Neal swelled under her attention. “So we’d best get the highly fertile blondes and brunettes picked first.”
I watched Diamond Head vanish behind us out the window.
Fiona dumped a stack of headshots onto the seat beside her. “Yes, and you can also separate the brunettes into either aggressive or under-the-radar. The under-the-radars win more often than not. Blondes have targets on them. It’s nature’s way.”
“We also need a Spanish-speaking brunette with an absurdly English first name,” added Tabs. “It means the parents were ambitious for their children, and it will broaden the show’s viewership into the Latino market.”
Fiona said, “God bless Jennifer Lopez’s mother for opening that door back in the 1960s.”
“Here,” said Tabs, waving a fan of photos. “I’ve narrowed it down to the most brazenly ambitious: 1) Persimmon de la Cal Empanada Delgado; 2) Gwendolyn Rodríguez-con-Pollo; and 3) Daisy Fernández.”
Fiona scrutinized a photo of Daisy Fernández’s knockers. “Wouldn’t want to get stuck eating those puppies. You’d die of vinyl poisoning before you reached for the dental floss. I say we choose Persimmon de la Cal Empanada Delgado and be done with the rest.” She held Persimmon’s photo up for Neal to see. “You like?”
“I like.”
“Then we’re agreed.”
“Absolutely.”
So Neal was suddenly a confident industry insider, while I, Raymond Gunt, accomplished videographer and connoisseur of womanly charm, was frozen out? “Fiona, I resent not being included in the casting process. You’d think that—”
She cut me off. “Take a Penthouse into the loo and finger-bang yourself. We’re working.” She returned to her stacks. “Now we have to find a hot mom. That’s tricky because she has to look like anyone’s mother but your own. It’s a real casting challenge.”
“Is that the same as a MILF?” asked Neal.
“Good question, but no. A MILF can be any female anywhere on planet Earth who is past her prime yet still exhibits some dimension of fuckability.”
“Good to be clear on that.”
Out the window lay five hours of featureless ocean. I opened a bottle of Chardonnay and glugged away while the unholy trio performed a task that was rightfully mine. Threatening, slightly crazy black woman. Female hillbilly. Possible lesbian. Afghan war hero. Brainy Asian.
I closed my eyes and before I knew it the wheels were touching down. I’d slept through most of the flight.
On the ground, a car was waiting just off the tarmac. The four of us hobbled to the vehicle while underlings lugged our bags to the boot. At the car door, Fiona said, “Raymond, I’m sorry if I’ve been a twat. You can’t imagine the pressure on me.”
“That’s sweet of you, Fi.”
“Could you do me a favour and run and get my Hermès scarf? I left it on my seat. Pretty please with a cherry on top?”
For Fiona to apologize for anything was newsworthy, and I found that my usual defences had dropped. “Sure,” I said. I went back into the plane to search. Nada. I glanced out the window only to see the limo drive off. That malignant clit. I picked up a pile of unchosen headshots and kicked them out of the plane into an uncaring world. “Fucking losers!” I shouted as they fluttered onto the tarmac.
“Mr. Gunt?”
I looked down the stairway and saw a pimpled Todd-like geek. “Yes.”
“I’m Walter, your hospitality ambassador.”
“My what?”
“I have instructions to offer you as much enjoyment as is possible at LAX. I’m here to take you to our ultra-exclusive VIP lounge.”
16
I hopped onto Walter’s little electric cart and we headed to one of the terminal buildings. We parked and he escorted me up a red carpetway to a pair of ornate golden Shangri-La doors. Please, dear God, let there be needy sluts in bunny costumes on the other side.
Walter opened the door to expose a bar that looked somehow familiar. And then I saw her, the dreaded LACEY. She looked up at me. “Can I get you a drink, sir? Wait a moment—it’s you.”
I turned right around, but saw, through a now-closed-and-alarmed security door, young Walter driving off in his goddamn cart. I touched my left front pocket: my phone was in my carry-on in the limo, and my passport, too. Fucking hell. I turned around to hear LACEY say, “May I see your boarding pass, sir?”
