Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come

by Jessica Pan

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  In the sitcom The Good Place (spoiler alert, if you haven’t gotten to the end of the first season, skip the next two paragraphs immediately), the characters, who have died, are told they are in the Good Place (heaven), when they are actually in the Bad Place (hell). Eleanor, the main character, always figures out she’s been duped, usually from one big, glaring clue, like having to endure three hours of spoken-word jazz from her “soul mate.” At each moment of discovery, Eleanor stands up and declares, “Oh THIS is the Bad Place” in shock.

  “Choose your response,” Charles had said. So far I’ve been letting my knee-jerk response to the destination and my preconceptions overwhelm any new possibilities. I’d arrived in Budapest unfairly biased toward it already being the Bad Place from my previous time here: OK food; not super friendly; dark, bloody history.

  The next morning, I walk out of my hotel and go right instead of left. Today, Budapest will be the Good Place. I will make it so.

  I buy a coffee in a cute café. A handsome Hungarian man serves me. I smile at him, and he smiles back.

  Yes, that tiny gesture is so big that the day already feels different. I ask him where I should go, and he writes down the address for the Széchenyi Spa Baths.

  It’s about a forty-minute walk away, and I wander through the quiet streets, savoring the different energy in these residential areas.

  When I reach the bathhouse, I take in the enormous, majestic yellow building. There are several outdoor baths in a large courtyard and dozens more inside. God, they really do love their baths here.

  I wander around the pools before heading for a quick massage. A Hungarian woman de-cricks my neck, which hasn’t been the same since my flight, and restores it to normal. I sit in a very, very hot steam room that smells like eucalyptus. It all feels good. There are people, so technically I’m extroverting, though it’s mostly couples.

  I swim in the outdoor pool, then hit the dry sauna, before I venture into the underground, natural mineral baths.

  They are warm and dark and smell like egg farts. I try to embrace it.

  What did you learn, Jess?

  That sometimes you just have to embrace the unknown and smell the

  thermal farts.

  I dive back into the outdoor pool to rinse the smell off.

  My hair wet, I get dressed and wander the streets again until it is time to grab a taxi and head to the airport.

  Jess, what did you do in Budapest?

  Washed myself fifteen times, walked fifty miles to nowhere, and barfed up fried dough. You?

  I had explored various baths and met new people, but I had eluded la-la land. Or la-la land had eluded me. Maybe you can’t find it when you are looking for it. Maybe that is a key feature of the place. I had tried to book a ticket there, and that’s the only surefire way never to arrive.

  In the departure lounge, my flight turns red on the board. It’s delayed. By several hours.

  NO. No no no.

  I’m going to miss the last train home. I’m going to have to take an expensive Uber or a taxi. I’m going to arrive in London at 3 a.m.

  I scour the airport for potential northeast Londoners, my shyness eradicated by exhaustion and thriftiness. I need to find someone to share a ride home with. After a couple of false starts, I happen upon Jaime, a Chilean man. He tells me he’s staying with friends in London and points to an address a three-minute walk away from my apartment. I yelp in joy.

  It is a Hungarian miracle.

  Jaime gets up and comes back with a beer and takes the seat next to me.

  He tells me that he works with Hungarian locals who have told him all the good secret bars and restaurants that tourists don’t know about. And a live music festival in small venues all over the city.

  “OK, well, it’s a little too late for that, Jaime,” I say, eating a Mars bar. “Your knowledge is no use to me now.” Any shyness I have ever felt has completely evaporated: frankly, I am over it. It’s midnight, and I still reek of chlorine from the baths (I did not shower after the bathhouse, thank you for not judging me at this fragile time).

  Desperation can bond people, but you can’t engineer it. Luckily, desperation has found me.

  Finally, our gate is announced, and we make our way toward it. I lose my passport four times in my own bag in the boarding line because I’m so tired. I bid Jaime goodbye until London as I settle in to my seat on the plane.

  I want a do-over. I want to book a trip to destination unknown again and specify that I want them to pick somewhere delicious and ultrafriendly. But there are no do-overs in life. This is a lesson I’m still learning as an adult. This trip happened. These days were real. This is life. Stop acting like it’s a rehearsal. Stop railing against goulash. I don’t get a second chance.

  When we land back in London, we disembark, and the cold London fog envelops me as I struggle to put my coat on. My bag strap comes undone, and I glance up to see that Jaime is waiting for me at the door. He lopes across and picks up my bag for me while I wrestle my way into my coat.

  There’s a theory that to survive in the workplace, you need a “Work Wife” or a “Work Husband,” someone platonic who you can count on to get you through the day. I think there’s a strong case to be made that each of us also needs a Budget Airline Spouse. Just a friendly individual who waits for you at the door, holds your coat when your shoelaces have come undone, and tells you that your passport is in your back pocket, where you just put it thirty seconds ago. Someone you can angry-cry with when delays are announced. They could assign them when you buy your ticket.

  Jaime and I get into an Uber, and we’re both delirious with sleepiness. He starts naming places that he would rather have had a surprise trip to than Budapest (Madrid, Vienna, Buenos Aires), and I remind him that if I hadn’t landed in Budapest, he’d currently be on a bus, alone.

