Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? Page 3
My stomach convulses as the elevator races toward the ground floor. Vomit perches itself at the base of my throat, a feline waiting to pounce.
The security guard in the lobby doesn't even bother to look up. I can't breathe until I pass through the building's glass doors and the sober air washes over me. Suddenly the office is just one little set of rooms in a honeycomb of an office building, in a city of such buildings.
I get two calls to my cell from Anna and then a series of calls from Marilyn. The phone is easier to ignore once I throw it into the East River.
Turbulence
62 DAYS UNTIL DEADLINE
“Let's go and fuck up New York City,” the Doctor's slurred voice crackles through the pay phone. It's ten in the morning and I've got nothing to lose. He's got everything to lose, but doesn't give a shit.
We'll show New York. We'll show New York for all those times that it has wronged us: lifted $1,250 a month from our wallets for microscopic studios with a view of a brick wall; duped us into following unattainable women for three blocks just to get a better look at their asses; smacked our dreams of being carefree Manhattan socialites with the reality of sixty-plus hours a week under fluorescent tube lighting. We, the Doctor and I, will take this city by storm in an alcohol-fueled blitzkrieg that it has never before experienced.
My job's gone. My phone's gone. My girlfriend's gone, for all intents and purposes, and my apartment's about to go. I'm on my way to eliminating any chance of backing out of my plans to escape the city.
“I must admit that cutting my ties with New York was easier than I had imagined. It was depressingly easy. You tell the city that you are having second thoughts about your relationship with it, and the city counters that it never loved you in the first place. It never even really liked you and already forgot your name.
Legend holds that Hernán Cortés, the Spanish conqueror of Mexico, made a heroic decision when he ordered his ships burned at Veracruz. It was a statement to his men that they would make an uncompromising stand against the Aztec Empire. Retreat was impossible. Victory was the singular option. It is the kind of story that gives birth to Successories posters and motivational paperweights. The anecdote is recited by playoff-bound high school baseball coaches and midlevel managers trying to fire up their employees to finish direct-mailing campaigns. Regrettably, the story's a bunch of crap.
Cortés never burned his ships, though he did have them disabled or run aground. This wasn't done as a spectacle, but most likely perpetrated in secret once his men were marching on the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán. The method of boat destruction may be a small technicality, but the motive behind the destruction is more telling. Cortés—a conniving opportunist in the classic sense—was out for the glory and riches of conquering one of the biggest indigenous empires in the Americas. He did not want to have to answer to his colonial superiors or work within their bureaucratic restraints. More specifically, he was making a tactical split from his nagging superior and brother-in-law, Diego de Velázquez, the governor of Cuba. Cortés knew that he couldn't count on the allegiance of all of his men and he sabotaged the ships so that Velázquez's sympathizers (which loosely included all those who respected colonial rule and followed its established law) didn't get word back to the governor. This was Hernán's chance to embrace his destiny on his own terms. He was tired of being beholden to other people who told him how to take his next steps and how to look at the big picture.
Sure, my undertaking is pathetic compared to laying siege to Tenochtitlán and conquering an empire of millions, but I guess that I take my own little Successories story from Cortés's strategy. I am not trying to burn my metaphoric boats as a magnificent act of decision-making, motivation, and leadership, but am simply trying to take my life down its own path and not have to look back or be responsible to anybody else.
If I am going to be some sort of travel writer, I want to be able to be broke and mess up my life and do whatever the hell I want or need to do without having to answer to my girlfriend or a boss or friends or anyone else. I am done with compromises with others. I will be free of expectations and constraints. I will be free of everything except for the most essential of possessions. I think that it was Tyler Durden who said, “It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.” I will live on my own terms and forge my own path in the universe. I will be Hale-Bopp.
I try to explain my thinking to the Doctor over the pay phone, though I can tell that he's not listening. He's recently out of rehab—classified as counseling so as not to compromise his career—and after a few more months finishing up at his Ivy League med school he'll be unleashed on the unsuspecting field of medicine. Why I've called him, I am not sure. He's rather undependable in a time of need. He has enough trouble dealing with his own chaotic life. His standard suggested remedies include consumption of large amounts of drugs, alcohol, and “not being such a fucking pussy.”
The Doctor pretends to listen to me for a minute or two and then answers with his deliberate, bedside-manner tone, “I've got just the thing for you: a fresh handle of Captain Morgan's left over from a med-school party last week. It's free and is therefore a wise choice for your individual health plan. Unfortunately, we're going to have to take a more aggressive course of action on your particular case. I think that a poly-medication approach is our best option. You see, I'm also going to have to prescribe you the eight ball that I'm going to pick up before meeting you in Union Square. With some luck, you're on your way to recovery.”
It is evident that the concept of fucking up New York City is like fucking up the Pacific Ocean. We all know who loses in the end, but neither of us is intimidated by self-destruction. In fact, we hold the tag-team championship belt. As I start to walk up to Union Square, I experience a moment of stabbing apprehension. I grab a tall can of PBR from Sunny & Annie deli on 6th and Avenue B and knock it back while walking across Tompkins Square Park. Yes, the Doctor is a medical genius; I'm feeling better already.
