Note: This is part of a "creative nonfiction" memoir I have worked on desultorily. One part of it ("Titanic Telecoms" was my title) was a cover story in the SDR some months ago.
This part is juicier in some ways but the editor at that rag apparently didn't want it. Trying to sort out the soft rejection, I came to the conclusion that the first part was something accepted as a first-person contribution from an unknown amateur-writer-dope writing on her kitchen table. Ergo, no interest in buying a Part II. You know, "you've had your 15 minutes of fame"—that may well have been the attitude. I felt resentful because I don't write "on spec," or so I tell myself.
Being a memoir, this is full of lies. I have had to change names and conceal the nature of some personal relationships.
The working title of this was "She Travels Fastest Who Travels Alone." Apparently I called the last draft "Down and Out in Dago and London." I'd been awash with Orwell minutiae for months and it was an obvious, if derivative, solution.
The Bad Traveler
I had a San Diego Junior League friend named Olivia
Nordstrom. I think I first met her at a rummage sale around 1991. Then I
spotted her again some months later, in a distant land. I had been sent abroad to
lie for my company, and Olivia was likewise overseas for work reasons: she was
updating her growing series of travel guides.
You probably saw some of those guides if you hung out in the
travel section of Bookstar or Barnes & Noble twenty-five or thirty years
ago. They all had chirrupy, upbeat titles—Cheap
Grub in Paris, Cozy Sleeps in London—that
sort of thing. At her busiest Olivia had six, eight, ten, maybe even twelve of
these titles, originally targeting London and Paris, but gradually expanding to
cover Italy, Spain, and then even Prague, Budapest, Hawaii—yes, Hawaii—and I don’t know what else. The basic concept was to
highlight quality restaurants and hotels that were aimed at neither the
backpacker/hostel crowd, nor the kind of crass, over-moneyed tourists who spend
a week at the Hotel Crillon every year and then send you notes on its
stationery. Discreet, tasteful people, you know. Like Olivia.
She was a lot older than I, but also much more stylish and
experienced, the way that polite ladies of a certain age are, or were, expected
to be. She was always full of fun stories when we dined out, which she did
frequently, as it was her job. Her home, in theory, was a smart little condo on
State Street, near Seaport Village. (In mind’s eye I see ginger jars on the
mantel and sporting prints on the walls.) The idea of living downtown by the
“Historic Gaslamp District” still seemed novel and edgy in those days. (People
from Cardiff-by-the-Sea made faces at the thought of downtown SD, not that they
knew much about it. They thought Kensington
was downtown, for Lordy’s sake!) But
as Olivia’s guides expanded she wasn’t much “at home” anyway. She spent half
her existence living out of a suitcase.
She may have told me, but I don’t remember how she got into
the travel-guide racket, just as I’m not sure who her former husband Mr.
Nordstrom was. (Olivia Nordstrom is an alias, by the way; she’s long gone from
her old telephone number and address, and I don’t know if she’s even still with
us.) What I do know is that her travel-guide series eventually faded out. I can
see how that happened. After September 11, 2001, exchange rates went bad. We
went from 95 cents to the euro, to about $1.30, so there really weren’t any
more cheap sleeps or eats. Not decent ones, anyway, not for Olivia’s audience.
The publishers conjured up other title concepts (Wonderful Grub! Affordable
Accommodations!) but nothing with
the same ring and panache.
The Cheap Grub
books must have looked like fun when she began them in the 1980s, but after a
few years she must have felt she was chained to a treadmill. The titles sold
well, but they needed to be updated every two or three years, because prices
changed, new venues came on line, while old ones went out of business. We once
ate at a Bertorelli’s, and while there are now enough eateries of that name in
London to see out the new millennium, the one we went to in Notting Hill Gate
disappeared almost as soon as the next edition of Cheap Grub: London was published. And as I say, during those glory days
of the 1990s, her publishers were always seeking to add new locales and titles.
She never complained about the constant hurly-burly. Not to
me, anyway. The secret was, she traveled light and she traveled alone. Only once
she broke her routine, and that was a hellish, memorable experience.
So here’s the story. She had a well-heeled socialite friend,
an heiress to building-materials fortune, whom I shall therefore refer to as Bobbi
Manville. After Olivia began writing her travel guides, Bobbi started to nag Olivia
to let her, Bobbi, come along her on one of her exciting eat-and-sleep trips.
Exciting? Of
course the trips were not exciting, they were all about tight schedules and
drudgery. And if you're picturing this right in your head, you know Olivia was
the sort of person who had long since learned to travel with a toothbrush, a raincoat
and very little else. (Makeup? Hose? Buy them in Paris or at the duty-free. I’ve
actually gone on long jaunts without packing any undies, simply to force myself
to visit my favorite lingerie department at the other end; but this is pushing
it.)
Bobbi, on the other hand, was the sort who would pack a
steamer trunk and two Samsonites for a weekend in Santa Barbara. Olivia gently
put Bobbi off for a couple of years. But in the end she relented. And the experience
was as bad as you’d imagine.
First leg of the journey was to London, where Olivia had
booked them into a three-star ("moderately priced") South Kensington
hotel. Bobbi kept making a fuss that they insist on a no-smoking suite, so
Olivia made a point of that. But when they got to the hotel lobby—I’m imagining
lumpy wall-to-wall carpeting topped with a couple of threadbare Berbers—the
effluvium of legacy cigarette smoke was just too much for Bobbi's nostrils. She
was already grumpy from the all-day flights from San Diego with a change at JFK.
Furiously, she demanded that they immediately
move to a different, “non-smoking” hotel.
This would have been about 1988. There were no non-smoking
hotels to speak of, certainly not in London or Paris. Moreover, this was a
hotel Olivia was specifically reviewing for a guidebook update.
So they stayed in that hotel for two days. Too bad for
Bobbi! But Bobbi repeated the drama everywhere else. They'd go out to eat in
some promising new restaurant, and Bobbi would order the weirdest thing on the
menu—tête de veau or something—and
then send it back because she thought it was going to be a veal cutlet. And
then there'd be an argument about the bill, and Bobbi, who had all the money in
the world, would declare that she
wasn't going to leave a tip because the service was so bad, and then loudly complain
because she discovered there was a minimum service gratuity included in the
bill.
And so, oh my goodness, they went on like this for
a week or two, until they got to Paris, and Bobbi still didn’t let up. But the
linguistic barrier now meant no one was really listening. Clearly it was time Bobbi
to peel off and fly home.
I can't imagine their friendship, such as it was, survived
the ordeal.