  As we make our way to London, he says I should think of the trip as the choice of taking the red pill or the blue pill in The Matrix. The blue pill is security, happiness, and confined comfort. The red pill is Wonderland, freedom, and uncertainty. Which pill do I want to take in life?

  I look out the window at London in the darkness.

  “Sleeping pill,” I say.

  The driver drops Jaime off at his friend’s house, and a few minutes later, I’m in my apartment, making myself a grilled cheese sandwich at 4 a.m. It’s delicious.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  People rave about Budapest. Mostly new couples, who hold hands while marveling at the Gothic and neoclassical architecture, eat one good bowl of goulash, drink a decent cup of hot chocolate, take the river cruise down the Danube at night, and then have sex on 800-thread-count sheets. But really, location is irrelevant: with that amount of oxytocin coursing through their bloodstream, they would have fallen in love with Fresno.

  I didn’t have the adventure of my dreams in Hungary. Clearly, worse things can happen while at sea (which is the main reason I didn’t take that night cruise), but also, I likely had zero drops of oxytocin in my system.

  Every place I’ve ever loved, like Beijing or Melbourne, I’ve known intimately. I’ve seen travel and adventure through the eyes of my most extroverted friends for so many years that I’ve stopped thinking about what really matters to me, what I actually enjoyed about visiting new places. I like slow travel. I like exploring an entire city or village for a week and then picking my favorite spots and walks to do again so that they feel like mine. I like recognizing local characters, like the old man in Beijing who took his birds to the park or the guy in Sydney who walked his goats. In Budapest I wasn’t swept away by the marvel of just being in a foreign city because I knew my time there was so limited—I didn’t have several days to bond with locals or get a real feel for the culture. I knew that I’d only skim the surface as a weekend tourist.

  Though I didn’t have the time of my life,
I did arrive back in London feeling confident that I could take care of myself if I had to. That I could occasionally be spontaneous. That I could make a friend when I was feeling lonely as hell. And that la-la land, while out of reach this time, was still a possibility for me.

  A recent study says one in two travelers thinks the best thing about traveling is getting out of their comfort zones. I left one too many comfort zones for this particular trip to be fun for my personality type—maybe I could do a surprise destination if I could take someone with me, or enjoy a mysterious destination if I could buy a travel guide when I arrived. Maybe I could get by solo without any guidance if I could choose the destination.

  I hear Madrid is nice. The opera is currently open, and Spanish locals are rated the friendliest in the world. And apparently they do really good dessert.

  twelve

  Scotch Courage

  or

  Stand-up Comedy, Round II

  It’s nearly midnight, and as I walk into the pub, the first thing I notice is that it’s nearly empty, save for a couple sitting in the front near the stage. Surely, the only thing worse than performing comedy is performing comedy to thirty empty chairs. Nothing has prepared me for this version of hell.

  The couple stands up and gathers their coats.

  I’m on them in a flash.

  “Guys, guys, guys. Where are you going?” I ask them. I sound like a bro, trying to get hot women to stay at a party.

  “We just saw a really terrible open mic set,” the girl says, apologetically. The guy nods, sadly. They are about twenty-five and adorable.

  “So . . . ?” I ask them.

  “It was unbearable,” the guy says, in a soft Scottish accent.

  “They made me eat a banana,” the girl says.

  “What?” This is alarming. “Who did this to you? Where are they? Are you OK?” I ask, looking around the room, suddenly Sherlock.

  “I don’t know; he pulled it out of his magic hat and dared me to eat it,” she says. Right.

  “My show is going to be good! And I’m not going to make you eat a banana. I promise you.”

  They look me up and down. I glance around the empty pub at the empty chairs and tables.

  “This is my second gig! Please stay. I need you,” I say, my voice getting higher and higher. I hear a cough and look to my right.

  Lily is standing a few feet away, looking alarmed. I am scaring people, including my own friends. I turn away from her. There’s no time for her disapproval. Her manners. Her sense of civilization.

  I ask the couple their names, and they reluctantly tell me: Adam and Jenny.

  “Jenny, I promise you that you’ll laugh. Adam—I really need you here.”

  Adam looks at Jenny. Jenny shrugs. They put their coats back down and take their seats again.

  So the transformation was complete. I used to be afraid of talking to strangers, and now look at me: I’m bullying them.

  See, I’d wanted to try stand-up comedy again because my initial success had confused me. Who was that person onstage? Was it a fluke? Could I actually get good at this? And, most troubling of all, do I like the spotlight?

  My second comedy gig is at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. I don’t know why I thought my very next gig should be at the biggest and most prestigious comedy festival in the world. I’d done the equivalent of winning my first game of tennis against my dad and then asking for a spot at Wimbledon.

  I might not be ready for this.

  But Kate hosts an open mic night at midnight every day at the Fringe, and she had agreed to let Lily, Vivian, and me each have a five-minute slot.

  We were all giddy on the train up through England and finally into Scotland. The three of us arrived at our Airbnb, and we practiced our routines in front of each other using hairbrushes. We had run around the city eating grilled cheese sandwiches with haggis, drinking hot chocolate, and watching some of the most talented comedians in the world.

