Last India Overland

by Craig Grant

  The doc dabbed something wet, alcohol, I guess, high up on my right butt cheek and then the phone rang. I could feel her hesitate just for a second. Then she jabbed in the needle. I let out a low howl.

  “Don’t move,” she said. “You need a shot in the other side too.”

  She went and jabbered on the phone for a minute or two, and I was thinking about pulling up my pants and heading out when this light headed feeling swelled up between my ears like a balloon and at first I just felt dizzy but then I felt like laughing, as though I’d just had a snort of laughing gas, and this heat wave rushed up my body. There was this McDonald’s poster on the wall near the door. There was a clown on it and he seemed to be laughing at me. So I laughed back and my head seemed to lift off my shoulders. The receptionist came to the door to see what was so funny, and she sees me standing there with my jeans around my ankles. She takes a look at my ugly. And that breaks me up, and I decide, yeah, buckaroo, it’s time to travel, but when I bend down to pull up my jeans, I crack my head on the bedframe. When I stand up, the room’s twirling. Next thing I know the floor comes up and smacks me in the face and I’m having some sort of spastic fit. That old fox face is right above me and I can feel her fingers in my mouth. They feel like big fat greasy worms. I bite down and I bite my tongue in the process. That stops the giggles. I hear the doc saying something to the receptionist about an allergic reaction and telling her to get a needle full of something or other but I’d had enough needles for one day. I somehow manage to get to my feet and I’m hopping out of the room, pulling up my pants, the girl in the reception room getting an eyeful. And then I’m out the door and running down the stairs, pulling up my fly, and I didn’t see that old wino, those stairs were so dark, and I trip over him and go flying right into the door. He’s a little bit pissed off because I knocked his bottle out of his hand. He gives me a good solid kick in the head. I tell him sorry, chief, and I open up that door, the bell jangles and it feels like pins in my ears. I boot it out into the street, straight into this woman carrying a bag of groceries and a black umbrella. She gives me a good poke with it before I can get to my feet, and I’m saying to myself, Christ, this is a nightmare, but I don’t wake up.

  The last thing I’m thinking about is how I maybe should’ve got the doc to stamp my medical book before I tore out of there.

  Instead I’m running across the street, and I should’ve looked left, though looking left isn’t something you tend to do in nightmares. This big black taxi hits me and sends me flying up on the hood, right to the windshield, where sure enough, I’m staring into the startled face of an old East Indian cabbie who looks like he’s having a heart attack.

  I jump off the hood and limp into the nearest bar, the Queen’s Arms or the King’s Head, something like that, which is just down the street, and I’m asking the bartender for a double Scotch, make it quick, when this Joe Adas type wearing a tight baby-blue pantsuit comes up to me and tells me that I’m kind of cute but I look just a little bit bothered, could I use a sympathetic ear? He takes a sip from something pink in a champagne saucer. I look around. There ain’t a woman in sight. I’d walked into a fucking fruit bar. There were more limp wrists than you could shake a strawberry daiquiri at.

  I tell the fruit, sorry, I’m only into dead people, and he says that’s fine, dearie, anything can be arranged, and he pats me on the ass and takes off.

  I knock back my Scotch and take off myself.

  It was just one of those days, like the old man used to say, when what a guy needs most is a good short rope and a good long drop.

  (an aerogramme)

  London Oct. 7 Dear Dex,

  Well, we’re in London. N.Y. was a weird experience for us hicks from Montana, but we managed to keep them city weasels at bay & we departed the city in 1 piece, psyches, for the most part, intact. London is a different story altogether. Perpetual cloud, & a sickening sense of ennui & despair permeating everything. Maybe it’s the grease from the fish & chips. Of course, you’ve heard that old axiom about how it’s best to travel with strangers. I think it might be true. C’s neurotic little tendencies were tolerable when I only had to put up with them 2 or 3 times a week. But on a daily basis? (She wants to read the book I’m reading; she’s completely paranoid about money; she has, ever so slightly, a whine in her voice that grates, after a while; & yeah, okay, I’m probably no picnic either. It’s just that I wanted to go to Stonehenge & she nixed it. As for F, well, F. is F, everything in stride, no ruffled feathers. That gets to be irritating after a while as well.) Later: disaster. I did a tarot lay-out this morning. The Tower card came up. But we’d already seen the London tower. So I was anxious all day. Sure enough, late in the afternoon, we were biking through Hyde Park, near a mill pond, when C’s bike tire slipped on duck shit & she went for a spill. We spent 6 hrs. in Emergency. She fractured her wrist & has a small cast on it now. The anesthetic is just starting to wear off. It will be a sleepless night. I’m glad mother sent me off bon voyage with some Nytol. C just said she wants to go home. But the Taurus Tours contract is pretty specific about refunds. Only in case of death. I warned C. there might be a snag or