Bad travelers are everywhere, but they’re particularly
discomfiting when you have a job to do, and they don’t. They know you’re “at
work” but nonetheless behave as though everyone’s on some kind of tourist
junket. They’re always expecting Aunt Fanny's bed & breakfast in Traverse
City—the place with 360-thread percale sheets and the scent of warm, home-baked
muffins. Their complaint about smelling cigarette smoke everywhere is a
perennial, non-negotiable complaint. They claim they have an obscure allergy,
or asthma; and the whole world had better mend its ways or there's going to be
a scene. And then, less tragically, there’s the inevitable question: Why does everything cost so much?
Because, Madame Millionaire, you are paying Full Tourist Price.
We were dining at a North Italian place in the Gaslamp when
Olivia gave me the broad strokes of the story. A year later, when we were having
dinner six thousand miles away and no one could overhear us, she told me it
again, this time with more awful details. We were near Piccadilly Circus,
eating at a place called the Criterion. This was a 19th century oyster bar with
lavatory-tile floors. It had been taken over by an American ad man we knew
who’d made a fortune introducing "rib shacks" and "Chicago-style
pizza" to London, and now was moving upmarket. Bob Payton was his name;
his plan was to reinvent this old Victorian haunt as a gourmet brasserie, with
a lot of shellfish in vast tubs of cracked ice. This was a popular look for
early-90s London brasseries.
There was a strange mildewy smell over where we sat. It may
have been rising-damp in the wall, or some exotic preparation at the next
table, where a couple of bohemian types were eating and smoking cigarettes at
the same time. Yes, I’m sure that was it. Olivia and I sniffed and looked
around—at the black-and-white tile floor, the furious smokers at the next table,
and the antique, atmospherically chipped wall trim. We laughed and declared in
unison: “Bobbi would not approve!”
This would have been about 1993, as there was a lot of
polenta on the menu. And it was expensive polenta, so I was surprised to find
that the Criterion made it into the next Cheap
Grub: London (“Years ago it was immortalized in the first Sherlock Holmes
story, ‘A Study in Scarlet.’ . . . You
can always expect to find caesar salad, a polenta dish, . . . homemade sausages
and mash . . .”) According to Wikipedia, our friend Mr. Payton died shortly
afterwards in a car accident, so alas!
he never got to read this glowing encomium.
Frankie Laine and the
Bloody Nose
I half-forgot the Bobbi story, and a couple of years later repeated
Olivia’s ordeal with my friend Mimi.
The tale begins with a late-Saturday lunch at a place in
Fashion Valley called The Crocodile Café. The Crocodile, long gone now, was
never a gourmet eatery, but was surely decent enough for a Mission Valley mall,
and definitely a step above your standard “food court.” I was back in town for
a few weeks, and Mimi was telling me how much she wanted to escape San Diego.
“You're so lucky to just be able to fly away like that,” Mimi was saying—and here she did a
flying-seagull thing with her hands. Mimi was trapped in a dead-end clerical
job at Sharp Hospital and pictured any alternative to that as a deliverance. Me,
I wished I could stick around San Diego for six months, instead of flying back
to London in 19 days.
I’d been drinking a couple of brightly colored tequila drinks,
and imagined a visiting friend might be fun for a little while. So I suggested
she come stay with me sometime. Perhaps for a week or two. I pointed out that
she’d been born in Canada, and could probably work over there with a little help
from the right immigration lawyer. Here I was talking through my hat, but those
London immigration lawyers had frequently assured me they could accomplish almost
anything.
Mimi agreed this was a great plan, but almost immediately
began to complicate it beyond recognition. Instead of coming over to visit me for
a week or two at some vague point in the future, she wanted fly back with me
right now, or rather in 19 days. She was looking for an excuse to leave her job.
This might be last chance to escape Sharp Hospital—the space-pod doors open
only once in a lifetime—so she decided to give notice right away.
From there on out, the “mission creep” was extraordinary.
Instead of just flying out of San Diego and changing planes in New York or
wherever, we were now to fly out of Vancouver BC. This is because Mimi had an
87-year-old grandmother in a nursing home in New Westminster. Mimi had been hit
with a panicky fear that if she left North America, she might never see granny again. So we were going
to drive all the way up from San Diego to New Westminster. It didn’t make much
sense to me, but how could I turn down a friend’s maybe-last opportunity to see
her grandmother? And how often do you get to drive 1400 miles? What an
adventure! Why, we could bring our cameras!
At this point in my life I was easily distracted. I had lots
of busy-work in the San Diego office and all sorts of springtime trivialities:
do my taxes, change my mail-forwarding service; participate in an Encinitas
script-reading with someone I once took a screenplay class with. (Holy hell,
why did I say yes to that?) Then I came
up with the time-wasting idea of taking my Cannondale mountain bike out of
storage, and finding if the bike shop in Sorrento Valley could box it up and
ship it to my office in London. Well, they could. But it was going to cost more
than the bike was worth. So back to storage; a half-day wasted.
And finally . . . I had to go visit Frankie Laine! I had
casually mentioned to an editor in London that I sort of knew Frank, and could probably call on him at his house in
Point Loma and write up a little interview. The editor agreed eagerly. For whatever
reason, Frankie Laine was still a much bigger name in England than in America. Brits
still remembered him as a late-40s crooner (“That’s My Desire,” “Lucky Old
Sun”) rather than as a “cowboy” singer of movie and TV themes (Rawhide, Blazing Saddles), the way we do in America.
A minor problem was that I didn’t really know
Frankie Laine. However I knew someone who knew someone who knew Tom Blair at San Diego magazine, and Tom had Frank’s
number.
The visit to old Frank’s house on Point Loma was something
of a downer. I’d read in San Diego
magazine that his first wife had died of cancer some years before. Now wife
number two had a pink turban on because she was going through chemo. So they were
both bald now. Eighty-two-year-old Frank didn’t wear his toupée—it was Sunday,
the day of rest, he explained—and covered his pate with a red Lucky supermarket
cap. I remember Frank spent a lot of time talking about how he used to own the
house next door . . . but then he bought this
house . . . and sold the old one to the writer Joseph Wambaugh.
A couple of days later I got into my old car to drive up to
British Columbia so I could fly out of Vancouver the following weekend. I was
in something of a fog regarding how that arrangement came about. Mainly I was
telling myself I’d scribble a draft of my Frankie Laine profile as we made our
way up the coast.
Halfway into our road trip we stopped for an early dinner at
a Chili's in Redding, CA. While we waited for food and sipped our beers, I
unzipped my black leather Tumi portfolio with the yellow legal pad. (A present
to myself I’d recently bought at University Towne Center when I dropped by
Williams-Sonoma to see my old co-workers.)
"Are you making notes on our journey?" Mimi asked.
