Merde Happens

by Stephen Clarke

  Oh well, I told myself, it was just one battle, not the war. Miami was bound to be more pro-British than Boston, which was after all the heart of the revolution. Same went for Las Vegas. We Brits are such huge gamblers that there had to be some fellow feeling there. And if things looked really bad by the time I got to Vegas, I could use some of my budget to buy a few roulette chips and win enough to repay my fine. The bulldog spirit would triumph in the end.

  "When you've finished," I said to Alexa, "we ought to head off to the railway station. The Mini's waiting for us in New York."

  "Leave Boston, Paul? But we are having so much fun here. Don't you want your breakfast?" She leaned across and forked a strawberry.

  Despite her protestations of anti-Americanism, she seemed to be adapting pretty damn well to the land of opportunity.

  New York to Florida

  Seriously South

  1

  “NOW that's an English flag." Dwight the mechanic was pointing his two index fingers at the freshly painted roof of the Mini like a bull about to gore a matador.

  "It certainly is," I confirmed.

  "You can throw away your passport. Everyone'll know you're English as hell."

  "You're right there." I mimed frisbeeing my travel documents into the far corner of the workshop.

  "You drive this baby past Buckingham Palace, the guards are gonna salute you."

  "Yes, they'd probably open up the gates and let me park it in the palace courtyard."

  "Yeah." Dwight had good reason to be proud of his paint job. The Union Jack was so bright it was probably visible from space. But I sensed that he was overdoing the self-congratulation because he'd seen that I wasn't entirely happy.

  He was right. It wasn't his fault, though. I'd noticed something new about the car. Something I should have spotted before. It was, as its name suggested, very mini.

  The headroom was fine, and to get enough legroom I just had to push the seat back so that only a legless passenger could sit behind me. No, like a studio apartment, the crunch came with storage space. There was absolutely no way I could fit all our luggage into the Mini's rear compartment. It was like trying to stuff an elephant suppository into a mouse.

  "You want a real trunk, you should get a real car," Dwight helpfully suggested. "This thing's cute, but it's for going to Midtown, not to Florida. It's like, for ladies on the Upper East Side that don't wanna take a taxi to the hairdresser's. Only time they use the trunk is when a valet puts a shoebox in there."

  "I've seen guys driving them," I said, less to defend my own image as a future Mini driver than to preempt Alexa before she let rip at him for being sexist. Instead, she expressed her frustration by heaving her rucksack one last time at the trunk. It stuck there and hung out as if the Mini had sprouted a snub bulldog tail.

  "There must be a way," I said, pulling her bag out and getting a closer look at the problem. "No one designs a car to hold one shoebox. And if it was made for shopaholics, they must have thought of a way of making space for the dresses, coats, and handbags."

  No sooner had I finished speaking than I found the catch that lets you fold the back seat down and create a whole new luggage space.

  "Voila." Triumphantly, I slotted Alexa's bag and my own inside the car and closed the trunk.

  "What happens in a parking lot?" Alexa wanted to know. "We will leave our bags and our laptops in view so people know it is a good idea to steal everything?"

  "We'll just have to keep our valuables with us at all times," I said. "And if we stop for a pee we'll go separately. Ladies first, of course."

  With the trunk closed, the lipstick-red doors open and the rooftop flag glinting in the harsh light of Dwight's workshop, the Mini looked irresistible. Dwight patted it on the roof and said that even if he'd made a few jokes about her stature, he'd be sad to see the car go.

  "She's like my wife," he said. "Small in body but plenty big in character."

  After that, for a few delicious minutes, everything was wonderful. The engine started first time, the heating turned the Mini into a snug cocoon, and I got the car out of the maze-like parking lot without taking any chunks out of the paint job. Then—with a bump—we were on the road to Florida, heading for the sun.

  In theory, at least.

  "This is Canal Street," I said.

  "Yes."

  "So we're back in Manhattan."

  "Are you sure?"

