear and sunny skies. Then we leveled out, the seat belt sign came off, and every once in a while I’d glance over at my co-traveler to see what he was up to. At first, he was looking at some photographs of himself and a woman and a little girl. Then he slipped the photographs back into the manila envelope he’d got them out of, and a laptop was produced. He opened it, called up a document with words on it, and a bar graph in the middle, and began looking it over. It made me wonder what he did for a living. He seems like kind of a free-spirit, I thought. An arrogant free-spirit. He’s probably self-made, owns his own business. Probably a successful one. Something in IT. I wonder how long he’s been in Europe. I wonder where he’s from. I’m going to guess Florida. The long blond ponytail, the casual arrogance – that’s Florida. Probably South Florida. I went back to Sherwood.

To get it in some way down, something felt.
A man was too much in a cage – in some way trapped.
A man got himself trapped. All this business of making a living.

Mark – I found out later my co-traveler’s name was Mark – spoke up when the flight attendant rolled up with her drink cart.

“Is this stuff free?” he asked, kind of rudely.
“Only the water’s free.”
“I’ll take a water,” he said.

He pulled down his tray table, put his laptop away and produced a book. The title of it was Red Army Faction Blues. He began reading, sipping his water. About five minutes later, he’d finished the cup, and got tired of reading. He put the cup and the book on the seat between us, lifted his tray table and dozed off. Bastard. I could never sleep on planes. Well, I wasn’t tired anyway. I continued with Sherwood.

A little while later, we flew over the English Channel, then started into our descent and Mark woke up. He picked up Red Army Faction Blues and put it on his lap.

“Where you from?” he asked.

I told him Florida. He was from Florida too, as I’d suspected. Hollywood, Florida. Born and raised. But he’d been living in Berlin with his wife, a German, since 2006, and was now going back to visit one brother in Colorado and the other in San Antonio.

“Do you miss the States?” I asked him.

He said he did. He said Americans were much more friendly than Germans. “You can talk to them just like we’re talking now. It’s easier. Plus I miss the backyard barbecues and the Mexican food.” We then started telling each other our backstories, though I never asked him what he did for a living. Mostly I talked, and pretty soon we were flying over the city of London. I got my iPod out my pocket, looked out the window and took this photo of the Thames.

I didn’t miss the States.

No, that’s not true. I sometimes did. I missed the Florida beaches, the Keys. I missed the Mexican food. I missed the comfort of familiar surroundings and familiar people. People I knew through and through. My people. I did miss them. But in another way, they’d gone so deep in my soul – all the pain they’d brought me, their laughter and love – they were never very far away. They were what I was made of and there was no escaping them.

But all these miles away – here, there was something else. A feeling of newness still. Something undeveloped or waiting to be born or found out.

I looked out the window as the plane came down into busy Heathrow Airport and the wheels touched the ground. What am I even doing here? I asked myself. This isn’t real. Not the beautiful young British woman waiting with her mother for me in arrivals. Not my four-year-old son back in Berlin, nothing. None of this is real. I should be doing what I’ve always done. I should be 4,400 miles from here in an oily little shop in a mad little Florida town renting out construction equipment. Shouldn’t I? Wasn’t it always supposed to be like that for me?

I consulted Sherwood Anderson and his story For What?

What was the use? He had wanted to say something he’d never be able to say. “I’m a shipping clerk in a lousy warehouse and I’ll always be just that, nothing else.” It was a child’s rage in a grown man. He picked up the canvas on which he had been at work all day and threw it far out into the stream.

London Town

It’s 8 a.m. and I am in a little room in a little house in a little village called Laleham that’s just outside London. I am here visiting Erica, who’s about ten feet from me still sleeping in bed, and the rest of the house is silent. Erica’s parents live here too, and they are also sleeping. I haven’t had my coffee yet. I don’t know why I’ve tried to write before I’ve had my coffee, but I can’t sleep anymore.

The room that I am in – Erica’s bedroom – looks a lot like I imagine it did when she was 12 years old. There is a doll house on the dresser behind me, and a pile of stuffed animals on the floor. There is a piggy bank on the bookshelf to my left along with lots of other doodads a 12-year-old might possess. The wine rack and her books, however, tell a different story. I’m seeing all kinds of dry historical tomes, and Dickens, Dumas, Dante, Hugo, Orwell. I even see a copy of my novel, Fortuna Berlin. Let it be known we first got together after she read my book. The book didn’t scare her away, in other words. Which is strange because I thought if the book didn’t accomplish anything else, it would at least succeed in scaring women away.

I have a good story to tell about my flight over here. I was composing it in my head while it was happening, but to tell it properly would take more time than I have right now. It’ll probably have to wait till I get back on Wednesday. In the meantime, my battery’s beginning to die, people are beginning to stir and I need to get some coffee in me. I’m feeling as glum as the London weather right now.

“This melancholy London – I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air.” ~ W.B. Yeats