mimi in NY

Maxim Radio

2008-07-02T21:04:00.001-04:00

On Maxim radio today. God knows how I managed to fit in four meetings around this. I am DEAD. LA is effing busy kids.

No. 11 to Los Angeles

2008-06-29T16:31:00.005-04:00

I hung out in the Mission during the day, at night frequented a dive bar full of travellers. The dive bar was really just a big, echoing room with peeling-paint walls. You had to buy the booze at the liquor store and bring it in the side entrance. The backpack brigade was out in force and if I heard one more asshole tell me about giving up his job back in London for a life on the open road (itinerary organized by STA, comprehensive insurance plan) I was going to fucking kill them all. Then this guy wandered into the dive bar and stood uncertainly in the doorway. He was wearing a suit and looked lost. I waved him over and gave him a beer. Turned out the dude was from Melbourne Australia, met a chick from New York a couple weeks back, decided to come over and visit her and take in some sights along the way. He said he had no clothes with him, no luggage, just the suit. He was gonna buy some shit in San Fran. He called this New York chick his girlfriend. I wondered if she sensed stalker like I did, but he seemed nice enough.

The hall was dark. The air was chilly and our breath made mists when we spoke. Everyone sucked on cigarettes urgently. Drum'n Bass made us all feel old, sitting their remembering the comedowns of times past, but no one made a move to change the music. It sounded frantic and scrabbling in that place, like the thin voices of the people I spoke to, insisting they were having fun, probably regretting that resignation letter to work. It was tiring. San Francisco was OK, but it was just tiring. I missed Montana. I missed it bad.

I had to catch the train to Los Angeles early. I woke up in the hostel, wandered down to the dive bar and watched two pale and sweating guys still high from the night before fall over. They asked me for a cigarette. I told them to fuck off. I wanted to sit on that damn train, not talk to anyone for nine hours, stare out the window and soak up the sea as we trailed after the coastline all the way down California. But of course when I got on the train it didn't work out like that.

I slept for a while, and woke up to find some kid staring at me. He was sixteen or so, spotty and dopey looking, reddish brown hair and some punk rock t-shirt.

"Can I sit here?" he asked. I looked around. The carriage was empty.

"No." I replied, and closed my eyes again. A minute later he asked:

"Why?"

"Because I'm sleeping and I wanted to stretch out. Why do you wanna sit here?"

His mouth hung open then, and he plunked down onto the seat.

"I'm in a punk rock band.... We play in Portland.... I live in LA."

He spoke like this. Weird staccato sentences, ellipses hanging in the air, filled with a nervous panting as he rocked back and forth frenetically. I wondered if he'd left his Adderall with mommy or something, because he sure as hell needed it. He leaned in close then and the monologue began, and I swear I was fucking speechless. For the first time in my life I had nothing to say. This weird little kid with the spots and the crazy stare drove that smart ass tongue of mine right down my throat. There was nothing to do but move, so I made some excuse, grabbed my shit and changed carriages.

An hour later I looked up from a book and the kid was back, panting and gasping nervously as he struggled over words.

"Hi. So you're, like.... sitting.... here.....Can I just say....your eyes are amazing... are you like twenny one..."

The monologue resumed. Five minutes in a large black lady strode up and tapped him on the shoulder - one of the conductors.

"Stop molesting this girl." she said firmly. The kid stuttered.

"I'm not molesting her! Am I molesting you?"

"Yeah."

There was silence as he took this in.

"Oh. So I should go?" he bleated plaintively.

"Son, leave this lady alone and move on."

The kid moved on and the conductor moved her shit opposite me.

"Apparently he was acting real weird after you left," she said. "Kept kicking chairs and cussing real loud, and several passengers complained about him and said he was wandering around asking after you. I'm gonna sit here and make sure he don't come back."

She plopped down firmly and sure enough the kid kept coming back, kept being driven away by her big brown eyes narrowed to slits, those arms crossed firmly over her ample bosom. We talked some when crazy wasn't around. She showed me pictures of her grandkids, let me say hi to the youngest on the phone. He was five months.

We got to LA and it felt weird. It felt kind of right. You ever have that feeling? You didn't even know something was wrong until it was right, and that was Los Angeles. The crazy kid hovered around me as I waited outside Union Station clutching bags, and then his mom drove up and he left, and my ride came along, and we went to his place in Silverlake, cracked open a few beers. I needed a cigarette to go with the beer and I didn't have any so I walked out onto the balcony in the yard at the back. There were three people hanging out and laughing, and they looked up and smiled when I came over, invited me in, gave me a drink and some cigarettes and we talked shit. I fell in love with them right there and then. They felt right too, and when I had the meetings the next day with the film people my agent hooked me up with, it all felt so damn right. I have a friend, Jonny, who kept telling me this trip would change everything. Everything's changed and everything's changing, and when I hung out the next night with a bunch of smiling, warm, funny, talented people who totally adopted me, I felt a little bit like I'd come home.