"No,” I snarled, “I'm
writing an interview with Frankie Laine.”
"Oh! So you don't want to talk to me?" she
said.
No, I said, I was sleep-deprived, and very stressed out.
Mimi then asked if I was mad at her for making us drive up to Canada, and
I said it was more complicated than that.
Which it was, of course. She had complicated everything. For
some reason she had done no packing at all until two days before we were to
leave. When we got to the storage space where we were putting her boxes of
belongings, it was evening and the facility had just closed, just as I said it
would be. So Mimi threw a fit, blamed for the closing time, said she didn't want
to travel with me anymore. She jumped out of the car and just walked by
herself, by a long, desolate stretch of Morena Boulevard, going no place in
particular. After a half-hour I calmed her down, we had dinner in Pacific
Beach, and the following day we went to the storage facility again and finally
set out on our journey.
I did not write my Frankie Laine interview at that Chili's
in Redding, CA. In fact I wouldn’t write it for a couple of weeks.
When we finally got to Canada, Mimi explained to her
relatives that we were a day late because I didn’t get her to the storage
facility on time. I let that go, didn’t argue; her relatives in New Westminster
were going to store my car for me till I flew back next. (I made up a story
about how I’d always wanted to spend a few days in Vancouver.) Nor did I write
about Frank on the airplane, since I was busy drinking all the red-wine
miniatures I could get.
For much of the past year I had been living in an expensive
furnished “service flat” in Chelsea, which as I told everyone was a five
minutes’ walk from George Smiley’s house at 9 Bywater Street in the John
LeCarré novels. But I'd given that up when I went back to San Diego. I dreamt of
something cheaper, more sordid, less pretentious. I have a weakness for nasty
one-star hotels, one rung above a doss house, where they do a heart-stopping
fry-up in the morning with greasy little sausages, dessicated ham, and lots of
toast and margarine. It’s always margarine at these places. Looking for
accommodations that were even cheaper, I’d booked us into a nasty b&b for a
week, in a dark corner of North London called East Finchley. We were in a state
of extreme jetlag, and I was totally delighted to arrive in squalor.
However, I was with Mimi, and Mimi was in full tourist-mode.
So we bagged East Finchley and spent the next few weeks and much of my bank
balance living in overpriced b&b’s and hotels, and then a friend's place in
Hampstead, where I finally calmed down enough over a bank-holiday weekend to
write about Frankie Laine.
It was around my fourth or fifth night back in London, after
I’d gone back to work but hadn’t slept much, that I realized I was on the verge
of an emotional breakdown. It was Friday, and I went out drinking with a guy
from the office. I needed those drinks. This guy, Andrew, did ventriloquism at
comedy clubs, using sock puppets that really were just white tube socks that he
drew features on with a felt-tip marker. That was part of the act. Andrew was a
total scream. I slid off my pub stool, laughing. My skirt rode all the way up
my butt when I landed on the floor. I was a mess.
Back at the hotel, Mimi was very cross because I’d gone out
with someone from work and didn’t bring her along. She watched an old 1950s
film on TV and refused to speak to me. I don’t know what movie it was, but a
young Jack Warden was in it, and he kept saying, “I guess I’ll be on my merry
way.”
I passed out in my clothes, then woke up a little later to
find my nose bleeding. Nothing to get excited about; I always get nosebleeds,
and I’d been picking my nose a lot ever since the plane ride. But when I went
to the bathroom to wash, I found there were no towels to dry my face.
Mimi had used up all four of our towels and thrown them on
the floor. She was one of those people who can’t shower without getting the
floor wet, so when they step out, put towels on the floor to dry their feet. The
bath mat’s not enough; they have to throw towels down too. The thinking is, in
the morning the maid will come in and pick them up and give you fresh clean
towels.
"What happened to the towels?" I shouted. Mimi, now
half asleep, shrugged and grunted. No problem, she said, just call the front
desk and say you need more towels.
“Hully gee,” I said, in words of greater ferocity, “this
ain’t the Ramada Inn. This is the Hotel La Reserve in Fulham, and no one’s
going to be at the desk at one in the morning.”
So she rang the desk, and got no answer, while I patted my
face with toilet paper. I into my bed, with a wad of toilet paper stuffed up my
nose, and I quietly sobbed to myself. I had completely screwed my life up. I
was caught in a full Bobbi.
A week or two later, Olivia flew
in from San Diego, checking out new eateries and sleeperies. We met at a place in
Fulham Road called Riccardo’s, which specialized in Tuscan food and great big
balloons of red wine by the glass. (I believe Riccardo’s did make the cut for the next Cheap
Grub.) I told my sorrows to my older and wiser friend. Olivia found it all
hilarious. The obvious thing to do, she laughed, was to take Mimi to Paris, and
lose her.
Which is pretty much what
happened in the end, though this took a few bumpy months.
“I Want Her Out!”
I leased a ground-floor flat with a elderly coworker called Malcolm.
I am using “elderly” in the British sense. Malcolm may have been only fifty but
easily looked sixty, at least. He needed a new place to live because he was six
months behind on his Battersea flat, and he didn’t feel like paying his back
rent. Better to spend the money on the new address, which was a step up
socially. Redcliffe Gardens straddled upscale Chelsea and South Kensington, as
well as the rather downmarket Earls Court. The neighborhood had some literary associations.
Beatrix Potter and Robert Lowell had both lived around the corner, although not
at the same time.
On the plus side, the flat was spacious enough for Malcolm,
and his baby-grand piano and wide assortment of musical equipment (he played
weekends in a “Scottish dance band”); and Dylan, his ancient, incontinent
Persian cat; and me; and Mimi. And since it was ground floor, we got the back
garden with an old barbecue grill where we eventually threw some sparsely
attended parties. (“Just a simple cookout; we’re inviting all our friend.”)
On the minus side we had an odor problem. Not only were we
living with a diarrheac cat, we had a Peruvian Indian in the basement involved
in some activity that generated a chronic stench. “I think she’s boiling
nappies,” surmised Charlie Hardaway, the flat’s owner, when he phoned in.
Charlie was with a bank and had recently been “seconded” to Hong Kong. It
appears our Peruvian had been burrowed-in down there for years, claiming some
refugee status, and thus defying all attempts by freeholders and the borough
council to dislodge her.
But the worst aspects were the fights between Mimi and
Malcolm. It was cats-and-dogs from the start, and they kept it up for weeks, till
other crises intervened. Even before we moved in, Mimi was summarily demanding
that Malcolm, a pack-a-day full-strength Silk Cuts smoker, not smoke inside the
flat. Because she was allergic to
cigarette smoke. Yes, folks: the old allergy scam again. Not being American, Malcolm
had never heard such nonsense. But Malcolm
smoothly agreed, smoked anyway, and we muddled through.
