by Paul Carr
Position three: the straddle
The only two drawbacks with hammock working are 1) after a while your attention can start to drift, and 2) after a couple of beers, dizziness becomes a factor. Both of these problems are solved with the straddle. As the name suggests, the straddle involves sitting up in the hammock, with your legs either side, planted firmly on the floor. This stops the hammock swinging, curing the dizziness, but also forces you to sit up straight, aiding concentration. When I showed it to Robert, he imagined it probably had long-term benefits for posture, but that was just a theory. He’s not a doctor.
On this particular day, I’d opted for the basic yogi, which, as the sun had grown warmer, had inevitably led to the snooze. A snooze interrupted by the gentle sound of goats being herded to their doom, and now Robert – talking loudly on his phone.
‘With all due respect, Alan, I just don’t think that’s a reasonable price for an ornamental goose lamp. Frankly, I’m not sure there is a reasonable price for an ornamental goose lamp.’
It was a slightly odd argument to wake up to, made no less odd by the fact that Robert had been waiting to have it for the past twelve months.
The argument had been inevitable, really, since the day, back in 2007, when Rob had first moved into his penthouse apartment just off Leicester Square. Along with its roof-top Jacuzzi, the apartment also had a bar, a dance floor and a cinema. An incredible place to live, but also much too large for Robert to occupy on his own. Most people would have looked for somewhere smaller. Not Robert. Instead, he’d decided to occupy just one small bedroom and turn the rest of the flat into a twenty-four-hour members’ (read: drinking) club for young entrepreneurs and assorted hangers-on. In a nod to its location next to a Chinese restaurant, he gave it the amusing – but borderline racist – name Mr Rong’s. So successful was the endeavour that, by halfway into the first year of the lease, the Financial Times had run a lengthy profile of Robert and his party flat – they were the ones who called him ‘the Hugh Hefner of London’ – Channel 4 News had sent round a camera crew and a documentary maker had begun making a film about the people who worked and played there. Of course, running a nightclub out of a private home broke about a dozen laws, as well as being a massive breach of the terms of Robert’s lease. And yet, remarkably, he’d got away with it for a whole year, largely because no one in the press thought to check who actually owned the place.
As one of Scotland’s most gifted comedy actors, Alan Cumming has played more than fifty film roles including Boris in GoldenEye, Piers in Spice World and Fegan Floop in Spy Kids. He’s won both a Tony and an Olivier for his stage work in the West End and on Broadway. He’s written a novel, and created his own fragrance and range of toiletries with names like – and this is possibly his finest work–‘Cumming All Over’ (a body wash) and ‘Cumming In A Bar’ (soap). Oh, and he has an OBE.
And yet, in common with an entire generation of twenty-and thirty-somethings, there’s only one thing I think of when I hear the name Alan Cumming. And that’s his portrayal of the über-camp flight attendant Sebastian Flight in the nineties sitcom The High Life. Specifically, his catchphrase ‘Oh deary me’. It’s hard not to feel sorry for the man.
But his inability to escape a role he played for six episodes of a sitcom in the nineties is not why I feel sorry for Alan Cumming. I feel sorry for him because Robert, me and about two hundred other drunks spent an entire year systematically trashing his flat just off Leicester Square.
It was vital that none of the press that Rong’s attracted mentioned Cumming’s name. If a journalist realised there was a celebrity angle – no matter how tenuous – then it was bound to show up on the Internet and Rong’s would be busted, as would Robert’s fivefigure deposit. I was one of only three or four people trusted with safeguarding the owner’s identity, which was trickier than you might think given that we kept finding cupboards full of ‘Cumming All Over’ body wash around the place.*
Now, though, safe at the top of a mountain in Spain, Robert didn’t care. Once he decided to become the second member of the Kings of the Road Club he’d sent an email to Cumming’s office saying that he wasn’t renewing his lease then he’d put the keys in the post and left the country. We joked that putting your keys in the post and leaving the country was the application – and acceptance – process for the club. A few weeks later, all being well, your deposit would land back in your bank account – neatly offsetting your first month or two of travel – and you’d be free. Or at least that was the theory.
