“What’s in the back?” I asked.
Neal, for some reason, seemed to be clued into what was going on. “It’s a surprise, Ray. Just rekindle your sense of childlike wonder and go with the day’s flow.”
Jennifer hopped in and took the main passenger seat in front of us. “Ready, boys?”
“Yes, ma’am!” said Neal. Me, I coughed up a loogey that was not unlike a sea creature. I flicked it out the closing door, where it landed on someone’s shoulder. I suppose it was very good luck for him, like being shat on by a gull.
The engines started. Over the roar, I asked, “Can you at least tell me how long we’ll be flying for?”
“Forty-five minutes there, one hour on location and then home.”
“What do you mean by ‘on location’?”
Her reply was cut off by the atrocious noise of the plane’s engines. Neal and I put on heavy-duty protective earmuffs. We taxied and took off, then headed southeast amidst glorious whipped-cream clouds. Neal had a window on his right; I had one on my left. Couldn’t ask for a better view, really.
About forty-three minutes into the flight, high above the Pacific, Jennifer turned around and gave us each a pair of goggles with dark glass lenses.
“What are these for?” I asked.
“Put them on, Ray,” said Neal. “You’d better, really.”
“Why the fuck do I want to wear some stupid glasses, Neal?”
“Ray, in one minute we’re dropping an atomic bomb.”
“We’re whattttttttttt!!!!!????”
The lieutenant pointed something out to the pilot. She then turned around and smiled at me reassuringly. “It’s a new tactic, Ray. We’re using leftover Cold War nuclear warheads to vaporize the Pacific Trash Vortex!”
“It’s a genius idea, it is, Jenny,” shouted Neal.
I screamed, “Are you demented cunts out of your fucking minds!”
“Showtime!” shouted Jennifer.
Behind us, bay doors opened and something dropped from the plane.
Now.
Oh dear.
This is awkward.
You see … I know nuclear warheads have a bum rap in our culture—radiation, nuclear winter, massive extinction, sad little doll heads lying in the gutter covered with bits of black muck. But to watch one exploding in real life is insanely fucking awesome. Yes. It is true. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it myself, snacking on saltines and drinking Arrowhead bottled water while our plane circled a heaving, pulsating, smoking-hot 15-kiloton explosion, with Neal pointing out little sparkling patches on the ocean where extra-dense bits of plastic trash were blipping into a green eco-friendly solution for a better tomorrow.
Yes, yes, I know, I know. Atomic weapons. Charred little kittens. Nuns vaporizing. The economy in shambles. But still … what a fucking sight!
I had to knuckle-bump both Neal and Jennifer for so skillfully keeping it a surprise for me. My hostess loaned me her iPhone and I took some smashing “Me and my good buddy Mushroom Cloud” photos, which she promised she’d send me once her workload lightened.
“Bombs are one thing, Raymond, but caramba, the paperwork involved in dropping one! There’d be less paperwork involved making the entire country switch over to metric.”
I had seriously underestimated this woman.
She caught the new, appraising look in my eye. “Too late, Raymond. The mood’s gone. You and your pals are on your way tonight.”
Fucking hell.
And then the plane cartwheeled, and that’s when I actually shat my pants. No dream.
24
Let me tell you, the first thing you do when you shit your pants for real is tell nobody. Nobody.
And then you try to deal with the fact that your plane just cartwheeled over a lake of fire, as the pilot declares, “That was easy,” followed by the lieutenant laughing giddily and Neal shouting, “Blimey! Let’s do that again!”
And you sit there trying to figure out how you’re going to get back to a clean, dry room on Wake Island with a hose to rinse yourself off and fresh undergarments and a fresh pair of trousers identical to the ones you’ve just kacked—as well as a rubbish can large enough to bury the soiled pants in.
“Ray!” Neal called out. “To think just one week ago I was frittering away my life in a cardboard Samsung telly box—and here I am living large!”
Sadly, the condition of my pants made it impossible to continue to enjoy the nuclear fireworks. Neal mistook my new highly focused and somewhat unhappy facial expression to be some sort of politically correct judgment on the bombing.