Mimi also took issue with Dylan’s stinky litter pan. Malcolm
liked to place it in the kitchen. Mimi would move it to the hallway toilet (the
“kitty loo”) then Malcolm would move it back. This went on for a long while,
till Malcolm disappeared on holiday to France.
“I want her out!”
Malcolm hissed to me about three days after we moved in.
I sometimes caught a ride with Malcolm to and from work,
since that was quicker than the 55-minute journey riding the Underground and
then the Docklands Light Railway. In theory we lived and worked in Central
London, but the journey to the office could take as long as driving from Golden
Triangle to Costa Mesa (another tedious journey I once had to do every day). Malcolm’s
little Peugeot often broke down, but it was much faster and more reliable than
the delay-ridden, strike-prone, bomb-enhanced London Transport.
On the way home to Redcliffe Gardens in the evening, we’d
sometimes stop at the Queen Mary, a
decrepit old steamboat café anchored along Victoria Embankment. Over my wine
and Malcolm’s espresso, and a couple packets of salt-and-vinegar crisps, we’d discuss
what to do about Mimi. She was now fighting with us both, with rude,
uncontrolled, screaming tantrums.
As an oblique way of offering advice and working out
possible solutions, Malcolm would tell me personal, coded, stories of his own
past: how he had fallen in with difficult, demanding characters who pushed him
to near-madness before he finally sloughed them off. There had been a number of
these, all young men, one of whom had run a nightclub with him in Bournemouth
many years ago and evidently stole from him, possibly occasioning his
bankruptcy. I didn't poke around for the seamy details. Somehow Malcolm had
spent his adult life in thrall to spongers and rent boys.
“I want her out,” he’d say again, then assure me it was for
my own peace of mind.
“Oh she’ll be gone in a couple of days,” I said in my
evasive way.
There was little point in telling Mimi to leave. She acted
out that farce every day. She’d dramatically pack her things (two enormous
rolling suitcases), generally in the evening, when I was home; only to return
an hour later. She’d tell us she’d rebooked her return plane ticket for
such-and-such a day, then the day would come and she’d still be around.
When this routine got old, she’d come up with baffling
excuses for hanging around. One day she
went down to the immigration office in Croydon to see about getting a work
visa. This was going to be harder than my attorneys let on. Then she got
herself an off-the-books job at a restaurant we knew (supposedly a “Mexican”
dive, but named Arizona). She never actually started work, though, because that
would mean finding her way back to Redcliffe Gardens from Camden Town at two a.m.,
long after the Underground shut down.
Then it occurred to her to do some freelance writing. She’d
never done it before, but obviously if I could do it, anyone could. For the Observer magazine, or maybe the Guardian, she tried to pitch an article
about a waiter she knew at the Arizona restaurant—this was the guy who offered
her the off-the-books job—who looked a bit like Keanu Reeves. And not only
that; this guy, Damien, claimed to have worked as Keanu’s body double in a
film! No takers for that proposal. So Mimi thought of doing a profile on yet another
almost-famous person we’d met in Camden Town. This was Josh Irving, the son of Clifford
Irving. Clifford Irving, you may dimly recall, was the writer who wrote the fake
Howard Hughes biography around 1972, and went to jail for it. This was slightly
more promising material, but when Mimi approached Josh about it he was totally appalled.
We came up with some other vague, evanescent ideas for Mimi.
There was Dr. Sooch, the garrulous East Indian who’d briefly been my company’s
head IT guy in San Diego. Sooch was now domiciled in Omaha, but was always
passing through London on one errand or another (“I cover seven countries in
five days!”) and claimed to be amazingly connected. He said his best friend was
managing director at NatWest—Sooch had been at Harrow with him—and this
selfsame best friend could give Mimi a job, as well as handle any visa
problems. Great news! But then I remembered that Sooch seldom followed through
on anything, and anyway it was unlikely the National Westminster Bank would
have a place for Mimi, a theater-studies graduate of San Diego State. Sooch
promised us a big slap-up dinner next time he came through town, but in the
fullness of time this turned into a lunch at Burger King. Of Mr. NatWest we
heard no more.
Sometimes Mimi would phone me at the office, about nothing
in particular, not even about how she was still mad at me, and thinking of
flying home real soon. Or she would
phone family and friends in British Columbia or California, again about nothing
in particular. I was supposed to have cheap-cheap international calling on my
home landline—I worked in the industry, after all—but I was always being
surprised by these £20 calls on my bill. Even for those days, £20 was a helluva
long-distance charge. Mimi would ring up her stoner brother and talk to no
purpose for a full hour, completely oblivious to cost.
But as Bob Hoskins was always saying on the BT television commercials,
“It’s good to talk.” That was BT’s equivalent of the old AT&T slogan,
“Reach out and touch someone.” Indeed, talk mindlessly for no reason at all.
This, this, is the business we have
chosen.
Eventually, to occupy her time more constructively, Mimi decided
to try standup comedy. She’d taken classes with Sandy Shore at The Comedy
Store in Pacific Beach, so she wasn’t going in totally cold. But after
listening to some of her shtick, Andrew (my friend with the tube socks) advised
her that she didn’t have the personality for comedy per se, not in London, anyway—but maybe she could be a compére—that is, an emcee. So once or
twice a week, in far-off pubs in Islington or Crouch End, Mimi turned up in
front of a microphone to introduce whatever grab-bag of soused comedians had
turned up for open-mike night.
Holiday in Brittany
And then, for a little while, our flat was quiet and
peaceful, because Malcolm had taken a week’s holiday in France. That week
turned into two weeks and then nearly three. This also improved the ambience at
work, where I now discovered that Malcolm was roundly disliked. It had come to
everybody’s attention that he spent most of workday on the telephone about
matters that had nothing to do with corporate sales for our company, Titanic
Telecoms Ltd.
Our clients had begun to ask if they could deal exclusively
with me, rather than Malcolm. The clients were fairly tolerant folk, and pretty
weird themselves, but Malcolm seemed to have too many distractions on his
plate. And I think they’d heard rumors that Malcolm was about to get the sack. These
clients were all shapes and sizes: Pakistanis, Nigerians, Sierra Leonese;
former photocopier hucksters who dwelt in the leafy suburbs of Chelmsford or
High Wycombe; retired army men; and a washed-up investment banker who had gone
to Eton.
