by Dom Joly
Anyone born in one of these places was subjected to NSEERS (National Security Entry/Exit Registration System, sometimes called Special Registration), one of the most explicitly racist, under-reported initiatives in post-9/11 America.
I didn’t want to enter the States. I didn’t even really want to get off the plane, but we were given no choice. We had to go through US immigration before being allowed back on to continue on to Auckland. I was taken aside when they saw that I was born in Beirut. I was marched off to the bureaucratic hell that was the NSEER special room. It was always the same in every US airport. A room full of tired travellers faced with rude, uninterested immigration officials who paid little heed to the signs on the wall that told you about your rights to be treated with courtesy and respect. I was held for an hour without being able to talk to anyone. I kept trying to tell them that I had to get back on my plane but they were not interested. Finally, I was summoned into an interrogation room, where I was repeatedly asked why I wanted to enter the United States. However many times I tried to explain that I didn’t, and that I just wanted to get back on my plane and go to New Zealand, they just didn’t get it. It was crazy. I’d show them my ticket, my boarding pass etc., but they just couldn’t compute. Eventually, I was saved by a kind air hostess who went above and beyond the call of duty to come and get me and harass the officials. They wished me a good trip to New Zealand as I was exiting. I thought it best not to mention the rocket – never has a ‘security’ policy turned so many potentially pro-Americans into enemies. Thankfully, Obama eventually repealed this ludicrous system.
Queenstown was the world capital of adrenaline adventure. A pretty little town on the South Island, nestled on the edge of a forbidding-looking lake and surrounded by a stunning range of mountains, it was originally a popular ski destination. But something must have got into the water because in the early 1980s everything changed.
First, they invented bungee jumping: you could still jump off the bridge where the first jumps ever were attempted. But they didn’t stop there. As I’d wander down a street in the town I would be deluged with offers of White-Water Rafting, Jet-Boating, Zorbing, Paragliding, Canyon-Swinging, Quad-Bike Safaris, Hot-Air Ballooning, Skydiving – the list was endless. What made New Zealanders indulge in these high-adrenaline activities? Actually, if you looked a bit closer, it didn’t actually seem to be the locals doing any of the activities. They just invented them and then charged gullible fools like me to partake. It was the tourists who were hurling themselves off precipices and rolling down steep hills in giant, spherical, plastic vomit buckets. The locals were just counting the money.
I rang the number I’d got for the Rocket Man and a monosyllabic voice gave me some GPS coordinates and told me to meet him there in three hours’ time. I drove up high into the hills behind Queenstown and eventually turned off the little road onto a dusty track. I parked my rental car next to a little sign in the middle of a very big field. The local residents, a flock of merino sheep, eyed me suspiciously before continuing on with whatever it is that sheep do.
Two hundred yards away, the lush green field dropped dramatically out of sight into the Shotover River. I could hear the screams of the passengers on one of the jet-boats that hurtled suicidally through its narrow gorges. Beyond the river, the jagged, snowcapped peaks of the wonderfully named Remarkables mountain range pierced the clear blue sky. The scene was not unlike the Cotswolds, except that someone appeared to have plonked both the Alps and the Colorado River slap-bang in the middle of it.
A beaten-up Land Rover hurtled down the track and screeched to a halt next to me.
‘You Dom?’ enquired the rugged-looking driver.
‘That’s me,’ I replied, trying to sound nonchalant.
‘Hop in, mate,’ ordered the Kiwi, and hop in I did.
My driver was a man of few words as we bumped and bounced up a very rough track, higher and higher into the forbidding hills. At the top of the track he took a sharp left turn and we started a precarious descent into a steep-sided valley. Strung across the valley was a set of steel wires. An even thicker wire dropped down from these wires to a platform on top of a hut. As we approached said hut I could see that the central wire was attached to a rocket-like device with handlebars at the front and an imposing propeller at the rear.
‘You ready, mate?’ said my near-mute accomplice.
‘I think so,’ I replied, again trying to look relaxed. A thin bead of sweat started to make its way down my back.
