Barbie was my Sophia Loren and Raquel Welch combo hands down. I first saw her across the tables at the Burleigh Heads tavern beer garden in 1985 at Schoolies Week. This is the Australian Spring Break equivalent, except that it is held at the end of the education year not at some random point in March when everyone in the country is sick to death of winter. In the USA there are several destinations to find Spring Break shenanigans; South Padre Island, TX; Miami, FL; Colorado ski resorts; Cancun and the Mexican Riviera; or the Dominican Republic. In Australia there is only one spot for Schoolies week, the Gold Coast. A strip of high rise concrete jungle looming over stretches of white sands in South-East Queensland. Extending from the spit at Southport to Snapper Rocks at the end of Coolangatta Beach.
Schoolies is a coming of age event. Seventeen-year-old high school students become adults. While 18 to 22-year-old university students revert back to being kids. Friendships forged in the fires of morning assembly are solidified over a celebratory beer at the Broadbeach tavern. For many, it is their first tentative steps into a brave new world. Emotions run high. The memories last a lifetime. I can't remember any grades from my senior year, but I recall every broken item we couldn't fix in the apartment that me and 18 mates stayed in during Schoolies that lead to our security deposit being forfeited.
Barbie and I danced around my sheltered feelings for her for the better part of a decade. In the same way a stray tabby stalks a pigeon that doesn't fly away but continues to prance around the backyard. Despite being surrounded by an army of suitors she remained single for the most part. During this time, she became one of my closest friends and a true confidant. Eventually, it was the overwhelming pull of my wanderlust that kept us physically separated by thousands of miles. In any times of loneliness and despair it would be her that I called for reassurance that I meant something to somebody back home. She was always there. Responsive, unhurried, compassionate. Is it any wonder that embers of attraction stoked firmly over the years into a blast furnace?
It was a near tragedy that finally brought us together.
One fateful day on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, California my life is almost terminated. A head on collision with a landscaping truck, followed by a rear ending by a sedan, leaves me clinging for life in a Los Angeles intensive care. Along with other structural injuries the restriction of the seat belt ruptures my intestine. My stomach wound is left open for 23 days and I am fed by drip. I am not allowed to eat solid food for 29 days. A month of hospitalization returns me sufficient strength to have my little sister haul me onto a QANTAS flight across the Pacific to get home. Pre-arrival in Sydney I am beset with stomach pains. The medico at Sydney airport clears me to continue onto Brisbane. The trip north starts with me using an air sickness bag for the first time in my life while the plane is still parked at the gate. The flight is thankfully short. I last an hour on the ground in Brisbane before I am bundled out of my sister's house and driven to the closest Emergency Room. I require another emergency operation to untangle scar tissue obstructing my bowels.
The worst thing about stomach surgery has nothing to do with being cut open. It is to do with the tube that must go into your stomach to drain the acid. I was in a coma when they inserted the one in L.A., so I never felt a thing. At the Brisbane Mater I am wide awake. The preferred orifice for access is not the mouth it is the nostril. Years from now some bright Medical student may be brave enough to question, why is the tube inserted into the nose rather than the mouth? The professor may respond, 'you know, that is brilliant we didn't think of that.' Or he may say, 'we do it through the nostril because it is shit loads more uncomfortable for the patient.' All that I know is I have never felt anything as deeply unpleasant as the doctor inserting a garden hose down my nose then asking me to swallow at the same time as it scrapes the back of my throat. It is that distressing that I would have preferred access the long way via my anus.
To make the tube slide down the esophagus the doctor liberally covers it with more lubricating jelly than Ron Jeremy used in his entire adult film career. Most of that lubrication gets trapped in my nasal cavity with the initial insertion, to be sneezed out at an inopportune time in the future. After surgery the tube acts as a drain to remove unsightly dark stomach juice that can leak from a stitched-up intestine and cause an infection. The liquid is collected into a clear plastic jar that sits near the patient's head. This allows visitors to see how foul the contents of my stomach are. Once my alimentary canal is sufficiently healed the action of peristalsis will recommence. This is the muscular contraction along the length of the small intestine. The telltale sign to know it is happening is the release of gas through the rectum. A patient can then have the tube removed and resume eating. After 29 days I am famished. I have lost 50 pounds, a quarter of my body weight. All without doing a scrap of exercise. The diet of the future - intravenous drip nourishment.
Three days after the operation in Brisbane my parents are sitting beside my bed when the curtain is drawn back by Barbie! Oh my god, did I die and go to heaven? I don't know what to do but I am feeling stoked. How I am supposed to react if Sophia Loren suddenly stopped shooting a commercial to wander over to me standing in the peanut gallery and say, g'day. I quickly shoo my parents out of the room and tell them to instruct the nurses, 'no one is to disturb me for any reason. If the monitor shows my pulse stops, then ignore it.'
Barbie sits down. 'How are you feeling?'
