Planet Panic

by Pam Pastor

  It was routine. He had done this with thousands of people before me and he will do it with thousands of people after me.

  “Okay na? Pwede na ako umalis?” I asked, standing up.

  My question seemed to snap him out of his almost robotic state. He paused. And finally spoke Tagalog.

  “Ano ’to—for delivery or fick up?”

  “Pick up,” I said with a straight face.

  It was his turn to smile.

  Later, when I told Jill about Mr. Biometrics, she said, “Dapat sinagot mo ‘Uf to you.’”

  May 24, 2014

  A dollar a day

  The idea hit me on the tail end of a previous New York trip, after I missed out on the chance to help a young homeless guy who told a packed subway car about his misfortune.

  “I’m not a bad person, I’m not an addict, I’m not an alcoholic. I’ve just fallen on hard times. I need some money for food and for a room so I can get some sleep and a proper shower so I can look presentable for a job interview. Please.”

  He mentioned how much the room would cost—it was a small amount, insanely small for New York.

  The train stopped. I reached into my backpack but I was too late. When I looked up, he was gone.

  When I come back, I told myself, I’m going to have my dollars ready. One dollar a day.

  And that is why I folded a dollar bill each morning and slipped it into my shirt or jacket pocket.

  Outside the Presbyterian Church on Fifth Avenue, just a few steps away from Henri Bendel, I spotted her: a girl just a few years younger than me. She had a guitar, a plastic cup with a meager collection of coins and a sign that read “Looking for kindness. Please help.”

  I dropped dollar number one into her cup and walked away.

  Dollar number two went to a man outside Macy’s on 34th Street. His head was down and he had a half-eaten bar of chocolate and an empty cup. His sign read: “Looking for a miracle.” It was a really cold night and I wondered how he was going to survive the night with only his dingy hoodie.

  I didn’t encounter a single performer or homeless person on the subway on the third day. I found it strange until the answer came in the form of an announcement: “We request you not to give … Let’s maintain an orderly subway.” I never heard that announcement again.

  Dollar number four went to The Man With The Cat at the Easter Parade.

  On the fifth day, a woman tried to give me a free ticket to the Museum of Natural History. I am ashamed to say that I responded with suspicion. “Why?” I asked her, looking at the piece of paper she was trying to shove into my hands.

  “Take it, take it, take it,” she said, in a voice that reminded me of Sofia Vergara’s. She shook her head, like she found my hesitation silly.

  It was a different lesson in kindness.

  But we already had tickets so we passed her generosity on to someone else waiting in line.

  Later that day, at a subway station, a man was asking for help. But two trains were coming and I couldn’t hear him. All I knew was he was in need. He got my fifth dollar. “God bless you, ma’am. Thank you. Have a good week,” he said.

  Dollar number six went to a jazz band on West 4th.

  On day seven, my heart broke for the homeless man who was kicked out of Molly’s. He wanted to use the restroom but they wouldn’t let him. I was glad I didn’t order a cupcake. I wouldn’t have been able to swallow with that lump in my throat.

  On the way home, we saw a one-man band playing “Billie Jean.” He got my seventh dollar.

  I dropped the ball on day eight. I was already in the apartment when I felt the dollar in my jacket pocket.

  “Holy shit! I still have my dollar!”

  But Jill saved my ass (as she had many times before). She had given a dollar to Spiderman in Times Square.

  The next days were a blur of dollar bills, subway musicians, street performers and homeless people.

  There was the girl in braids who was singing Boyz II Men’s “Mama” at the Penn Station. The dude who said no to breadsticks. The veteran playing harmonica in Atlantic City. The man with the brain injury. There was the crappy magician at Rockefeller Center who didn’t ask for dollars—he forced them out of you. There was the cool and steady One Love guy who wanted to know where we were from.

  Then there were the siblings who entered the train for a morning dance routine. The guy set down a boom box, played offensively loud music and began swinging from the poles. His sister stood by, as if waiting to make an entrance. But something an old man on the train said pissed her off.

