That's My Bix!

At O’Hell, we stand outside for a moment to catch our breath before setting into motion the wild unstable ride of what will in stories be referred to as Once When We Went To London. We are soon joined by a group of kids, two boys and two girls conforming to the current individualistic trend with many tats and piercings… I call them kids in my head, but then they excitedly tell us that they’ve just been guests on the Jerry Spring show-“For Reals!”-because the one boy is married to the one girl but engaged to the other girl who is married to the other boy and his wife is pregnant with his fiancée’s husband’s baby. They smoke excitedly, borrowing Esteban’s silver Zippo, and then reenact in full detail each of the fights they had been encouraged to perform for the cameras. One of the boys pulls up his shirt to show us exactly where Steve The Bodyguard grappled him under the arm, smearing a red friction strawberry under his armpit, which has only a few filaments of hair. The trip has just begun and already, strangers are showing us their armpits. For Reals.

The plane is full. We don’t sleep. I hate everyone around me. I hate everyone. I want to hit them. Everyone. We land in London, where today has been replaced by tomorrow. We blink into a hazy gray future. Outside at the taxi stand, it is like we have just walked into “A Hard Day’s Night” and I expect to see a mod group of teenagers screaming after a group of shaggy boys. Our hotel is a former Vanderbilt enclave, but really it’s just a series of twisty mazy series of moldy smelling hallways. Our room, she is tiny. Lilliputian. Esteban declares that we have arrived in a wee country and our next vacation would be somewhere where things are not so wee. Like Alaska. Or Texas. Then he looks down at my knee and says “Well, maybe not Texas.” Fiji, I correct him. We’ll go to Fiji, where the population is nee wee. Then, because I am very stupid, I exclaim “Bunch of flowers!” in my best Eddie Izzard and Esteban reprimands me for being wrong in the head.

Also, we have twin beds. Horrible uncomfortable twin beds. I call down and explain to the girl at the desk that this is our honeymoon (and technically, it is) and it is cruel and unusual punishment to be paying as much as we are for what is essentially a kid’s bedroom. Or that of Lucy and Ricky Ricardo. However, there is nothing, nothing, nothing anyone can do and they are most apologetic while managing to be not at all apologetic. We soldier through the sleeping arrangements. Our first night of sleep finds countless springs waiting to pierce our tender bits with each movement. The next night, we request duvets and pad the bed with them. Esteban invents long detailed histories of our mattresses, involving jail breaks, Sweeney Todd and the Spanish Inquisition. At night, we giggle in the darkness like roommates, bridging the gap until sleep detangles our fingers.

We take a tour of London from the top of a bus. It weaves through the parks and streets, past J. M. Barrie’s house. “He invented my name.” I tell Esteban, and seconds later, the voice in our earphones tells us with great theatrical flourish that J.M. Barrie invented my name. Across the park, somewhere, the voice tells us, is a statue of one sir Peter Pan, who appeared in the dark of night. I have never seen the Peter Pan statue, not in all the months that I was there the first time, and even now, I crane my head over the rails but do not catch site of that playful Boy Who Never Grew Up.

Together, we wander through museums, shop in food halls amidst strange Britannic delicacies, twisting our way through Churchill’s war cabinet, climb up the Bloody Tower, perch in a private box and watch Shakespeare. Each evening, we try a different cuisine, burning our mouths on Vindaloo, tempting fate with British beef. After dinners, we sit in pubs, sipping pints of dark warm beer and tangy cider and then wander back through rainy streets to our little section of Cromwell street, trip up the marble steps into a mirrored coffin of a lift and then fall into our beds, hoping madly that we won’t be impaled by an angry wire coil.

We discover that there is a mysterious sulfur cloud that is belched from the pipes in our bathroom at random points throughout the day. It is like living with a flatulent bulldog who is unseen, shuffling along under the table until inflicting you with its own version of the Blitz. We learn to keep the bulldog in his crate and the door to the WC closed.

I take Esteban’s hand and pull him through the first floor of the Victoria and Albert museum. Years ago, I spent a quiet afternoon wandering through the Italian Renaissance wing, transfixed by images of the Virgin with her child. Such passion to create. The ability of humans to create an object that serves no purpose other than to show love… it leaves me breathless every time. I search for my favorite piece in this wing… a roughly hewn life-size wooden crucifixion, the gaunt Christ with his eyelids half-parted. Seven years ago, in some weird bit of what might have been synethesia or perhaps some snakeoil brand of religious piety, when I looked up into his luminescent eyes, I heard the sound of ancient church music, some version of a pipe organ accompanied by a chorus of voices singing in Latin. The hair on my arms had stood on end, and I looked around the wing to see if anyone else had heard it, but there was no one. I was alone amidst antiquities, each of them foreboding, as though they too were waiting to speak to the right listener. I looked back up into the eyes… they were glowing, I swear they were lit up somehow? Even though that was impossible and the light in here was more of a yellow, not that bluish purple opally light of his eyes… I heard it again, this time I could discern other instruments… a stringed something and the thin reedy sound of a recorder. Dominus te, benedicta tu in muleribus, et beneictus fructus ventrus tui, Jesus. I looked away and then looked back again, but already the music was fading, a scratchy phonograph being played in a dusty attic, disseminating into distant chatter of tourists.