“Don’t be such a sourpuss, Ray! Think of all that plastic, gone forever—fluffy little dolphins now able to romp through lagoons free of plastic six-pack yokes. Seahorses cantering about, snacking on little bits of seahorse food. It’s a Disney movie down there now, like Finding Nemo. It’s world peace. Our Jenny here is a planetary hero.”
“You’re making me blush, Neal,” said Jennifer. Then she stared at me and her brow furrowed. “Raymond—are you … leaking?”
Neal looked down at my seat. “Oh, now you’ve done it, Ray …”
“Done what?” asked Jennifer.
I said, “Look, both of you, it’s nothing …”
“Raymond’s shat his pants.”
“Raymond!” Jennifer sounded really shocked.
“Christ, the plane did a fucking cartwheel overtop a nuclear explosion.”
“Changing the subject,” Neal chided. “Common behaviour for someone experiencing fecal remorse.”
Jennifer flipped into problem-solving mode. “Raymond, once we’re on the ground, I can have someone come meet us with a hazmat suit. I’ll call for one right now.” She clicked a button on the dash and began barking into her headset: “Alpha nine, alpha nine, we’ve had a Code-Mocha bowel evacuation—”
“No, really, I—” But there was no stopping her.
Neal, meanwhile, looked me over with a father’s sad, judgmental eyes.
I said, “Come on, Neal, I think what happened was a perfectly normal response given the situation.”
“I would never judge you, Ray.”
“Thank you, Neal.”
“Bye the way, Ray, Sarah sent me a text to relay to you.”
“What the fuck? Neal, since when do you have a cellphone?”
“Poor Arnaud du Puis never cancelled his account with Orange France, so I took the initiative and started adding to his contact list the numbers of people connected to the show. That Sarah is one hard worker, mate. I think she has a thing for you. In fact, I’m sure she does.”
She does? “I’m listening, Neal.”
“She said, ‘Give my Ray-Ray a big hug and tell him I can’t wait to introduce him to the alluring ways of the tropics.’ ”
“Show me.”
Neal showed me the text; he was word for word. “I think she could be The One, Ray, I really do,” he said.
I thought of her spooning me back to health in Honolulu, her cheerful manner, her milkmaid freshness—her absolutely perfect pair of baps.
The flight back was as airy and hopeful as the infinite shaving-cream clouds above us and caterwauling flocks of sea birds below. The cockpit was somewhat chilly with the altitude, and I felt like I was sitting atop a tub of melted gelato, but I didn’t care.
Once on the ground, we were greeted by perhaps fifty goons, all of them clapping wildly for the lieutenant. Jennifer took a bow, smiled for the cameras, gave a small speech and then said, “But before I disembark, we have a small medical issue to attend to.” She stood away from the door, saying, “Raymond, the medics will take good care of you. They really will. All of us here in your Wake Island family just want you to get clean again. And watch your left leg. You’re dripping on the hatch.”
The crowd went silent as it watched me walk down the aluminum stairway, where I was met by a ginger-haired medic—whom I recognized as being the one on whom my good-luck loogey had landed earlier. He came at me with a huge
Spielbergy Tyvek jumpsuit, bellowing, “Mandatory for potential bowel-related contamination scenarios! Can I ask you, Mr. Gunt, if you have any history of hepatitis A, B or C, cholera or superbugs?”
“Fuck off.”
“No need to swear, sir. There are ladies present.”
Fucking Americans.
The silence continued as everyone watched me don my hazmat suit. I gave up trying to maintain dignity. I’d be out of this fucking sun-kissed dump soon enough. Also, I had just witnessed the first Pacific detonation since 1962.
25
Instead of taking me to a nice clean clinic furnished with a functioning shower, Ginger the medic led me behind the Quonset hut beside the canteen, where three of his pals stood ready and armed with firehoses.
“Look, boys! It’s Billy Elliot!”
“Let the dance of pain begin!”
Bloody hell.
But when you’re caked in your own leavings, you really don’t mind being hit with brutally hard jets of water. Truth be told, it just gets the crap off sooner, though it does hurt like all get out. When the water hits a large enough flap of trouser fabric, liftoff is easily achieved, and more than once I was hurled into one of the canteen Dumpsters, crammed, no doubt, with saltine packaging and empty Pepsi bottles.