  Vivian had performed the night before, brilliantly, to a crowd of twenty-five. Lily had nailed a performance to a group of forty. And now I am about to perform for Adam and Jenny.

  It’s 11:45 p.m. Fifteen minutes before the show. I make a beeline for the restroom to talk to myself. I am like Clark Kent, except all I do is yell at myself in the mirror and emerge the exact same person.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  In the end, there are eight people. Adam, Jenny, two members of the crew, a couple in their forties from Sheffield, and two drunk Scottish girls who seem lost. Plus, Vivian and Lily, who sit in the front row. There are about thirty empty seats.

  I’d felt so confident after my first gig. Doubly so after watching that video and realizing that a good chunk of my inner turmoil wasn’t visible to the human eye. The MC calls my name, and I make my way onto the stage, past poor Jenny and Adam clapping politely. OK. I am ready for this.

  “Hello,” I say. “How is everybody doing?”

  Lily and Vivian reply “GOOD!” in obligatory loyal-friend-unison.

  I swallow. I am so scared I can barely move. I don’t dare move my feet. Or my hands. I’m afraid that if I move, the earth will cave in from beneath me. Finally, I say my first joke, about being from Amarillo.

  And—nothing. There is no laughter. I hear nothing. I had even delivered the line with that tone that always makes me cringe from other comedians, that self-satisfied tone of, “Isn’t that so funny?”—and, sensing my neediness, no one had laughed.

  Keep going, keep going. I say another line. Silence. Actually, imagine that sound, in movies, of a glass being set on the counter, of a solitary cough in the darkness.

  That was what I heard.

  No laughter.

  I’m about to do my bit about being an American in the UK. I try not to lose momentum and bust out some of the enthusiasm that Kate had told us was so vital. Go big. Get them back on your side.

  “So I’m not from here,” I say. “But I love it here! I LOVE England!”

  If I could impart one piece of advice (and just one! One tiny one!), it would be that when you are performing comedy in Scotland, do not earnestly proclaim your devotion to England.

  The Scots do not love England.

  “BOOO!” the drunk Scottish girls yell from the front row. “BOOO!” yells the bartender in the back.

  I stare up at the bright lights, see glimpses of dead eyes not laughing, the Scots booing me. Just take me now, God. I cannot go on. I have violated the social code, and now I must die.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  “I can’t believe Jenny and Adam had to see me that way,” I cry out to Lily, on the Royal Mile. “I promised them that I would be good!”

  Lily is marching me somewhere I can down a vodka as quickly as possible.

  “Those Scottish girls in the front row were drunk,” Vivian says. “I swear I saw one of them nearly fall down when she came out of the bathroom. And then her friend went straight in. They were on drugs. Lots of them. So many drugs. All the drugs.”

  I don’t say anything. I’m still reeling.

  “And that couple from Sheffield? I really don’t think that guy spoke English. Did you see how he didn’t speak when the MC asked him questions?”

  As soon as we arrive, Lily starts introducing me to people. Lily is an extrovert with a capital E: she chats effortlessly with cab drivers, couples in the line for comedy shows, and other performers. Men and women alike adore her. At one point, Vivian exclaims, “I can’t take it! Lily talks to too many strangers! If you’re never going to see someone again, why bother?”

  Well, for one, convivial Lily is offered more free food than anyone I have ever met. It would be irritating if she didn’t share it, but she always does.

  Somehow, that night when I died on that stage would go on to become one of my favorite nights of the year. At around 4 a.m., Vivian, Lily, and I walk the th
irty minutes back to our apartment along the windy, hilly Edinburgh streets, singing tunelessly but merrily.

  I haven’t experienced this precise, intense sense of giddy closeness and warmth in new friendships since college. After more than a decade without it, I thought those halcyon days were over. It makes me wonder: is this la-la land? We’d met fun strangers, we’d laughed a lot, we’d wandered all over the city and into different pubs and bars, and we were in a beautiful city we didn’t know.

  Either way, if you’re going to bomb your stand-up routine, it helps to have people like Lily and Vivian, who introduce you to people as, “This is my friend. She’s a comedian, and she loves England,” without any further explanation, making you realize how ridiculous life can become very quickly.

  When Vivian and Lily climb into my bed holding cups of tea the next morning, I feel overcome with emotion, and not just because they have woken me up after only three hours of sleep. I had told Chris, the stranger who I’d played vulnerability tennis with all those months ago, that I was scared a moment like this would never happen again.

  “All of my closest friends have moved away or we’ve grown apart, and I’m afraid I’m never going to have a new close friend whom I can tell anything to, and it makes me sad,” I had said. What I had also meant was, “What if I never have the cozy closeness of a friend casually climbing into my bed with a cup of tea, gossiping about last night?” I didn’t even know Vivian and Lily four months ago, which feels unbelievable to me.

  The adventure is over all too soon. I head back to London earlier than the others. On the train, alone for the first time in a few days, I put on my headphones and gaze out at the Scottish coastline, the rugged cliffs, and the wide-open beaches looking positively Mediterranean in the bright sunlight.