On this particular afternoon, the museum was filled with people. Loud people. I dragged Esteban once again through the pre-Renaissance wing, hurrying along, always a gallery ahead of him as he lingered to read ever card and look at every single piece of brass. Finally, we came upon the triptychs I remembered, the legions of Virgins carrying their blessed infants in their left arms. But the wooden crucifixion I remembered was not there. A single soulless Christ hung on one wall, eyes closed. The only sound the babble of tourists in countless languages and the grumbling of Esteban that I move too fast, too fast.

This is not the only thing that is different than the last time I wandered London’s streets. I tell Esteban about a pub up the street from St. Paul’s Cathedral, a pub called Ye Old London Town, except that when we get there, it has been replaced by some kind of corporate restaurant catering to gothy tourists with prepackaged gargoyles and clearanced Halloween decorations. We decide to go searching elsewhere for some dinner and end up at a swank establishment in Chelsea, where, with the exchange rate, we eat $40 hamburgers and $4 glasses of water. Afterwards, we take a taxi back to our Edwardian garret. As Esteban is standing on the sidewalk waiting for me to pay our driver, a party mini-coach drives by slowly. A rather drunken reveler is standing in the open door, yelling something, but his drunken Cockney accent is indecipherable. We make out something about footballers and something about “Westminschtah” and the raised end of his garble means that he is asking a question. Esteban shakes his head to indicate that he doesn’t understand, so the reveler repeats his question regarding something footballers something something Westminschtah. Esteban shakes his head again and in glaring American accent says “No clue, man.” This incenses the reveler! “Wot!? Bloody American barstahds!” Esteban, who had four pints of room temperature chocolatey dark draught before dinner, isn’t in the mood, so makes a rather rude gesture involving his crotch that would not be lost in the translation. The reveler is shocked! He is beside himself! The bus is slowly moving even further out of earshot, so he must come up with something brilliant to put this colonist in his place.

Finally, he spits out “George Bush is a fooking wankah!”

It is four minutes before I can stop laughing and get up off the curb and get my change back from the now exasperated driver. The bus has long disappeared down the streets of Kensington, so we are unable to tell him t

hat we completely agree about Dubya being a complete and total wankah. Regardless, he has given us a true gift: from that point forward, everything is a fooking wankah. Everything. The tube is a fooking wankah. The exchange rate is a fooking wankah. The mattresses are a matched pair of fooking wankahs. In one fell swoop, I have br

oken up with “Bunch of Flowers” and “fooking wankah” has become my baby daddy.

We wander through Leicester Square. I am amazed because I remember being here, but the square itself, with its giant Swedish clock and the throngs of tourist friendly food stalls, has flitted from my memory, like a dream ten minutes after waking on American soil. And yet, the second I am there, seeing the form of Charlie Chaplin, the colored lights in the trees, and I remember the details of that past life, the hazy summer afternoons eating banana gelato on the bench, laughing with some German boys, the warm rain falling after a matinee of Les Miserables, my flatmate and I ducking into a patisserie for strawberry tortes and Earl Grey. It was all there, all had been forgotten and then in an instance, stepping out from the wings into the light. It made me giggle. Esteban was giggling himself, but he was giggling at the Swiss clock, which had minutes ago finished its little show, and the tourists who kept staring up at it, mouths agape, waiting for it to do it again. I declare right then that I hate Americans. I hate how loud they are, how brass, how obnoxious. They walk in enormous groups like cattle, they don’t read signs, they view everything like some kind of amusement park, like the Old Church Ride and the Big Government Stuff Spectacular and they expect characters walking around wearing big felt heads with white curly wigs and giant crowns. There should be some kind of sign outside every Big Important English Thing that says Your Country Must Be This Old To Get On This Ride. They are all fooking wankahs. Except, you know, those of us that get it.

I leave Esteban drinking at a pub and go to Evensong at St. Paul’s. I have to fight my way through tourists who are all looking in every other direction but at the beautiful service in progress. The voices are incredible, threatening to burst through the marble halls and gilded tile ceilings. Midway through the service, I get overcome by the beauty of the music and my eyes start to well up. Then I feel ridiculous, a poseur tourist with a religion only for holidays. In the last decade, I’ve attended regular services at St. Paul’s Cathedral more than any other place of worship. I am not Anglican. I am only barely Lutheran. Also, I find all of the gold and money spent within distasteful. I’m not sure what it proves, to spend so much money on gilding a place of worship while being a bastard to friends and family and cutting proverbial throats to make a shilling? Is it possible to buy a first class ticket to heaven? Does religion only count when there are beautiful expensive things?

