The Flight of the Professionals.
Tuesday, 9 August 2011
Get your kicks...
Road trip coming soon. Barstow, Route 66, Flagstaff, Alomogordo, Roswell, Trinity, and back again on a completely different route. Grand Canyon? Sure! There is no destination. This is all about the journey. 3 good friends, one drives, one writes and the other with a camera.
The Flight of the Professionals.
The Flight of the Professionals.
Thursday, 24 February 2011
Exodus
In April of 1997, the company I worked for decided it would be a good idea to send me on a junket to London, UK for a month to provide technical assistance for a large project they were working on.
Now, I had done quite a bit of travelling in my life up to this point, but never on my own and never unsupervised. I was glad for the opportunity that the company gave me, and proud of the fact that they invested a lot of trust in me. Unfortunately for them, providing me with a substantial per diem proved to be a critical flaw in their plan.
Now, unleashing a 26 year old in a foreign country with a generous expense account and next to zero supervision is a phenomenally bad idea. Very quickly I fell into the pub scene, because hell, that's what you DO after a hard day's work at the office in London. Much to the chagrin of my English drinking mates I was not much of a drinker (yet), and was subsequently told that rum and coke is a "girl's drink".
This didn't endear me too much to the pint drinking crowd, so I started drinking at the hotel bar instead. The bar was staffed mostly by young people in their 20s, usually from Germany or France so they didn't really care what I drank so long as I tipped well. Then I met The Dane. A fellow named Sten who worked for HBO Sports as a cameraman, and he was interested in Canada because of the F1 race in Montreal. So we got to chatting, then out of the blue he asks if I want to come to a grand opening of a new Sports Club in Leicester Square. Invitation only, and he had a spare ticket.
Hell, why not. Free food and booze all night long and there were going to be local sports celebrities there including the West Ham Rugby team. I'll get to these guys later. Let's start the clock at 8 PM.
I immediately start drinking the expensive scotches and tipping the bartender 20 Pound bills, which resulted in very generous pours. About 2 hours of this and Sten has disappeared, leaving me to my own devices. This horde of rugby players then enters the scene, belly up to the bar and start ordering peach schnapps shots. Really? Really? I don't have a filter at the best of times, so I immediately approach the team captain and declare that if they want to shoot drinks that aren't found in a Harrods Lingerie department, they should join me in straight shots of Jack. Immediately regretting my poorly chosen words, my "yank" arse was about to be used as a tackling dummy until I angrily slurred that I was Canadian. It was then decided I would join the team with their shot of choice.
If Alcohol was The Internet then Peach Schnapps is Goatse.
Not wanting to sully my national pride, I started matching the Rugby players shot-for-shot. This was gaining me tremendous respect from the team, but also a creeping sense of dread. We're at about midnight now, the club is packed and from what I can remember I was down 4 double shots of Talisker, at least a couple of pints, some Gentleman Jack, and and an indeterminate amount of sickly sweet peach. There's a muted alarm claxon ringing steadily at the back of my skull, a warning of medieval horrors rising out of a faustian nightmare. I had to leave the club, NOW.
I make it outside the front door and take in the fresh air. My head is a complete fog, and I'm not able to speak in coherent sentences. A large black man is pulling at my arm towards a car, I step back defensively then notice it's a taxi. Probably arranged by the club to take patrons home. I manage to tell him where I'm staying and the drive begins. I remember crossing over Tower Bridge, turning on to Rotherhithe street, then this guy hits what had to be a bomb crater left over from The Blitz. That was it, the demons were unleashed and I could feel and taste Peach Schnapps rising at the back of my throat. I had the sense not to spew in the back of this poor guy's cab, but rather in the inside pocket of my grey field jacket. The cabbie realized what was happening just as we pull into the hotel driveway. I pay him double what the fare was and then stagger back to my hotel room, past the security guard who I'm sure caught a whiff of fresh peach vomit.
What happened next was probably the single most horrific drunk experience of my life. I drained the heave from my coat pocket and started to rinse the jacket out in the tub... and then it came. Like a freight train loaded with chunky toxic slurry... crashing headlong and without mercy into the bathtub. I'd nailed the taps, the jacket all over again, and the tile backsplash... and it kept coming. I had the sense to down as much water as I could between heaves to try and mitigate the damage, but that had the opposite effect. Drinking anything triggered the gag reflex and it was a rail disaster all over again. This must have lasted at least 30 minutes. I was making deals with God how "never again" would this holocaust of vomit be allowed to happen.
At the point where I had completely purged the corrosive contents of my abused stomach, the bathroom looked - how shall I put it - like someone had thrown water balloons filled with Thames river silt in the tub and down the side of the toilet. Then the worst possible thing happened. I had to shit. I had to shit with the force of the hydrogen bomb blast at Bikini Atoll. My guts were cramping so hard I wad doubled over. I barely got my pants down and squatted when I unleashed a shart of colossal magnitude. A cross between ripping a very wet bed sheet in half and drywall being torn off a wall then building up to a sound unlike firing up a Harley.
