Worst. Person. Ever. (5 page)

Beep.

In the distance, Neal was already gathering his X-ray-screened carry-on bag (a vinyl tote from Tesco). I, meanwhile, watched as every item in my carry-on bag was unpacked, picked at with tweezers, nuzzled with chemical sampling cloths for gunpowder residue, and otherwise examined closely by a group of people who seemingly spoke no English yet had no other language in common. Crows descending on run-over squirrels go at their game with more decorum than shown by this lot.

On my fourth pass through the metal detector, I heard yet another dreaded
beep.

“Could you please come with us, sir?” said one of the lifers.

Oh Christ, the fucking magic wand.
I put my arms up.

“No, sir, could you please come with us into this room?”

“A sleeper cell?”

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

Get a fucking sense of humour. “Nothing.”

Inside, a group of five young screeners-in-training stood ready. My screener said, “National security is a vital issue, Mr. …” he looked at my boarding pass, “Gunt.” Outside the door I heard the Buñuel crowd whizzing their way towards the gate, sounding like a cluster of ambulances.

My screener said, “If you’ll give me one second, Mr. Gunt, I’ll remove my flashlight and forceps from the sterilizer.”

I was the last passenger on the plane. I walked to 67E, withstanding the angry and accusatory glares of every passenger and each crew member. At the plane’s rear, all twelve Buñuel children took one look at me and ignited like smoke alarms.

I forgot to look for Neal. Well, wherever he was, once we were safely in the air, his seat was mine.

Just before we taxied to the end of the runway for takeoff, the captain announced that the entertainment system’s software was glitchy and that only one film was available for the flight: “We are proud to present to you the beloved year 2000 family favourite,
The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas
, starring Stephen Baldwin and Joan Collins, with a cameo by eighties rocker John Taylor, of Duran Duran.”

Liftoff.

I’m actually not a bad chap.

Really.

I listen to people if they have something to say, as long as they’re not too slow or too boring. I leave pennies in the penny jar, and I’ve been known to double flush in restaurant toilets—courtesy flushes, I believe they’re called. But sometimes I am tested by the universe. For example, when I heard the landing gear pull up, I unbuckled and stood up, whereupon a flight attendant screamed at me, “Sir, sit down
immediately.
We are experiencing a pocket of mild turbulence.”

Well, okay. I sat down.

*Ding!*

Good! It was the bell to indicate that it was okay to unfasten our seatbelts and move around, but it set the Buñuel children to expressing themselves with gusto.

Expecting to be reprimanded at any moment, I stood to retrieve my small, chaste Adidas bag from the overhead bin, amid a snowdrift of drool bibs, adult diapers, restraining harnesses and baseball caps reading
BUÑUEL CHILDREN ARE PEOPLE TOO
, with the intent of finding that cuntfart, Neal.

Just then, the drinks cart emerged from the mid-plane galley to begin a zombie-slow service likely to reach row 67 by the time the plane was over Greenland.

In my mind there existed a duality: I wanted a triple Scotch, but I also wanted to get as far away from the little Buñuel fucks as possible.

Dilemma.

In the end, the triple Scotch won. But when, after seventeen hours, the trolley limped past row 67 and I asked for a triple Scotch, she who told me to sit down during the turbulence said, “I’m sorry, sir, but EU regulations prohibit the sale of more than a single drink at a time on all EU carriers, either within or without EU airspace.”

“You sound like a computer program.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Nothing. I’ll have a single, then.”

As the vile, Tabasco-gargling sky-wench grimly slapped a Johnnie Walker and a clear plastic cup with one ice cube onto my tray, she gave me the evil eye. Then she favoured the Buñuel child to my right, who screamed for something incomprehensible, with a cartload of smiles, an infinite glow of love and compassion, plus a juice box featuring the face of a
Toy Story
character whose arrival created a brief interval of merciful silence before the sirens of hell once again flared. How the fuck do humans ever manage to reproduce if
that
is what lies at the end of the coitus/lust/DNA dance of doom?