  "Pretty sure." In fact, I was very sure, and so was Alexa, because we'd just paid to drive through the Holland Tunnel for a second time, passing several million signposts informing us which bits of Manhattan were waiting for us on the other side. "Unless Jersey City also has a Canal Street, a West Broadway, and—" I nodded to our right"—a Brooklyn Bridge."

  OK, that last one was a really cheap shot because I couldn't see the bridge at all, but Alexa made no comment except to give a Parisian shrug, the most profoundly felt gesture of indifference and/or ignorance so far developed by Western civilization. If the universe had decided we were meant to be back on Canal Street, she was implying, then who was she to argue with the greater forces of the infinite cosmos?

  There wasn't really much she could say. With her in charge of the road atlas, we'd followed Dwight's directions down the riverbank to the Holland Tunnel, dived under the Hudson into New Jersey, and then somehow ended up back in Manhattan again.

  "Doesn't the atlas tell you how to get us from the tunnel onto the New Jersey Turnpike?" I pleaded.

  "No."

  I was half willing to believe this. I'd found our road atlas in a forgotten corner of a giant supermarket-style drugstore in Manhattan, next to some curled-up postcards and a yellow-paged book of crossword puzzles.

  "Is this detailed enough for a trip down to Florida?" I'd asked the uniformed girl at the counter.

  "Dunno, I never been there," she said, which was fair enough.

  Still, I figured, it couldn't be that difficult to find something as big as the Atlantic Ocean.

  Wrong, it transpired, for a reason that Alexa now revealed.

  "I can't read a map," she said matter-of-factly as we said hello again to Broadway.

  "You can't read a map?" We stopped at some traffic lights, and I took time out to stare at her in horror.

  "No, not at all."

  "Can't you try?"

  "No. They discovered it at school. I have no sense of two-dimensional orientation."

  "Of what?"

  "Of maps. And atlases." She shrugged again—this handicap was the fault of the great French engineer who'd designed the universe.

  The light turned green and we headed even further away from New Jersey.

  "But Alexa, how can you be such a female stereotype? It's the biggest gender cliche since the footballer's wife."

  "Please don't moralize to me, Paul. You're not my father."

  "See what I mean? In a minute you'll be getting at me because I'm male and never ask for directions."

  "Why don't you ask, then?"

  "Because I know exactly where the tunnel is—we just came out of it," I said, neatly combining my tiff-winning argument with a left turn that would enable me to backtrack west. "I'll find a place to stop and you can drive. I'll do the map reading."

  "Oh no, I can't drive an automatic," she said. "I've never driven one."

  "It's easy. You just press the accelerator when you want to go, and the brake when you don't. It's like a toy."

  "You want me to learn a new way of driving in the middle of New York? No way. I will crash the car and your tour of America will end at the beginning, and people in England will shout at you. Or people in India, anyway."

  This, I gathered from a quick side view of her smile, was a really amusing joke.

  "OK," I said, accelerating needlessly fast around a corner into the westbound lane of Canal Street. "Forget the atlas, let's try to read the signposts together."

  Which was easier said than done.

  2

  French road signs are polite—"If
you'd like to stay on until Paris," they tell you, "it's 122 kilometers straight ahead, but if you'd prefer to leave the route and go to Rouen, then feel free to turn off at the next exit, yes this one just coming up now, which, incidentally, will also take you to the villages of this and that, and, if you go far enough, Belgium." They shepherd and coax you to your destination.

  By comparison, American road signs are like riot police. "Hey you," they yell. "Yeah, you! Where you think you're going? Don't know, huh? Well get off the main drag now, yeah, now, exit 21, interstate 95, highway 17. Whaddya mean you don't know the number of the road you want? Get off this mudderfuggin highway right now, where it says exit only, yeah there, get outta here, ya dumb fuck."

  What I mean is, you're driving away from New York, you think you're heading more or less in the right direction on the right road and then a sign appears ordering you to get off the highway. It doesn't tell you what will happen if you stay on the highway, whether you'll be heading for New Jersey, New Orleans, or New Delhi. It just tells you to exit now for some Aztec-sounding town like Secaucus or Warinanco, and you think, My God, Mexico already? I'd better exit or I'll end up in Patagonia. Next thing, you find yourself spinning down a swirl of off-ramps into the Jersey wasteland of cranes, pylons, and railway tracks.

