“Are you … Sarah?”
“Yes. Hello.” Her body language said almost too upset to shake hands.
“Raymond Gunt.”
“Neal Crossley,” Neal chimed in, then added, “Sarah, hey, what’s wrong?”
“It’s awful,” she said.
“What’s awful?”
“Matt Bradley—he’s dead!”
Oh dear. I looked at Neal, and he at me, and he said, “Oh?”
I disingenuously asked, “Was Mr. Bradley with the TV network?”
“He was.”
I thought about this. “Why on earth wasn’t he on a corporate jet?”
“I don’t know,” Sarah said. “Something about wanting to be with the common folk who made him what he was.”
I thought, Good fucking thing he’s dead, the way I treated him. “What was his role in the show?” I asked.
“He was the brains. The show’s soul. He knew the answer to everything, how everything actually worked: casting, cameras, human behaviour under stressful conditions.” She honked her nose loudly into a tissue. “It’s just awful. I don’t know who’s going to replace him.”
It took every molecule of falsity within me to say, “No wonder you’re so sad.”
“Sad? About Matt Bradley? Good God, no. He was awful. I’m thrilled he’s gone. I’m just sad because my workload’s tripled and I was supposed to go to Fiji with my boyfriend and now I have to fly to Kiribati myself to oversee a bunch of imbeciles who, in turn, oversee our bikini-wearing human lab rats. It’s so unfair.”
Now this is my kind of woman. I think that was when I first contemplated falling in love. “Join us for a drink? Nothing to mix it with, though.”
“What do you have? Ooh! Tia Maria!” She grabbed the bottle and tipped it back.
I said, “It really is a terrible fucking thing, Matt Bradley being dead and all.”
She held up a hand as Neal twisted the cap off another mini bottle for her. “Please, your language.”
“Sarah, what is it with you Americans and swearing?” I asked. “You crow over enhanced interrogation procedures and the current destruction of shitholes like Africa, but I throw in one ‘fuck’ and you all go nuclear.”
Sarah chugged her drink as she looked at me, then tossed her mini bottle in the trash. She was going to say something sanctimonious. Oh God …
She said, “Bono still thinks there’s hope for Africa.”
I blinked and we passed a moment in total silence.
Then she laughed. “Come on! I’m totally fricking kidding. Look! You’ve got me swearing now! Pass me another Tia Maria.”
Phew.
“I was sitting next to Mr. Bradley when it happened, you know,” I confessed. (Actually, I was bragging.)
“No!” She was unscrewing the next mini bottle’s top.
“Seat 1K. Twelve inches away.”
This sank in to Sarah’s mind as she guzzled the bottle. “They put you in business class?”
“I … yes, they did.”
“You must have friends in high places. I would have thought they’d put a B-unit cameraman in a cage with the goats.”
“Well, that makes me feel great.”
“It’s a food chain, Raymond. Get used to it. There are a few things you need to know about this show and how it’s run.”
“Such as?”
“Such as, it’s a temple of lies built on fear and cocaine.”
“I suspected as much, but hadn’t dared hope it was the truth.”
She laughed at me. “I’m messing with you! It’s actually more like a church or a cult. You can’t make any mistakes or it’s …” She mimicked slicing her throat. I honestly can’t think of any other point in my life when I’ve fallen so hard and so fast for a woman.
She patted my arm then—contact! Please, dear God, there has to be a broom closet we can use nearby. I don’t think I’ve ever troubled you much; just making a small request here.
“We’ve got to be flying to Kiribati soon enough,” Neal interjected, wrecking the mood. “Any idea where our plane is?”
“Follow me.”
We followed her with pleasure towards an exit surrounded by GIs or commandos or whomever it is the president hurls off to face certain death in whatever goatfuck war his country happens to be waging.
“We have to go to another terminal,” Sarah explained, as we stepped out into the tropical night. “And there’s our van and driver.”