Having downed my meagre ration, I set off to find Neal.

But you see, the thing was, I was looking for Neal somewhere in coach class. It never occurred to me that the dim fucker could have finagled his way into the business
class seat that rightfully ought to have been
mine.
It was only after the third circling of rows 15 to 69 and back again that it dawned on me:
Oh my dear God. No. This isn’t happening. No. It just isn’t happening
 …

I walked down the cabin, climbed the staircase into the plane’s bubble and there, in 77A, reclining in a pod like something out of a utopian sci-fi movie, was Neal, clinking champagne flutes with Cameron fucking Diaz.

Cameron fucking Diaz?

I loomed over him. “Neal, here you are. Business class? I think not. Come on now, chop-chop. It’s time for you to assume your rightful seat, 67E, at the back of the plane.
Now.
”

“Ray, relax. Have a drink with Cam and me.”

I was so peeved that Miss Diaz’s fame factor didn’t register.

“Neal, no. You’re my personal assistant and I command you to swap seats with me.” Other passengers were staring at us.

“Ray, chill. Cam here is just telling me about various formulas for generating prime numbers. A smart one, she is.” The pair made bedroom eyes at each other.

I lost it. “You fecal-scented golem, get out of my fucking seat
now.
What the
fuck
is your problem?”

“Excuse me, sir …” Lady Cuntly McRazorpanties, the flight attendant from down below, had followed me up into the bubble.

“Oh, it’s
you.
”

“Sir, I have to ask you to leave business class immediately.”

“Not bloody likely. I’m staying here, while this git who works for me takes his rightful place in coach.”

Lady Cuntly backed off to confer with a hag cohort out by the meal-heating ovens, then came at me again.

“Mr. Gunt …”

She knew my name. Bravo!

“Mr. Gunt, Mr. Neal here is a street survivor. We at the airline are honouring the homeless this year, and it was our airline’s privilege and delight to offer him the one remaining business class seat as a token of our faith in the triumph of the human spirit over adversity. With the full authority of the EU air system code behind me, I order you back to 67E.”

Order me? “Who the hell do you think you—”

Glunkkkk!
On went the plastic zap-strap handcuffs from behind and,
ghufghghghg!
, a steward’s hand went around my neck and, within a constellation of pain, I was marched back down the bubble’s stairs to 67E. I was furious, but it was also (if I’m honest) a bit of fun having everyone I passed looking at me and thinking I was violent and dangerous.

Once I was seated, the steward hissed into my ear, “Mr. Gunt, you can stay there and behave, or we can manacle you to your seat and make an emergency landing in Reykjavík, where you’ll be jailed and made to pay a fine that will bankrupt you. Am I clear?”

Dick.
“Yes.”

“Good. We have approximately nine more hours ahead of us. Behave like an adult and we’ll be fine.” He removed the zap straps with a small pair of scissors.

“What about my seat up in business class?”

The steward and McRazorpanties eyed each other. “That’s not your seat,” he said.

“It fucking well is.”

“Sir, you’re terrifying the children,” McRazorpanties chided.

“These tards would be frightened by a paper napkin.”

In unison: “Sir!”

“I want my seat!”

“I warned you, Mr. Gunt.”

From nowhere came six arms, and
zap, zap, zap, zap
—I was bound onto 67E while a Buñuel child sniffed my hair and began shrieking into my right ear.

I sat there imprisoned, deprived of meal service, unable to comprehend what had just happened, while the Buñuels caterwauled and the drunken yobs voided their bowels in the toilets that sandwiched my ears.

And then Neal came down the aisle towards me. “God, Ray. You must have been pretty out of control.”

Words failed me, though I hope bulging forehead veins conveyed what words couldn’t.

“Cammie was worried about you and asked me to bring you a flute of champagne, but I thought it might get you in trouble, so I didn’t. She’s amazing.”

Dumbfounded, I stared at Neal.