  “Fuck! I have a 3.7! I go to school! I hate this train. I just wanna get out.”

  Her brother stopped dancing.

  They yelled at each other from across the train.

  Janna whispered to me, “Is this part of the show?”

  I shrugged.

  “What is wrong with you people? Ignorance is bliss!” the guy yelled while his sister continued to drop “fucks” and talk about her 3.7.

  It was pure bliss when they finally left the train. I did not give them a dollar.

  That night, also on the subway, a pierced and tattooed couple couldn’t keep their hands off of each other.

  The girl grabbed a seat and refused to let her guy’s hand go so one of the other passengers stood up. The guy sat down, hands once again all over his girl, and said, “This is unanimously the nicest train. If I had banana stickers, you would all get one.”

  They made fun of the train announcements and continued to touch each other. They were drunk or high or both and they were incredibly entertaining.

  They weren’t asking for it but I felt like giving them a dollar. It was a great show.

  May 28, 2014

  Still chasing Amy

  My favorite thing to do in London costs nothing: I pop in my earphones, click on my LDN playlist and I walk around the city, from Covent Garden to Oxford Circus, Waterloo and Notting Hill. I pound the pavement until my feet couldn’t take it anymore and then I head to the tube and ride the train, the music still filling my head.

  It’s a killer mix of Amy Winehouse, Lily Allen and the occasional Adele, but it’s mostly Amy.

  Amy. I mourn her every time I go to this city.

  She should have turned thirty last year, and I celebrated her birthday by crying at her exhibit at the Jewish Museum.

  I found out about the exhibit by accident, first stumbling across a poster at one of the tube stations and then seeing a flyer while rifling through old records in Camden. I didn’t have a lot of time in London then but I knew I had to go.

  I spent two hours of that rainy morning looking at little pieces from Amy’s life, curated by her brother Alex.

  There were childhood mementos: her first guitar, her school uniforms, her tap shoes, her application essay to the Sylvia Young Theatre School, her vinyl collection, a handwritten playlist that included Carole King’s “So Far Away,” a song that was played at her funeral.

  The playlist, which Amy called “songs on my chill-out tape,” was on loop at the exhibit.

  There were snapshots of stardom: wristbands and passes from gigs and festivals, the outfit she wore in her “Tears Dry on Their Own” music video, her Glastonbury Festival dress, her Rolling Stone cover, the Grammy she won after her death (her sixth) and her arsenal of expensive heels.

  But it was the forlorn pair of ballet flats that stood out for me. Images of her blood-stained shoes from that horrific hotel fight flashed in my head.

  And then there were the little things that showed normalcy in Amy’s life despite the madness of fame and addiction: the books she read as an adult, her sudoku puzzles, her collection of fridge magnets and the numerous photographs she swiped from family members, the ones they said she was looking at days before she died.

  I had goosebumps the entire time and I spent many minutes reading the wall of messages for Amy before adding my own.

  There is no exhibit now, no way to lose myself in Amy’s world like I did last
year. So instead, I take comfort in losing myself in the city she loved, walking the streets she walked and seeing the things she saw while I listen to her voice, still playful and true and devastating, even after she’s gone.

  June 2, 2014

  Will Thacker’s door

  I arrived just in time to see HMV close. I blame that on the trains not stopping at Bond Street and the minutes I wasted thinking about Ben’s Cookies.

  That was the theme of my Sunday: everything was closed.

  The box office of The Drowned Man had closed by the the time we got out of Matilda so I couldn’t get our tickets. HMV was closed. Even Ben’s Cookies had closed.

  I whipped out my phone to look for something I could do on a late Sunday afternoon.

  Ooh, Portobello Market. I soon found myself sitting in a train, on my way to Notting Hill.

  I like Notting Hill. I like that it’s dotted with tiny shops, little cafes and noisy pubs. But by the time I reached Portobello Road, there was no sign of the market. It had also closed.