Unfortunately for Robert, and his deposit, there was still the matter of an ornamental goose lamp.
902
‘Who was that?’ I asked, once he’d finished on the phone. It was apparent that he had not been the one to hang up.
‘Alan Cumming.’
‘Oh deary me.’
Robert gave me a summary of the conversation. Apparently, when Cumming had received Robert’s letter, he’d sent a letting agent around to the flat to see if there was anything that needed fixing before he returned the deposit. A broken light bulb or two, maybe some scratches to the paintwork. What the agent had in fact discovered was the aftermath of a 365-day party. The Jacuzzi needed rebuilding, almost completely, as did the entire wooden floor – marked as it was with the holes of a thousand stiletto heels. The list of things that were broken or missing went on and on, ending finally with a missing ornamental goose lamp.
‘So that was him calling to say you weren’t getting your deposit back then?’
‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘that was him calling to say I’m not getting my deposit back and I owe him an additional twelve fucking grand.’
‘You’re kidding me.’
‘I wish I were – he’s sending me a list of missing things.’
For the rest of the afternoon Robert sat in the hot tub, his laptop perched on the side, reading items off the list Cumming had sent through.
‘Do you even remember seeing an ornamental goose lamp?’
‘No, Robert, I don’t recall seeing an ornamental goose lamp.’ Ornamental goose lamp was one of those phrases – like ‘pineapple chunks’– that became more ridiculous the more you said it.
‘Shit – someone must have stolen it on opening night. Wait, what the hell is a ‘brushed steel ornamental carrier bag’?’
‘I have no idea. Are you going to pay for all of this stuff?’
‘I don’t know.’ He considered the question for a moment, making it clear he thought he had a choice. ‘I might. Or I might just spend a hundred quid on a new phone. What’s he going to do? Come looking for me up a mountain?’
He closed the lid of his laptop, laid it down on the patio and sank down into the hot tub.
‘You’re right,’ he said, ‘being a nomad does give you more options.’
903
I took another swig of my beer and figured I should probably get back to ‘work’. The previous day, I’d received a call from Rebecca Lewis*, courtesy of my publishers, Weidenfeld & Nicolson. The fact that I was being assigned a publicity manager was just about the best news my ego had ever heard, and for the next twenty-four hours I’d been sure to drop it into every conversation I’d had. ‘Oh, I’ll have to call you back, I think that might be my publicity manager on the other line.’
The truth is that Rebecca wasn’t just my publicity manager, but the publicity manager for most of W&N’s authors, including ones that were actually popular and successful. It was into this deep well of legitimate talent that Rebecca would dip to try to find some famous – or at least recognisable – name to write a promotional quote for the front of the book. Also, once we got nearer to the day of publication, it would be her job to try to get it reviewed in newspapers and to get me on to Radio 4 programmes to pretend I knew what I was talking about.
Until then, though, I was basically on my own. Rebecca was relying on me to use my skills at online self-promotion to get people excited about the prospect of my book.
During our conversat
ions we’d realised that I had a couple of advantages in this area not enjoyed by other first-time authors. For a start, I knew my way around the Internet. I had a blog – which Rebecca had been reading, leading her to characterise my time in Spain, quite unfairly, as ‘a holiday’. I also knew how to use things like Facebook and YouTube and even Twitter to build hype. Rebecca hadn’t heard of Twitter, something I made her feel bad about, even though I’d only discovered it myself a few months earlier. Making people feel bad for not knowing things is something Internet experts are very good at.†
The second advantage I had was that Bringing Nothing to the Party was a memoir, which meant that, to promote the book, all I really had to do was to draw as much attention to myself as possible.