We hopped into a minivan and drove past a bunch of generic airport buildings—pleasantly scented airport buildings, but still, it was an airport. I tried to remember where I was, or what time it was, and just kind of gave up, happy to be like the cartoon character Snoopy, dancing his happy dance atop a cumulus cloud laced with dog bones.
A thought occurred to me. “Why is it Americans are socially permitted to say ‘fricking,’ ” I asked, “when, in fact, everyone knows the word they’re actually saying is ‘fucking’?”
Neal mulled this over. “That’s a real conundrum, Ray.”
“I know! I mean, here you have some bland ho-bag telly presenter saying, ‘I’m so fricking mad’ about whatever, while you, the home viewer, know she’s three millimetres away from saying, ‘I’m so fucking mad.’ But instead of being outraged because she basically said ‘fucking’ on TV, everyone giggles, like she’s being cute.”
Sarah gave me a contemplative look.
I was on a roll. “And then, later on, when they’re masturbating to the mental images of that bland ho-bag—not me, mind you, the public in general—the masturbators get turned on by the tiny fragment of difference between her saying ‘fricking’ and ‘fucking,’ like it’s a little tiny sliver of porn.”
“Right,” says Neal. “It’s subtle, innit? But it’s like ten times worse because the public is thinking, fucking, fucking, fucking. They’re so full of shame or so socially conditioned that the mental effect of saying the word ‘fucking’ is technically amplified. By actually saying the word ‘fucking’ in real life, instead of ‘fricking,’ you’re doing American society a favour.”
“Exactly,” I said.
At that point, the minivan’s driver—some bearded chunk of chewed-up-and-spat-out social debris—pulled to the side of the road, turned around and started screaming at us, “Shut up! Shut up, both of you! I have a nephew in Iraq!”
Neal and I genuinely had no idea what on earth was going on.
“Iraq?” Neal said.
“Iraq?” I queried. Then we did it again.
“Iraq?”
“Iraq?”
Was he serious? “Sorry to hear that, sir,” I said, “but could we keep on going?”
“No.”
“Excuse me?”
“Not until you apologize,” the driver said.
For what? “For what?” I wondered.
“For using the F-word.”
“What is the connection between me using the F-word and your nephew being in Iraq?” I was baffled.
“Don’t make things worse.”
“Make what worse? I can’t apologize for something I don’t even know I’ve done, can I? I just don’t get the link.”
“Get out of my van!”
“No fucking way. Now you owe me an apology.”
Neal backed me up, as a good slave assistant should. “As opposed to the apology you want to extract from us, which doesn’t make sense no matter how one approaches it.”
“Thank you, Neal.”
“You’re welcome, Ray.”
Sarah said, “Driver, there’s an extra twenty in it for you if you ignore these pinheads.”
“No, ma’am, I’m taking a stand here.”
Insanely loud volleys of trucks stuffed with pineapples and bound-and-gagged whores destined for Dubai roared past us, shaking the van.
I said, “Okay, then, so on one hand you have Iraq, which is what it is. And then on the other you have the difference between ‘fricking’ and ‘fucking,’ which is basically the differenc
e between the letters ‘RI’ and ‘U’.”
Neal added, “You could almost make it a scientific equation, like:
Iraq = U – RI
“I don’t think so, Neal. It would be more like a differential equation:
“I see,” Neal said. “Much more subtle.”
“I rest my case.”
By this point, our purple-faced driver (shades of Mr. Bradley) had opened his door, got out, come to the right side door panel, opened it and was screaming for us to leave. Talk about baffling. “Sarah,” I asked, “can you tell us what on earth this guy is on about?”
“You said it yourself, Ray. Americans don’t like swearing.”
“But Iraq? What the fuck?”
“It’s … complicated.”
“So there’s a relationship between fricking-fucking and Iraq?”
“Perhaps in a theoretical way.”
“Neal, close and lock the doors.”
“Done, boss.”
The driver started pounding on the side of the van.
“Sarah, use your iPhone to capture a few seconds of our driver going apeshit.”
“Done.”
I hopped into the driver’s seat. Before he added two and two, we peeled away. I asked Sarah, “Which way to the hangar?”