They’d all heard there were big £££’s to be made in
corporate-telecoms reselling, mainly because that was the hype they got from me
and others who were in on the same game. My oddest clients were a jolly pair of
Hasidic Jews, one tall and one short, who intended sell comms to the small-businessfolk
in their community, who were way the hell up in Stoke Newington, northeast
London. The tall one called himself Mister Schneider, the short one was Mister
Taylor, and they both wore baby-blue chalk-striped suits with coats that hung
down to their knees. Mr. Taylor and Mr. Schneider were my only agents who fully
understood that our service was crap, but they really didn’t care.
A word or two about Malcolm’s “distractions.” Basically, he
used his work landline as a convenient “office number” where he could be
reached for his other businesses. (He had a big Nokia mobile, but in those days
that was expensive, something like 40p a minute.) His main outside venture was
his folk-music combo with squeeze-boxes and fiddles. His stationery read:
“Malcolm Laird and His Scottish Dance Band.”
Back in the 1970s, there had been a craze for this stuff—much
like the American fad for bluegrass music—and bands with names like The Border
Reivers or The Highland Revelers. Malcolm’s group almost made it to the big
time. They performed at the World’s Fair in Spokane in 1974 and then did a
North American tour. An experience he was hoping to reprise someday. Like
others in our London office, Malcolm imagined that working for Titanic Telecoms
would lead to a paid vacation in San Diego.
By the 1990s, the Scottish music fad had mostly drifted off,
but Malcolm’s name still carried some weight amongst an ever-aging crowd. Thus
you’d see him at his desk, cupping his telephone handset, speaking softly as he
lined up future weekends for the big Scottish dance band. “I’m playing KP next
weekend,” he once told me triumphantly, suggesting he’d just booked a Princess
Margaret party in Kensington Palace.
Alternatively Malcolm might get a ring from his other moonlight job. That was an evening
gig as visiting rep for Moben Kitchens. This involved long sit-downs with
people in country houses in Wiltshire and points west, where he tried to nudge
them into investing £20,000 for a new kitchen with stone-top counters and
chef-grade cookers. Often the prospect was just too far away, and Malcolm’s
soft coo would break into a yell: "What do you mean, it’s just across the Bristol Channel? You mean it's in WALES!? I’m
not driving to bloody Wales!"
And then sometimes he would hear from his garage mechanic, often
bringing bleak news about how the Peugeot had flunked the Ministry of Transport
registration. The carburetor “sprayed petrol.” The Peugeot would be
"condemned" by the MOT if the carburetor weren't replaced
immediately.
Malcolm led a very busy life on the office landline.
But as I say, he went on holiday, and then was gone for
weeks. When he finally reappeared he had a crazy tale. It seems he was in
Brittany, dining out one night with his aunt and uncle, when the uncle
collapsed from a heart attack. The uncle clutched at his wife as he fell to the
floor, and she went down too. They must have been in their 80s, at least.
Anyway, now Uncle Bob was dead, Aunt Dorothy had two broken
ribs, and Malcolm had the job of bringing the uncle’s coffin, the invalid aunt,
himself, and their red Honda back to Bournemouth via the ferry from Brittany.
Only he couldn’t do this for days and days . . . because they were in France,
you see . . . where once again the dockworkers were striking.
I don’t know if any of Malcolm’s story was true, but at
least it wasn’t a sick-note you could use a second time. Regardless, he didn’t
get much chance to tell anyone at work, because when he at long last turned up,
he was advised that Titanic Telecoms Ltd was terminating his employment.
“Oh that’s too bad,” I said, impassively, when he told me
the story that evening. He was in the kitchen, furiously scrubbing scale off
the bottom of the plug-in teapot.
“Well you know,”
he said, they’re going to give you
the sack too. I knew that when I went away. But of course I told you this before.”
Of course he hadn’t
said anything of the sort. Anyway I couldn’t think of anyone at work who would
vouchsafe such confidential information to Malcolm Laird.
But now he was gone from Titanic Telecoms, and had no need to
be in London during the week, and life for me was peaceful, at work and at
home. Malcolm went to stay in Bournemouth with elderly Aunt Dorothy, she of the
busted ribs. As for weeks past, I was left with the chore of feeding Dylan,
Malcolm’s senile, incontinent cat. He would leave me with a cupboard full of
canned, gourmet cat food he bought by the case at ASDA. I deduced that this
stuff was responsible for Dylan’s chronic diarrhea, which more often than not
fell outside the litter pan. So I switched Dylan to cheap, hard discount kibble
instead. This improved his digestion (and the atmosphere) immensely.
On return visits Malcolm would surreptitiously count the
remaining cans to make sure I was giving Dylan his daily fare. What he didn’t
know was that Mimi and I were throwing the canned food away. Not in the
household trash or a waste bin, though. We’d put a dozen cans in a sack, and
stroll around the neighborhood, leaving gifts of Pricey Feast cat food on the
doorsteps and pillar boxes of Chelsea and Fulham.
Another bit of mischief Mimi and I enjoyed at Malcolm’s
expense was going through Malcolm's correspondence files. On my landline I'd
begun to get dunning calls from Mister Sparks in Battersea, Malcolm’s old
landlord. This is when I found out that Malcolm had skipped out on six months’
rent. In fact, Malcolm had a deadbeat dossier going back years, as I discovered
when I went through his paper files and floppy disks.
It was around this time that I began to receive invoices,
for council taxes and water rates. As I was the non-bankrupt leaseholder,
Malcolm and our landlord had put my name down at the householder of record.
This was a smart move on Malcolm’s part; no wonder it took his old landlord
months to find him. But when the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea or
Thames Water kept dunning me for taxes and water bills, I started to think of
an escape strategy.
Somewhere in the files of the Royal Borough, there is a
black mark against the name of one Meg Burns, who never paid her poll tax.
Punch Line
At Titanic Telecoms Ltd. there was always talk of sending me
to run the Paris office—or, latterly, the Istanbul office, since we’d just acquired
one. These were probably cover stories, office jokes really. I’d come to terms
with the fact that Titanic would be vomiting me out me soon. So the question
was, should I vamoose back to San Diego right away, or play the odds in London?
It was hopeless to think that I could make a living as a
freelance writer. I was painfully slow, and my stuff was never Quality Lit.
There was that lugubrious Frankie Laine interview, and similarly toned pieces
on old timers I knew (an early-1960s London scandal girl; a late-1950s Angry
Young Man), as well as a few San Diego-themed pieces, for which there is always
a market in London. I remember a column about Bill and Hillary Clinton visiting
Coronado, and staying, inevitably, at the Hotel Del Coronado. This sounds like
thin gruel indeed, except they were the guests of Democrat fundraiser and Hotel
Del’s frontman, M. Larry Lawrence, who was good enough to give me a couple of
cute stories.