  2. I chose not to remind her of this. Why don’t they have midnight plays in London? These walls are closing in. Next day: I jumped ship. Left F. to fend with C, himself. He gets all the sexual benefits, that’s got to cost something. I took in Evita & hunched down by myself afterwards over some tandoori chicken & chapati. Definitely the best day of the trip so far for me. Maybe I’m a loner at heart. Late breaking bulletin: the sun is actually peeking through cloud, before it sinks from sight. Take care, Κ.4

  from Kelly’s diary

  Oct. 9

  2 days ago, on a Hyde Park footpath, the Tower card fell to the table. We’d gone biking. Bike tire slipped. C’s wrist crunched. Spent a nightmarish evening at the hospital, watching mangled bodies come & go thru Emergency. She isn’t taking to the cast too well. Last night at the movies (Breezy) F bought some popcorn, didn’t offer C any, maybe because she’s always refused it in the past. Something simmers, & this morning she brings it up, along with the fact that F. is spending what she calls precious money on cassettes when we don’t even have a player. (He says there might be one on the bus; he’s got the new Neil Young, Dylan & Stones.) Everything escalates & C. finally lets it all blow in 1 of her periodic rages. Emphasis on “periodic.” She let fly with past grievances while I stood witness. I’m sure F. could’ve let fly with a few of his own but he didn’t. Instead he packed his suitcase & a door click later he was gone. C’s not worried. He’s just being dramatic, she says.

  Mick

  After a day like that I decided I was a tad tired of London so I headed out to Stonehenge, partly because Hasheeba told me I should. She said maybe I’d be able to pick up on some strange Druid vibes. But I could care less about strange Druid vibes. I just wanted to be able to say I was stoned at Stonehenge.

  I’d smuggled a couple of joints across three international borders in a dirty sock, and I smoked one of them while I sat out in the middle of the Salisbury Plain, gazing at the sun going down between the Stonehenge pillars.

  It was a nice sunset, as sunsets go, but I was used to spectacular Pacific sunsets, from a little private dune me and Nancy Pickles had, not too far from Wreck Beach.

  I got back to London in time for a pre-tour get-together party that was mentioned in my tour-kit material. It was held at the Black Horse Pub, a nice little pub full of secretarial types, about two doors down from Taurus Tours.

  The bartender jerked his thumb to the top of the stairs in back, where a Sad Sack female with the complexion of a pretzel asked me if I was on the Oktoberfest tour or the India Overland. I told her. She checked off my name and gave me a ticket for a free beer.

  I sashayed over to the bar and ordered a Toby, and I was sucking on that and casing the place when this guy that was short, balding, a little overweight, wandered up to me, said hello with a limey accent, asked me how my battle was going.
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  I took a long swallow of beer and looked him over. Besides green polyester slacks, he was wearing a baggy blue turtleneck and Hush Puppies. He had a Pentax camera hanging around his neck, he was wearing shoemaker glasses. He reminded me of one of the Seven Dwarfs, maybe Sneezy.

  I held up the Toby and squinted at it. “Looks like the bottle’s losing,” I said.

  He said that’s sad and offered to buy me another brown, as he called it.

  I never turn down free suds.

  He ordered a martini for himself, and we settled into the usual chit-chat that drives me nuts at parties. Where ya from, whaddya do? And the upshot is that this guy’s name was Patrick Ignatieff and he was from some town in Somerset, which is somewhere in south-west England, I guess. He’d been working as a stage manager in a theatre there. And the trip for him was part business, part pleasure. I asked him what kind of business.

  “Oh,” he said, “just buying a few things, that’s all. A vase here. Some ivory there. A Persian rug or two. Perhaps an occasional gem.”

