Worst. Person. Ever.

by Douglas Coupland

  “Have you ever seen Billy Elliot, Ray?” Her fingers, still inserted through the bars, were now rubbing my neck.

  “Um, yes, I watched it—or part of it—on a Singapore Airlines flight back in ’04.”

  “Singapore?”

  “They were revising their chewing gum laws, and the BBC wanted arrest footage.”

  “You’re a fascinating man, Raymond Gunt.” Her hand slid down towards my gentleman’s region. “My, my … you’re so tense.”

  “It’s been a week of airports and hospital beds.”

  “Go on. Tell me what you thought of Billy Elliot, then.” I could smell her breath: Listerine.

  “Well, to me it all boils down to whether Billy is a poofter or not. I mean, if he were a flat-out flamer, there’d have been no movie. He simply would have looked at his small town, said, ‘Right then,’ moved to London, entered the sex trade and gone to dancing class at night, but where’s the uplifting story in that? I think viewers are really thinking, What if Billy’s a poofter, even though he says he isn’t? But because he’s underage, you’re not allowed to mention sex, so instead you have to say how heartwarming it all is and be inspired. And the thing is, in real life, a small-town Billy Elliot would most likely lure you out into the bramble hedge for a good tussle, save some DNA from the crime scene, and then blackmail the bejeezus out of you to pay for his dancing lessons, until you justifiably went out and slit his throat.”

  Jennifer looked at me with eyes that beamed with admiration. “Raymond, you have such imagination.” She pulled me closer by the belt and started to fondle my gentleman’s bits, which were about as aroused as a small bag of sun-dried apricots.

  She said, “Raymond?”

  Gulp. “Yes?” I shut my eyes.

  She let me go, but then I heard her key inside the cell’s lock. I swallowed, hard.

  Suddenly a harsh alarm began to clang. Jennifer screamed, “Shit! Why do the engineers need me now, of all times?”

  Blowing a kiss and mouthing, “Later,” she left me.

  In gratitude to the gods, I hit PLAY on the DVD and began to practise my brains out.

  The chewing gum ban in Singapore was enacted in 1992 and really does ban the import and sale of chewing gum. The offense is punishable by caning.

  When first introduced, the ban caused open defiance, but offenders were publicly “named and shamed” by the government to deter other would-be smugglers.

  Origins: In his memoirs, former Singaporean prime minister Lee Kuan Yew recounted that as early as 1983, chewing gum was causing serious maintenance problems in high-rise public housing. Vandals had been disposing of spent gum in mailboxes, inside keyholes and on elevator buttons. Chewing gum left on floors, stairways, buses and pavements in public areas increased the cost of cleaning and damaged cleaning equipment. However, Lee thought that a ban would be too drastic and did not take action.

  In 1987, vandals stuck chewing gum on the door sensors in a new $5 billion metro system. The doors malfunctioned, causing disruption of train services.

  In January 1992, Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong decided on a flat-out ban. The import of chewing gum was immediately halted, but a reasonable transition period was given to allow shops to clear their existing stocks.

  Yes, this really happened.

  21

  Morning came. Fucking hell. My feet were cheese-gratered and bloody from a night spent rehearsing the appalling routine in which little Billy lugs his twinkle-toes up and down the bricks of some failure-filled housing estate, which is, in the film, conveniently devoid of crack ampoules, used condoms and surgically licked-clean crisp packets.

  I involuntarily dozed off at 11:30 a.m., only to be woken at noon by a gorilla of an MP. “Got orders to take you over to the canteen for your matinée performance.” The word “matinée” filled me with foreboding. Was this all somehow being engineered by Fiona?

  I caught sight of myself in a mirror en route to the venue. Not my Bourne-iest moment. I was highly unshaven and putty grey—I mean, how can that even happen, skin turning grey? Blood is red. How hard is it not to even be pink? I asked the gorilla if I might stop to shave, and of course the answer was no. Fucking Americans.

  I hobbled after him for maybe a quarter-mile to a small building housing the canteen. The sun was directly overhead; I had no shadow. The exterior humidity was like a proverbial wet towel, and I was soon drenched in sweat.

