Chapter Twelve
Garnet’s holiday lasted almost twenty years, during which time he circumvented the globe on more than a dozen occasions, and lost count of the number of different countries - let alone hotels and cities - he visited. His purpose, though, throughout this epic journey, remained the same: to visit the site of every major new construction project on the planet. If he was ever to be the best, first he had to check out the competition. It made sound business sense. It would have been what his father would have done, in the same situation.
He readvertised for a new carer - a luxury that he had denied himself since his Swiss excursion - although now the position was renamed ‘personal attendant’, and an additional skills requisite was the ability to ‘organise fast and economical travel itineraries’ with the understanding ‘that a considerable proportion of the job would be spent overseas’. For many - judging by the huge post bag that Garnet was to receive - it sounded like a dream job; for most - judging by the rapidity with which his advertisement reappeared in the national press - the reality proved to be closer to a nightmare. Garnet Wendelson had not got easier to care for with age.
For every rule though, there is invariably an exception. And the exception, in the case of the long succession of Garnet’s attendant helpers, was Martin Meek. The year was 1997 and Martin was twenty-two years old. An Englishman, he had been propelled to the States on the tidal wave of opportunity that surrounded the current dotcom revolution. For a young man with the right ideas it was a time when millions could be made overnight. Martin decided that he fitted the age criterion perfectly, and as for ideas? With the stakes for winning so high, it was a gamble too good to be refused, and with the optimism - and inexperience - of youth on his side, he was confident of pitching the mental capabilities that a good comprehensive education had instilled in him against the best that the global marketplace could offer. After all, he reasoned, so much in business - as in life - is just luck, in any case. There will be better men than him who will fail; there will be abject wasters who will succeed.
In the end, it was neither luck nor ideas which defeated Martin, but time. The dotcom wave, despite being a big one, was destined to break up as quickly as it had surfaced: the big bucks had already been made - and in most case lost - the venture capitalists, who a year before had been prepared to throw money at any company that had a full stop somewhere in the middle of their name, were retreating quicker than a spring tide, and the stock market, which had artificially allowed the dotcoms to be so buoyant, was finally coming to the conclusion that it was not just hope that floats, and had effectively pulled the confidence plug on the whole teetering colossus. At a moment in time when Martin had visualised himself surfing clear blue waters to a personal fortune, he was, instead, struck a broadside blow by a board-upending dumper, leaving him washed up and broke on a friendless beach: sleeping rough, underneath the torn awning of one of the deserted sideshows on the seafront of Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach, to be completely accurate.
It is a picturesque image, only occurring in the worst of sentimental movies, where the course of the hero’s life is dramatically altered by the chance reading of a scrap of information he sees in a newspaper, the fated page of which, having been blown by the random vagaries of the wind, presents itself, still legible and intact, at the feet of the down-on-his-luck star but, nevertheless, this was, more or less, the sequence of events that resulted in Martin noticing an advertisement in the ‘Help Wanted’ section of the New York Times, something that he would otherwise never have found himself reading had the erstwhile paper detritus not been swept by a kindly breeze directly into his temporary boardwalk abode. Even then Garnet’s advertisement was not immediately enticing: would-be dotcom impresario to rich man’s gopher requires a massive readjustment of thinking, not only in terms of self-image, but also in respect of hopes and dreams; commodities, which to a young man, are more precious than gold and riches. In the end, what persuaded Martin to at least make the effort of responding to the invitation to apply was the prospect, mentioned in the advertisement, of foreign travel: he would have been the first to admit that his American experience had been far from the success story that he had hoped for, and now, without even the funds to afford to buy himself a passage home, the possibility of departing the ‘land of opportunity’, by whatever means, was something too good to throw up.
Two days later, it was with the Kirsty MacColl lyrics of Walking Down Madison echoing in his head, like an eternally reprimanding ear worm, that Martin found himself transported from the gutters of Little Odessa directly into the luxury of Park Avenue society. He hummed, unconsciously to himself,
From an uptown apartment to a knife on the A train,
It’s not that far.
From the sharks in the penthouse to the rats in the basement,
It’s not that far.
The United States of America. Oh, what a country!