“Can I get you a pillow or a snack?” he offered.

“Neal, when you were waiting for the car to pick you up, you were sitting on the curb and those two teenage birds came up to you, and I could see that in their minds they wanted to shag you on the spot, and you did, too. I
saw
it. How the fuck did you
do
that? I mean really … you look like shit. You smell like shit. You have nothing going for you outwardly … and yet you’re like Jimi Hendrix with a never-ending rotisserie of pussy circling his dick.”

Neal knelt in the aisle beside me. “You know,
Raymond,” he said, “I’ve been homeless for years, but not a week’s gone by where I haven’t had two or three unique encounters, all of them instigated by women—in their cars, in their offices, in alleyways, once even inside a police van. I just sit there on a curb, like, needing to be fixed, and these ladies come along thinking they know how to fix me.”

If pathos and uselessness are somehow erotic, I ought to be the Leonardo DiCaprio of the new era. And yet I end up zap-strapped to seat 67E.

Neal looked at me. “Ray, open your mouth.”

“What?”

“Just open your mouth. Trust me.”

And so I did, and Neal stuck something in it that felt like a Tic-Tac, and that dissolved on my tongue almost instantly.

“What the fuck was
that?
”

He smiled at me. “Something to make the flight bearable. By the way, John Taylor of Duran Duran is in the inflight movie. Fucking brilliant. See you on the ground in Los Angeles.” And with that, he was off.

What the?

When next I opened my eyes, the plane was empty and a team of swarthy-looking people was vacuuming the seats. Grim-faced McRazorpanties walked past carrying a pile of paperwork. “Oh, Mr. Gunt,” she said. “You’re awake. Good. I think you’ll find your party waiting for you at gate two. Have a lovely trip to Honolulu.”

Twat.

But a
doable
twat.

I had the delight of visiting Los Angeles International Airport in the mid-1980s, when I was beginning my career as a cameraman. The London production company I worked with was treated to a god-like junket: five of us were sent to California to learn about new lines of increasingly digital cameras and new techniques for lighting and sound, as well as to grind our schlongs to the bone on an endless roller coaster of pussy. Enormous meals. The best booze. Women hurling themselves at us. Palm trees. Freeways. Fuck, it was easily the highlight of my young life, and it ended with a farewell shag in the business lounge loo with young Shelley, who worked for Panavision or Kodak or something like that. Returning to London felt like going back to a Dickensian orphanage. Grimness. Clouds. Soot. Diesel fumes. Labour unrest. I mean, it really was an eye-opener to see how Americans lived back then.

The point is that I remember LAX back in the day, and was kind of looking forward to a little dash of that California energy. And as my pretzelled, blood-starved
body limped out of the Jetway and into the terminal, I thought that a ghastly mistake had been made. Maybe the plane had landed in Tijuana. The concourse was full of short little munchkins percolating away in Mexican or whatever it is they speak in California these days. A filthy, clapped-out terminal building. Darth Vader Homeland Security warning messages blaring every thirty seconds. Police and K9 search squads imperiously sniffing everything. Greasy fast-food stands. I mean, if they’re going to ape Mexico, why not throw in some donkey cock floorshows and a few five-minute hand-job booths? How hard is it to get a titty bar going? Staple-gun a black bed-sheet up in a corner, break out a halfway decent flashlight and start minting twenty-dollar bills. Gentlemen, it’s not rocket science.

Neal saw me coming and waved me over to our gate. “That was a good flight, Ray. I saw the Flintstones movie four times. That Joan Collins, sure, she may have been driving ambulances in the Korean War, but she’s still got something going. And how are you?”

“Fucking Americans.”

“I have to agree. I was expecting something a bit fancier, maybe even kind of like that bar scene in
Star Wars.
” At that moment half of Peru cut in front of us and clattered away to some distant gate. “The one thing I wasn’t expecting was …”

“An anthill? Neal, please tell me that our flight to Honolulu is on time and that I have a seat in first class.”