Gladys Reunited

by Sandi Toksvig

  It would be fair to say that I headed into Seattle feeling less than cheerful. I was busy puffing my past behind me with no idea of what lay ahead.

  I know the human being and the fish can coexist peacefully

  George W. Bush, 29 September 2000

  Seattle — home of the dot.com, the sit-coin Frasier and the big con Microsoft. It is also, bizarrely, where the American coffee revolution began. It was here that someone started Starbucks and soon the myth spread across the world that everyone must have a ‘daily cup’ but it must be so thin that you could see the bottom of the cup. I can’t think why it happened here — you couldn’t be further from the home of a Java bean if you tried. This is, of course, salmon country. Indeed, the first thing you see as you leave the airport is a billboard which reads:

  Greetings From What Used To Be Salmon Country.

  Save the Salmon While We Still Can.

  I don’t know if the last word is an unintentional pun but I entered the city in a fever about fish. The papers were full of the fact that the actor Kelsey Grammar had just signed for $1 million an episode of the next series of Frasier. It was only because of that sitcom that I recognised the skyline with its legendary ‘Space Needle’ which spread before me. When the first settlers arrived here they were faced with great cliffs which made up the seven hills of Seattle. They promptly set about levelling the place and it is an interesting thought that 40,000 tons of Seattle cliff lie beneath Telegraph Hill in San Francisco. They called the place New York-Alki, which sounds like a description of several people I know rather than a town name. Alki was a Chinook word so the whole thing meant New York By and By, but soon a founding father named the place in honour of Chief Seattle of the Duwamish tribe. The chief wasn’t keen on the idea. He lacked the ego. The Christians then baptised him ‘Noah’. How sad is that?

  The Seattle Times made rather good reading as I rode in. The property section was full of tiny classified ads offering me wilderness property for no money at all. I could get a ‘39+ acres Mountain Hideaway’ for just $37,000. There was a ‘Mountain cabin on 20 treed acres’ for $39,500. Immediately, I skated off into one of those fantasies in which I sold everything I owned, moved somewhere mortgage-free abroad and spent my time writing slightly bawdy novels that no one wanted to read. Two things niggled at me, however. One was the word ‘treed’ and the other was the thought that the sort of people who usually buy those properties are folks making plans to bomb government buildings. I’d move in and there would go the neighbourhood.

  There was also a rather chilling news story that morning about cheerleading, that quintessential element of American sporting life. It is actually much more dangerous than anyone had previously supposed. Apparently, last year alone 22,000 cheerleaders were admitted to hospital emergency rooms with ‘cheerleading related injuries’. I arrived at the hotel determined never again to be lured into doing the splits when holding a baton.

  I think I do well with taking much of life at face value. The unknown Edgewater hotel turned out, as I had imagined, to be a romantic hotel on the edge of the water. It is a faux hunting lodge with red and green tartan carpeting, floor to ceiling windows looking straight over to the waters of Elliott Bay and metal pillars in the lounge, covered in tree bark. It sounds ghastly but it did actually work. Sixteen television screens in one wall of the bar were showing splendid footage of the whale I failed to get in my hand luggage. My room was intimate and cosy. It had a small fireplace and a balcony hanging above the sea. I stepped out to say hello to the gulls. It was cold and I had a true sense of having moved nearer the Arctic. I read somewhere that all seagulls are born in California. I can’t believe it’s true. If it is, I could only think they were here for the winter sports.

  Each room had its own small pitched roof and the gulls seemed to have selected one each to oversee. Although the night was clear there was a blast from the horn of a large ship. In the distance, a lighthouse blinked at me. It was not the ‘I love you’ signal of Cohasset but enough to make me lonely. There is no point in staying in romantic hotels on your own.

  I turned on the TV and, thank God, my old friend Maury was there. People were revealing shocking secrets which, pleasingly, make my life look rather tame. Tony was here to confess to her mother, Carol, that she had a brain tumour. They hugged and cried, the audience cried, Maury managed to stay dry-eyed. Shannon, aged fifteen, revealed to her husband Chris (Husband? Fifteen? Are you following this?) that she had ‘prostituted my body between fifty and seventy-five times’ and not surprisingly, she wasn’t sure who the father of her eight-month-old baby was. Maury offered to pay for a paternity test at which point Chris got up to leave.