“Boarding pass? What the hell are you on about?”
“You came in through the VIP exit. I’m required to ask all VIPs to show me a boarding pass.”
“I’m on a private jet, thank you.”
“Your passport?”
“It’s in the limo.”
“Then I’m afraid I can’t serve you alcoholic or non-alcoholic beverages.” She pushed a button that buzzed. “Garcia will be here shortly.”
“Your gardener?”
Sour face. “Your racial stereotyping is dehumanizing. Garcia happens to be the head of security in this terminal.”
“Why call security?”
“Between you and me, it’s because you didn’t tip me last time. This is my revenge.” I was speechless.
“And as there are no microphones recording this conversation, and we’re the only two people in the lounge, Garcia bangs me twice a week in the men’s room. So he’s in my palm. He won’t listen to a word you say.”
I remained mute.
“Would you like some corn nuts? The airline catering company grows half the corn in Nebraska, so I’m allowed to offer them even to people who enter this lounge without authorization. There are some napkins here, and if you feel like cutlery, please enjoy a complimentary spork from the cutlery bin. Oh, look—here’s Garcia now.”
A swarthy hobbit entered the lounge. “LACEY, do we have an incident here?”
“I’m not sure, Garcia. This gentleman arrived through the VIP doors without a boarding pass or passport. You know, with the war on terror, you can never be too careful.”
Garcia stared at me. “Do you have any form of documentation on you, sir?”
“No. It’s all in the fucking limo.”
“Watch your language, sir. You’re in the United States. People here don’t appreciate profanity.”
“This man here swore quite a bit at me, too, Garcia. Does that count as terror in your terror handbook?”
Garcia gave me the steely eye. “You were swearing at LACEY?”
“What the fuck is wrong with you people?” I said.
“This is the last warning I’m giving you sir. No profanity.”
Trying to configure sentences without swearing caused my brain to seize up. I knew there and then exactly how a stroke feels when it strips you of the ability to speak. I began to make sound effects instead: “… #$((>@ * * *…”
“Garcia, listen to his speech patterns. I bet you anything he’s high on some form of illegal drug.”
“What flight did you come here on today, sir?”
“In a private ffff … In a private jet, thank you.”
“From where?”
“Hawaii.”
“We’re going to have to do a sweep of that jet, pronto.” He removed a walkie-talkie from his breast pocket and made a show of finding the plane on the tarmac. While he did this, LACEY offered me more corn nuts.
“Sir,” said the hobbit, “I’m going to have to ask you to come with me.”
“What the fuck?”
“That’s it, sir.” Garcia ran towards me with a pair of zap-strap handcuffs he produced as if from nowhere.
LACEY smiled.
Zzzzzzap! Thirty seconds later I was being frogmarched down the concourse, which looked even more like Mexico than on my first stop. I’d hoped to make a friendly joke about Garcia’s mother fellating bored donkeys out behind the Cinnabon, but the cuffs stung too much and made it difficult to be witty.
Cinnabon is a chain of American baked-goods stores and kiosks normally found in high-traffic areas such as malls and airports. The company’s signature item is a la
rge cinnamon roll. As of July 2009, over 750 Cinnabon bakeries are in operation in over thirty countries around the world. Its headquarters are in Sandy Springs, Georgia. For many people, the odour of a Cinnabon quickly alerts the reptile cortex that one is in the middle of an unpleasant travel experience. Curiously, scent scientists have done multiple analyses of airport environments and came up with an interesting observation, published in the March 2013 issue of Boarding Pass magazine: if one were to take one bottle of all the perfumes and colognes on earth and mix them together, the resulting odour would be exactly that of a duty-free shop.
Garcia marched me through a door emblazoned with a janitor’s icon, which, in fact, opened into a corridor in LAX’s massive underground security system. Were Neal there with me, he’d have said something charmingly childish along the lines of, “Oi! It’s like entering the Matrix! I wonder if we’ll meet enchanted animals who speak Jacobean English!”