‘Right, let’s get you strapped in.’
He offered me a helmet that wouldn’t have protected me from strong rain and a pair of goggles that had a whiff of Biggles about them. I lay down on my stomach and grabbed the rudimentary handlebars as he strapped me into the machine with a series of what looked like old airplane seat belts.
‘Right, mate, when I press a button, the rocket will be slowly winched backwards up the side of the valley until it reaches its full height. When it stops, pull that left handbrake lever to release yourself and keep your hand tight on the right-hand one. That’s your gas. If you get it right, you should reach speeds of up to 105mph. You’ve got a six-minute flight. Enjoy it, mate.’
He gave me the thumbs up and pressed a button on a yellow plastic controller, and I felt the rocket lurch backwards. I was being dragged up the valley walls, getting higher and higher, with the front pointing down into the abyss. It was obviously far too late, but only now did I really begin to wonder, how had I got myself into this situation: just me and a monosyllabic Kiwi, alone together, miles from anywhere in the hills high above Queenstown, New Zealand, me strapped to a rocket? If I died here, nobody would be any the wiser. He could have just got back into his Land Rover and trundled off to start a new venture. If asked, he could have said that I’d never turned up. A shepherd might find some scorch marks in the side of the valley wall one day, but would he manage to put two and two together? I thought not.
The rocket reached the end of its climb and I heard an audible click, like the hammer of a pistol, as the release mechanism was engaged – and then there was total silence, save for my futile attempts to control my panic by deep breathing. I looked down into the abyss of the valley and instantly understood the whole drowning-man’s-life-flashing-before-him concept. More through resignation than determination, I pulled the left-hand lever with my quivering wrist. It was a hundred times worse than I’d imagined.
I screeched down into the valley, towards the ground and straight over my impassive Kiwi friend – the only witness to my impending death – who was holding an enormous sign over his head that read ‘MORE GAS’. I screamed and screamed until there was no breath left in my body and my only choice was to breathe or expire. The rocket started to climb up the other side of the valley and I remember thinking I was going to vomit, and then feeling a peculiar dampness down my left leg, and then blackness. I think I blacked out; certainly there were no more signs, just a light at the end of a beautiful tunnel where seven icy blondes were beckoning to me and they were holding beers . . . Six minutes later, the rocket came to a gradual stop and the man unstrapped me. I got in the Land Rover and, again in silence, we trundled back down to my car. As he drove away I was left alone with the sheep and my thoughts, wondering whether any of it had actually happened.
Sam Cadman suddenly came back into my life. He had won the Green Card lottery and moved out to live in LA. He was working as an ad director but kept getting a lot of love when people found out he’d done Trigger Happy TV. People kept telling him that we should do a movie. Sam contacted me and asked me what I thought. I was all for it, but was it really feasible? We were very clear what we wanted to make: a ninety-minute cinematic spectacular shot in the USA. Trigger Happy: The Movie. We wanted to make the Ben-Hur of hidden camera movies: epic stunts with hundreds of people involved. Sam had already been in touch with Charlie Todd from Improv Everywhere in New York to see whether we could borrow his impressive online list of people who’d signed up to do huge sce
nes. We figured that not only would these guys be up for being extras in our movie, but that it was a very cool way of getting big numbers of people inexpensively. The basic pitch was: if you like Trigger Happy TV, don’t just watch it, come and be in it.
The irony was that when Trigger Happy TV had been airing in the UK, several movie companies who wanted us to make a film had approached us and we’d given them fairly short shrift. Our view of TV comedy shows that turned into films was that they were almost always awful. They always had some narrative arc shoehorned in and we really wanted to make a big, dumb, non-linear movie. We were terrified of ending up with a movie in which suddenly the Big Mobile guy went on a ‘journey’ to find the lost battery for his big phone and ended up in all sorts of wacky adventures . . . I hated those sorts of movies. We wanted to stay true to what we wanted to do and that meant no movies. In the time between, however, the success of Jackass and their subsequent ‘no story’ movies meant that possibly the time was right for us to make the movie we’d wanted to make. Sam and I got together online and started writing up ideas.