  Damn it.

  I whipped out my phone again. What else could I do in Notting Hill?

  The answer came instantly: the blue door. Of course. The one that led to Hugh Grant’s flat in the film Notting Hill.

  I walked walked walked in search of the blue door and I walked so much that I walked past it.

  I made my way back and realized that there were cafes on both sides of the street just a few feet away from the flat. If you stop to take a picture, people will see you—the idiot who traveled all this way just to take a picture of a door she saw in a movie.

  Two girls were doing just that. I refused to join them, standing instead across the street, doing my best “oh no, I’m not here for the blue door, I’m just a girl standing across the street looking at her phone” impression. I wasn’t fooling anyone.

  A group of guys appeared from around the corner. I looked at them and at their backpacks and sneakers. They were probably kids when Notting Hill came out. Surely they weren’t there for the blue door, too?

  They crossed the street and started taking photos, with one of them pretending to knock on the door.

  I started laughing. Oh yes, they were there for the door.

  A couple arrived. Suddenly, there were ten of us, all there for Will Thacker’s door. There is shamelessness in numbers.

  But I continued to watch them from across the street, still not wanting to walk over.

  The guys left. The couple left. Only the two girls were left. I crossed the street.

  “Do you want me to take your photo?” I asked because they had taken a lot of pictures of each other but still didn’t seem satisfied. The girls smiled and handed me one of their phones.

  I took a few photos of the door with my phone. As I got ready to leave, one of the girls walked up to me again. She spoke, her Italian accent thick. “Do you know Freddie Mercury’s house?”

  I go to one door and suddenly I’m an expert on celebrity homes. I turned to my best friend Google Maps and told them they needed to take a bus and that the trip would be around thirty-five minutes.

  The girl translated for her friend, and we said our goodbyes.

  I made my way back, taking a different route so I could see more of Notting Hill. I stopped by a discount book shop and bought a weird book about London.

  I was crossing the street when I saw my blue-door friends again. “Ciao!” they called out. I waved. I hope they found Freddie Mercury.

  June 4, 2014

  Roald Dahl, Champion of the World

  I stepped out of the hotel, took one look at the pouring rain and thought, “Nope, not dealing with this.” The gloomy and wet afternoon made me want to escape.

  I googled “day trips outside London” and three words jumped at me: Roald Dahl Museum. Bingo. I went back to my room, grabbed the hotel umbrella and took the tube to Marylebone so I could catch the train to Great Missenden, where Roald Dahl lived for over thirty years.

  Although still relatively short, the trip gave me the train fix I had been longing for. The tube just wasn’t doing it—everywhere I needed to go took less than twenty minutes. I like my train rides like I like my sleep—long and peaceful.

  Forty-five minutes later, I was taking my first steps into Great Missenden.

  Goodbye, city. Hello, countryside. I was happy to see that it wasn’t raining.

  There was a library right outside the train station. “No wonder Roald likes this place,” I thought. That library has made its way into his stories—it’s the same one Matilda visited while her mother went off to play bingo.

  The museum was supposed to be on High Street, just a short walk away from the station. When I saw the purple and brown Wonka gate, I knew I had reached the right place.

  Inside was a celebration of Roald Dahl’s life and work. There were videos, audio clips, pictures and letters from Roald’s childhood, his days as a pilot and as a writer. There were little pieces of his life—his RAF pilot helmet and binoculars, his school slips, first editions of his books, the magazine he was first published in. The Willy Wonka costume Johnny Depp used in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was on display, including his candy-filled cane. The characters Roald created—Matilda, James, Charlie, Willy Wonka, the BFG, the Twits—were everywhere. On murals, on books, in pictures and videos, on merchandise.

  There were British school kids running all over the place. I was the only adult guest who wasn’t chaperoning a child but I didn’t care. I was happy to be in Roald’s world.