Between her office in London, and my equally connected one in a Spanish hammock, Rebecca and I formulated a plan. Since South by Southwest, traffic to my blog had continued to grow, with a few thousand people a day following my travels, particularly when I got drunk and did something stupid. With Rebecca’s blessing, I would spend my time in Spain expanding the blog into a fully-fledged promotional website, complete with details of the book, extracts, interviews with key people featured in it (starting with Robert, of course). I’d also make sure that I wrote something new for the blog each day in the hope that more posts meant more visitors, which meant more potential book buyers.
To sweeten the deal – as if sitting in a Spanish hammock writing about myself wasn’t a sweet enough deal already – Rebecca agreed that W&N would release the final chunk of my book advance, normally due on publication, a few months early to pay for my time while I worked on the site.
When I got off the phone I couldn’t stop laughing. For the next couple of months, I was being paid to sit in a hammock at the top of a mountain, building a website about myself and writing daily blog posts about my own brilliant adventures. For an egotist, this was the dream gig.
For the next few months, getting drunk and doing stupid things would no longer be a hobby, a distraction from my day job. It would be my day job. My decision in Vegas was completely vindicated. It was possible to be a professional drunk, if you were prepared to put in the hours.
I was more than prepared.
904
Of course, having brilliant adventures in Vegas is easy. Having brilliant adventures in Laguna Beach is pretty straightforward too. Even on a train between Dallas and Chicago, you can meet enough interesting people to inspire half a dozen blog posts. But being up a mountain in Spain poses real logistical problems, from a brilliant adventure standpoint. For a start neither Robert nor I spoke Spanish. We hadn’t really appreciated how much of a drawback this would be: like most Brits, we’d grown up with package holidays to the Costa del Sol where every barman spoke perfect English and you were never more than ten feet from an expat bar called Knockers. In the Valle de Abdajalis, we couldn’t find a single English speaker; not in any of the bars, not in the one local restaurant and not in the shops.
I’d downloaded a beginner’s guide to Spanish from the Internet and was embarrassing myself daily. On the first night, I’d ordered what I thought was a bottle of house white wine – ‘vino blanco de la casa, por favor’. Unfortunately, what the bartender actually heard me say was ‘fino blanco de la casa’ and after ten minutes of shuffling around in a dusty storeroom he emerged with what he thought I wanted. Robert and I had forced down almost the entire revolting bottle before we realised we were drinking very dry white sherry.
Robert had taken a different approach to overcoming the language barrier, relying on a combination of shouting in English and rudimentary hand gestures. His way of ordering five slices of ham in the local shop was to point at the ham, hold up five fingers and then make a chopping motion with his other hand. I mocked him for his laziness and ignorance until he pointed out that his ignorance had actually resulted in him obtaining five slices of ham, whereas my ‘Spanish’ had ended with us drinking a bottle of white sherry.
Our inability to meet the locals and discover the first thing about them meant that Robert and I had spent much of our first week enjoying our own company, inventing a succession of ridiculous games to fill the time between drinking and sleeping.*
Most of the games had brilliantly cryptic titles, including my two favourites – ‘Water-balloon Dodgeball’ and ‘Ten Can Orange Bowling’.
The former was the result of a drive to the nearby town of Alora where we found a small kiosk selling ice cream and water-balloons. The latter was ten-pin bowling using empty cans and some oranges which we managed to cajole out of a kindly local farmer. Each game lasts for five rounds, or until the last orange has been smashed to Tropicana.
Then there was ‘Kate Nash or not Kate Nash’ – a game where players listen to short (five-or six-second) clips from my iTunes library and have to determine whether the singer is London-based singer-songwriter Kate Nash or not Kate Nash. Robert was the undisputed champion of this, having zipped through Kate Nash, Remi Nicole, Kate Nash, Laura Marling, Kate Nash and Kate Nash before being tripped up by Colbie Caillat. A bonus round involving a Victoria Wood clip took him a good minute and a half of internal debate.
There was ‘Roof Ball’ – a game involving getting a ball stuck on a roof. That was quite a short game.