After we’d got a pitch together, I flew out to LA and we headed off on a road trip into the Mojave Desert. This was how we always came up with our best stuff and it worked well. Not only that but Sam had rented a whole lot of costumes and we shot some stills of me in various scenarios: me jogging through Death Valley and a motorcycle cop having a nervous breakdown on a roadside rock. The photos were funny and we hoped they’d help people visualise our idea.
Once back in LA, we set up some meetings in which to pitch the project. Our big hope was that Comedy Central, who’d aired our original series and had a development deal with Paramount, would like the idea and help us realise it. We set up a meeting and they sounded very enthusiastic, but then again everyone sounded very enthusiastic in LA. Come the big day, Sam and I drove downtown, practising our pitch in his car. We got to the building and announced ourselves to the receptionist in the foyer, who was looking at Sam and his homeless-person-style beard with some distaste. We told her that we had a very important meeting with the guys at Comedy Central. She called up and then spent quite a long time on the phone. Eventually it turned out that we had got the date wrong and that the meeting had been scheduled for the previous day. We were so embarrassed. We got in the car and called them up and made some ridiculous excuses and managed to reschedule for the next day.
The receptionist was still suspicious of us when we turned up the following afternoon, but she called up and we got the green light to ascend to their offices. She gave us a weird fob that we assumed was to register our presence in the building. We reached the bank of lifts and got into one that some sharp-suited guy had just got out of. The door closed behind us and we waited . . . and waited, but nothing happened. We pressed the buttons but the lift wouldn’t move. We tried to open the doors but they wouldn’t budge. We laughed at how stupid this was and pressed all the buttons again. Nothing. We were stuck.
Then, to make matters worse, the light inside the lift went off. We were now imprisoned in a lift in LA with no idea of what to do. Sam wanted to ring Comedy Central upstairs and let them know of our plight. I told him that this was a bad idea. We already looked really dumb for getting the day wrong – now this would confirm our total loser status. We were in the lift for more than an hour until somehow the door opened and a man stood staring at us in an accusatory manner. Someone had spotted us on CCTV cameras and had called the police, thinking we were demonstrators of some sort. I think it was Sam’s beard. We found out that we’d needed to swipe the fob the receptionist had given us over some metal board in the lift. When she rang up Comedy Central, the people we were meeting with were ‘unavailable’. I can’t say I blamed them. We must have looked like muppets. LA didn’t jump at the chance of making our movie and I returned to the UK determined to approach it from another angle.
Meanwhile, a trip to Vietnam had made me start thinking about my curious predilection for travelling to dodgy places. This would subsequently lead to my first travel book: The Dark Tourist. I was particularly taken with a visit to a set of Viet Cong tunnels a couple of hours outside Ho Chi Minh. A group of ex-Viet Cong ran the site and proudly showed me all the tricks in their dark little handbook.
First up was a series of quite sublimely awful booby traps that involved hinged bamboos with sadistic pointy bits ready to stick into every part of an unwary GI’s body. Then there was the man making flip-flops out of old car tyres. I’d see these sort of flip-flops again in The Dark Tourist, when a war criminal tried to sell me Pol Pot’s shoes. There was also a firing range where, for roughly a dollar a bullet, you could fire an AK47 at some chickens – as in a later trip to Cambodia, where I was offered the opportunity to blow up a cow with an RPG, I declined.
The best was kept for last: the tunnels. It would be fair to say that the Viet Cong were a hardy bunch. They used this fact to great effect by building a labyrinthine complex of tunnels all over the country. They would live full-time in these claustrophobic, cramped rat-runs, only emerging at night to attack the enemy before disappearing back into their deadly mole holes. These particular tunnels were built right under an enormous American base. This allowed the Cong to enter and terrorise the US soldiers at will. The tiny entrances to the tunnels were brilliantly camouflaged so that you could actually step on one and have no idea. Even ventilation shafts for the cooking smoke would be built so that it exited three, four hundred metres from any entrance. Some of the tunnels had been widened so that corpulent dark tourists like myself could have a look. Once inside, however, I got hideously claustrophobic and had a total panic attack. I was trapped and had to force myself to relax before I could work my way back out. The idea that these were widened and that people had lived and fought in these tunnels was beyond my comprehension. The Americans never had a chance them.
