Narcissism for Beginners

by Martine McDonagh

  I pulled a bunch of photos out of the folder. Twenty years ago, when I was a baby, people still paid for prints of every photograph they took; it was the only way to get to see them. Even the shit ones, which I guess you paid for, laughed at, separated from the good ones and tossed in the trash like you would a two-legged carrot at the market. (Although for Thomas a two-legged carrot would be a prized possession, especially if he grew it himself. I don’t think he has a photograph collection but if he does, I never want to see it.) A couple of the pictures in the folder I’d seen before, but I couldn’t say when. The one of my dad in his pink guru apparel, sitting cross-legged in the garden in Olinda, I’ve seen, like, a million times since.

  A guru is someone who follows nobody on Twitter but has thousands of social media suckers following him. Go figure.

  There was a photo of baby me I’d never seen before. At least, Thomas said it was me but I guess it could have been anybody. There was no one else in the picture to validate his claim, and, even if there had been, how would I have known who they were? Another one of me, a couple years later, with way more hair, black like mine, and wearing real kid clothes and sitting in a wheelbarrow. This kid did look a little bit like me now and there was even a hint of another person present, in the form of two hands, gripping the handles of the wheelbarrow. But whoever those hands and forearms belonged to had had them amputated at the elbow by whoever was holding the camera.

  One picture still creeps me out, I don’t know why but it does. First time I saw it, I looked at it for a while and then I had to go lie down on my bed for a longer while to think about it. It’s of a man and a woman standing side by side. The guy is my dad in his guru clothes and a beard, and the other, I guess, is you. You can’t see your face because you’re looking down at his hand, which is spread flat against your belly, and where your face should be is a shining drape of black hair. He is staring right into the camera and smiling. Not happy and joyful smiling, smug and self-important smiling. I’m a guru smiling for the camera smiling. The only kind of smiling I ever saw him do. When I imagined reaching into the picture and sweeping your hair away from your face, my imagination put my own face where yours should be. And I wasn’t even high.

  That was enough of the bag for a while.

  Eventually I got up from my bed and life went on for a few more days. I continued my post-graduation break like nothing happened. Except that I had intended to look for a summer job, but what with being a multi-millionaire and all I didn’t know if I needed to do that any more. I just had to complete a couple forms to claim my inheritance and avoid ever needing a job.

  I didn’t complete the forms. I didn’t look for a job. Instead I did things I hadn’t done in years, like ride my bike. Most days I cycled to Santa Monica and back on the Marvin Braude, a thirty-mile round trip. I watched movies. Okay, I watched a movie, Shaun of the Dead. I scoffed Trader Joe’s non-pareils by the tubful. I avoided all the Big Subjects. Thomas went on as usual, routine-ritual-routine, but I could sense him watching and thinking and wondering how long until I’d be ready to talk. Thomas was always ready to talk and as usual I was keeping him waiting. Or maybe all he was thinking about was whether the Great Dudini would prefer to turn left instead of right on the street for his walk that day. Now I’ve read his letters, though, I’m pretty sure that he was avoiding the Big Subjects too; they were too big even for him.

  I’m going too fast again.

  One night at dinner we were talking about my ride that day and I showed Thomas the videos I’d shot on my phone. The regular stuff: a pelican kamikazeing into the ocean by the pier; a dolphin, hanging with the surfer dudes, looping the waves real close to the beach at Hermosa; two palm trees by LAX that, if you got the angle right, looked like they were on a tiny desert island; the fat silver underbelly of the plane that took off right over my head while I was lining up the picture of the two palm trees. Man, that was loud.

  It was the plane that did it – let Thomas in.

  ‘Have you had any more thoughts about going to England?’ he said.

  I actually hadn’t thought about it at all, but said, ‘Yes. I think I will.’ And that was the decision made, right there. Even though I knew Thomas wouldn’t be coming with me like I’d always assumed he would. Since Brazil, I’d never been anywhere outside the state of California and I’d hardly even travelled to school alone until I started at USC. ‘Do I even have a passport?’ I said.

