The Devil Rides Out (35 page)
Read The Devil Rides Out Online
Authors: Paul O'Grady
Tags: #Humor, #Form, #Anecdotes, #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #General, #Personal Memoirs, #Biography & Autobiography, #Fiction
Oh dying Port of Liverpool,
No more your liners sail,
The Prince’s Stage deserted now
Could tell us many a tale
Of rich and poor and emigrants
Who sailed with hopes so high
Of a brave new land in another land
But leaving with a sigh
As they gazed their last at the Liver Birds,
Soaring to the sky,
And the homeward-bounders’ hearts that thumped
As the stage hove into view
Oh Liverpool, my Liverpool
What have they done to you.
Hopelessly sentimental, but enough to reduce me to tears of homesickness. Maybe it was time to go home? Ryan was moving on to a new job in Jakarta anyway so I had no choice. In the short time that I’d been in Manila I’d gone from loathing the place to falling in love with it. I’d even managed to get over my revulsion towards the food, happily wiring in to
lumpiang bahay
, a sort of Filipino egg roll, and a bowl of
pancit molo
, a dish similar to won ton soup, although I still fled in horror at the sight of the dreaded
balut
.
I learned that the people were very special indeed, hardworking and resourceful, enduring life’s many hardships with a smile and a song – a cliché with a Disney twist, I realize, but true nonetheless, and the more I got to know these people as individuals the more I admired and respected them. I was really going to miss all the folk I’d made friends with – Gussie and his customers, the manager of our hotel and his heavily pregnant wife, an elderly expat who lived in the apartment below us and occasionally invited me in for tea, the kids in the street who greeted me every day, but most of all I was
going to miss Joselito with his enduringly optimistic outlook on life and sunny good nature.
As fate would have it, the day I was due to fly home all DC-10 aircraft had been grounded following a major accident in Chicago and the airways were in chaos. Manila airport was heaving with people trying to get home as I joined one of the seemingly never-ending queues to check in. Ryan slipped a twenty-dollar bill inside my passport, hoping that a little bribe might just guarantee me a seat. It didn’t. The Philippine Airlines steward behind the desk was above such blatant corruption and slid the bill across the desk with a sniffy but pointed ‘I think you’ll find you’ve left some money in your passport, sir.’
After a wait of over ten hours I was finally allocated a seat on a Pakistan Airlines flight to Bangkok. It was time to say goodbye to Ryan. He hugged me self-consciously.
‘Try to keep out of any trouble, eh?’ he said. ‘I’ll see you around.’
I grunted in reply as it was all that the lump in my throat would allow. I gave him one last wave as I entered the departure gate and then he was gone. As I’ve said frequently, I’m hopeless when it comes to saying goodbye.
No sooner had the flight taken off and we’d all settled down to read the in-flight magazine than I found myself in trouble. The plane had developed engine failure and was falling from the sky. The cabin shook violently, sending luggage in the overhead lockers flying into the aisles, all the oxygen masks popped out and from somewhere over the screams of panic a voice was telling us in broken English to adopt the brace position.
A group of Italian women in the row behind me cried out
like the Wailing Women, clutching their rosary beads and appealing hysterically for divine intervention. I was strangely calm; nothing to do with nerves of steel, I just firmly believed that I was invincible, confident that my time wasn’t up yet and convinced that even if the plane were to crash then I would undoubtedly survive.
The plane didn’t go down. Instead it turned back to Manila and all the passengers were put up in a nearby hotel for the night with the promise of a flight in the morning. After oversleeping and nearly missing the flight the next day thanks to a heavy night in the bar with a couple of Germans, I finally made it to Bangkok, although the airline had other plans for my luggage and sent it off to an unknown destination on a long holiday all of its own. At Bangkok airport I was told that there wasn’t much chance of me going anywhere for the next couple of days as all flights were full.
Outside the airport I was mobbed by taxi touts. The most dogged of the lot won the day and I ended up agreeing to a guided tour of Bangkok for what I now realize was an extortionate price. At the temple of the Emerald Buddha I met a girl who looked like a forties film star, dressed in a crimson jumpsuit with a matching turban and spiky red heels.
‘This place is Hustle City,’ she drawled in a thick New York accent. ‘Ya gotta watch’em like a hawk or they’ll fleece ya first chance they get.’
I thought her the ultimate in sophisticated glamour, the Lana Turner of the Temples, and it wasn’t until she removed her enormous tortoiseshell sunglasses that I realized that underneath the slap she couldn’t be much older than me.
‘The name’s Roxanne,’ she said, ‘Roxanne Casey from New York City, pleased to meet ya.’
She was in the same predicament as me, unable to get a
flight home and stranded in Bangkok where she’d spent the previous night sleeping on the floor at the airport. I asked her how she’d managed to look like she was about to step on to the red carpet at the Oscars, remarkable in the circumstances.
‘The washroom, the goddamn public washroom.’ She shrugged. ‘What else is a girl to do? But I sure as hell don’t fancy doing it for much longer. Y’wanna get outta this heat, go for a beer? See if we can’t figure a way how to get the hell outta here?’
Roxanne was quite rightly suspicious of the taxi driver, wanting to know how much the ‘son of a bitch’ was charging me and haggling furiously with him before she agreed to let him take us any further.
‘OK,’ she said, once she’d managed to bring the price down to a sum she considered respectable, ‘take us to the Oriental Hotel.’
She explained to me in the back of the cab that it was the best hotel in town and we stood a good chance of meeting a couple of guys there who might be able to ‘help us out’. ‘A couple of nice guys, businessmen looking for a little company,’ she said, sitting back in her seat, ‘who in return will put us up until we can get a flight.’