“Next exit, three buildings on the left.”
“And when we get questioned about why we took off in his van?”
Sarah wore the expression of a child choosing the candy bar she wants. “He kept on saying he wanted to frick me. Like he was obsessed. But I thought, Sarah, you’re a big girl, you can take it. Then he stopped saying ‘fricking’ and started saying ‘fucking’.”
Neal said, “And that’s when Ray and I snapped out of our jetlagged sleep. We couldn’t believe this nasty piece of work was hitting so explicitly on Sarah.” Neal was instantly, deeply, into the story. “ ‘Fricking’ is one thing, but ‘fucking’ is a whole new level.”
“Oh, thank heavens I had you two there to rescue me.”
“Think you’ll be pressing charges, then?”
“I’ll certainly discuss the idea publicly.”
Ah, when life is good, it’s great, isn’t it? Cocktails. Laughter. Me looking like an alpha Jason Bourne–like killing machine in front of the woman I now officially loved. Added bonus: a sidekick to torture who also feeds me good lines. I didn’t want our minivan ride to end, but it did, at a small satellite terminal for private jets.
We pulled up to the curb. The head of local transportation asked, “Where’s Dino?”
I said, “You mean our driver?”
“That’s him.”
“Sarah?”
Sarah took Dino’s dispatcher aside. While she spoke with him, the man nodded gravely and looked suitably outraged. As Sarah came back to us, I heard her say, “For the good of the show—and because right now is more about the memory of Matt Bradley than it is about me—I’m going to let it slide. But you might want to get Dino in for some counselling.”
“You’re a wise and kind woman, Sarah,” I said, and she giggled.
Inside, the hangar lobby resembled the Columbine parking lot, network TV people keeled over and looking miserable in the wake of Mr. Bradley’s death.
Sarah vanished while we stood for a few minutes trying to decipher the action. She returned with a cartoonishly handsome executive-type guy. He barely glanced at us, then asked her, “Are these the two B-unit camera guys?”
“It’s them. Guys, this is Stuart.”
“Great.” Stuart proceeded to ignore us, quizzing Sarah. “Did you get a refund of the Fiji tickets?”
“I did.”
Shit. This guy was Sarah’s boyfriend—my competition.
Sarah turned to us. “Fellas, we’re going to be a little while organizing a thing or two. Go grab a bite from the vending machines.” She gave each of us a pile of U.S. dollar bills and a chaste kiss on the cheek. “Thank you for rescuing me back there.”
I said, “Our pleasure, ma’am. I didn’t know Matt Bradley for long, but I know he would have done the same thing.”
She giggled a big satisfying giggle and went off to wherever. But Stuart didn’t follow her. Instead, he came up to me. “Okay, fella,” he rumbled. “I can see you mind-raping my Sarah, so I’ll ask you to stop right now. If I ever get even the slightest inkling that something is happening, I’ll sweep down from the sun with one thousand of my best ninjas and carve you into hamburger. Am I clear?”
“Uh …”
“Am I clear?”
“Right. Loud and clear.”
“When are we leaving for Kiribati?” Neal asked him, trying to break the tension.
“No idea. Screw off, the both of you.” Stuart stalked away.
12
Maybe you have a Stuart McDoucheworthy in your life. Look at me, I’m Stuart. When I check myself out in the mirror, I think I’m better-looking than even, say, Matt Damon. I coast on my good looks.
“A right dickhead,” Neal observed.
“No, he can’t be a dick, Neal, because he’s a twat.” At least Matt Damon has the talent to play Jason Bourne. Without his looks, Stuart would be nothing more than, well—he would be nothing more than me. Except I am a well-rounded bloke seasoned by a life of adventure; it kills me to think of all the attention Stuart gets just because he has a fucking chin. I seriously wish that Stuart had spent his entire childhood being serially arse-raped by teachers, scoutmasters, members of the clergy, relatives, policemen, doctors, door-to-door salesmen and all registered sex offenders within a 500-mile radius of his unprotected bedroom.