  Now, I like to give life a go. I like family dinners. I like to see elderly people trying their hand at painting even though they couldn’t possibly have a career ahead of them because they’ll soon be dead. But in spite of my positive disposition, I was at a low point as I entered what for me could only be a dome of shame, the mess hall. Two stainless steel doors opened inward and …

  Brrrrrrrr! Air conditioning! Extreme American air conditioning, one of the few things they’re good for! Thank fucking God.

  Inside the mess, the tables were arranged in some sort of pecking order, not unlike at private schools: head table; peons; losers; victims; thugs; the doomed; the hopeless. Enter a room like this and you might as well not bother being born in the first place. And, of course, there at the head table, along with Elspeth, Neal and the flight crew, sat Miss Lieutenant, glowing with B vitamins and sunshine and whatever anthraxy sludge the U.S. government forcibly injects into its military’s bloodstream.

  Some idiot up before me was juggling hatchets. The good thing, though, was the room’s atmosphere of … cheer … bonhomie, even!

  I thought, You know, Raymond, how bad could this possibly be? This could be a lighthearted episode in your life’s journey. If I spun it properly, I could even turn it into a fundraiser for some dismal charity like Alzheimer’s or AIDS or poor people.

  That’s when Neal saw me. He flew across the room, shouting, “Ray! You won’t fucking believe this! I know this whole island inside out!”

  Okay, Neal’s a street nutter and all, but he totally lost me. “Come again?”

  “Wake Island! I’ve been here a million times before in the video game Battlefield 1943! Except I was playing the Russian version, where it’s called Forceps 13, you know, in those backwards upside-down letters communists like.” Neal was wearing an ensemble of expensive resort wear and, unlike mine, his skin had colour.

  “Neal, you lived inside a cardboard box slathered in human feces on the streets of West London. Where on earth did you play a complex video game requiring an expensive console and a place to play it?”

  “Those birds at the Russian massage parlour on Gunnersbury Avenue.”

  “Kum Guzzling Traktor Sluts?”

  “You know the place?”

  “Only to walk by it, Neal. Frankly, I find the flyer cello-taped to their front doorway’s glass offensive to women and people of taste and refinement everywhere, not just West London.”

  “Oh, Raymond, you’re the king of the purchased wank, so you’re the last person who should be judgmental. And those girls on Gunnersbury—so new to democracy and freedom and its ways—were so kind. They were always willing to feed me and take care of me when life on the streets got too rough. But forget all of that. Last night, once I realized where I was, I couldn’t sleep. So some of the lads took me out in the Jeep—full moon!—and we visited the strategic points of Battlefield 1943, like connoisseurs discussing brandy, stopping in all the best spots. We got to waste a whopping good bundle of ordnance out by the rusting Jap tank in the lagoon and we got to blow shit up, including the remains of the Pan Am Clipper dock! Funny, but these airmen all feel like brothers to me now. A band of brothers is what we are.” A tear ran down Neal’s cheek.

  “Neal, fucking hell. Remember who you are.”

  “Sorry, mate. I’m just sentimental is all. We’ve been through some things together, you, my brothers and me.”

  Oh. My. God. Neal was confusing reality with his video game experiences. “Neal! Kum Guzzling Traktor Sluts!” I slapped him, and some semblance of sanity returned to his face.

>   “Sorry, Ray.”

  We heard polite applause for the hatchet juggler. I looked over at my tormentor, the flawlessly uniformed witch. She saw me staring her way, smiled and grabbed her soup spoon. She stood up and tinged her glass, and the room—maybe two hundred enlisted folk—went quiet. “Timothy,” she said to the previous act, “thank you for your juggling magic, and thanks to all the other participants in today’s end-of-project Celebration of Excellence fun.” She cleared her throat. “Gang, today’s a big day for all of us, and I don’t need to say why. We’ve worked hard as a team to fulfill our Wake Island mission, and in a few short hours we’ll have some results—photos and data—and we’re all excited about that.”