  Turned out I did. Thomas had ordered it from the UK five years before, just in case I needed it, using my birth certificate and a photo from the bunch we had taken for my Junior High ID. Man, I look grim in that picture. You know how sometimes you can look at a picture of your younger self and know exactly what you were thinking at the exact moment the picture was taken? You know it but can’t articulate it; you remember having the thought but not the words that describe the thought. I guess that’s probably classified as a feeling, then, right? If I were the immigration official processing that application I’d have refused it. At sixteen I was into my fourth year of getting wasted and the thoughts in my head at the time that picture was taken were the exact opposite of SoCal Positivity. But I guess I don’t look so different now, just a little healthier. Like I said, no more flesh on these bones.

  I lifted the final item, the box, out of the bag and put it on the table. Thomas pushed the salt and pepper and guacamole out of the way, already gone brown and unappetising because he forgot to leave the avo stone in, and I opened the box right there among the pizza crusts and soggy salad leaves. ‘It’s your father’s autobiography,’ said Thomas when I flipped the lid back. Not a book, not even a manuscript, but a bunch of small tapes with their own special machine to play them on that’s about the size of an old-school cellphone. ‘Your father always said writing wasn’t his medium,’ said Thomas. ‘I haven’t listened to them.’

  Writing isn’t my medium? Who the fuck says that?

  So, to summarise, Thomas put all that shit together for my birthday so I could go to the UK and discover my lost past and move on unburdened into adulthood. Despite our pretence about it being a Shaun of the Dead zombie pilgrimage, in my heart of hearts I knew I was going to look for you, and in his heart of hearts Thomas knew that too; we just couldn’t admit it openly. I assumed his silence on the subject was to avoid sending me into such a panic that I wouldn’t go.

  Like I said, never assume.

  Next thing I know, I’m on the plane to London, my backpack loaded with the important stuff Thomas gave me inside a plastic sleeve: the list of names and addresses, the photos, and a list of all the SOTD location addresses in London, printed off the IMDb website as back-up in case I lose my phone or my tablet. Also, weighing me down, the whole damn box of my dad’s tapes because I didn’t have the cojones to listen to them before I left or the wherewithal to just leave them behind.

  Milly-Anna cried when we said goodbye, even though she knew for like a week that I was leaving and would only be gone for a couple weeks – or so we thought back then. She gave me a tub of non-pareils for sustenance because ‘those flight meals are so icky’, and Silent Ike gave me a dictionary of British slang and shook my hand. Kind of an ironic gift from a man who never speaks, so it was pretty obvious the dictionary had been Thomas’s idea and he was way more interested in it than I was, at least until it disappointed him. According to him, The Man Who Hasn’t Set Foot on British Territory for Twenty Years, it was out of date. So we watched SOTD together for the last time and we shouted ‘nincompoop’ and ‘bloody bugger’ over all the 21st-century cursewords. Definitely out of date.

  Then we were driving me to LAX like it was part of our daily routine and for a moment my brain got confused and thought we were headed for my NA meeting at Hermosa even though it was the wrong time of day and I hadn’t been there for three years. But we kept on going up PCH, through Hermosa, through Manhattan and El Segundo.

  Thomas looked kind of nervous too as we entered the terminal and I remembered he hadn’t flow
n anywhere in years either and was probably suffering vicarious anxiety. By the time we hit the departure gate though he relaxed enough to throw me a high-five as if saying goodbye at the airport was the kind of thing we did all the time. ‘Oh, that Sonny,’ an onlooker might say, ‘where’s he headed this time?’

  I guess I’ve grown since I last sat on a plane; I need more physical space than my seat provides. But I luck out when the guy at the other end of our row gets upgraded and I score all three seats to myself. The woman across the aisle seems to think I should have offered my good fortune up to her and squints her curses in my direction. If I weren’t so scared of losing my privilege I’d tell her and her sense of entitlement to go swivel. Instead I send her a creepy SoCal smile as if to say, ‘Hey, lady, be happy for me, and next time it might be you!’ and settle back to explore the movie channel.

