My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere (31 page)

I felt sorry for her, so I treated her to a bowl of noodle soup from a stand at the western end of the street. We were, at that moment, on the very edge of the rest of the city. Thirty paces away, on Chakrabongse Road, were a dozen bridal shops where Thai girls shopped for their big white gowns; a few paces beyond that was the temple, Wat Chanasongkhran, where monks in yellow were chanting their daily sutras. All of it seemed surreal and sort of irrelevant and much farther away from Khao San Road than almost anywhere else in the universe, including outer space. Elizabeth had a travel tip for me.
The Phantom Menace
was starting at one a.m. at Buddy Beer, and if she finished her soup, and we hurried, we could make it back for the opening scene.

EVERYWHERE

Part Three

Homewrecker

Recently, my friend Gene asked if I’d let a friend of his use my apartment while I was away. I declined, and then, later, he mentioned that the person needing a place to stay happened to be Tina Turner. I was sorry I’d said no, because even though I don’t know Tina personally, I had just seen the movie about her—
What’s Love Got to Do with It
—and I think that it would have been cool to have her stay in my apartment. It’s a two-bedroom on the Upper West Side, which I have decorated as if it were owned by a midranking official of the Chinese Communist Party. I like how it’s turned out.

However, I don’t know if it would be to Tina’s liking. In the movie, Ike and Tina’s apartment (or mansion, or whatever) has a different look from mine, but maybe Ike did their decorating.

I’m a size 2, and I bet that Tina is also a 2, or maybe a 4 on her fat days. I’m sure she’d end up rummaging around in my closet—something I ordinarily wouldn’t like, but I’d love to be the person who turned Tina on to J. Crew plain-front relaxed-fit khakis. On the other hand, if she visited on a fat day and tried on something of mine and split a seam, would she fix it? Or would she hide it and hope I’d never notice? Or—worst of all—would she throw away the ruined outfit and then let me spend the next year of my life trying to figure out where I lost my pants? I’d hate having to worry that some celebrity who hadn’t worked out her shame-and-denial issues was going to be destroying my stuff and then pretending it had never happened.

Also: Does Tina Turner cook? I’ll bet that she doesn’t cook a lot but that she has mastered one fancy party dish—something that’s not actually hard to make but looks complicated, like smoked-bluefish pâté or nachos. It’s become her signature dish: Whenever she goes to pot lucks, people see her coming up the driveway and instead of saying, “Hey, here comes Tina,” they say, “Hey, here comes that smoked-bluefish pâté,” or, “Here come the nachos.” Anyway, my kitchen is typical for New York City, so there wouldn’t be much for her to see, except that I have one cupboard absolutely loaded with cans of water-packed tuna. This could have a downside. It might tempt her to just “borrow” a few cans, with every intention of replacing them at some future date, and we all know how often guests spend their vacation running to the grocery store to replace what they’ve filched. The answer is: not very often. I also have these great boar-bristle hairbrushes that I think a show business person with a lot of hair and an elevated hair consciousness—for example, Tina Turner—would adore. Unfortunately, I’m not crazy about sharing combs and brushes—this is something I was taught as a child—but if Tina had just shampooed and had forgotten her own stuff, she would probably use them, even if I had specifically asked her not to. No comment. I’ve done it myself.

I think my neighbors would like Tina, but I’m not sure they’d like her clattering around the apartment in those spike-heeled pumps of hers. I would have to ask her to limit her clattering—she could borrow my socks if she wanted to, but I would appreciate their being washed afterward. Moreover, if she had friends over—I’m assuming her friends also wear noisy shoes—she’d have to insist that they also take theirs off, but they’d have to bring their own socks. If she’s too uncomfortable to ask them to do something like that, then maybe she ought to get new friends, or maybe she should look for somewhere else to stay. Isn’t that what hotels are for?

The World

The first time we saw the World was in a friend’s bathroom in the East Village, and we knew in an instant that we had to have it. It had been some time since we’d thought of ourself as a colonial power, or even a post-isolationist neocolonial power, but once we saw the World, the Gulf of Bothnia and the Strait of Malacca started to look irresistible instead. We wanted the own the World. We wanted hegemony. We hankered to expand our sphere of influence globally. The greatest thing about owning the World, which is a transparent vinyl shower curtain imprinted with a pastel geopolitical world map, is that if you hang it with plastic rings on a good strong rod, you can exercise expansionism at will. Moreover, by applying proper antifungal treatment, you can also control worldwide growth, especially where the curtain hangs against the side of the tub.