And, of course, there was much festive heckling. “Come on, Billy! Eat hose water, you po-faced Limey bitch!”
“Aim for his teeth, guys! Maybe we can ship his teeth to wherever it was his chin went.”
But then I removed my kacked pants and turned away from them. I bent over to let their warm, brackish water rinse away the last of my self-marinade. The tone soon changed when they realized they weren’t so much torturing me as they were administering a fairly efficient enema whenever I unclenched my rusty bullet hole. They soon turned off their hoses and walked away in disgust, Ginger tossing a pair of clean sailor’s trousers to the ground. I togged up.
Right.
The jet. Time to leave.
Just then Neal roared up in a Jeep driven by one of his video-gaming friends, with two more in the rear seat, all of them holding foaming half-full Oktoberfest mugs of beer. “Rejoice, Ray!” Neal shouted. “The trash vortex will soon be gone.”
“Christ, Neal. You’re wasted. Let’s just get to the fucking plane.”
“Not until you have a beer with us, my friend. Everyone on the island is celebrating a new era of hope for mankind.”
“Yes, yes, whatever. We’re the worst thing that ever happened to the planet. But a pint of lager right now would be just the ticket.”
A back-seat goon turned a spigot on an aluminum canister and … voila! A cold, frosty, surprisingly delicious mug of lager appeared. I became drunk with the first swig. “All hail the atomic bomb!”
“To the bomb! The bomb! The bomb!”
It was a matey moment that cancelled out the horror of my cleansing. I climbed in beside Neal and we began driving on the runway, carving donuts and weaving in between other Jeeps filled with soused airmen. The whole island had erupted into an orgy of stress release.
“Makes you feel good, doesn’t it, Ray?”
“Just hand me another fucking beer.” Finally, a bit of light-heartedness after seventy-two hours of total shit.
Neal found an eighties radio channel on the Jeep’s satellite set, and the afternoon turned into a blur of hair-band ballads and puddles of vomited saltines. Around sunset, to the waning sound of Haysi Fantayzee’s hit “Shiny Shiny” from the departing Jeep’s sound system, I found myself utterly cunted and lying in a heap on the ground at the foot of the stairs leading up to the jet. Neal was Angry Dancing his way upward. I crawled after him. Once on board, I heaved my old aluminum medical gurney out the door. It bit the concrete with an aching clang. Elspeth closed the port and, finally, Wake Island was history.
Haysi Fantayzee was a British New Wave band of the early 1980s. Their single “Shiny Shiny” was released in 1983. It’s fun.
26
I can’t remember the last time I’ve been so thrilled to hear the landing gear pull up. Neal, Elspeth and I feasted on Advil and microwave luxury meals as we tried to process the biggest twenty-four-hour travel kludge in history.
“I telephoned me mum when I was down there,” said Elspeth. “I told her where I was and she said her brother, Olly, went through Wake Island back in the late 1970s on a transpac boat when he was shipping off to Yokohama.”
“Where’s Olly now?”
“He runs a Dungeons & Dragons shop in Hull. He never really was the same after he’d spent time training dolphins to wear video cameras on their foreheads. I think those little buggers stole his mind.”
“You’re fucking kidding me.”
“Laugh if you will, but Olly served the Queen very well.” Elspeth wiped tomato sauce from her lips. “And now he throws rocks at you if you go too near his council flat door. Fucking dolphins.”
“They think they’re actually going to fix the trash vortex with bombs,” I exclaimed. “These fucking Americans are like children.”
Neal, being one of nature’s mimics, said, “Imagine John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe riding in a bomber above a nuclear blast. ‘Ooh, Mr. Kennedy, that H-bomb is so scary.’ ‘Don’t you worry, Marilyn. Just cover up your diseased minge with this lead-lined X-ray-proof garment I stole from Jackie’s hope chest.’ ”
“John Kennedy,” said Elspeth. “Is he the one who had a lot of sex and the retro hairdo?”
“Dear God,” I said. “What year were you born?”