  I watch three movies one after the other: one about a guy who likes to tie women up in his basement and make them cry by playing them Whitney Houston CDs; one in black and white about a cute girl in New York who isn’t much good at anything but works it all out in the end; then next up, from the classics selection, ladies and gentlemen, it’s Shaun of the Dead. (A message from the Universe, right?) In a few hours, I tell myself as I stretch out across all three seats, those same streets and sidewalks will be right there under my feet.

  Somewhere in the middle of the first movie, my meal arrives and it’s not at all icky because Thomas knew to advance-order the Asian vegan option. I opt for non-pareils instead of rehydrated melon for dessert and then all the lights go out and the plane is in total darkness, except for all the little rectangles of blue light flashing on to people’s faces, and I’m actually quite cosy. I doze off right after Philip has died, just like I do at home.

  When the attendant wakes me for breakfast the plane is all lit up again. My whole body feels empty, like all the blood’s been sucked out of my veins, a not completely unfamiliar sensation. I flip open my breakfast box and eat, gorming like a zombie at the little plane on the moving map as it jerks its way towards London at five hundred and something miles per hour. One hour till landing.

  It’s cool watching the numbers wind down to zero as the cartoon plane’s nose hits the black spot of London. When the wheels of the real plane hit the runway, some guy in the row behind me starts clapping. Thomas warned me this might happen. In addition to kissy sucky mouth-noises I also can’t stand the sound of palms smacking together, be they dry, sweaty or otherwise. I cover my ears but the noise gets louder because other people join in, probably so the first guy – I’m guessing only a guy or a monkey would applaud a routine landing – won’t be embarrassed. I feel like Shaun at the beginning of SOTD, on a bus where all the other passengers are indistinguishable from zombies, and Oh My Gosh, I’m in London.

  London airport is on the west side of the city. My hotel is on the west side too, but closer in to downtown, in the Bayswater neighbourhood, right by Hyde Park. The train from the airport brings me to Paddington station and from there it’s ten blocks or so to the hotel. Even though my backpack is dragging on my shoulders and my head feels like it’s detached from the rest of my body, and even though I can now afford to ride everywhere by taxi, I walk, because I want to feel the London sidewalk under my shoes, to test it out, see if it feels like home.

  Man, London is alive-alive-o. So many people out walking on the street. It makes RB look like one of those ghost towns out in the desert where the only residents are starving kitties and the only vegetation is tumbleweed. People walk in RB too, of course. When they need to get from their car to the store. Or from their car to the boardwalk. Maybe every couple blocks you’ll see someone with a dog leash or three attached to one hand and a baggie of doggie poop swinging from the other. In RB walking is exercise, to be done as little or as often as your level of obsession, or the number of doggies in your care, demands. In London, a pair of legs is a means of transportation.

  This morning most people around me are rushing along, their faces screwed up from stress or lack of sleep, going about important business. You hardly notice the others, the shopping zombies, daydreaming along in amongst them. I’m with them, shuffling along, enchanted, excluded like the main character in a movie about a man who falls asleep on a beach in SoCal and wakes up as a multi-millionaire wandering the streets in a mankini in a strange but familiar city six thousand miles from home.

  Across the street, a couple blocks from my hotel, is a mom and pop’s store like the one Shaun goes into to buy a can of soda for himself and a Cornetto for Ed, and I get my second rush of excitement. I have a secondary SOTD mission that I call the Cornetto Challenge.

  Did you watch SOTD yet? The first time I watched it Thomas had to translate what Ed was saying because he says Cornetto without pronouncing the ‘t’s, but that has nothing to do with my Challenge.

  In the movie, Shaun walks home from the store, and sits on the sofa to channel-surf and chat to Ed, who’s stood looking out of the window. Then they go out into their back yard and try to kill zombie one, go back inside the house, kill zombie two, then outside again to kill zombies one and three. No big deal, right, BUT, all this happens BEFORE Ed sits down to eat his Cornetto. It’s at least ten minutes since the ice-cream left the store, in movie time, which is probably more like thirty minutes in real time. This is ice-cream we’re talking about. It melts, right? So, while I am eager to eat my first Cornetto, the Cornetto Challenge has to take precedence. Trivial as it may seem to you, it’s important to me to know if a Cornetto is still edible ten minutes after coming out of the freezer.