As for my faltering romantic life, I didn't intend to end things with Sydney. I really did love her. While I couldn't fault her for being practical or wanting to be with someone with a guaranteed financial future, I didn't know if I was, or could ever be, that person. I explained to her what had transpired at work, and when I made it clear that I would not apologize to Marilyn or return to the job, she told me, “It's me or this dead-end job in Brazil. . . . You need to learn to deal with a real job and learn to deal with being a man.”
“What kind of man spends his best years sitting in a chair?” I told her that I was cut out for a different lifestyle.
She responded, “Yeah, like poverty and living in your parents' basement. . . . Thomas, I thought that we were going to get married. I already told my family and friends that you were the one. Don't you think that when I told you how I always wanted a teardrop diamond, with two sapphires mounted in white gold, that I was giving you a major hint?”
“Well, I guess . . . I mean I thought that, ya know, we could wait. There are things that I need to do and I'm just not ready to—”
“You know what. Just stop. I see that you've already made your decision.” She forced out a good-bye through gritted teeth and punctuated it with a receiver-shattering slam. I have not heard from her since and she will not answer my calls or emails.
It would be hard to classify me as a die-hard optimist, though I firmly believe that—with the right level of enterprise—an advantage can be wrought from any bad situation. As for ditching my apartment,
I had complained to my 1980s supermodel-cum-junkie landlady two times before the robbery that the front door of the building did not close properly and that it was a matter of time before somebody got ripped off. I thought that she might actually care as she lived in one of the building's three apartments. I had written the complaints in emails to her father, who managed the building (she was so smacked out that she rarely answered the door of her top-floor apartment or picked up the phone). After the robbery, I was able to convince her father with a few carefully chosen words that it was better to let me sever my lease and pay only half of my last month's rent than deal with whatever drama I could potentially cause them. Working with my favorite corrupt telecom research analyst taught me the advantages and pitfalls of etching information in the permanent electronic record. I still want to know how someone pounded a hole through the wall in the middle of the day without anybody noticing, but that's in the past.
The physical process of moving out was also aided by the break-in. All of my valuables were probably in some East New York pawn shop, so I had only a few sentimental things, such as photos, to mail back to my parents' house in Seattle. I boxed up my winter clothes and left them with relatives on Long Island. Everything else I dumped on the street corner, and—though I can't imagine what people could see in some of that stuff—it disappeared within a few hours.
Of the valuables that were appropriated during said robbery, the one thing that was insured was my laptop (through a loophole that I'd rather not admit to in print). As the cost of laptops had gone down considerably in the past few years, I was able to purchase a new computer that was smaller, lighter, more durable, and better for travel than the old one. Sure, I'd lost my entire downloaded MP3 collection (easy come, easy go: the karma of music piracy), my digital photo collection (including some tasteful nudes of an ex-girlfriend), and everything that I'd ever written, but now I had a Panasonic Toughbook. There is nothing tough about writing—the act of writing is about as burly as operating a cash register—but with this Toughbook, I could be a rugged, risk-taking travel writer, corresponding about the Maoist insurgency in Nepal, Yanomami mating rituals, or jungle survival in Papua New Guinea, and I hadn't even left Manhattan yet. I had just received my Lonely Planet business cards in the mail, so I was practically bona fide.
A backpack stuffed with T-shirts, shorts, and the laptop sat in the middle of the hardwood floor of my otherwise-empty apartment. I had been gouged on a rush job for my Brazilian visa and a rush job for my new passport. The last-minute and extremely overpriced flight to Rio de Janeiro would depart tomorrow just before lunch.
The Doctor hasn't bathed or brushed his teeth and is wearing hospital-issue scrub pants with a polyester Hawaiian shirt. He's shod in an old pair of leather flip-flops that have somehow survived for as long as I've known him. His mass of curly blond hair is consistently cut to the awkward point that people hit when trying to grow their hair out and he keeps it back from his eyes with a pair of dollar-store plastic sunglasses pushed up on his head. A tiny safety pin fastens the right earpiece of the sunglasses to the lenses. Only a place like 1970s Los Angeles could give rise to such a creature.
Seated on one of Union Square's wooden benches, the Doctor looks sedate and fleshy with his increasingly full, ruddy cheeks. The saccharine perfume of yesterday's booze emanates from his pores, telling of a heavy hangover, but his glazed eyes betray a stimulated anxiety. I know how bad his hangovers are and there is no way he would be out right now without having dipped into the cocaine. The bottle of Captain Morgan's sticks out of a small black deli bag; the cap is already missing.
While rum is underrated—usually dressed up in cuba libres, mojitos, and lameness like coconut Malibu for spring breakers and big-hair divorcée alcoholics—it is, in fact, a brilliant creation. Rum and its Latin cousins aguardiente, cachaça, and old-fashioned ron (“mi amigo, Ron” as the Doctor likes to say) are the true and noble firewater that inspired generations of pirates to sack port towns, burn them to the ground, and carry off the booty. George Washington, a bit of a scallywag himself, ordered a barrel of Barbadian rum for his 1789 inauguration. Today, rum will accompany us as we attempt to pillage the western seaboard of this island known as Manhattan.