And yet, these voices make swirling patterns in the empty space of God above me. The basses and tenors pulse along with the airy sopranos, each syllable becoming a painting, each note washing color in the current of sound. Soon the program in my hand is covered in inky splotches, and even still, I cannot help myself. I know that no matter what I do, I won’t be able to explain this to anyone, much like I am embarrassed when I lose control listening to Ave Maria or Mozart’s Requiem. It’s not so much my own belief that moves me but rather the strength of their love. That anyone could feel so strong and be moved to create such beauty. I weave my way out of St. Paul’s and stop at a Marks & Spencer, purchasing a small packet of grapes and some white nectarines, then wander down the hill, popping perfectly turgid parcels of fruit into my mouth and feeling them explode as sweetness against my throat. This is beauty, right here. This is holy perfection.

Esteban keeps making me laugh. Each and every day, almost every hour, I am amazed that he is so completely funny and brilliant. We should have taken a honeymoon years ago. Hell, we should go on honeymoon every damn year from now until forever. Late one night, after giggling across the great divide between our twin beds/torture racks, we both sigh, which is the sign that we’re about to fall asleep, and then Esteban whispers, “Isn’t ‘fucking wanker’ an oxymoron? I mean, if you’re a wanker, you’re a habitual masterbater, and if you’re a fucker, then you’re, you know, getting something something? So how does ‘fucking wanker’ even make sense?” Which makes us laugh again. Drunken Westminschtah guy… we salute you.

I teach Esteban to read Tube maps and soon the names of the lines are tumbling from his mouth. Our vowels start to get softer, our accents less pronounced. I can feel words growing form inside my mouth, making round jaw breakers that I must speak around. My brain voice starts to sound out long ahs, short ohs, gentle els and lahs. We wander through Portobello Road market, Covent Garden, and Camden Town (which Esteban renames Bong Water Market). We watch pigeons argue for discarded cigarette butts (“Don’t go for that… it’s bad for your health.” “Weet, admonishing the pigeons is really a lost cause.” “Well, it’s not like they can read the warning labels.”) and get chills as the blustery wind blows through our clothes. I stop in each candy store, looking for new chocolates to try. Every night, we sit cross-legged on our respective beds, watching weird shows on the four English-speaking non-static channels and use really bad English accents to make up names for new British sitcoms (“Brumbly, Grumbly and Snout!” “52 Uses for a Cold Pot of Porridge!” “Cocksmiths!” “That’s a town, not a show.” “It totally needs to be a show! It should be a wakka chicka wakka chicka kind of show!”) and chomp on many chocolate bars, all of which easily trump the flavored sweetened wax we call chocolate here in the colonies. Esteban discovers that he also likes Hobnobs. This is a very disturbing development. Finally, I tire of carting back heavy bags of chocolate to have them summarily feasted upon in the evening and declare, “There will be no more munching on my chocolate!” We seal the deal by devouring four different Cadbury bars and one big Lindt something crunchy something.

On our last evening in England, Esteban releases me to go to the theatre, as he does not like musicals, does not like opera, does not like sitting in wee theatre chairs with no leg room. I wander up cobbled streets, through back alleys, down Jermyn and up Haymarket, to sit in the first row first balcony and indulge in one of my guiltiest pleasures. Afterwards, I wander back up to the tube. Esteban recommended that I should take a black taxi back to the hotel and avoid scary late night tube riders, but I am enjoying myself too much, trying to soak up every tiny bit of London I can before we fly out in twelve hours. I decide to walk up to the next tube, just so that I can enjoy sounds of traffic on water-covered cobble, the smell of wet Macintoshes and the sound of Brits shaking out their brellies. The moon is a fingernail sliver above Piccadilly. In the distance, there is a low peal of church bells, chiming eleven times through a light fog.

It is then that I remember a dream I had once about walking on a night just like this one, through a deep fog, until I found a statue garden in a church courtyard. In it, the statue of Peter Pan and at the hour of eleven thirty on a specific day, the statues would come to life. In my dream, I wanted to find out if it was true, so I sat myself down on a cold stone bench and waited. And waited.

And then finally, eleven thirty came and went and nothing happened.

But for whatever reason, (because in retellings of dreams, it is imperative to use some variation of the phrase “for no reason whatsoever”), I stayed in the courtyard until midnight, and a little before then, the statues began to shake off their slumber, knock the pigeon droppings from their shoulders, step down from their pedestals and walk stiffly about. And when I got over the astonishment of stone moving on its own, I looked up and there was Peter, staring down at me, asking what kind of stone was I made from?

As I wander back through Westminster chasing the shadow of Peter Pan back towards Kensington, I wonder if I would follow him straight on ‘til morning, without a second thought to my other responsibilities. And perhaps on this trip I have done just that.