But then an angel appeared in the form of one Mohammed
al-Fayed. You’ve heard of Mr. al-Fayed; he owned Harrod’s, and his son Dodi’s
inamorata was none other than Princess Di—at least until some Dark Forces did
them both in, in a Paris tunnel, September 1997.
Technically I suppose the banks really owned Harrod’s, as
Mr. al-Fayed was supposed to be mortgaged to the hilt. But he had enough loose
cash to afford such indulgences as buying the library and rights to the old Punch magazine, which had recently gone
out of business after 150 years. And then, deciding to attack the British Establishment
through satire after nothing else succeeded, he hired a few veteran Fleet
Street scapegraces for about £150,000 a year, acquired some offices across the
street from Harrod’s; and announced that Punch
was returning.
Yes! Mister Punch himself! And it would be better than ever!
A four-color glossy weekly, filled with cartoons and fun, bigger—thicker!— than The New Yorker. And the best part was the freelance pay scale. They
were going to pay £600 per printed page. Now: figure you write two pieces a
month, each one a bare two pages. That’s £2400 (maybe $4000 American),
middle-class income by 1996 hooligan standards, and a hairsbreadth more than I
was getting at Titanic Telecoms, where I did work I despised (the joyous
Messrs. Taylor and Schneider notwithstanding).
A London journo whom I slightly knew invited me to a Literary
Luncheon at the Groucho Club in Soho. We had maybe a dozen people at the lunch—old
hacks and young hacks, and freelancers who eked out a respectable living in
advertising or something worse. And it turned out that most of these people, my
peers I guess, were all a-hankerin’ to get sumdat lovely £600-per-page pay
rate.
I don’t think anyone had written anything for the new Punch yet—launch date was still a couple
of months off, and the new editors and art directors were mainly busy hiring
staff and choosing cover illustrations—but there were an awful lot of people
who were already measuring drapes in their heads, so to speak.
The managing editor had me to his office, and we shared a
bottle of wine and built castles in the air about how great this new Punch was going to be. I did eventually
write a little for him, and these pieces were handsomely compensated, just as
promised. Unfortunately my well-lubricated managing editor was soon gone, Punch was cut back to a much thinner
biweekly, and the whole thing turned into a mammoth failure. Mohammed
al-Fayed’s business manager figured out that this escapade was going to lose
money at the rate of two million pounds per annum, even with the big, glossy, New Yorker-calibre [sic] advertisements,
once the advertisers started to pay. (They were giving away a lot of ad space
to start.) It wasn’t something I could build a life on.
I’ve tried to trace back how I got involved with the Punch adventure, and keep coming to the
conclusion that, like so many things in this world, it began with a gentleman
by the name of George Mitrovich. George was founder of something called the
City Club of San Diego. I long imagined the City Club was like the Racquet Club
or the Union League, a place where I’d have to enter on a member’s arm.
Actually it was a kind of speakers’ forum. Every month or two he’d bring some
noteworthy savant to a hotel in Mission Bay, where you’d eat lunch and then
listen to a talk and maybe buy an autographed book by a famous politician or
visiting newspaper columnist.
George had the kindly air of a lay minister, coupled with a
delightfully droll way of speaking in rolling periods—sentences that soared and
took flight, so that where they were going to land was anybody’s guess. Eric
Sevareid, the late CBS newsman, used to talk this way; maybe the still-with-us
George F. Will is a close equivalent. A
writer I knew at San Diego magazine
used to imitate George’s introductory style thusly:
“Of course it should be noted that, as
the renowned English journalist Peregrine Worsthorne once confided to me,
‘there is oft a slip betwixt cup and lip,’ an observation I am not prepared to
gainsay.”
The real joke here was that you’d eventually find out that
Peregrine Whatshisname was an actual person of note, and George knew him, and
George knew an awful lot of other people as well, across the 48 states and in
the London journo world. I suspect this had less to do with George’s having
once been a Senator’s press secretary, than with his ceaseless quest for
speakers at the City Club of San Diego.
Early in my Titanic Telecoms adventure, circa 1993, I phoned
up George to show off. George said, “Oh you should go see my good friend Xan
Smiley at The Economist, he’ll take
you to lunch, a really fascinating man. I have his number here…’
Unfortunately Mr. Smiley couldn’t take me to lunch; he was about
to dine with the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
When I finished banging my head against the wall a few hours
later, I walked down to the World’s End pub and reflected that perhaps it
wasn’t all that humiliating—no, not really embarrassing at all—that the new senior
political editor of The Economist had
brushed me off because his mind was frazzled by an imminent summit lunch with
Norman Lamont. I drank another pint of bitter and wended my way back down Kings
Road. A day or two later I had another connection (via George) who led me to
this editor, and that venue, and at the end of the journey I was ready for Punch’s brief renascence.
It was during the early Punch
weeks that I got canned from Titanic Telecoms. I think about half our people
got canned that season. Meantime, as I scribbled away in our sunlit lounge in
Redcliffe Gardens (furnished with Malcolm’s ancestral leather sofas and
cherrywood dining table, as well as his piano and Scottish dance band
impedimenta) Malcolm was brimming with ideas. He would suddenly reappear from Bournemouth,
count the cat-food cans, and propose to me some new venture in which I could
play a part.
These ventures sounded strange and dreadful. Through some
friend of Malcolm, we had the Golden Opportunity to run a call-center in South
London, off the Old Kent Road (as in the old song). One of those nasty little
shopfronts where Africans could call home to Sierra Leone and Nigeria for two
pounds fifty. All we needed to do was outfit it with some plywood partitions and
second-hand phone equipment, and off we go!
Another fine opportunity was starting a cardboard-box
factory in Uzbekistan. Why Uzbekistan, for heaven sakes? Well, Malcolm had a friend—the story always began like
this—with interests in Tashkent. The friend had explained to him in glowing
detail how in Uzbekistan they grew a lot of oranges—the finest, biggest oranges in the whole wide world! But they could not
export them for, alas, they had no
boxes! So we would build and operate a corrugated-cardboard-box factory, and
the Uzbeks would export their oranges, and everyone would get rich.
San Diego Dreams
About a third of the people in our London office of Titanic
Telecoms were American, either temporarily stationed on London but paid through
our San Diego HQ (techs and ops people, mostly), or else locally hired,
long-settled Americans with dual nationality or resident visas.
The locals were a broad mix. Some were idlers and buffoons,
recruited through the Job Centre, a nationwide quango that forced the workshy
to take jobs for a while so they could qualify for the dole. (In the old days the
Job Centre was called the Labour Exchange. It pops up in proletarian novels as
a grim bureau full of cloth-capped drudges “signing on” for their 15 shillings
per week.) I believe the Job Centre subsidized our lucky hires for a little
while, maybe a month or two, by which time they were usually long gone.