  Maury: ‘Wait, Chris, where are you going? What’s your problem?’

  Chris didn’t say a word, probably because he didn’t know where to begin. Anyway, it turned out that he was the father, which is good and, even better, I learned that if I do have ‘acid reflux disease’ (apparently it’s likely) then I can do something about it. I have worked in television all my adult life but this stuff, the broadcasting of today, is nothing to do with me. I fell asleep while outside my window my personal gull turned a worm into mincemeat.

  Ah! the clock is always slow;

  It is later than you think.

  Robert Service, Poet Laureate of the Yukon

  Fran and I were due to meet after breakfast and, as had been the case with every other encounter, I was nervous. It hadn’t happened yet but I felt sure I was due at least one person spitting in my eye. I had been awake since five, watching ferries come in across the bay with their lights on. Seattle is a long way north and the sun took for ever to decide to turn up. I was hoping it would snow. They say the lift in the Space Needle goes up so fast that when it snows, from inside the flakes seem to be falling up.

  Fran was waiting for me in the lobby. I recognised her although she looked older, with a different hair style and much trendier glasses than the spectacles of her youth. We hugged, although I am sure that was something we had never done in our lives. I think we were both nervous.

  ‘What do you want to see?’ she asked.

  ‘Everything,’ I said unhelpfully and we headed out. We walked along the harbour front trying to get to know each other.

  ‘Have you been to Seattle before?’ she began.

  ‘No,’ I said, suddenly horribly English, ‘but I recognise the skyline from Frasier.’

  Fran nodded. ‘Yeah, that’s actually not what it looks like. They moved the Space Needle somewhere else for the shot.’

  I couldn’t think why but I knew she didn’t mean literally. It was just another in the long line of real things the entertainment industry changed to suit itself. We wandered past the Imax theatre which claimed to be showing both Mount St Helens and Michael Jordan. I presumed not on the same bill and that he was taking time off from being a franchise.

  Fran has recently left work after twenty years in the criminal justice system as a social worker. We talked about her career. About how hard it was to maintain liberal views after you have children. How you are so desperate to protect them that suddenly care in the community’ seems harder to commit to. I could see immediately that she was an honest and bright person and that this would be a good day.

  We looked across at the Olympic mountains and the San Juan islands. The air was crisp and clean and I thought about the cheap parcels of land available in the distant wooded hills.

  ‘I could live here,’ I declared as we stood on the deck of a ferry taking us out to the quiet isolation and beauty of Bainbridge Island.

  ‘It’s nice but I miss New York,’ smiled Fran. ‘I miss the culture and the energy. I think people have odd ideas about Seattle. They think we’re practically in the Arctic.’

  It felt like the Arctic. Fran moved here partly because of the Gladys Society. Sue was living here for a while and Fran felt safe moving this far from home. She settled, Sue moved away and now Fran is bringing up her family here. Her husband is a prosecutor for
the District Attorney’s office and they have two daughters.

  Seattle seemed a world away from the other places I had visited. We quickly left the city behind on the chugging ferry and headed out towards a simpler, more rural life on one of the islands. When Fran first came she said you could see cowboys walking the streets. Once gateway to the Alaskan gold rush as well as fortunes in timber, Seattle still has a slight frontier feel about it. This was the very edge of America.

  I liked it. I could imagine living out on Bainbridge Island, where many a writer has settled, in the exquisite wooden houses lining the harbour with gardens that run right down to the water’s edge. The Suquamish people used to call the place home but now the place is open house to the tourist. You can buy a heck of a cute quilt or a scrap of art and still have one foot on the ferry.