Ray Faragher, who makes the World, told us over the phone the other day, from his office in Cincinnati, that he hadn’t expected to sell many copies of the World at all, and certainly hadn’t expected it to become his bestselling shower curtain in New York City. But that is what has happened. The World has supplanted curtains featuring frogs, fish, and parrots as the shower curtain of choice. According to Mr. Faragher, it sells particularly well at the United Nations gift shop.

Mr. Faragher, who is something of an international bath accessories kingpin, grew up in a house in Kentucky that had no indoor plumbing. “I named my shower curtain company Saturday Knight, because Saturday was bath night when I was growing up,” he said. “Plus I’m an Anglophile. Which reminds me: The World is being very well received around the world. It’s quite a conversation piece. After all, how many people have a world map hanging in their bathroom? I’d heard about a survey that showed that most people don’t know where Iran is, and I thought that with the World they’d be able to find it in their shower.” Mr. Faragher went on to say that he’s not always sure what makes one shower curtain work and not another one. This year, for instance, he thought that pigs would be big, but pigs flopped—instead, hippos were a hit. As for the World, he thinks some people like it because it transforms their bathroom into something like the Situation Room of the National Security Council. “I knew it would appeal to people with imagination,” Mr. Faragher said, “and to people with young minds.”

Margo Warnecke Merek, who has an apartment in the East Sixties, originally bought the World just because the colors—creamy pink, yellow, gray, and light green—looked good in her bathroom. Then the real benefit of the World ownership dawned on her. “I had just started doing crossword puzzles,” she told us, “and I realized that the curtain would be a good way to check countries.”

The apartment in the East Village where we first saw the World belongs to Paula Klausner, who first saw the World when she attended a party on Central Park West three years ago. “The minute I saw it, I knew I had to have it,” she told us. “I was enjoying the party, but I spent a lot of time in the bathroom that night just admiring the curtain. I’d never known where Swaziland was. I’d also just heard of Gambia that year, and I liked it that the World had Gambia on it. I even liked the mistakes—the way they spelled ‘Manila’ just like ‘vanilla’ on those early curtains.”

Beth Shulman, who lives in Morningside Heights, bought the World last winter to cure her wanderlust. “My husband and I used to travel a lot, and then we had our son, and we cut back on our traveling, but we missed it,” she said. “We have friends who are on a six-month trip through Asia and Australia, so I’ve been monitoring their trip on my shower curtain.”

Mrs. Shulman, like everyone else we know who owns the World, spends a certain amount of her shower time planning imaginary trips and a certain amount trying to figure our whether there’s a pattern to the way the countries are colored. For example, the Soviet Union, Ethiopia, and Bolivia are pink; the United States and China are gray; Canada and South Africa are yellow; and Greenland and Kenya are green.

We asked Mr. Faragher to explain the World.

“There’s no pattern at all,” he said, and laughed. “Pastels are very popular in the market these days, and the design just worked out that way.” He then seemed to reconsider and added, “Of course, I thought we should at least do the Soviet Union pink.”