One of our Job Centre cuties was Dawn, an 18-year-old
near-albino elf from the council estate down the way. Dawn was forever handing
us new lists of international tariffs—that is, wholesale costs—because the old
ones were “wrong” for whatever reason.
“So what do we do with the old one?” someone would always
ask.
This was just so Dawn would reply, “Aaoh! Just frow it awye.
Frow it awye!”
We had some intelligent, capable souls, too, though most
were slightly delusional. They were under the impression that after putting in
a year or so here, they could get a transfer to sunny San Diego, California. This
is a very London way of looking at things. All those City people, you know, the
banking crowd at Lloyd’s or NatWest—they always get “seconded” to overseas
offices. We, however, were not the National Westminster Bank. We weren’t even
the Woolwich Building Society.
Aiding my colleagues’ transfer hopes was the fact that some
of them knew the San Diego area pretty well. Certainly they knew it better than
most Americans do. Everybody had a sister who got married at the Hotel Del, or
an uncle who was putting up McMansions in Olivenhain for Barratt American, or
spent three weeks in Pacific Beach a couple of years back.
It was all so sad and poignant; they were working for a San
Diego company, but the only way they were getting to San Diego was on their
dime, or florin or whatever.
Speaking of which: I always paid my own damn airfare from
San Diego or Vancouver; I was supposed to get reimbursed, but almost never did.
My T&E’s had a way of being bucked back and forth between accounts payable
and CFO before finally disappearing behind a potted palm or water cooler.
No, at Titanic we didn’t really do expense accounts. We didn’t “second” or transfer people; we
hired ‘n’ fired. Unwanted employee? Just frow
it awye! No performance plans, no
career-path nurturing. If you came in as a file clerk with a masters in applied
mathematics, a file clerk you remained.
Some of this corporate weirdness came out of the fact that our
company founder, J.J. Hughes, had never had a normal, corporate job. Before
Titanic, J.J. worked for his father, or sold cocaine, or ran a boiler-room outfit
that flogged precious metals to golden-agers. J.J. Hughes didn’t know or care
how companies in the real world worked. Apart from a few accountants and
telephony engineers, almost no one at Titanic—in San Diego or in London—had
ever had a “real” job or career. Most were drifters who’d only done loser-work in
sales or admin or “retail”; or maybe they got some basic technical training as
military enlistees.
But there I go, forgetting Rocky Doogan, our head switch-tech.
Wherever I went—London, Seattle, Los Angeles, probably Istanbul if they’d ever
sent me to Istanbul—there would be Rocky, with his ever-ready rolling toolkit
behind him.
To the Paris Office
Rocky the Switch Tech: he was round-faced and jug-eared and
bore a slight resemblance to the 1890s funny-pages character, The Yellow Kid. I
would tell that to Rocky, and he’d shake his head, and I’d go: “Before your
time!”
Rocky had a way of turning up wherever I went, and whenever
we saw each other, Rocky would always ask why I hadn’t done switch-tech
training yet. Actually I had done some switch-tech training, but not much, because
the company didn’t want to pay for the rest of it. It would have fine with them
if I paid for it myself, then submitted another T&E to join the others
behind the water cooler.
Back in our San Diego days, we worked out of a string of
high-rises along La Jolla Village Drive. It seems whenever I crossed Genesee
Avenue to get from one building to another, there would our Rocky . . . crossing
the street from the other direction . . . dragging the rolling toolbox behind
him. We’d wave and say something tiresome, like “Same shit, different day.”
Rocky remained on my radar for a long time after I left
Titanic. A year or so later I was working in Seattle, and trudging up the hill
on lower Third Avenue, when
—lo!—a half-block
ahead of me, coming my way with his wheelie boxes, was good old Rocky. I was doing donkey-work for a failing firm
called Midcom Communications, but Rocky was still with Titanic Telecoms,
dropping by to visit the Seattle switch. We did our little wave-thing to each
other—just like crossing Genesee—and moved on.
(Out of curiosity I decided to visit the Titanic switch
office in Seattle one afternoon. It was a tiny place, with two kids in it, one
white and one colored. They were stoned out of their minds. I was dressed like
an accountant and they couldn’t stop giggling.)
A little later I flew down to LAX for some job interviews. (Not
very successful ones; I moved down there anyway and worked in a coffee bar near
Santa Monica.) But at the airport, about thirty seconds after I’m out of the Jetway,
there’s our Rocky again. He’s coming up the mile-long concourse with his suitcase
and toolbox. It was beyond weird. This time he gave me his new business card. He
said he figured Titanic might be going down the tubes, so he was advertising
himself as an independent tech.
I also saw him once in Paris. We had a Paris office and it
didn’t have much, just a big empty space and a telecom switch. But I used it as
a pretext when somebody asked what I was doing in London. “I’m going to be head
of the Paris office,” I’d say.
Gradually, though, I decided that Paris was the solution to
all my problems. I figured Malcolm Laird was going to skip out on the rent
eventually, leaving me as the leaseholder of record, unless I got out first.
And if I moved to Paris, it would be that much harder for Titanic to fire me.
They couldn’t just pull me into a conference room on a Tuesday morning and tell
me to hand in my building pass. Weeks and weeks would go by before someone
remembered I was still working for the company.
But that’s all beside the point. Paris would be the perfect
ruse to get of Mimi. I could go down there to take a look at the office, and
then put Mimi on the plane!
So one day when Malcolm had been away for two weeks and we tired
of changing Dylan’s litter box, I put it to her: “Redcliffe Gardens is falling
apart. Malcolm’s not paying his rent, he’s ready to skip out. The company’s
moving me to Paris. I have to visit Paris in a few days, so why don’t you come
with me with me, so you can fly out of Charles de Gaulle?”
I was dead-set on going to Paris by train. The Channel Tunnel
train had been open for two years, but it didn’t get much use and wasn’t making
money. But the people at Eurostar (for such was its official name) advertised
aggressively. The current campaign had posters and television commercials
featuring a suave Frenchman, an Alain Delon type, with devil’s horns and a
pitchfork. “Meester commuter, don’t take thee train to work. Take the train to
… Paaarees!”
Some future Max Weber will interpret this as a French
attempt to impose the French work-ethic upon the doughty, hard-working Brits.