Not me, however. My extensive life experience had prepared me for being hurled into a room filled with innocent middle-class people, all of them face down on rectal probe tables while burka-clad TSA agents used hot-dog forks to dig in deeper and deeper, ferreting out smuggled nail clippers, Bic lighters and containers of shampoo larger than 1.5 ounces.
I was partially correct. I ended up in a cell with old-fashioned steel bars and a chrome toilet, like in a seventies cop show. My cellmates were two cold-sored Venezuelans detained, they told me, for smuggling fertilized parakeet eggs, along with a Mrs. Peggy Nielson of Kendallville, Indiana, who, through some form of accidental keystroke in a system somewhere on the planet, had landed on the no-fly list with a level red warning attached to her.
Peggy, God bless her, wouldn’t stop yammering on about how, instead of returning with her family to her numbingly dull cornfields after a Disneyland holiday, she was being whisked off to Guantánamo Bay without legal recourse.
I was in a foul mood, even for me. “Listen, Mrs. Nielson. You might as well get used to a life of gang rape and prayers five times a day. It’s a nasty, shitty world. How do we even know you’re really who you say you are? You could be a very good little actress, for all I know.”
She began to cry. “Disneyland was so amazing—and now this. Why are they doing this to me? My life is boring. I’m no terrorist.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“What is wrong with you? Why are you being so mean to me?”
“What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with you … Peggy bin Laden? Your mom-pants and that poorly styled meerkat on your head don’t fool me for one second. The more you snivel, the more I question your supposed identity.”
More boohoos and even more snivelling. A merciful spirit swept over me. “Mrs. Nielson, for God’s sake, look at life for what it is—a repulsive waste of self-important protein molecules. It’s not you who did something wrong. It’s life.”
“That’s so negative. You’re so negative!”
Well, I had tried to be nice. “Peggy, you’re wearing out my patience. What sort of place is Kendallville, anyway? A hub for the manufacturing of crybabies?”
“I hate you.”
“But I don’t hate you. I, actually, in some hard-to-describe way, like you.”
“Really?”
“I do. But you have to tough this out, Peggy. What comes around goes around. I prefer to think I lead a fine and upstanding life. When things turn to rat shit—as they invariably do—I never think it’s me who’s done something wrong; it’s the fucking universe having a bad day, and I just happened to be there.”
“That’s a new way of looking at things, Mr. …”
“Gunt. Raymond Gunt.”
Miracle of miracles, she stopped snivelling.
The Venezuelans regarded both of us with disdain, and I stared right back. “Look here, you two. Go fuck dead goats or whatever it is you do in your taco factories back home.” I turned to Peggy. “Venezuela. Dreadful country. Nothing but cocaine and Miss Universe contestants.”
“Nothing but grief.”
“See there, Peggy? You really can turn that frown upside down.”
“Thank you, Raymond Gunt. Tell me, where were you headed before you ended up here?”
“Kiribati. I’m a cameraman on that TV show Survival, and if I ever get out of this hole, that’s where I’m headed, on one of the posh private jets the TV network uses to fly me around.”
“I have to admit, I love Survival.”
Oh, crap.
“What’s it like being on a shoot? Where do crew members sleep when the contestants are in their camps?”
“Well, you know, Peggy …” Christ, get me out of here now. I stared around the cell and suddenly had a brainwave about how to escape. One of my Venezuelan cellmates was idly snacking on fragments from a Hawaiian Airlines snack pack he’d dug out of his pocket.
I walked over to him. “Share?”
“¿Qué?”
I snatched his snack bag, dug inside and found what I wanted: one macadamia nut. I ate it.
Tree nut allergy is a hypersensitivity to tree nuts that causes an overreaction of the immune system, which may lead to severe physical symptoms. Tree nuts include Brazil nuts, cashews, chestnuts, hazelnuts, macadamia nuts, pecans, pine nuts, pistachios and walnuts. The severity of sensitivity can vary from person to person. Those diagnosed with anaphylaxis will have a more immediate mast cell reaction and must avoid all exposure to any allergen-containing products or by-products, regardless of processing.