Skymalling

One characteristic of the Skymall customer seems to be an excess of body hair. In fact, as you leaf through the hundred or so pages of the Skymall catalog, you begin to suspect that its customers have luxuriant growth everywhere, sprouting out of their noses, ears, cheeks, legs, underarms, and what is always delicately referred to as “the bikini area.” In the world of Skymall, though, hirsutism is not an obstacle: It is a challenging and market-exploitable opportunity, with exciting products attached to it. Just look at last summer’s issue of the catalog. On page 23, you are offered the Turbo-Groomer 5.0, with superior Swiss surgical stainless-steel blades, for those hard-to-reach nose and ear hairs; on page 42, the immersible long-use travel shaver, for hair removal underwater; on page 74, the Igia Forever Gone Plus, “the permanent solution to hair removal”; on page 81, the Discrette Plus by Epilady, which announces itself as “Always one step ahead in hair removal.” There are also line extension hair-removal-associated products, such as the Chrome-Plated Fog-Free Shower Mirror and the AM/FM Shower Radio with Lighted Mirror, which allows you to listen to traffic reports while you shower and shave, satisfying another Skymall trait, the desire to do more than one thing at a time, especially if one of the things you’re doing is removing hair. I never used to think about hairiness when I flew, but then I began to read Skymall regularly, and as a result, much of my air time is now devoted to wondering if I have too much hair and, if I do, what system I should use to get rid of it. I also wonder, persistently, whether or not I should at last surrender and order myself a solar-powered cascade fountain or a jewelry organizer with sixty-six pockets or a Pop-Up Hot Dog Cooker—three Skymall items I have thought about buying time after high-flying time. I have dog-eared enough copies of Skymall to fill a kennel. I fly all the time, and even on those overscheduled days when I fly somewhere in the morning and somewhere else in the afternoon, I always pull Skymall out of the seat pocket and browse through it, savoring each and every brass guest towel holder and hand-painted Russian balalaika and foldaway closet ladder and pocket pepper mill. For me, Skymall is the land of products I never think I want, serving needs I never thought I had, and which I can’t quite bring myself to buy but can’t help considering once they have been brought to my attention.

Skymall is a weird entity. It is a go-between that packages other mail-order companies and offers them in a virtual shopping mall in the virtual megalopolis of the sky. In the trade it is known as a “multichannel specialty retailer.” It actually has no products of its own: It doesn’t produce anything or manufacture anything or even customize anything it offers for sale. Its closest precedent is probably the Yankee peddler. Skymall is offered in some hotel rooms and airport lounges and on some Amtrak trains, but its singular and fundamental microenvironment is the airline seat pocket—that grimy pouch sagging from the seat back, where it is tucked between the evacuation-slide instruction card and the airsickness bag and whatever previous travelers’ rubbish the ground crew failed to clean out. Skymall debuted in 1990. It is now distributed on nineteen airlines, including American, Delta, Southwest, United, Continental, and Alaska. More than five hundred million air travelers see the catalog every year; its sales in 2000 were a whopping sixty-two and a half million dollars—that’s sixty-two and a half million dollars’ worth of garden toad ornaments and FM radio/ballpoint pens and Old Fashioned Nachos & Cheese Makers, ordered, in a few instances, from the Skymall website but in most cases purchased while at the comfortable cruising altitude of thirty-five thousand feet. According to a company spokesperson, the founder of Skymall, Robert Worsley, came up with the concept of the catalog when he was on a flight and noticed how bored passengers were. In the words of the corporate legend, Worsley “decided to start a business that would alleviate the boredom factor and give passengers something useful to do with their time.” Skymall gobbled up another in-flight catalog along the way and then was in turn gobbled up by Gemstar–TV Guide International in 2001. The Skymall vision, though, has remained the same from the day the company began. “Passengers tell us they think we have something for everyone,” the spokesperson e-mailed me recently. “Their reaction to products in the catalog range from ‘Wow! That’s something cool that I must have!’ to ‘Who on earth would buy that?’ ”

I began reading Skymall during a period in my life when I had developed a ferocious fear of flying. Because of the itinerant nature of my work, I have to travel all the time, regardless of the state of my nerves. Like all sissy fliers, I gorged compulsively on airplane disaster news, became fluent in traffic controller lingo, and developed a self-taught genius in diagnosing aircraft thumps and rattles. During takeoffs and landings, in particular, I was very busy assisting the pilot. At the same time, of course, I was scared witless and needed to distract myself or I would have jumped out the emergency exit. There were also a few unfortunate episodes of me clawing the arm of the stranger in the next seat when I thought the plane was moments from hurtling out of control. I always carried dozens of magazines and books with me, but honestly, who can concentrate on reading when at any moment she might be called upon to pull a 767-200 jumbo jet out of a nosedive? No, the reading I wanted to do during my flying phobia days was not actual reading: I just wanted to flip through something, the pages sticking slightly to my clammy hands, while running my eyeballs over text. This is how I discovered, and grew to deeply love, Skymall.