Finally there was ‘Road Frisbee’: All of the fun of Frisbee, all of the excitement of being hit by a car coming around a blind corner at high speed.
The games were fun, for sure, but as you will no doubt testify, they don’t make for fascinating reading. No, if I wanted to fulfil my obligations to Rebecca, I knew I had to accept reality, no matter how unpleasant. My only option was to spend every single day getting absolutely blind drunk in one of the two local bars – Alejo’s and Carpe Diem – in the hope that I would inevitably end up doing something stupid enough to write about.
The plan began well. On the first night Robert and I decided to see if we could drink so many beers that the empties would cover an entire table in Alejo’s bar. Even with the relatively strong euro, bottles of San Miguel were still less than 60p each and by 3p.m. we’d drunk at least a dozen each. At this point Alejo realised that we were likely to be his best customers that week and so started offering us even more beers on the house. For less than twenty-five quid, between us we covered an entire table with beer bottles. It was only then that we remembered that the bar was halfway down the mountain, and our villa was right at the top. An amusing blog post about mud and fields and goats and a frighteningly deep leg wound soon followed.
Another night we decided to try our luck with the local women. And by local women, I mean the only two twenty-something-year-olds in the entire village. Every other woman was either under sixteen or over sixty. ‘But don’t forget the age of consent is only fourteen here,’ said Rob. He was joking. I hope.
Our efforts with the twenty-somethings were relatively unsuccessful. Robert wisely gave up after a couple of minutes when he realised that there was no hand gesture for ‘if I told you you had a beautiful body would you hold it against me?’ Or, rather, no hand gesture that wouldn’t get him shot by an angry farmer dad. I pressed on, though, realising that I was at least fluent in the language of booze. Buying girls a drink is the same in any language, right? Unfortunately the girls had figured out another language that was universal: they knew the lyrics to hundreds of English pop songs and were able to repurpose them to explain their lack of enthusiasm for going up a mountain with a drunk Brit. ‘Get back,’ said the first girl, while the second sang the lyrics of Babylon Zoo’s ‘Spaceman’, to indicate that she wanted space, man. I had to admit, it was a rather neat pun.
The most exciting drunken adventure, though, came at the end of our second week, when Robert’s business partner Scott flew out to join us. The three of us spent an enjoyable afternoon getting to grips with the villa’s barbecue, thanking our lucky stars that there were no women to be amused by how inept we were at creating fire and grilling meat. Then we headed down to Alejo’s where Robert had becom
e adept at ordering vodka and Red Bull by doing a passable impression of a drunken man pretending to be a bull.
Through trial and error, we’d realised that there were no actual licensing laws in Valle de Abdajalis. As long as we were happy spending our money, Alejo was happy to serve us. Generally we’d made it to about three in the morning before stumbling back up the mountain, but tonight Scott decided we should do a proper test – how late could we continue drinking until Alejo insisted we call it a night? You could tell Scott was a scientist.
The experiment – which was actually closer to a battle of wills – began just before 9 p.m., and by 3 a.m. we were trashed. Beers had become mixed spirits, which had become straight spirits, which had become shots. I was wearing a cowboy hat and Scott was occupied at the far end of the bar helping Alejo cut a wooden butternut squash in half with a hacksaw, for some reason. Robert had long moved on from vodka Red Bulls but was still doing his drunk bull impression, just for fun.
‘I’m going to call it a night,’ Robert slurred, after a few more rounds. ‘I can’t walk.’
‘Moo …’ he added.
‘That’s not the point,’ I replied as best I could. ‘The point is we’re experimenting.’ The sound that came out of my mouth in no way resembled the word ‘experimenting’. There was no convincing Robert of the importance of the experiment – him not being a scientist, and all – and so he headed off on his own, back up the mountain.
And then there were two – well, three – Scott, me and Alejo, who had left Scott to finish cutting the wooden squash and was now rummaging about under the bar. He emerged with a bottle of some kind of green liquid. It looked like toilet cleaner. Looking back now, there’s a very good chance it was toilet cleaner.