Tree nut allergy is distinct from peanut allergy. Peanuts are legumes, whereas a tree nut is the hard-shelled fruit of certain plants. A person with a peanut allergy may not necessarily also be allergic to tree nuts, and vice versa.
Many people feign nut allergies as a means of establishing an often pathetically small amount of control in a social or dining situation. In a recent and highly gratifying airline decision, a passenger who alerts airlines of a nut allergy after having obtained a boarding pass must be removed from a flight and forced to wait until a different plane, certified to have no contact with nuts, appears, a process that can sometimes take days. This process is irreversible, even if the passenger immediately admits he or she is a lying needy tard.
17
Next thing I knew, I was staring up into Neal’s face—and yet it wasn’t Neal. This person had a proper haircut and shave, moisturized skin, a silk tattersall button-down shirt and radioactive-looking American-white teeth.
“Wakey-wakey, Ray. Good to see you up and alert.”
“Who the fuck are you?”
“It’s me, Ray, your buddy, Neal.”
“Why am I not in that airport shithole?”
“You ate a macadamia nut, you sly devil. Your oneway ticket out of the Homeland Security system. We’re on a jet to Kiribati.”
“My brain feels like a caged circus animal. What the hell happened to you?”
“I got myself a makeover. Ever had one? You go in looking seedy and feeling like a failure—and then all these smashing hot birds and enthusiastic gay guys run their hands all over you and you walk out looking like a pop star. I had to do something while you were stuck in Homeland Security’s intensive-care pavilion. A few of the girls from Fi’s casting session took me on as their project, so to speak.”
“But what the fuck happened to your teeth?”
“There was nothing wrong with my teeth, Ray—at least, nothing Zoom laser-whitening couldn’t zap away in seconds.”
I looked around me. “And why am I not in some American prison?”
“Oh that. Fiona brokered your release. She’s a smart woman, Ray.”
I instantly needed to know what my exact trade value was on the open market. Three defecting Chechen spies? Five political dissidents with a cache of industrial data? A phalanx of Chinese terracotta warriors? “What did she trade me for?”
“I believe Fiona was able to get you released for a pair of matinée tickets to Billy Elliot, the Musical at a Los Angeles dinner theatre. Pretty good se
ats.”
“Matinée tickets? She didn’t even have the decency to trade me for evening tickets?”
“Ray, tickets to evening shows are hard to come by. You could get seats in the balcony, but you wouldn’t really enjoy the magic of it all.”
I spat out, “The magic of it all? It’s Billy fucking Elliot, the fucking Musical.”
“Exactly, Ray. I hear it’s a pretty good show, but I don’t know if I hold with having an adult dressed up as a wee boy dancing on stage. A bit like mutton dressed as lamb, if you ask me.”
I breathed deeply and decided to get a better grip on my physical situation. The jet was similar to the one we flew to LA in, and I was in a gurney, facing forward.
Neal removed the IV drip from my right hand. “As I keep saying, Ray, good thing I was once a paramedic. Otherwise, you’d be stuck in one of those hospitals for crack babies like they have all over the U.S. I’ve read them about in the Daily Mail.”
“Where is that ball-chopping witch, my ex-wife?”
“She’s following in another plane with Sarah and your friend Stuart.”
Safe for the time being.
I hobbled out of bed and sat in a leather seat, too tired even to bother scoping out a source of booze. “Neal, how long have we been in transit from London?”
“Several weeks at least, Ray.”
“At the moment I feel like we’re some form of sock puppets who exist solely to amuse some cruel cosmic manipulator whose hand is up my arse.”
“I know what you mean, Ray. We haven’t even crossed the equator. Maybe our journey was meant to be different from what we thought.”
I looked at Neal. “Don’t be such a fucking simp. Of course things are different from what we expected. It’s called life.”
“Maybe you should get a makeover, Ray. It’d perk you up.”
“I don’t need a fucking makeover, Neal. I’m quite happy with how nature made me.”
Worst. Person. Ever. Page 8