••••••••••
The Victorian Grand Tour was a requisite rite of passage for every self-respecting young man of a certain rank and social status in the nineteenth century, in order to complete his education and gain what was considered ‘essential life experience’, but the bold Continental travellers of their day could never have foreseen such a journey as the one that Martin Meek was to embark upon over the course of the next few years, compensation indeed for the insults endured, and arduous work suffered, in the service of the ever irascible Garnet Wendelson.
The stamps and visas in Martin’s passport read like a gazetteer of the world’s countries, including several that only Garnet’s privileged financial position had permitted entry to. There had been the visit to Malaysia in 1998 to visit the undisputed new champion on the block, the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur. Martin had pushed Garnet’s wheelchair across the transparent sky bridge which links the two colossal twin towers, forty-one storeys above the level of the busy streets below: halfway across the dizzying divide, if he had not realised it before, Martin knew that his life had changed forever. Most of the following year had been spent in East Asia, where the new tiger economies, hopeful of finally challenging the West’s financial and industrial stranglehold that had shackled them for decades, were exhibiting their economic muscle by building increasingly impressive monuments to wealth and status. They had visited the Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai - a city they were to return to almost a decade later in order to be passengers on only the second plane to ‘fly through the eye of the needle’, as the local tourist authority was dubbing their latest attraction, the experience of flying through the massive portal at the summit of the recently constructed Shanghai World Financial Center. The events of 11th September 2001 were not so far distant for the general opinion of the world’s media to be to denounce the new tourist activity as being in particularly poor taste, but consideration of such sensitivities rarely seemed to be something that greatly upset the thick-skinned Chinese, particularly when there was a healthy buck to be turned by the enterprise.
Martin was beginning to equate Asia’s major cities almost exclusively with the tall buildings located in them: Hong Kong, so it must be the Bank of China Tower and The Centre; Guangzhou, CITIC Plaza; Shenzhen had the benefits of both Shun Hing Square and SEG Plaza; and a trip off the Chinese mainland to Taiwan, meant visiting Kaohsiung and the T & C Tower. Further afield, the Lotte World Tower in Pusan, South Korea was only visible on the plans in the designer’s office, rather than as a steel and concrete structure to be scaled as, too, was the BDNI Center in Jakarta, but nevertheless this did not deter Garnet from wishing to visit the proposed locations of both buildings.
The turn of the new Millennium had been spent in Saudi Arabia, to witness the progress of the rival construction sites of the Kingdom Building and the Al Faisaliah Tower, each a posturing Goliath on either ends of the same street, towering about the low level grid of buildings in central Riyadh. Neither building a contender for the title ‘World’s Tallest’, Garnet
still admired the naked exhibitionism and rivalry which existed between the two buildings, mirroring a similar power struggle between their two wealthy backers: rarely could there have been a more blatant case of ‘I’ve got a bigger one than you’ syndrome.
A short pause in the globetrotting came during a prolonged stay at the spectacular Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai, a regular feature of which was the weekly helicopter flight that Garnet took from the helipad of the hotel, located on the 28th floor, 210 metres up, overlooking the waters of the Persian Gulf. But the break was all too brief before the fact-finding mission continued with a vengeance, taking in, in quick succession, the proposed location for Skidmore, Owings and Merrill’s latest skyscraper, at 7 South Dearborn, Chicago, the rumoured site of the Maharishi Tower of World Peace in Sao Paulo and its rival location in Katangi in central India where it was hoped to build a massive pyramid-like structure which would play host to 100,000 Vedic Pandits and Yogic Flyers and, then, more as an exercise in completeness rather than with any intention of viewing seriously tall buildings, there were the short stays in Paris - La Defense - Frankfurt - the Messeturm - and London - where the progress of Norman Foster’s glass gherkin at London Bridge and a ride in a pod on the London Eye momentarily tickled Garnet’s fancy.