I seriously doubted Roxanne’s hair-brained scheme to get us bedded down for the night but pretended to go along with it for something to do. I couldn’t imagine anyone lusting after me, man, woman or beast, not unless they were into extremely rough trade as I was still wearing the same clothes that I’d left Manila in – jeans, T-shirt and flip-flops. I also hadn’t shaved for a few days and my hair, which badly needed cutting, was as high as the proverbial Maori’s hut. And it wasn’t the only thing that was high. Having overslept and nearly missed my flight to Bangkok, I’d had no time to shower or even clean my teeth and I was conscious that I must be more than a little ripe.
‘Holy Mary, Mother of God!’ Roxanne exclaimed when she saw the prices on the drinks menu, ordering two beers nevertheless. ‘Now all we gotta do is sit tight and wait for a couple of big fish to swallow the bait.’
I was content just to sit in the cool of this beautiful lobby listening to the piano and people-watching. Roxanne was certainly attracting lots of attention from both men and women – it would have been hard not to notice her in that jumpsuit and turban, she put the colourful flower display to shame – but to her growing chagrin no ‘nice businessmen’ approached us with the offer of bed and board until eventually, after what seemed like an hour, a man made his way over to us.
‘Quick. Look interesting,’ Roxanne hissed as he gave us the once-over before settling himself at a table next to ours and unfolding a newspaper.
Leaning across to him and waving a cigarette she asked coyly if he had a light. Lowering his paper, he gave her a look that managed to convey that he was used to being hustled by a more superior calibre of con woman in hotel lobbies and, indicating the lighter sat on our table, asked her why she didn’t provide her own.
‘It’s broken,’ she simpered sweetly.
‘I don’t smoke,’ he replied curtly, getting up and moving to another table. ‘But I’m sure one of the waiters will provide you with a book of matches if you ask.’
‘What is it with these guys? They all celibate or something?’ she protested, watching him go.
‘C’mon, let’s get out of here, we’re wasting our time.’ I was
anxious to leave, worried that any minute now we would be thrown out.
‘OK by me,’ she said, gathering her few possessions and marching smartly across the lobby towards the exit. ‘The place is a bore anyway.’
On the way back to the airport I asked the driver if he could recommend a shop that sold jewellery. My sister had a thing for what she called ‘Siamese silver’ and I wanted to see if I could find something to take home that was within my limited price range.
The driver took us to a shop. ‘The best prices in Bangkok,’ he said.
‘He probably gets commission for every dumb mug he takes here,’ Roxanne said, looking around her. ‘Jeez, what a load of crap.’
She haggled like a trooper with the shop assistant over a bracelet of ‘Siamese silver’ that I wanted to buy.
‘Silver my ass. Leave this thing on overnight and you’d wake up with verdigris poisoning. I’ll give ya five bucks for it.’
My sister got her bracelet but we were not so lucky when it came to getting a flight out. At checkin we were told again that there were no seats available on any flights and that unfortunately for us we were at the bottom of a very long standby list.
Roxanne took herself off to the washroom to change for ‘bed’ and re-emerged a different woman, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. With her face scrubbed clean of make-up and her squeaky-clean shoulder-length blonde hair freed from the confines of the turban, she looked like a little girl.
Trying to get to sleep in a small plastic chair is impossible, no matter how tired you are. In the end I joined Roxanne on
the floor, where she at least had a jacket to cover her and a holdall for a pillow. We talked for hours until Roxanne finally fell asleep. I lay on the hard floor trying to get comfortable, wondering what the hell I was going to do. The little money I had left wouldn’t last much longer and it looked like I was stuck here for days, maybe a week. I could just picture myself starving, my clothes in rags, harassing people on the streets of Bangkok for the price of a meal. No, I had to get out of here and as I lay on the floor a brilliant if devious scheme to get us home slowly unfurled in my mind. Roxanne’s luggage had gone AWOL, as had mine, so what we’d do was this: we’d go to the offices of the airlines for which we were on the waiting list and tell them we were diabetic and that since our luggage containing the necessary supplies of insulin had gone missing we were now in danger of going hyperglycaemic as the little we had with us in our hand luggage was running out fast. Brilliant.
‘Hypergly-what?’ Roxanne asked the next morning as I explained the plan over breakfast in the airport café.
‘Hyperglycaemic, it’s what happens to a diabetic when they need insulin.’
‘How do you know this shit?’
‘I used to look after kids who had it, so I know all the facts. It’s worth a try.’
‘OK, I’m in.’ She took a slug of coffee and peered at me over the tortoiseshell sunglasses. ‘Now run all the details by me again.’
I managed to dissuade her from putting on the warpaint and the crimson jumpsuit, explaining that she looked more vulnerable au naturel.
‘I’d rather die than be seen without lipstick,’ she moaned. ‘You’re a goddamn sadist.’
‘Guess what? They’re putting me on a flight to New York tonight,’ she shouted excitedly, rushing towards me and giving me a kiss. ‘They said I could use the first-class lounge while I waited, and I got you a pass as well. You’re a genius!’
Roxanne went to town in the first-class lounge, availing herself fully of the facilities in the ladies’ washroom to transform herself from all-American girl back into forties vamp. We exchanged addresses and made promises to keep in touch and then went our separate ways, never to see each other again. Once safely on the plane I was beside myself to find that I’d been allocated a seat in business class. After a lovely dinner I settled down in the luxury of my enormous seat and went to sleep. Heaven.