  What the fuck?

  “It can be a tough life working here: hot days followed by nights that somehow feel hotter. Weeks that go by without a breeze, and then suddenly we get a typhoon. One thing for certain is that we’re never at a loss for extremes on Wake Island.

  “But one extreme we don’t get enough of here is the extreme of talent. I took piano lessons. Maybe you did, too. Or clarinet or electric guitar. We’re all old enough to know that talent is something either you’re born with or you aren’t. So imagine my pleasure to learn that we have a celebrity visitor here on the island who’s going to help us kick off our great day of days …”

  Mumbles of expectation.

  “Today I present to you the beloved well-kept-secret English entertainment treasure, Mr. Raymond Gunt.”

  22

  Up front, a set of packing crates was stacked in a formation replicating the estate housing from the previous evening’s DVD. I tried putting myself into some kind of stoked mindset, but really, if they were going to do council housing, why not take some bags of flour and throw them around to represent recently raped unwed mums left for dead? Or at least bundles of palm husks to signify pensioners stabbed for the postage stamps in their purses and also left for dead?

  A faint drumbeat began to emerge in stereo from speakers on either side of the crates. Lieutenant Nielson continued: “So let’s all get ready to enjoy a sweet treat from the land of tea and hard-to-digest food. Craig and Justine from the radiological data interpretation team have helped assemble today’s sound system. Thanks, guys!”

  Crap! She wasn’t going to give me a chance to introduce myself and turn the dance event into a fundraiser for the world’s useless people. How dare that sociopathic gorgon deprive me of my right to help the planet! I mean, was it wrong to want to bring even a whiff of joy to someone with a shit life? It wasn’t my problem they had no money or some disease. What mattered was that I cared about helping humanity.

  I realized that, in my head, I was sounding like some lefty feel-good brochure entitled “Self-Esteem,” which you find untouched in a Boots pharmacy waiting area, right beside the pamphlet titled, “So Your Urethra Is Starting to Burn.”

  Lieutenant Jennifer was winding up. “And now, Wake Island, put your hands together for the dance stylings of Raymond Gunt, a man who only wants to bring joy and magic to all our lives—but not scary magic, because that would be contrary to Christian beliefs. Take it away, Raymond, with your interpretation of ‘The Angry Dance’ from the beloved film Billy Elliot!”

  Boomp boomp boomp …

  I jumped onto the first crate to mild applause. And to my own astonishment, I found myself doing Billy’s moves.

  You have to remember that the last time I danced to any song whatsoever was to “Like a Virgin” in an Ibiza nightclub when I was riding a cosmic wave of some IQ-killing party drug in an attempt to land this girl from Liverpool with scientifically unaltered tits like musk melons and wearing a bright yellow dress. But it all went wrong because she passed out and I had to carry her into the chill room—which you’d think might have led to a cheerful grope of some sort, had it not been for the skinhead muff-snacker in charge. “You, Mr. Fuckingperve, get your fucking hands off that girl or I’ll personally come and slice off your testicles with the opening tab from this can of lager.”

  Ah, memories.

  Wake Island.

  Crates.

  Demented cunts.

  Check, check and check.

  Showtime!

  Now, I suppose we’ve all had a dream at some point in our lives about kacking our trousers in public. It must surely be universal. So imagine you’re having that kacking-your-pants dream, except instead of shitting yourself, you’re dancing in front of two hundred barbaric airmen in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and you have no idea how to dance, but there’s no waking up here, and you’re light-headed from lack of sleep and bad diet, and you’re realizing that being an actor/dancer/performer is hard work. It really is. Hats off to every bender who’s ever trudged his way through Swan Lake or a production of Lord of the Dance, and even to those heartbreakingly deformed little Oompah-Loompahs in Willy Wonka. Tough line of work, dancing.

  At first, there was little audience reaction. Maybe the people in the back rows couldn’t quite see me, I thought, so I hopped up onto a third crate, arching my feet and making some kind of go of it.