How am I feeling? Like the limousine starts backing out of the drive then Alice jumps out screaming, 'I can't leave, I love him.' That is how I feel. We talk for half an hour catching up on our lives over the last five years. She laughs, recounting the time that I call her drunk from the States three consecutive nights over one weekend. She was away so her Dad kept answering the phone. He told her that I always had no recollection of calling the day before. I had no recollection of ever calling. A spectacular accomplishment in the annals of drunk dialing stupidity.
'You were always so nice,' she states and reaches out to hold my hand. Oh my god, it is really happening. Life has finally stopped being a shit show and come good. This is a moment I have waited years for. A fairy tale ending to the hardships I have endured. It was if in the end of the movie Casablanca, Ingrid Bergman abruptly decides to leave her wealthy Czech git of a husband to shack up with the impoverished Humphrey Bogart and work as a waitress in his dive bar.
However, her unanticipated move catches me by surprise. There is a reflexive tightening of all the muscles as my heart rate shoots into the low 170s. Before I can stop myself, I pass a significant amount of gas out my arse. The unapproving surprise registers clearly on Barbie's face. That is bad. There might have been a chance to recover from this if I graciously apologize. Perhaps excuse the horrendous event away as the result of an unfortunate side effect from the medication that is keeping my life hanging on by a thread. But, I am thrilled. I have a smile from ear to ear. 'You little ripper. Been waiting for that for days!' I exclaim.
Barbie's eyes spring wider at my comment. She lets go of my hand and stands up. 'You get to feeling better okay, Simon,' she says, then quickly walks out. Silence pervades the room, much like the smell. Why did the Universe choose that exact instance to screw with me? The happiest and saddest day of my life. To this day I regret that fart and I don't regret many of them. I reach for the intercom, 'nurse, I passed gas. Can I get something to eat please?' They don't have pills to heal a broken heart. If they did, the likely prominent side effect would be erectile dysfunction.
This is not the only time in my life that I end up in a hospital after a plane flight. I did it so well the first bloody time I just had to take another shot at it.
Having a shocker
Landing at Narita Airport, Tokyo feels about as close to crash landing in the middle of the ocean as I want to get. Flying from the USA to Japan the last sight of land is the west coast of California then miles of open ocean capped off by a sudden descent into Narita. Off course, the pilot is telling the plane ove
r the intercom that we are coming in to land, but the only views afforded to anyone seated in the middle rows is that they plane is coming down into the ocean. We don't have the benefit of being able to look forward to spy Japan right in front of us. I think the pilot must have miscalculated his descent and come down way too fast, way too early. It happens. Air New Zealand flight TE901 into Mt. Erebus for example. The plane is flying the last ten kilometers barely skimming the tops of the waves. It is rather disconcerting to be staring over the heads of your fellow passengers and all that is visible is miles of Pacific Ocean, yet the plane seems only ten feet off the surface. Then we still have another ten miles over land to cover to reach the landing strip. Good thing the Japanese farmers tending to their fields are short.
Most coastal airport approaches after a tortuous trans Pacific flight allow for a slight banking of the wings for passengers to get a sense of the landmass they are headed to. Brisbane and LAX have islands off the coast to give travelers an early feeling of land ho. Even though their tarmacs both start a mere 100 meters inland. Planes coming in to the famed Princess Juliana Airport on St. Maarten, where Airbuses land directly over the top of sunbathing tourists lying on Maho Beach, are at least aware they are over the Caribbean. The Eastern ocean approach into Tokyo airport has nothing to indicate it is coming up. Not even an oyster diving flotilla parked a few hundred meters off shore. The sudden approach of the ocean without any sense that there is land around has everyone scrambling to read their inflight safety guide, because no one paid any attention during the safety presentation before take-off. People pay more attention to Steven Seagal than they do to that thing.
Pilots make mistakes, I realize that. But the feeling we undershoot the airport by 20 miles is a bit much, even if the pilot is drunk. They have autopilot. The Japanese are noted for their enthusiasm for high efficiency and space is at a premium in the land of the rising sun. So, they try and get their planes on the tarmac in the first 10 centimeters of the asphalt. An old girlfriend's brother was on a British Airways flight in 1989 that almost crashed into a Heathrow hotel after the pilot mistook the lights of a nearby motorway to be the landing lights of the runway. It is one of the dangers of getting from A to B on an airplane. If I want to travel I have to be prepared to not inflate my safety life vest till after I have left the plane by making my way to the closest exit. Which may be behind me. There, nailed it.
I have come to Japan to fulfill a life ling dream. Not to come to the land of the rising sun, but to get a cheap international flight by acting as a courier for a global freight company. This is one component of the holy trinity of bucket priced travel. Sleeping in an airport and donating at an Italian sperm bank to earn $50 for a week's worth of food are the others. You pretend like you are shocked but we all know this is an ugly reality when travelling on the cheap. We shouldn't shy away from the hard truths. If someone considers a Neapolitan pizza and a fresh macchiato are worth ten minutes of their time, who are we to judge?