“I’m old enough to be a flight attendant is how old I am. Just like Prince William’s mum-in-law.”
We became reflective then and took a pause from eating. Overtop the dusty whoosh of sleek jet engines I put forth a question. “Neal, let me ask you this: do you think camel toes are, in any way, you know … hot?”
“That’s an excellent question, Ray.”
“Oh God,” said Elspeth. “I’m going to be sick.”
Neal said, “Come along, Elspeth, think of this as an interfaith symposium, with you representing just one of several points of view. But I do want to say that simply because a woman’s got camel toe, it in no way indicates she’s a slag.”
I said, “Thank you, Neal. I, too, believe women are the future—yay, women! Yay, tampons and all that! But it’s the camel toe part about women that’s the topic here.”
Neal reached for brandy. “It’s hard to really get in the mood when there’s a badly packed kebab three and a half feet away from your eyes. It’s all about the packaging.”
“Agreed,” I said, “Part of the charm of the quim is that it’s on the inside, not the outside.”
“And,” added Neal with authority, “just because there’s something big on the outside doesn’t always mean a bird’s got a clown’s pocket on the inside. Perhaps the contrary. And it’s a slippery slope, too. One day you’re fine with having a camel toe, and the next day you’re out behind the chip shop with your knickers yo-yoing up and down, servicing strangers for the price of a pack of fags. Not helping society much that way, are you?”
Elspeth rebelled. “Will you two stop blabbing on about camel toes! I would like to enjoy my chicken piccata in peace.”
So much for the consolation of philosophy.
I looked over at a pile of apparently blank CDs on a seat beside me. “Neal, for fuck’s sake, who the hell uses CDs these days?”
“Oh, them. They’re bootleg Harry Potter movies I promised someone in LA I’d take to his friend in Kiribati.” Neal threw a Sharpie my way. “Do me a favour, Ray, and write ‘Harry Potter’ on them so they don’t end up in the rubbish.”
“Will do, mate.”
Sharpie was the first permanent ink pen-style marker, launched in 1964 by the Sanford Ink Company. In 1992, Sharpie was acquired by Newell Rubbermaid. The Sharpie created an entirely new category: a rigid felt-tip with minor give to allow for characterfullness. There’s something fun about Sharpies that’s really hard to articulate. T
hey are to handwriting what Play-Doh is to sculpting.
Bonriki International Airport is the only international airport in Kiribati and serves as the main gateway to the country. It is located in the capital, South Tarawa, a group of islets in the atoll of Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands.
AWK to TRW = 8 h, 30 m
27
Stuart Greene.
What a total fucking dick.
But let me back up a bit.
We finally landed in Kiribati in the fiery coral dawn. Christ, could these people have found a place on earth more remote? Excuse me, but were the Kerguelen Islands all booked up? Was Pitcairn Island shut down for an extended religious holiday? Try Google-Mapping this place; it’s a dogfart.
On a practical level, since cartwheeling over the atomic blast, I’d been down to a borrowed pair of sailor pants. Before we landed, Neal gave me one of Arnaud du Puis’s linen outfits.
“Ooh,” cooed Elspeth after I changed, “you’re dressed just like Ewan McGregor.” She brushed some dust off the lapel.
Neal added, “And your lobster-like sunburn from our afternoon beerfest gives you a previously missing outdoorsy air. We should go drunk-driving around Wake Island a lot more.”
Wake Island had left me a bit tender red on the scalp and face. Still, standing on the Bonriki tarmac, I was feeling pretty darn good about myself, and felt even better when I spotted Sarah, with a clipboard, overseeing some staffers while something was being unloaded from an aging prop plane. She smiled and waved at me, and my heart swooned. And then a pickup truck approached and came to a stop. Stuart got out of the passenger seat. He looked at me and said, “Oh, great. It’s you.”
“Hello, Stuart.”
“Jesus, you look like Rock Hudson with late-stage AIDS. What the fuck happened to you since Hawaii?”
“Well—”
“Like I could care. Which one of you is Neal?”
“That’s me.” Neal raised a hand.
“You’ve got some Harry Potter CDs for me.”
Worst. Person. Ever. Page 11