Once the initial flood had subsided, one thing became apparent. My colon's seizing indicated that more was on it's way, and the bathroom was now beset by a horrible, eldritch stench - and I vomited again, this time right into the pants that were around my ankles. God had forsaken me.
Now, I had done quite a bit of travelling in my life up to this point, but never on my own and never unsupervised. I was glad for the opportunity that the company gave me, and proud of the fact that they invested a lot of trust in me. Unfortunately for them, providing me with a substantial per diem proved to be a critical flaw in their plan.
Now, unleashing a 26 year old in a foreign country with a generous expense account and next to zero supervision is a phenomenally bad idea. Very quickly I fell into the pub scene, because hell, that's what you DO after a hard day's work at the office in London. Much to the chagrin of my English drinking mates I was not much of a drinker (yet), and was subsequently told that rum and coke is a "girl's drink".
This didn't endear me too much to the pint drinking crowd, so I started drinking at the hotel bar instead. The bar was staffed mostly by young people in their 20s, usually from Germany or France so they didn't really care what I drank so long as I tipped well. Then I met The Dane. A fellow named Sten who worked for HBO Sports as a cameraman, and he was interested in Canada because of the F1 race in Montreal. So we got to chatting, then out of the blue he asks if I want to come to a grand opening of a new Sports Club in Leicester Square. Invitation only, and he had a spare ticket.
Hell, why not. Free food and booze all night long and there were going to be local sports celebrities there including the West Ham Rugby team. I'll get to these guys later. Let's start the clock at 8 PM.
I immediately start drinking the expensive scotches and tipping the bartender 20 Pound bills, which resulted in very generous pours. About 2 hours of this and Sten has disappeared, leaving me to my own devices. This horde of rugby players then enters the scene, belly up to the bar and start ordering peach schnapps shots. Really? Really? I don't have a filter at the best of times, so I immediately approach the team captain and declare that if they want to shoot drinks that aren't found in a Harrods Lingerie department, they should join me in straight shots of Jack. Immediately regretting my poorly chosen words, my "yank" arse was about to be used as a tackling dummy until I angrily slurred that I was Canadian. It was then decided I would join the team with their shot of choice.
If Alcohol was The Internet then Peach Schnapps is Goatse.
Not wanting to sully my national pride, I started matching the Rugby players shot-for-shot. This was gaining me tremendous respect from the team, but also a creeping sense of dread. We're at about midnight now, the club is packed and from what I can remember I was down 4 double shots of Talisker, at least a couple of pints, some Gentleman Jack, and and an indeterminate amount of sickly sweet peach. There's a muted alarm claxon ringing steadily at the back of my skull, a warning of medieval horrors rising out of a faustian nightmare. I had to leave the club, NOW.
I make it outside the front door and take in the fresh air. My head is a complete fog, and I'm not able to speak in coherent sentences. A large black man is pulling at my arm towards a car, I step back defensively then notice it's a taxi. Probably arranged by the club to take patrons home. I manage to tell him where I'm staying and the drive begins. I remember crossing over Tower Bridge, turning on to Rotherhithe street, then this guy hits what had to be a bomb crater left over from The Blitz. That was it, the demons were unleashed and I could feel and taste Peach Schnapps rising at the back of my throat. I had the sense not to spew in the back of this poor guy's cab, but rather in the inside pocket of my grey field jacket. The cabbie realized what was happening just as we pull into the hotel driveway. I pay him double what the fare was and then stagger back to my hotel room, past the security guard who I'm sure caught a whiff of fresh peach vomit.
What happened next was probably the single most horrific drunk experience of my life. I drained the heave from my coat pocket and started to rinse the jacket out in the tub... and then it came. Like a freight train loaded with chunky toxic slurry... crashing headlong and without mercy into the bathtub. I'd nailed the taps, the jacket all over again, and the tile backsplash... and it kept coming. I had the sense to down as much water as I could between heaves to try and mitigate the damage, but that had the opposite effect. Drinking anything triggered the gag reflex and it was a rail disaster all over again. This must have lasted at least 30 minutes. I was making deals with God how "never again" would this holocaust of vomit be allowed to happen.
At the point where I had completely purged the corrosive contents of my abused stomach, the bathroom looked - how shall I put it - like someone had thrown water balloons filled with Thames river silt in the tub and down the side of the toilet. Then the worst possible thing happened. I had to shit. I had to shit with the force of the hydrogen bomb blast at Bikini Atoll. My guts were cramping so hard I wad doubled over. I barely got my pants down and squatted when I unleashed a shart of colossal magnitude. A cross between ripping a very wet bed sheet in half and drywall being torn off a wall then building up to a sound unlike firing up a Harley.
Once the initial flood had subsided, one thing became apparent. My colon's seizing indicated that more was on it's way, and the bathroom was now beset by a horrible, eldritch stench - and I vomited again, this time right into the pants that were around my ankles. God had forsaken me.
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