  To the store.

  It’s tiny, about one-eightieth the size of our local drugstore but with the same amount of stuff for sale. The guy at the register points at a freezer rammed into the corner between the magazine display and the shelf of potato chips and I almost clear the shelves of produce when I try to manoeuvre my backpack in the limited space available. I’d care more if I wasn’t about to buy my first two Cornettos ever. (Two? you say. What, you think I’m gonna wait ten minutes? Obviously I need one to eat as soon as I leave the store.) In a frenzy of cinematic authenticity I grab a can of soda I don’t really want and head for the register. The guy scans my stuff without asking me how I am today, or smiling, or making eye contact. Even when I say, ‘Thank you, Nelson,’ to drop him a clue he shows no recognition of what we’re doing here and just throws my three purchases into a blue plastic bag. Thomas would shudder at the casual use of plastic, start muttering about the fish in the ocean, I feel like a criminal just touching the bag.

  A combination of ice-cream ecstasy and looking in the wrong direction to cross the street almost gets me killed. Fortunately the taxi driver sees me first and presses his whole body weight against his horn. The headline flashes into my mind: World’s Youngest Multi-Millionaire Walks Into Traffic, Dies Enjoying First Ever Cornetto. It’s What He Would Have Wanted, Says Tearful Guardian.

  I figure the hotel wouldn’t appreciate me dripping ice-cream juice all over the lobby before I’ve even checked in so I cross over to the park and dump my backpack on to the first bench I see, in the shade of a big old tree. Not a palm tree – there are no palm trees here – a real tree, with thick green leaves as big as hands.

  On the bench opposite, a guy in a grey suit so shiny it might actually be made of silver is reading a pink newspaper and talking on his phone. A steady stream of joggers and cyclists runs between us. The clock on my phone tells me I have another five minutes to wait before the Challenge is up so I spread the empty wrapper of my F.E.C. on the ground and take a photo of it to send to Thomas. Meanwhile the guy opposite has folded his pink paper and stood up to leave. ‘I hope you’re going to pick that up again,’ he says as he skips between two bikes. Fuck off, asshole, I say. In my head.

  When the ten minutes is up my Cornetto Challenge Cornetto is too soft to eat, but I eat-slash-drink it anyway and message the result with the photo to Thomas and he writes back right away. So the idea of people coming
back to life as zombies to eat the living is entirely plausible, but an ice-cream not having melted in ten minutes is an insurmountable problem? Thomas never abbreviates his text messages, spells out every word in full. It’s three a.m. in RB; he must have stayed awake waiting for me to message him. I imagine him there on the sofa, a bearskin hat covering the top half of his face.

  Man, I’m tired.

  I wake up in the middle of the night when my phone whistles in a new message from Thomas. Your challenge is null and void. There’s a jump cut. Watch it again. A hundred dollars says Shaun put the Cornetto in the freezer.

  Motherflipper. (© Flight of the Conchords. Love those guys too.)

  There’s no way I’m getting back to sleep so I take the two lists Thomas gave me out of their plastic sleeve and put them side by side on the bed. SOTD locations, or Existential Quest? My head says SOTD; my stupid heart says otherwise.

  I flip a coin. Existential Quest it is.

  You win.

  Doris and her Puppies

  Doris Henry, aka Mrs C, isn’t first on the list, but there are good reasons to go visit her first. One, she knew my dad before anyone else did so it kind of makes sense chronologically, what with past and background being important to build the picture and all. Two, she’s old and it would be just my kind of luck for her to pass, like, the day before I get to meet her. Also, three, the train to Devon, where she lives, leaves from Paddington station, which as you already know is close to my hotel. It’s a four-hour train ride to Torquay, the town where she lives, and I’m jet-lagged as hell, so I plan to sleep the whole way. It doesn’t quite work out that way because apparently it’s compulsory to eat potato chips on Brit trains – I have to switch coaches twice because the sound of people crunching makes me want to smash my fist through the window.