  And then I had a moment of pure bliss when I realized I really didn’t give a fuck whether I ended up locked away in a forgotten prison until global warming drowned me.

  … And then I was hit on the head with a grape.

  I snapped back to reality: they were booing. Not good.

  Another grape.

  And then increased booing.

  Well, what else was I expecting, up on the fifth crate, shuffling my body around like a tard?

  Suddenly, cheering broke out. ¿Qué?

  I looked down to see Neal, fuck him, stealing my limelight. He was already on the second crate, doing a flawless “Angry Dance” for an audience of baboons who had at least stopped throwing food at me, and who were showing distinct signs of feeling genuinely entertained.

  Shuffle-shuffle. Neal leaped up onto my crate. Tempted as I was to shove him off, an instinct for survival got the better of me. I thought, Oh Christ … I’m going to have to be comic relief. Well, worse things have happened.

  The crowd, of course, had completely fallen in love with Neal. I could see the women in the front row holding up their hands, trying to guess the size of his member. Heterosexual men behind them were figuring out ways of adding him to their sports teams. Moreover, in the midst of his truly accomplished dancing, Neal was somehow managing to mock me the way mimes mimic passersby: he caught my slumping posture, my grimacing facial expression and my doomed efforts at dancing to the beat perfectly. Even I had to smile.

  Then, at last, it was over.

  Thunderous applause.

  Waves of love.

  Thank fucking Christ.

  As Neal took deep bows, I scuttled off the bottom crate, crab-like, over to a buffet table now devoid of food save for saltine crackers in little cello wrappers. I pocketed as many as I could, then turned around to find the canteen almost empty; the audience had fled. Neal was standing with Jennifer, who was all smiles for me: “Raymond! I had no idea you and Neal were planning such a sensational performance. I underestimated you.”

  “Well, you know, uh …” Finally, I’d caught a fucking break. I changed the subject. “Neal, where did you get the new clothes?”

  “Jenny here gave them to me. They belonged to some French bloke.”

  Jenny?

  She cut in. “Arnaud du Puis, the world’s leading radio telemetry expert until last Bastille Day, when he jumped off the dock directly onto a Portuguese man-of war the size of a child’s wading pool.”

  Neal added, “One of the lads told me last night that a clump of poor Arnaud’s lymph nodes washed into the lagoon, but an albatross ate them before they could be landed in a net.”

  “Neal is the same size as Arnaud,” Jennifer volunteered, “so fortunately the clothes won’t go to waste.”

  Pinching his jacket material, Neal said, “Everything’s made by Paul Smith. The fabric breathes.”

  “Linen!” said Jennifer.
“Don’t talk to me about linen—the wrinkles! Gentlemen, as a token of our thanks, you’ll be riding as my guests on today’s mission.”

  “Today’s mission?” I asked.

  The Portuguese man-of-war is a jellyfish-like marine invertebrate whose name is borrowed from the man-of-war, a fifteenth-century English warship.

  The man-of-war is not a true jellyfish but a siphonophore, which differs from a jellyfish in that it is not actually a single creature but a colonial organism, made up of many minute individuals called zooids.

  The man-of-war is found floating on the surface of warm seas, its air bladder keeping it afloat and acting as a sail while the rest of the organism hangs below the surface. It has no means of self-propulsion and is entirely dependent on winds, currents and tides.

  The stinging venom-filled nematocysts in the tentacles of the Portuguese man-of-war can paralyze small fish and other prey. Detached tentacles and dead specimens (including those that wash up on shore) can sting just as painfully as the live creature in the water, and may remain potent for hours or even days after the death of the creature or the detachment of the tentacle.

  Stings usually cause excruciating pain to humans—not unlike the effect of globules of molten steel or lava burning through the skin. The stings leave hideously disfiguring red welts that normally last for weeks and that people on the bus stare at and then quickly turn their heads away from.

  23

  Jennifer and Neal wouldn’t tell me what the day’s operation was to be, only that “we” were going to be taking some photos. An hour after the performance, we walked up aluminum stairs into a massive beast of a plane with no windows, save for a few up front, where we were to sit.