I am knocking off the second of the holy trinity. Courier flight discounts are better than stand by, better than a seat on a budget airline. For 20% of the regular cost of a seat I have the rest of my reservation subsidized by the freight company. I simply must use my checked baggage allowance to transport time sensitive documents. Not everyone is aware of this little loophole to save some serious money. I have always wanted to travel this way, so I could stand by the aft cabin toilets and engage my fellow passengers in conversation regarding the price they paid for their tickets.
'How much did you pay for your fare?'
Fellow traveler. 'Eight hundred dollars. Why?'
'Oh, I paid less than a third of that.'
I am a walking advertisement for discount travel websites long before the internet really gets into high gear. No one ever has a problem when they watch commercials of people proudly claiming they saved $20 on a hotel reservation using Hotels.com. But, most people don't react the same way when confronted with the fact they got screwed by overpaying on their airlines tickets while waiting to take a midflight dump. I find this odd. Don't people like knowing how to save money? I challenge you. Is there anything in life more rewarding than knowing that you paid the least amount of money for a flight than anyone else on the plane? Anything? It is the poor man's lottery jackpot. You take that win to the grave my friends. I still get a shot of adrenaline and a hard on every time I receive an email from a travel booking site telling me that a fare I purchased two months ago has gone up in price.
I walk off the plane with an extra bounce in my step. Now what does Japan has to offer? First step is to figure out the complexities of getting to my mate's apartment in Ichigaya. Nigel and I have been mates since high school. We were in the same class together, played on the same rugby team and, just like an episode of Seinfeld, we had a rivalry regarding who was the fastest sprinter. Nigel was considered by all to be the slowest on the team. He was given the mantle rather unfairly. It wasn't as if we had a competition to empirically measure everyone's time over 40 meters. It was done, as most things are done when boys are seventeen, subjectively. Nigel was known to sneak a cigarette every now and again and that was enough to have him branded as a Clydesdale. See what happens to you when you smoke kids? Your mates turn on you.
Then one day at practice I couldn't run Nigel down while playing touch and aspersions of doubt regarding the claim he was the slowest suddenly abounded. To put the matter to rest we were scheduled to have a race. But I succeeded in continuously having it put off. Primarily due to the fact I knew I was going to be beaten. I wanted to hold onto my lofty position as second slowest for as long as I could. Eventually we had the race. I lost. In fact, I didn't even finish. I was laughing so hard knowing that unless my team recruited a one-legged, blind kid with cerebral palsy I was never going to find my way off the bottom rung. That is okay. Emphysema will one day catch up with Nigel and I'll be waiting to issue a rechallenge.
Having a shocker - part 2
Nigel had sent me an email with a step by step guide to get to his place. Tokyo is not like other cities I have been to. You can't walk outside the airport, hail a cab, and say take me to so and so. No. Not even close. For a start, the taxi fee will bankrupt you. In Japan it costs something like $200 for the driver to turn the meter on. Nigel, apart from being barely slightly faster than me, is also barely slightly cheaper than I am. So, when I asked him for directions I trusted that he knew the least expensive way to get from Narita Airport to his front door without me spending one extra yen. Second point is that Japan doesn't use addresses the way we use them in the western hemisphere. Nigel has sent me a map to show the location of his apartment building. Not a street name and a building number but a treasure map of the immediate area around the local train station I need to get to, with his building marked with a cross. He could have just been screwing with me. Hopefully he knows me well enough to understand I wouldn't care but it will make life hell for the taxi driver taking me from the local train station.
First thing I need to do is get on the Sky Access Express to Shinjuku. This is not the absolute cheapest train, but I will explain that in a moment. This one gets me to Tokyo within an hour and then I connect to a local subway for a few stops to Ichigaya station. Then, according to the map, I must leave the subway via the correct exit to bring me out beside a clearly marked 7-11 convenience store. From there I hail a cab to take me the last kilometer. I probably could have hoofed it from Ichigaya station, but the genius of Nigel is that all the descriptions on the map are written in Japanese. I have no idea what building he is telling me to look for. I plan on just shoving the paper in front of the cab driver and saying in my best Japanese, 'there you go mate. Take me to the X!'
There are three options for trains from the airport to the city. Even the fastest option still takes over half an hour travelling at the speed of sound. Narita is so far away that it could be in another time zone. The slowest train is the Kensei Limited Express, which also makes it the cheapest. This option rem
inds me too much of the history between Nigel and me. So, I chose the second slowest. It only costs a dollar fifty more and I can just steal that from Nigel 'The Flash' with any money I find between the cushions on his sofa. The problem is that the Sky Access Express has a name close enough to the more expensive Skyliner that I am worried that the ticket seller won't clearly understand me with my Australian accent. The Skyliner doesn't stop at the station I need to transfer to the local line, so if I bugger this up I will be wandering around the middle of downtown Tokyo at midnight with my little treasure map harassing passersby for directions.
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