US: The Trip

I started writing this thing at 30 thousand feet in the air, in a metal tube filled with coughing Frenchmen and air stewardesses who look like they’ve been on the receiving end of one too many self induced abortions in the toilet of a backstreet nightclub. The plane was farting its way across the Pacific to the US, where I was to pretend that I knew what I was doing on behalf of the company that employs me. I thought originally that this was a bullshit trip that was getting me out of the stale confines of my office, a break from staring at the same spreadsheets and awaiting the steady approach of death or retirement, whichever sweet release came first. On reflection, and after the meetings, I realise that no non lethal dose of amphetamines would have kept a person awake over the phone as we discussed the intimate details of the IT system we were developing. In short, the Charlie Sheen of a weekend in New York and subsequent nights in hotel bars and lavish restaurants have proven fruitful.

I shouldn’t have been here originally. It was a random, entirely arbitrary dissolution of responsibility that was thrown to me like a zoo keeper chucking peanut shavings at a chimp that gave me control of the system we are developing in the first place. This stroke of luck meant that given a little mild sycophancy, I was able to convince those holding the purse strings that a trip to North Carolina, via a weekend in New York was the only course of action which could be followed.

I would, given the choice, see minor testicular surgery as a better alternative than yet another week of my life spent in my office, so this was well received news. And this was before I heard that the equivalent of a naked Kelly Brook had fallen mouth first onto my erect penis in the form of a surprise upgrade to business class. My excitement was tangible when I checked in online at home and saw the airline had bestowed this luxury upon me. Tangible in a form which has no doubt become all too familiar to my computer, and the sponge which collects the protein filled damage.

I’m normally not a good traveller, especially when heading somewhere I want to be. It’s a hollow, wasted experience that must be endured to receive the prize at the end. The discomfort is agony, the endless monotony maddening, but above all I am invariably twitching and restless, like a crack addict awaiting a soothing hit of the pipe, desperate to start having fun.

This flight though, felt like a soothing cuddle, entombed in a giant, soft cleavage. The stewardesses, an affront as they are to the porn star looks you’d have thought would be required, did not look like were going to stop bringing me luxury food, and I as sure of shit was not going to give them any reason to stop, even if I had to throw up to get more in. And the wine. I tried each of the 6 on the menu and not being a wine snob by any stretch of the imagination, still felt the Bordeux made me believe in God.

To say the subsequent weekend in New York was surreal to my European normality is not doing it justice. My dog finds it surreally exciting when he’s accidentally fed by two people in the morning because the first wasn’t informed. This was like someone had handed me the keys to an unguarded Police lock up and told me the cameras were off.

Within a matter of hours, already in a dream like state induced by jet lag, wine and excitement, I was sitting in a studio dedicated to the filming of S&M porn. Each wall had a array of chains, the floor was coated in filth, scattered in abandon was a collection of butt plugs, impossibly busty mannequins, whips, metalled boots and, less sexy, cats that looked liked they had been living in a small cellar without cleaning facilities for the last decade. After enhancing our evening suitably in this weird, weird place we moved on to a relatively normal bar where drinks were being hurled with a fury and gusto that I think us in Europe believe we have a monopoly on.

The next day I peeled the crust off my eyes so that I could take in the area around me and try and determine where the fuck I was. After a good ten minutes of panic, I remembered I had flown to the US. Within minutes of this, I was scrapping off my equally crusted clothes and preparing to head back out to a party to celebrate St Patrick’s Day, weeks before the official date was due.

We arrived in Haboken, an area where college students go when being a college student is no longer feasible, but the life style is not something they are prepared to give up. Clapham in New Jersey essentially. We got there are midday and the casualties littered the streets like the Somme. Everywhere you looked there were moaning, barely functioning corpses, holding their wounded stomachs and revealing their pizza laden innards on the pavements. These bastards take this holiday fucking seriously I thought to myself.

And so it did transpire. We arrived at a house party, on the top floor of an apartment block, the entire residents of which were playing some sort of drinking game involving a ping pong ball, cups, but curiously, no Thai ladies. We were, at midday, considered and definitely appeared through straight walk, late arrivals. I was presented with a beer can penetrated with a key, and told to consume the whole thing immediately by holding my mouth to the hole, shaking the can and opening the can peel. This had the affect of presenting a group of lions with a fresh piece of Zebra. Walking out of the toilet at some point in this madness, holding my nostril in marked celebration, I was met with the sight of 15 policemen storming into the party in full uniform. It is with some relief that I am able to say I held my initial panic, and did not immediately chuck myself from the window. As it turned out, these cops, carrying musical instruments and doing random party performances, were part of what most Europeans would consider a desperate US celebration of Irish heritage, although probably a more accurate description would be, like in the UK, any excuse for having a beer at 9am. We are lucky to have a close identity with our own heritage, and should look as closely at our frowning on others lack of historical time as we do our own lack of ability to celebrate our own wealth of it.

The last memory I have is of stumbling into the fresh air outside a bar for a cigarette and immediately forgetting where I was. I tried desperately for the next few hours, I assume, to find where I had come out of, before coming to hours later back on the sofa that had supported me for the weekend and with the car that was to take me to work in imminent arrival.