  That’s the way Patrick talked. Real highbrow.

  “How about yourself, Mr. McPherson?” he said.

  I said, “Yeah, I’m on a shopping trip too.”

  “Indeed?” he said. “Anything in particular?”

  “Oh,” I said. “A little of this. A little of that.” Maybe I grinned at him a bit.

  “Oh ho,” he said. “Yes indeed. Well, listen, you really must take me on some of your shopping expeditions. It would be a shame to travel all the way to India and not visit some of the more exotic emporiums, nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more.”

  So. A Monty Python fan. That was okay. We talked some about Monty Python and the Holy Grail. And then he said something about how he was feeling somewhat peckish and he ordered a huge sausage and a pickled egg from the bartender, and then we got into telling dirty jokes, because that’s what guys do when they run out of chit-chat. Patrick was telling me about this theatre critic he knows who never gives anyone good reviews and all the actors in Somerset call him the ultimate cast rater when this guy wandered over and introduced himself. He said his name was Frank Jenkins. He was wearing a yellow farm cap that had a decal with a squirrel on it and the word Edson beneath the squirrel. He was wearing a blue denim jacket with a Canadian flag on the left chest pocket. Blue jeans, beat-up cowboy boots. He had shaggy dark brown hair and kind of a beak for a nose. He had this little-boy-lost look about him.

  He said, “I was just listening to you guys, and I remembered this story I heard once. It’s about a couple bulls. Which is okay, since this is Taurus Tours and everything. One of them’s old and the other one’s just a yearling and they’re standing on this ridge, see, looking down at this herd of cattle in a valley, and the yearling says to the old one, hey, let’s run on down there and jump on a few of them cows. The old bull just looks at him and says I’ve got a better idea. Let’s walk down instead and jump on all of them.”

  This all spills out of him at about a mile a minute. He was one of these guys who couldn’t tell a joke if his life depended on it, but he was anxious to please and Patrick laughed and I laughed too, even though I’d heard the joke maybe ten years ago from my old man.

  Patrick offered to buy Jenkins a drink. Jenkins went for a half & half, whatever that is,* and we had to go through the whole chit-chat business again, and it turned out that Jenkins wasn’t quite as rednecked as he looked. He’d just spent a year in university, going for an English B.A. and a summer working on the oil rigs near Edmonton, and he decided he’d rather travel than hit the books or feed the cows down on his old man’s ranch. I told him I used to live in Saskatchewan, in Regina. He said he’d been to Taylor Field and so we talked about Ron Lancaster and George Reed for a while. Patrick got bored with us and wandered off, and then me and Jenkins got to talking about music and movies. He was into Springsteen and Peckinpah, just like I am. He said Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid was one of his favourite all-time movies. And so I started to relax about the trip. Because Patrick and Jenkins were okay guys. I mean, they didn’t mind drinking a beer with a guy or telling the odd joke. And anybody who likes Springsteen and Peckinpah is okay in my books. Now all the trip needed was a few good-looking women, and I asked Jenkins if he’d met any women in the room who were heading to India like we were, and he just shrugged and looked around.

  “Nope,” he said. “I just got here, actually.”

  I looked around the room and I caught the eye of this chubby girl with curly black hair and a cute freckled face. She was maybe five-five. She looked away real quick. She was talking to this tall, good-looking redhead. They were both drinking white wine.

  “I wouldn’t mind it much if those two are on the bus,” I said to Jenkins.

  He looked over in their direction. “Yeah,” he said. “Don’t think I’d kick too much either.”

  As it turned out they were.

  Then Jenkins said, “Just between you and me, Mick, actually I’m not from Alberta.”

  “Yeah?” I said. “Where you from?”

  “Montana. Wolf Creek. A friend of mine told me if I was smart I’d travel as Canuck through some of these Asian countries, less hassle that way.”

  I took a swig. It didn’t matter to me he was from Montana. “Your friend’s probably a smart guy,” I said. “Don’t worry, I’ll keep it under my hat.”

  “Thanks a lot,” he said. Then he said he had to go make room for more beer and he took off to the can.

  A few minutes later the black-haired girl sauntered over to the bar for another glass of wine and while she was waiting for it, she glanced over in my direction and asked me if I was going to India. She had nice grey eyes.