  Fran’s children were beautiful. After our wander out to Bainbridge, we returned and met them off the school bus. Little girls with dark ringlets tucked into colourful bandanas and full of chatter. They live in the Queen Anne district, a place as steep and impossible to cycle in as San Francisco. Here the original trains had needed a counter-balance system of pulleys and ropes just to get them up the hill. Fran’s husband Marc was delightful — a squat little man with the body of a clown. Before donning the cloak of the law he had been a street performer, a mime. It must have suited him. He looked as though he had just stepped out of the Le Coq School in Paris.

  ‘Do you ever use your clowning skills in court?’ I asked him.

  ‘I did once start a closing statement with some mime,’ he said, ‘but the judge stopped me.’

  ‘Why?’ I said, thinking the judge was narrow-minded.

  Marc laughed. ‘Everything has to be entered in the record and they couldn’t write it down.’

  Marc was a clown who thought he should get a proper job. I had done the reverse. I had trained as a lawyer and become a clown. I have no idea which is the better way round but the two professions have a lot in common. I asked him if he ever wanted to be a judge and he looked at me seriously but with a twinkle in his eye.

  ‘You have to understand that Seattle is a very politically correct city. Being made a judge is a political decision. The only way I could make it is if I were a handicapped Native American lesbian.’

  ‘How about just a limp, a tan and a slight lisp?’ I asked.

  ‘That might do it.’

  Seattle is a strange, liberal metropolis in an otherwise somewhat conservative state. It is an unexpected place of art and culture in an endless wilderness. Unlike the neighbouring state of Oregon, Washington never banned the residency of African Americans. That doesn’t mean it is all forward thinking and at peace.

  Outside the windows of the fish restaurant we chose for dinner, there were signs of a harbour in dispute. Above a memorial to dead fishermen, fresh with new photos of lost young men, was a placard reading ‘Yachts don’t feed people’. The fishermen were battling for their harbour and on the doorstep was the death dance of a traditional industry which John McCarthy and I had watched disintegrating as we sailed around Britain.

  Fran had not changed her name and we talked about that. Her daughters, Loren and Siri, have Marc’s name but then she has her father’s. I have been travelling to discover my identity for myself and have decided that I like the Native American idea of the descriptive name — ‘She who must have big cup of tea in morning’, ‘she who lives by the joke’ — something which makes you unique. My great-aunt Signe belonged to a society of women in the 1920s who campaigned not to change their names. From the outside I liked Fran and Marc’s relationship. He seemed to be a good friend to her, but I wondered if men and women would ever settle down to understand each other completely. A small gift shop by the restaurant offered T-shirts with the sentiment, ‘Women want me, fish fear me.’ I stopped wondering.

  When I got back to the hotel and phoned home, I found my youngest daughter had won her netball match, the other had been to soccer and my son had lost his sweater at karate club. I was the same age as my eldest child is now when I had a magical year which has stayed with me ever since, but this was the important stuff. With a sudden lurch I realised that I had not had the best time in my life as a member of the Gladys Society, but was actually having it now, and it was important to put the past in perspective or I would spend the rest of my life feeling nothing had ever really matched up to that experience.

  The next morning I set out to explore the city on my own. I took the trolley car which runs along the front to the old quarter. I thought it was exciting. I wanted the conductor to think it was exciting. I wanted to have one of those friendly American chats. She wanted to read her paper. I was travelling the world but she was at work. Undaunted I decided that I needed somewhere ‘different’ to have breakfast. I got off at Pioneer Square. The area is a mix of rather fine bookstores, gift shops and people sleeping rough. It used to be the red-light district but now it is ‘artistic’ and designed for the rich. No one had told the men asleep on the park benches covered in newspaper. It was too early for the rich. In the centre of the square stood a magnificent and towering totem pole. The generally peaceful people of the Suquamish, Duwamish, Nisqually, Snoqualmie and Muckleshoot tribes had once lived here. They spoke mostly Lushootseed or Whulshootseed dialects. No doubt great languages, but hopeless if you suffered with a sibilant S. Stupid they were not. The totem pole in the square had been stolen from a local tribe and set up by some white settlers. Then the darned thing was cut down so the city fathers sent the elders of the tribe a cheque and asked for another one. They cashed the cheque and wrote back, ‘Thanks for the money. That will pay for the first pole you stole. If you want another one, you’d better send a cheque.’