The most interesting and ambitious trip, though, which stretched both Martin’s administrative skills and also his patience at his employer’s seemingly continual criticisms, was the one to Saddam’s Iraq in the summer of 2002, where there were plans afoot to recreate the ancient buildings of Babylon, the crowning glory of which would be a new Tower of Babel. It was not a good time to be an American in Iraq: George W. Bush’s latest posturing in his war against terrorism had turned from the Taliban in Afghanistan and were now firmly focused on the man who had outstayed Bush’s own father in longevity as a leader of his own country - Saddam Hussein. Iraq was bracing itself for war, and in their eyes America and its western allies were the aggressors. Garnet’s ‘influence’ secured an entry visa for himself and Martin under the auspices of an invitation from a construction company based in Baghdad, and also the services of a local government tour guide allied to the Ministry of Information for the duration of their visit, but an attempt to have the architect Marcel Chin join them on their Iraqi adventure failed. Chin had recently become a naturalised American citizen and such a blatant display of pro-Americanism was viewed with suspicion by the Iraqi authorities: Chin’s visa application was returned, invalidated. The trip went ahead regardless.
Saddam’s vision of his own personal Babylon was intended to mirror his own massive ambitions, and the numerous building projects that he had established, not only in his capital Baghdad, but around the rest of the country, too, were intended to stand as a testament to his period of rule, long after the actuality had ceased to exist. In this respect he was, perhaps, no different to many men of a certain age: whatever a man’s achievements, or not, during his lifetime, there comes a time when instead of looking to the future as an endless path stretching ahead along which to continue the progress you have made all your life, suddenly the view is dominated by the gaping chasm of mortality, and the only way to bridge the gap is to leave a more permanent memorial to your life than is provided by mere flesh and blood. Such is the driving force for many major constructions: bricks and mortar, historically, withstand the test of time better than mortal man and his ego. Martin stood beside a triumphal arch in central Baghdad, a memorial to the Iran-Iraq War, depicting two huge arms each holding a crossed sabre, the hands of which were modelled on Saddam’s own, the blades of the swords having been recast from the melted down guns of fallen Iraqi soldiers, while at the foot of the monument the bullet-riddled helmets of the Iranian foe tell their own story, and, for the first time in his life, considered his own legacy to posterity. Perhaps it was only natural, while in a country considered so perilous to visit to outside observers, to think about his own mortality. There would not be a great deal to show the passage of one Martin Meek, should his life end today: a few eclectic possessions, collected over the last few years, currently residing in a small bedroom in an apartment in New York - they would all be tidied up and disposed of, leaving no trace of previous ownership. His diary jottings and few photographs, similarly, would probably all be destroyed, or maybe, if he was lucky, turn up, years later, in a trunk in a junk shop, anonymous words and faces of forgotten people, steadily turning yellow with age. He had no one to treasure his legacy; no one to pass anything on to; no reason for his name to be specially remembered. Martin knew this desire to leave behind a lasting monument was the force which had transported him to this unusual outpost: it was Garnet’s memorial he was helping to construct though, not his own. In the crook of his arm the plaster that covered up the recent puncture mark he had received during the course of an HIV test - a recent requirement of the Iraqi government for all Western visitors, although one that Garnet had managed to neatly dodge by magically displaying an official-looking doctor’s certificate printed in the cursive Arabic script - was furling up at one edge, begging to be ripped off. Martin thought about the implications behind the test and decided not to dwell on the subject of man’s own mortality.
For the majority of the Muslim world the depiction of the human form in art and sculpture is regarded as blasphemy: the massive bas-relief image of Saddam Hussein that greets every visitor to the new Babylon was proof that the current day leader was not troubled by such convictions. Garnet and Martin had made the 50 mile journey south of the capital city in a hired four-wheel drive taxi, as ever accompanied by their willing guide and chauffeur, who kept up a non-stop commentary as he drove, chiefly extolling the virtues of the current Ba’ath government, at the same time berating neighbours Iran and Kuwait, by way of unfavourable comparisons, at every opportunity. Martin expressed the opinion that his president should be very pleased with him, which succeeded in producing a wide smile beneath the moustachioed face, and a reply of “you are too kind”.
The ancient mounds of mud bricks, which have been the only indications of the greatness of the original city of Babel, had been reconstructed; the architect of the colossal walls of the new buildings, largely untroubled by historical accuracy, making no attempt to deceive the visiting public into thinking that they were revisiting the ancient city as it would once have looked, instead modern building materials had been utilised in the construction, and the intimidating fortress-like structures, topped by crenelated parapets, spoke only of the folly of modern day Iraq, without recalling any of the past glories of such great leaders as Nebuchadnezzar.