Back in the UK, I had spoken to various people and told them about my and Sam’s idea for a Trigger Happy movie. We organised a series of meetings with all the big movie honchos in London. Sam flew over from LA. We didn’t need Americans. We were going to make the big British breakout movie of the summer. What followed was profoundly depressing. Sam and I would turn up to meet some big cheese in the film world. They would almost invariably be wearing black polo necks and doing a lot of invisible-goatee stroking. We would explain our idea and there would be a lot of uuhming and aahing before the words ‘narrative arc’ would appear. ‘Can we see a script, please?’ was always the next question. Sam and I would then launch into our spiel about there being no script, as this was hidden camera and all impromptu – we had ideas though? We could see them start to glaze over and lose interest. Pretty soon, desperate as we were to please, Sam and I were pitching ludicrous storylines to beef up what had been our pure, original idea.
‘So, the Big Mobile guy has lost the magic battery to his machine . . . It gives him power . . . Angelina Jolie, Dom’s girlfriend in the movie . . .’ We were doing anything to retain interest, but of course they were more interested in this fictional fantasy than the one we wanted to make. We eventually got a good development deal, but by now there was a script and the whole thing was so far away from the original film that we wanted to make that we started to actually hope nobody would ever greenlight it. It was embarrassing.
If you ever want to empty your mind of everyday worries, a trip to explore the legendary Empty Quarter, the vast desert area on the end of the Arabian Peninsula, will do the trick. I got the well-timed opportunity to do so, guided by some ex-SAS men who had served with the Omani army in the Seventies when fighting against Marxist rebels. The SAS guys were keen to set up a company that took people round the Empty Quarter, and as such had organised a tour for me. I managed to get on with them very well and dealt with desert conditions without embarrassing myself . . . until the last night.
It was yet another crystal-clear night and we were eating outside, under the stars, in our final camp. The stars were like an IMAX experience – you felt compelled to p
ut your hand up and try to touch them. As the first course arrived I noticed something white moving right next to my open-toe sandals. I looked down only to spot a large scorpion about two inches away from me. Very calmly, I lifted my leg and watched the beast scurry on past me and away. I was very pleased with myself for such sangfroid. I glugged some wine down in what I considered to be a macho manner and rejoined the conversation with gusto.
After supper, we sat around a roaring campfire swapping manly stories about travel and adventure. I was one of them, an adventurer, an explorer, a soldier . . . Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye I spotted something scuttling towards me. It was a ginormous, hairy camel spider and it wasn’t alone. There were about six of them and they moved in that horrible, fast, scuttling way that ginormous, hairy spiders do. I lost it. I went mental with fear and jumped onto my chair and started gibbering like a baby. My military escorts were beside themselves. They nearly fell off their chairs laughing as I stood there pleading with them to do something. They just laughed and the spiders seemed to sense their indifference and gain courage. One scuttled up the leg of my chair while the others encircled me like a lonely wagon train. I was screaming now. I was out of control. Arachnophobia, as I would later discover in the Australian jungle, is my Achilles heel – it is utterly irrational and impossible to control. My military companions were actually on the floor laughing so much. Finally, one of them took pity on me and started grabbing the spiders and hurling them into the fire, where they hissed and popped like angry chestnuts. Maybe I wasn’t cut out to be in the SAS after all?
Back in the UK, my social circle had changed. As a fellow Indy writer, I had met Alex James from Blur on several occasions and become friendly with him. This led to Stacey and me being invited to several social functions at his farm in Kingham, about thirty minutes away from where I lived. We were based in the south Cotswolds – Hurley/Winslet Country. Alex lived in Clarkson Country. Unbeknownst to me at the time, I was venturing into the Chipping Norton set.