  On our second attempt, though, it did look as if we'd escaped the magnetic attraction of Manhattan. We crossed a giant bridge that didn't take us to Brooklyn, then passed an airport that was neither JFK nor La Guardia. And after a couple of wrong exits and hurried reentries onto the main drag, I learned a simple lesson about American highways. You just stick with the road you're on until you absolutely have to get off it—which sounds like die chorus of one of the cheesy songs we had to listen to before finally tuning in to a decent road-trip classic-rock station.

  Besides, sticking to the straight-ahead lane soon turned out to be the only viable policy because, contrary to what I'd expected, American drivers were even more deadly than the French. What was all this bullshit I'd heard about low speed limits and hardline highway patrols? These New York and New Jersey drivers had absolutely no problem with slaloming around me at a hundred miles an hour to get where they wanted. I could be toohng along in the center lane at the speed limit, overtaking plenty of trucks and stragglers, and cars would come careering up to witliin a yard of my compact rear end, then veer randomly either right or left. They'd overtake me and then swerve back across my nose, often without taking the trouble to indicate.

  If I dared to stay close to the speed limit when there was neither a veer-right nor veer-left option for someone tail-gating me, then suddenly my whole rear-view mirror would be full of the glowering headlights and growling radiator of a high-slung SUV

  It was obvious that these guys had grown up with computer games. They were flinging their heavyweight vehicles around as if, after a fatal multicar pileup, they'd just start a new game with a brand-new car and ten more lives. What's more, they were free to take on any identity they wanted, because practically every SUV had windows tinted darker rJian a film star's sunglasses. There was no way I could see the faces of the maniacs who were trying to shunt me off the highway. For all I knew they could have been wearing masks and living out Darth Vader fantasies—"You don't know the power of the dark outside lane, Obi Wan Mini driver. So fuck off and let me pass."

  The worst of the intimidators were the truckers. A typical American truck looks just like an antique Samurai helmet, with the wide cowl, slit eyes, and bare-toothed grin of a ruthless killer swordsman. When you see one of those coming at your rear windshield from the seat of a knee-high Mini, you start looking for a place to hide. Especially if you've got a Union Jack painted on your roof and you look like some kind of beach towel.

  But despite all the heart-stopping moments, it felt great to be on the road south, the Garden State Parkway, which certainly lived up to its name. It was a straight highway running through a tree-lined park. Not a house in sight. I wondered if anyone actually lived in New Jersey, or whether it was just some kind of drive-through entrance lobby for New York.

  "Hey, we should give the car a name," I suggested.

  "A name?" Alexa frowned at the idea, as if I'd said we should call her rucksack Gerald.

  "Yeah, something that sums up its personality. How about Mini Me?"

  "I'm sure she would be very flattered," Alexa said icily. It took me a second to work out why. Of course, being an arty French woman, she had never seen Austin Powers. I cleared up the misunderstanding, but she still seemed convinced I had some subliminal thing for our Korean receptionist.

  "No, come on, Alexa," I told her. "You're The One. You're the girl I gave everything up to be with. You're my elle e'ternelle." Normally I hate making declarations like that, but being able to stare straight ahead out of the windshield helped me to pile on the romanticism.

  "Merci, Paul," she said. "No one has ever called me their elle eternelle before." She gave my elbow an affectionate squeeze. "How about Thelma?"

  "Thelma?" I said, trying it out.

  "From Thelma and Louise."

  "Yes, great, I like it. Thelma. Sassy, knows how to have a good time, a little bit dangerous."

  "You'll just have to make sure you don't drive her into a canyon, like they do in the film."

  "I don't think New Jersey is known for its canyons," I said.

  Alexa pretended to check for gorges in the atlas.

  "Why are we going down this parkway?" she asked, suddenly serious again. "Didn't Dwight say we should go via Washington?"