Garnet’s wheelchair bobbled over the dry, rocky ground, its passenger being flung back and forth like a rag doll, this despite Martin’s best attempts at avoiding the worst potholes and loose boulders. Their guide directed them towards a lacklustre souvenir stall, behind which its frowning custodian was persuaded to emerge momentarily from his shaded seat in order to sell Garnet a yellowing guidebook, the pages already furling up at the corners, the cover gritty to the touch due to a thin covering of sand. Where the old city would have been alive with the sounds of life, this newly restored outpost already felt like an archaeological site, quiet, neglected, and already showing signs of ruin and decay. Martin’s sense of growing depression was only compounded when their guide explained that the next project for reconstruction was to be the magnificent Hanging Gardens, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and after that Saddam intended to complete his grand plan by building a new Tower of Babel. To Martin it sounded like a recipe for disaster: it was something akin to a Middle Eastern Las Vegas, minus the booze, the gambling, and the neon.
For some reason Garnet loved it all. He loved the excess; he loved the ridiculousness; most of all he loved the supreme egotism: every time he came across one of the many bricks which pronounced itself constructed in the ‘age of Saddam Hussein’ he was forced to point and chortle to himself like an excited schoolboy.
The Persian excursion - as Garne
t, with untypical geographical inaccuracy was wont to call it - was over far too soon for Garnet, but there was one final epitaph to the trip which was to have a major impact both on the remaining few years of Garnet’s life, but also for Martin too. Before their travel to Iraq, Martin had decided that this was to be his final trip with Garnet, that as soon as they were comfortably settled back in New York he would hand in his resignation and look for employment anew: he was tired of the non-stop round of travel arrangements, bored of living in different hotels, more than anything, he was weary of his irascible employer. It had been good while it lasted, but now he was ready for a change: he was still a young man, the world was his oyster. He realised that he had been very fortunate to have seen so many different countries, but now he wished to be recognised for himself, and not purely as a pair of limbs, at the beck and call of a wealthy master. The occurrence which upset all of Martin’s plans happened on the flight back from Paris to New York, on the last leg of what had been an exhausting round of flight connections from Baghdad, which had begun the previous day. Perhaps it was as a result of so much aeroplane travel, perhaps it was just a case of pure bad luck, but at 11.15 on the morning of 2nd July 2002, at a cruising height of 31,000 feet, Garnet developed a venous thrombosis, and on arrival at J. F. Kennedy Airport was immediately rushed to the nearest hospital suffering from severe chest pains and shortness of breath. He was operated upon the same afternoon.
Interlude
I’d never been worshipped before. It was kinda cool. I mean, it wasn’t why I joined the job, or anything, I didn’t even know about these Terminal Baggers at the time, never heard of them, I just needed the work, and, well, I wasn’t exactly qualified for anything, and, after all, it doesn’t need many examinations to be able to chuck people’s luggage around. Baggage handler, shmandler. It was easy money. And as for the religious crap, that just came along later.
They call us the Unseen. I kinda like that. You know, like we’re some kinda sacred spirit. Some of the lads, they really play up on it, and all, you know, like they’ll just offer a little glimpse of hand or arm, as they throw the suitcases out onto the carousel, it’s cruel really, they know that to some of these Terminal Baggers that brief sighting is like a religious experience, like a reaffirmation of their vows. I don’t pull no cheap stunts like that. I respect these guys and their beliefs. It’s like my mama always said, you reap what you sow. Mordy, though, he is quite funny - he’s like my best buddy at work, cos we do the same shifts, you know, 5a.m. through to midday, it’s a killa cos you have to be up at 3a.m., but the money is better - well, Mordy, he works the tarmac, you know, drives the truck out to the plane, loads, unloads, and all, well once he draped himself, head to foot, in a long white sheet, really ghostly stuff, right, had us all killing ourselves laughing - Unseen, right? Mordy he was real unseen that day, must have had them Terminal Baggers wetting themselves with excitement. He had to stop, though, Mr. Warren said that the sheet was impairing his ability to do his job, or some such phrase, I don’t think many cases got put on the wrong plane, but with our job you just can’t afford one slip up, you know.
(Extract from Confessions of a Baggage Handler by Arnold D. Drexler.)
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