Neal said, “This certainly mixes up your mating strategy, doesn’t it, Ray?”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“It’s pretty obvious you want to bonk Sarah till her skull pops. Even that clueless American twat noticed that. Shall we hit the vending machines while we’re hanging about, Raymond?”
“Might as well.”
Okay.
I’m not a celebrity chef. I like to think of myself as a giving, caring person who really does think about the modern world—someone who tries to improve the planet, even though it seems pretty much doomed. As a consequence, maybe I’m not fully qualified to pass judgment on the diet of most Americans. But as I stood there staring at the shit-coated guano logs and repulsive cans of room-temperature weasel piss in the airport vending machines, I was appalled. “Come on, America, you’re living creatures, not science experiments.”
“Scary, isn’t it, Ray.”
“How on fucking earth do Americans expect to ensure that weaker countries stay weak when all they eat are overpackaged chemical goatfuckings manufactured in the same factories that make dildos and pesticides?”
“Ray, I don’t think there’s anything in there we could actually put in our bodies.”
Still we scanned the grids of toxins wrapped in bright paper and the cans of sugary blight.
“Look!” Neal was pointing, with a heartbreaking note of hope in his voice. “Look at that bar there—it’s got peanuts in it. That’s food.”
“Probably tastes like a pocket calculator garnished with dried herpes juice flakes.”
“That’s quite a word picture, Ray.”
“I try.” I was reflective for a moment, “Neal, back home in your Samsung telly cardboard box, what do you eat?”
“I like to think I eat very well—that I’m discriminating, actually. Always try to eat vegetables and the like. I find the women who work in the better class of restaurant enjoy feeding me properly out the back door. They like to take me on as a personal project. I can’t count the number of them I’ve shagged, too, in the back alleys after closing time.”
The fucking hobo lives like a king. “God, there have to be more options for breakfast in this place.”
“Let me look around the corner.”
Neal went scouting and returned a few minutes later. “Ray, you have to come see this.”
He led me down a hallway and into
what had been maybe a hip and trendy waiting lounge back in the days of Led Zeppelin’s 1973 North American tour, but was now a putty-coloured, soul-crushing dump with a groovy tattered orange stripe around the ceiling. Seated in the lounge’s cracked leather chairs were twenty-four men and women who were … who were … awfully…
“Ray,” Neal whispered, “that is one highly fuckable group of people.”
“Fuckable. That is the word I was looking for.”
We scanned the crowd: cheerleader, MILF, yoga teacher, schoolgirl—every fetish category imaginable, a true buffet. And while I’m not gay, I could swear the guys had something going for them, too.
“This is no accident, Ray.”
“How do you mean?”
“To gather a group as fuckable as this one would take a trained professional weeks.” He took a few steps forward and asked a “farm gal” who they were.
“We’re this year’s Survival contestants.”
“Ah! That’s terrific. I’m Neal. I’m working on your show.”
I came over to ogle her chest. “Hello-hello.”
“Raymond here is a cameraman on the show and I’m his personal assistant.”
She smiled but didn’t get up to take Neal’s extended hand. “Sorry. We’re all pooped. They’re pre-starving us for the show, and we’re actually not allowed to speak to crew. They said our meals would be here soon, but that was eight hours ago, and we can’t leave the lounge to go find something to eat because our flight could be leaving at any moment. It’s awful.”
“We’re looking around for something to eat too,” said Neal. “If we have any luck, we’ll bring you back something.”
“God bless you.”
As we walked away, I was shagging all twelve of the girls in my head. “Holy Christ, Neal, two months with that lot? We’ll be living like gods.”
Down a few corridors, we saw a thirteen-year-old driving a golf cart. In the back seat were twenty-four packaged meals. I flagged the boy down. “I’m Raymond, and you are … ?”
“Todd.”
“Todd, right. Stuart told me to bring the meals to the contestants, so if you’ll get out of the driver’s seat, I’ll take over.”
Worst. Person. Ever. Page 6