  "It's more direct." Apart from the fact that the knot of highways heading through Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington looked like perfect traffic-jam territory, I'm a coast-road type of guy. "Look." I prodded at the map where the green land joined the blue ocean. "We go down to Atlantic City, which is bound to be deserted at this time of year, then nip over the Cape May ferry and we're practically in Virginia."

  Instead of being thrilled about my scenic—and, I hoped, quicker—route, Alexa was mad with me again.

  "You decided this without consulting me? And you accuse me of being a gender stereotype?"

  The trouble with French feminists is that although they might be sexier than their foreign counterparts, they're also more intellectual. A deadly combination. You let slip one lazy remark that might conceivably be gender biased and— if they're in the mood—they'll pounce. You've put die grenade in your trouser pocket and they'll pull the pin, explaining sexily why it's your own stupid fault diat your balls are getting blown off.

  "When did you plan all this?" she demanded, pouting beautifully.

  "Last night. Did you think I was just watching die European football highlights? Men can watch TV and read a map at the same time, you know."

  Unexpectedly, she garrumphed in defeat. I'd outstereo-typed a French feminist. It had to be a first.

  "Are you sure this isn't just a summer ferry?" she asked, clearly reduced to looking for minor weak spots in my unassailable defenses.

  "Yup. I checked on the Internet. Even in winter they run till six o'clock. We stop over in Virginia tonight, then Jacksonville next night, and in forty-eight hours we'll be swimming on South Beach."

  Alexa admitted that this sounded cool.

  "Wake me up if you need me to ask directions for you," she said. She closed the atlas and reclined her seat for a nap.

  3

  Jake had made me promise that when I was in the USA, I would visit his favorite pancake chain. I'd find them at plenty of malls and highway exits, he said, and they had ten different sorts of maple syrup.

  I mentioned this to Alexa. She was awake again, but drowsy after an hour of semi-jet-lagged dozing, and in need of a coffee.

  "Ten sorts of maple syrup?" she said. "That's very sophisticated."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Well, I suppose they have different syrups from Ontario and Quebec, perhaps a vintage one, you know, a 2005 Vancouver Red or something."

  I had to laugh at the she
er Frenchness of the idea.

  "No, Alexa, this is America. So they're going to be sugar-free, low-fat, salt-free. Probably vitamin-enriched, fiber-added, and nonstick. And definitely cranberry flavored. Everything in America gets cranberry flavored at some point in its existence."

  Alexa thought I was being very patronizing, and we had a bet. If there was a cranberry-flavored syrup, she would learn to drive Thelma in the restaurant parking lot.

  It turned out, though, that we'd have to wait for our bet, because when we reached the service station it was a modest, central-reservation job with a gas station and a cafe, and a parking lot in between.

  "Food and Fuel," the sign said, sticking to the essentials.

  "I'm sure a man invented that sign," Alexa said.

  I had to admit that she was probably right. Jake once told me about a shop near his summer camp, a place called Beer, Bait & Ammo. As the name suggested, it sold everything a guy could wish for on a trip into the woods. The French would probably have called it Tout Pour l'Homme.

  Sticking to the rules of our luggage-guarding strategy, I offered Alexa the chance to go visit the service station first, but she insisted that I go in and bring out a coffee for her.

  I jogged through die damp chill of the parking lot into a kind of sauna with deep-fried air. I'd expected something more grandiose with a real American flavor to it. Instead, it was a lot like every other service station I'd ever been to, except for a couple of roadside places in Thailand. There was dull brown tiling on the floor, fake paneled walls, a meagerly stocked newsstand on one side of the entrance, a candy and drinks store on the other. I quite fancied a chocolate bar myself, but the only ones on sale were giant, instant-obesity packs, and I decided to give diabetes a miss for today.

  After exploring the restrooms, I ventured into the main part of the service station, where the atmosphere smelled of hot caramel, as if the whole world was being sugarcoated. A long open workshop was churning out giant cinnamon buns, sugar-glazed cowpats, each one of which must have contained the daily intake of carbs and calories for an average African school. They looked great. I bought two.