On the other hand, allow me a moment to be unfashionable and state that I think that cocaine is crap. If you don't believe me and are caught up in the whole romance surrounding blow, I dare you to hang out sober (or even just drinking) in a small room of people doing lines. They end up as a bunch of red-faced, bug-eyed sweaty freaks all jockeying for airtime. It's true that when you're doing coke, you feel confident, alert, and sexy, but it's just a matter of hours before you are gurning your face off and are paranoid-delusional with your cock crawling up into your abdomen. You wake up the next morning realizing that you spent the better part of the night finding new and creative ways to excuse yourself to the bathroom, trying to chase the high that you got from your first line and were never able to achieve again.
I'm not saying that I've never done the drug. I've lived in South America. I've snorted it, smoked it, drank it, you name it—everything short of shooting it—and it took me a while to come to terms with the fact I never really enjoyed it that much. The whole cult of cocaine, with all of these bankers, hipsters, and brokers thinking that they're the man with their heavily cut eight balls, is a bunch of misguided hype. Foreign exoticism and our national obsession with performance enhancers have raised the stock of the substance from a cheap plant derivative to a social phenomenon. It's similar to when an Eastern European high roller takes his elegant date to T.G.I. Friday's in Moscow and thinks that he's the shit. And he may be the shit in that time and place. But when he then experiences T.G.I. Friday's at O'Hare, or a coke aficionado gets down to Peru and sees the drug without all of the mystique, it is clear that they've been duped. T.G.I. Friday's is a sit-down McDonald's and the magic powder is a bunch of smashed bush leaves run through chemicals that you could find on the shelves of your grandfather's garage.
If rum inspired characters as extraordinary and enduring as Black Beard, Captain Kidd, and George Washington, who has coke inspired? Andy Gibb, Corey Haim, and Roger Clinton?
“Take your medicine like a good boy.” The Doctor holds out a key; the tip is piled high with the pinkish white flakes. My eyes dart about quickly and I lean in to take the bump.
So much for soliloquies.
“Who says I don't care about your well-being?” he asks.
“Who says that I care about my own well-being?” I retort.
I have penciled out a list of pros and cons regarding the Lonely Planet offer and begin to read it aloud. I can tell that the Doctor isn't listening. He's still wasted from the night before and has had an argument with his girlfriend, Sandra. The quarrel degenerated to the point that she punched him in the face, three times. The Doc and I are swirling around the drain in a similar mental state and that's always dangerous, as neither of us is the type of person to say, “No, thank you, let's call it a night.”
I continue with my list, my voice trailing off. I am reading in my head as much as out loud.
Pro: I will cover the Brazilian states of Pernambuco, Paraíba, Rio Grande do Norte, Ceará, Piauí, and Maranhão.
Con: I will then have to write nearly a hundred pages and update a dozen maps.
Pro: It is recommended that I travel in Brazil for four weeks.
Con: There is no way that I can do that much research in four weeks.
Pro: I will have to go to Brazil for at least seven weeks.
I do some quick accounting on the page and weigh the advance offered by Lonely Planet against what will be required of me. Then I add another to my list:
Con: There will not be enough money for seven weeks of research.
And another:
Con: There will not be enough time for seven weeks of research and nearly a hundred pages of writing.
“Sounds like a fucking sweet deal,” the Doctor says and then starts to talk about his relat
ionship drama again. Now it is my turn to tune him out as I try to do some career evaluation. If a trip to Brazil is all I really want, I'd be better off working for two or three months at Starbucks, getting its health insurance, smoking bowls every day, and then using my earnings to go to Brazil on vacation than I would be taking this job. Starbucks employees start at almost $9 per hour, plus medical and dental benefits, and the pay goes up from there. Lonely Planet, a company that sells some six million books per year and calls itself the only independent global publisher, claims that writers' workload-versus-fee averages out to $600 per week. That would mean that working a basic forty-hour week, authors earn $15 per hour. Of course, if you read between the lines of what is expected of the writer for this project, it isn't difficult to see that this job will take closer to every waking hour of my time, from weeks of pretrip preparation up through the deadline. Of course, after the deadline there will be additional stages of edits, queries, map clarifications, and rewrites, which will tack on many extra days, if not weeks. That puts the hourly pay below minimum wage, and U.S. minimum wage is nothing nice. You can also forget about health insurance.
Also, a Starbucks employee has no real overhead, whereas my entire research trip (hotels, restaurants, bars, transportation—including the aforementioned visa, a new passport, and the thousand-dollar-plus last-minute flight that I purchased to Rio) is coming out of the advance. It has already been whittled down to a laughable amount. As for the actual work that I'll be doing, let's not forget that the position requires one to have writing skills, foreign language skills, international travel skills, budgeting skills, plus the ability to endure long periods of rough overland travel in developing countries and long periods of solitude. I have scores of PDF pages that I am supposed to read to learn how to write for Lonely Planet and hundreds of pages of feedback from readers that I am to take into account. It is a lot easier, and apparently more lucrative, to make caramel macchiatos.