  I told her I was, how about herself, and she said yeah. “So it looks like we’ll be getting to know each other, huh?” she said. She had an Aussie accent.

  “Yeah, looks like it,” I said.

  She gave me a little smile and then she walked back over to the redhead.

  When Jenkins came out of the can, he didn’t come back and talk to me, which hurt my feelings a tad. Instead he got to talking with this couple who looked like they were married and in their early thirties. Couldn’t have been much older. This trip was only for the 18- to 35-year-olds.

  Patrick was talking to the bartender and it didn’t look like anybody else was thinking about coming over and talking to lonesome Mickers, so I finished off my Toby and decided to call it a night, since I’d have to be up by six in the morning to catch the bus and getting up in the morning isn’t one of my long suits.

  I lit out and got down to the tube station just in time to watch the gates clang shut. So I’m walking down Charing Cross, looking for a cab, and I come across this movie theatre showing some old horror classics all night long. Movies like The Thing and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Attack of the Y Chromosome.

  And since I had some heavy English change in my pocket to get rid of, I decided to check it out, and when I went inside I was surprised to see that the lights were halfway up. On the screen the Thing was sinking its fangs into someone’s stomach. The place was about a quarter full. Most of the people were derelicts. Some of them were snoring. Others were either coughing or hacking up spit or just shuffling around. It was like something out of The Twilight Zone.

  I should’ve turned around and left, but I didn’t. I sat down and stuck it out through most of The Thing, but near the end of the movie some brain-dead wino sat down right next to me, when there were a few hundred other seats he could’ve picked, and he looked at me and picked his nose and said, “Lead them to the right place,” in a voice that sounded like it was coming from a college professor.

  I said, “Sure thing, chief,” and I got up and left.

  I hate it when my life turns weird.

  I caught a cab out to Earl’s Court, and when I got to my room, the frogs next door were going at it hot and heavy, as usual.

  I can thank their early morning hump for the fact that I woke up in time to make i
t to the bus. If it wasn’t for that one high-pitched moan, I’d probably be back in Kits right now, maybe watching the Muppets on the box, instead of lying here flat on my back in the Ko Samui General, watching the skin near my bandage turn from Big Bird yellow to urine yellow.

  BELGIUM London—Bruges

  Day 1

  Departure: 7:00 a.m.

  Route: London—Canterbury—Dover (A2, M2). All passports stamped when you leave U.K. and when you enter Belgium. Camp: St. Michael—hot showers till Sept. 30. Bar and cafe, poor rate on the money exchange.

  Points: 1. Well, here you go, Day One. Don’t worry, there’s only sixty-seven more days to go. Major thing you have to do on the first day is do a lot of talking. Be friendly and witty, of course. Make them look forward to hearing your well-modulated voice for the next two and a half months. On the ferry is as good a time as any to collect money for the camping section of the trip. Let them know that the camping section ends in eastern Turkey. Check all their medical books to make sure everyone has the correct shots. Be very careful doing this, it’s easy to overlook something. I did once. The jerk was disallowed entry into Pakistan and he sued me over it. If you have time, split the group into groups for cooking, dish washing and bus cleaning duties. Concerning food kitty and camp costs, keep an open and accurate book. People invariably like to see how their money is spent.

  2. As for notes, maybe ease into it the first day. Nothing too heavy. But don’t ever neglect the history notes. It gives people the impression that they’re getting a sense of history for their hard-earned bucks. Subtle things have an impact, and it’s a way of maintaining communication with the group, particularly if you’re landed with one of those groups that you never want to have anything to do with again, after the first day.

  3. “Bruges” means bridge, and it’s the capital of West Flanders. Pop. (all pops, are ’55 estimates, which was close enough for me) is 51,000. Maybe point out the city’s well-preserved medieval aspect on the way out of town, through the downtown area, as well as “Grote Markt” and the Belfry with its carillon of forty-seven bells, the Palace of Justice, and the post office, with its neo-Gothic style. Hopefully nobody will ask to see the Dyver canal, out near Gruuthuse Museum, or the Cathedral of St. Donatian, out on the northern outskirts, but if someone does, oblige them; it is, after all, the first day.