  I spent the most amount of time at Roald’s writing hut. They moved the interiors from his home to the museum, making sure they preserved his things the way he left them.

  I stared at his writing chair, originally owned by his mother, which he modified to minimize body pain (he had injuries after his plane was shot down over Libya during World War II). Knowing that Roald spent decades of his life in that space—creating the books and stories that we love—left me feeling overwhelmed. There were so many things to see: his writing board and the clothes brush that kept it clean; his writing lamp; the portrait of Olivia, Roald’s eldest child who died when she was only seven; the sleeping bag that kept his feet warm while he wrote. I looked at the many little things that surrounded him while he worked: his spine shavings, the top of his femur, a dried mangosteen, letters and cards from his kids and grandkids, his walking stick, his favorite Dixon Ticonderoga pencils, rocks, ceramics and sculptures.

  I couldn’t find the ball of silver foil, though, the one he made out of the wrappers of the Cadbury chocolate that he ate every day.

  I snapped out of my reverie when a little boy ran into the room and shouted, “If anybody wants to see his false teeth and an eyeball, follow me!”

  He wasn’t kidding—Roald’s dentures were at the museum, hidden in one of the drawers. Not his eyeball, though—the kid meant William from Roald’s short story William and Mary.

  When I first entered the museum, the lady who welcomed me handed me a map. “Walk around the village,” she said. “You will find some of Roald’s inspirations. And if you walk a little more, you can visit his grave.”

  But did I really want to visit his grave? Was I ready to cross the line between devoted fan and creepy grave hunter?

  I guess I was.

  I followed the map, walking past what used to be Roald’s favorite butcher shop. When I reached the intersection of Church Street and Church Lane, I hesitated. The winding road was empty and all I could see were trees.

  Were there foxes there? Bears? Oompa Loompas? Axe murderers? Serial killers?

  I kept walking, taking pictures every few steps, the iPhone addict’s answer to Hansel’s breadcrumbs.

  I crossed a bridge, watched trucks rumble by below and continued to walk. I was a little breathless by the time I reached the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul.

  “Look for his grave near the memorial bench under the tree,” the map said.

  I made my way to the cemetery on the left side of the c
hurch and realized I wasn’t alone. There was a guy digging up someone’s grave.

  Uh oh, I thought. This could get awkward.

  I didn’t want to step on people’s graves so I followed the pavement that circled the yard until I had no choice but to walk on the grass.

  The grave digger kept digging. I started to hear a familiar sound.

  Lorde. Singing “Royals.” The grave digger was listening to Lorde while digging up a grave. When he saw me, he turned the volume down.

  I made my way around the memorial bench but couldn’t find Roald’s grave. Then I realized it was the one the guy was digging. Then I realized he wasn’t really digging up the grave, he was shoveling and tearing out patches of grass.

  He looked like a cross between Ansel Elgort and a One Direction boy. “Hi,” he said, smiling as I approached.

  “Hi,” I said, standing two feet from him, quietly staring at Roald’s grassless grave and the bucket of soil patches beside it.

  He made a move to remove the bucket and I raised a hand to stop him, mumbling incoherently. I don’t know why I even opened my mouth—I had nothing to say. He turned to me and said, still smiling that wide smile of his, “What?”

  “Nothing,” I mumbled. I can’t do small talk at cocktail parties, and I certainly can’t do it in the middle of a graveyard.

  I kept staring at Roald’s grave, wishing I brought something. Flowers. A letter. A Cadbury bar. Anything.

  The guy picked up the bucket of soil and brought it to his truck.

  When he returned, I was still there, staring at the grave. He picked up the shovel again.

  Enough, I thought. It’s five minutes past creepy.

  I started walking away but leaving without saying a word seemed wrong. “Bye!” I called out.

  Again, there was that smile. I wondered if he was naturally smiley or if he was amused by this weird Asian girl who appeared out of nowhere to visit a stranger’s grave.

  “Bye!” he said. “See you later!”