So exciting! Mimi was glad to pack her rolling duffel-bags
one more time and headed out to Waterloo Station with me. All I carried was a
totebag and briefcase. I couldn’t actually move to Paris (I explained) until my
company found me accommodations. She kept talking about going to the Louvre,
but the afternoon was getting on, and I first checked us into a tiny three-star
hotel in the Rue de Saussaies, opposite the Ministry of the Interior. It had
three stars because it boasted a teensy elevator that could barely accommodate
two nonfat people.
Coming out of the hotel, I noted that No. 11 Rue de
Saussaies, a side door to the Interior Ministry across the street, had been
Gestapo headquarters, way back during the Occupation.
“The Gestapo?” said Mimi, concern crawling all over her
face.
“Oh yeeah. I heard they still have, like, torture chambers
in the basement.”
“I’d rather go to
the Louvre!”
So we found our way over to the Louvre, following some
mental points-of-interest map I remembered from a French school-text I’d had when
about twelve years of age.
At the Madeleine there was a silvery-white Citroen DS parked
against the gate, its front wheels up on the pavement. Nearby begged an ancient
she-gypsy who was got up in what I took to be an approximation of a nun’s
habit. She shook a cracked coffee mug half-filled with coins and franc notes in
our general direction.
“No thank you, sister,” said Mimi. “You need it more.”
I suggested to Mimi that the Madeleine was must be having
some kind of a church raffle, and the grand prize was this snazzy, space-age voiture that Charles de Gaulle tooled
around in, in that movie The Day of the
Jackal.
We passed the American Embassy and the Hotel Crillon, where
George Orwell used to wash dishes in the basement (as I, in tour-guide mode,
informed Mimi) until he caught pneumonia, went to the public clinic, and nearly
died. I told Mimi how my Uncle Walt, a Briggs & Stratton heir from Grosse
Pointe Farms, would stop at the Crillon every year. Walt would boast about how
he spent 27 or 28 thousand francs in just a week. Walt always laid in a goodly
supply of Crillon letterhead when in Paris, and sent out notes on it throughout
the year. In an early novel, Hemingway joked about doing just this kind of
thing, but it was serious business to Walt. I made fun of him for it once, in
my teens. It was one of those private family jokes; I shouldn’t have said
anything. Anyway, a few days later I got an FU letter from Walt, probably
drunk, scrawled on Crillon notepaper. I treasure it to this day, or would if I
could find it.
Years later, catching up with Mimi again, I found her
telling relatives in New Westminster about how when we were in Paris we stayed
in the old Gestapo headquarters, where you could book a suite for 27,000 francs;
and how she even got to touch General de Gaulle’s car.
The next day, after depositing Mimi at CDG via the airport
bus, I made my way over to the Titanic Telecoms office. It was just outside
Paris, in an office-park enclave called La Defense. The French didn’t want
their attempts at modern architecture to mess up Paris, so they crowded them
all together behind a cordon sanitaire
that nobody has to visit unless they actually work there. It seemed to be
mostly banks and telecom companies in shiny skyscrapers, along a broad, sterile,
potted-tree promenade.
And on the promenade, coming toward me as usual, was Rocky
the Switch Tech. Wearing his usual beige windbreaker, and rolling his cases
behind him.
“There’s nothing to see, really!” he said, meaning our
Titanic offices, just a hundred meters in the distance.
I said I’d take a look anyway, and he said, “I’ll see you
around then. I thought they were sending you to Istanbul.”
Rocky was right. I punched in the entry code and went
upstairs. Nothing to see. Our Paris-La Défense office was a lot like our London
Docklands digs, though not quite as cozy. Basically brutal, utilitarian space
with industrial tile-carpeting, and the inevitable spaghetti-cables and
electrical conduits sprouting out of the floor. It was completely devoid of
people. Its furniture was one or two metal folding chairs, and a couple of
packing boxes up against a far wall. I imagined myself bringing in a futon and
an electric jug, and just hiding out for a few weeks. But my return trip on the
Eurostar was leaving from Gare de Nord in an hour, and my ownership of the
Paris office remained just a pipe drea.
“Eddie Really Really Wants
to Speak to You”
In an earlier episode of this story I mentioned how our
company’s founder tried to keep himself under wraps, and so set up a screen of
front-men to play senior executives on the financials. One of these was Eddie
Kant—large, expansive, hirsute, and no more like the philosopher Kant than I am
like Chu Chin Chow.
Eddie Kant, of Philadelphia and Rancho Santa Fe, was
nominally President and Chief Executive Officer of Titanic Telecoms. He had
very little to do with the actual workings of the company. Mostly he sat around
his office and talked basketball, and went to lunch. When the Charlie Chips man
came by, Eddie would treat everyone to great canisters of potato chips and
popcorn. He wasn’t really a chief executive, he was the morale officer.
Nevertheless Eddie was the point-man I was supposed to talk
to if I wished to resume my stellar career at Titanic Telecoms. Because the Big
Boss, the secretive J. J. Hughes, didn’t want to hear from me.
Eddie’s office was in the main Titanic building, across La
Jolla Village Drive from University Towne Center, which was then a decent
shopping center but hardly the upscale showplace that Westfield Properties has
turned it into in recent years. On the other hand, in 1996 it still had a
Carlos Murphy’s. That’s where I holed up when I finally landed in San Diego. They
had good pay phones in the foyer at Carlos Murphy’s, and I pumped lots of coins
into them that afternoon. (I still had my mobile phone from London, but in the
mid-90s that was completely useless in America. Where do people at UTC hole up
for an afternoon these days? Could mobile phones be what killed Carlos
Murphy’s?)
Two, three, four times, I tried to phone Eddie from the
Carlos Murphy’s pay phones. I kept getting Eddie’s secretary Sophie. Sophie would
assure me that Eddie would be right back and I could speak with him as soon as
he got back. “Eddie really wants to speak to you.”
I offered to trudge on over, via the concrete bridge over La
Jolla Village Drive, and cool my heels outside Eddie’s office. Sophie did not
think this was a good idea.
Surely I hadn’t dirtied my copybook at Titanic Telecoms? Not
at San Diego headquarters, surely? I guess they just didn’t want me back, on
general principle. But Sophie encouraged me to stay in touch.
“Eddie really really wants to speak to you.”
I had another beer at Carlos Murphy’s. And a big plate of
nachos. And tried the payphone again an hour later.
Eventually I got Eddie, but there didn’t seem to be a job in
the offing. Eddie’s alternative proposal was that I go move in with him in his
mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, “till you get settled.” I had no idea what that
meant.
In the meantime, the new Punch
wanted me to interview Bill Gates. So I flew off to Seattle. Nobody in Redmond,
Washington had ever heard of Punch. I
never got to meet Bill Gates, and of in London my bibulous Punch editor was canned shortly afterwards. So that’s the end of
that story. And I’ve already told you the rest.