  And they did.

  I wandered past the Last Supper Club. A fine name for a restaurant. As good as the Toronto bar I once got hammered in called the Betty Ford Center. Down Yesler’s Way, the original skid row where lumber had once skidded down to the docks and men had hung around looking for work and prostitutes in equal measure. I had meant to find somewhere elegant but I found myself outside Seattle’s oldest saloon on First Avenue S. Next door at Larry’s Blues Café, Home of the Blues, breakfast of sorts was being served. It was 9 a.m. but not too early for the bar to be already filling up with men drinking beer. The place was lined with posters for rhythm and blues records. A large clock over the serving hatch was ringed in red neon, advertising breakfast burgers, while purple light spelled out the words ‘Rhythm and Blues’. Apparently I had just missed Dr Funk playing live the night before. In fact, I think I could still sense a certain Funk smell in the air. A few old wooden tables with a rough covering of light green Formica and wooden chairs had been set up on the tiny ten-foot-square black stage which smelled of beer.

  ‘If you hate globalisation as much as you do then this is the place to eat,’ I said sternly to myself and went and sat on stage, by the window. The waitress was a very blowsy blonde with several previous meals spilled down the front of her black T-shirt. I thought you could probably guess the menu by analysing her top. She brought me a Hangtown Fry which I ordered because I had no idea what it was. It came and I still had no idea. It was omelette style but there its similarity with other food parted company. It seemed to have eggs, certainly, but also contained every other known food group. There was bacon,, oysters, spinach, hash browns, cheese, sour cream and an inexplicable slice of orange, presumably for Vitamin C. I can’t say whether I liked it or not; I just know that I’ll never have the same again anywhere else in the world.

  The Klondike Gold Rush Museum was just opening for business. It tempted me to go in and trace the Chilkoot Trail where bearded and rough-hewn men had once tramped looking for gold. I saw fresh fish for sale as I walked the red cobblestones in front of Pike Place Market, I drank terrible coffee in the oldest Starbucks in Seattle and a man in the street tried to sell me a ‘work of art’. He was a black Rastafarian and his collection of art appeared to be any old piece of wood dipped in pu
rple paint. On one a childlike scribble of a man’s face had been scratched.

  ‘I call that the milkman,’ he said to me. ‘It’s $18!’ he called to a passer-by, who wasn’t the least bit interested. Why $18, I wondered? How did he fix his prices?

  Across the slightly choppy waters of Elliott Bay I could see that the grey clouds had broken over the snow tops of the mountains. The light was hitting the snow in great shafts like torch beams from above and I thought again of Georgia O’Keefe and her art. I, who had been tired of travel, wanted to stay. I wanted to see the dormant volcano at Mount Rainier, visit the isolation of the San Juan islands and one day hike the Chilkoot Trail but I wanted to do it with the people I love. My partner and my children. The air was fresh and clean and I felt as though I was beginning to wake up again.

  CHAPTER 13

  Ginger — Gladys Four

  Here Lies

  Jonathan Blake

  Stepped on the gas

  Instead of the brake.

  Epitaph in Ripley’s Believe It or Not Odditoriurn,

  Hollywood, California

  It was nearly the end of my journey. I was off to Hollywood to seek, along with everyone else, fame, fortune and spiritual wellbeing. Actually, none of those things pitched up for me but I did find a tobacco enema kit for restoring the dead. It’s in a glass case in the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Odditorium on Hollywood Boulevard. The device looks for all the world like a brass bicycle pump. From what I can gather from the rather scant instructions you put one end of the hosing up the arse of a drowned victim and blow tobacco smoke in the other end. This was intended to stimulate the deceased back to life and probably gave the smoker a bit of a turn as well. It’s a substantial item that would make anyone sit up straight on a beach. It was something I felt I could do with. On the very last leg of a several thousand mile journey, I now needed to make sense of it. It may be that I had not chosen the ideal venue for contemplative thought.