Now today - today - I just feel fucking hungover.

Amtrak

2008-06-28T23:01:00.000-04:00

My Amtrak article came out today

LA

2008-06-26T22:51:00.002-04:00

Penguin Podcast

2008-06-24T11:57:00.001-04:00

I like this podcast. Had a blast recording it back in February with the producer and engineer, two great guys!

No. 11 to San Francisco

2008-06-23T16:26:00.007-04:00

I'm going home to my city by the bay

I wrote a lot in Portland. I sat on 23rd in Cafe Reese and I wrote, and at night I hung out in the south-west and drank Margaritas in a bar with a transman who looked like he should be called Barry. Barry was dating Lavinia, and they groped each other a lot. We'd sit on a table right opposite them and stare, until Barry and Lavinia left to fuck and we had to talk to each other instead. It was no fun without Barry so we'd leave pretty soon after those guys.

Portland went on like this for a week, days borrowed from California, nights ogling Barry, until I woke up one day and my book had come out. We went to Powell's that night and bought it, and sat on the street in the sultry evening heat, my guy reading the book, me just watching the kids walk past. That seemed to be Portland, pretty much. Green and hot and clean and good. If I ever settle anywhere, it will be in a house in north-west Portland Oregon, with a beat up sofa on the porch, a front door I never bother to lock, neighbors called Barry and Lavinia.

I've been terribly alone
And forgotten in Manhattan...

I got on the train the next day, the Coast Starlight it was called. I sat next to an Australian girl called Sarah who had been hospitalized in New York for heat rash, had visited emergency in Portland for a spider bite, had lost her purse in Chicago. Also, her apartment burned down. She was pretty nervous. I took Sarah to the dining car to get her drunk. I figured she needed something other than the pills she kept popping.

There was a girl sitting with a big lady at a table gazing at the landscape, all snow and forests and deer. I knew as soon as I saw her that she'd been terribly alone and forgotten. She had that look about her that just hurt. We sat next to her and Candy, the big lady, in the dining car as the sun was setting near Klamath Falls. We were still in Oregon though we'd been on the train a good four hours. Klamath Falls was the end of Oregon and though I was sad to leave Portland because the city by the bay was not my city, it felt good to move, to keep moving, to turn my back and look forward. She didn't look like she was moving. She looked like she was hurting and didn't know where she was going, like she'd been forgotten and just didn't care. I think we asked her name, but we never got the answer. She twisted a napkin, pushed a wilting salad around an amtrak bowl, and her story came out.

"I split up with my boyfriend just as I moved to Portland and I hate it. I'm just lonely and miserable and the city sucks and we had this ridiculous conversation a few hours ago where he said he didn't want to talk to me until August as 'it hurt him too much'. Everything was perfect between us, everything was fine, and then I moved from San Francisco to Portland and he broke up with me."

"Are you going back to San Francisco?" I asked.

"No, LA. I went to Seattle for the night, and was getting the train back to Portland, but then I set all my stuff up in the sleeper cabin, and hung everything, and unpacked my little night bag, and I didn't want to get off. I love trains. I need to think. So I upgraded when I got to Portland and never got off. I'll get to LA and then fly back to Portland in the evening."

You could feel the older lady bristle then and waves of indignation wafted offa her. She did not dig men, not anymore, not after her life. I call her Candy though her name was not and should not be Candy. She was an old hippy, looked part native Indian, large and grandiose with long black hair frosted gray and a magnificent wise face. She played the ukelele and had been burnt and charred in the past but now liked living alone and had reclaimed herself: this is what she told us.

Our server came by and brought us Merlot and Pepsi and Sierra Mist. If you mix Sierra Mist and Pepsi you get ginger beer, and that's what the sad girl wanted. We watched as she measured it out carefully in a plastic tumbler on a table covered with a linen cloth that rocked and mocked us gently. Behind us the two Mexican kids from Phoenix waved shyly. Eduardo had been telling me about the immigration officials stopping all the Mexicans in Phoenix. His illegal friends never left the house now, scared they might get stopped. He was legal but he never left the house as it was 115 in Phoenix and it sucked. Eduardo looked at me and smiled and looked away as he was with his friends and was 16 and cool, and I was 29 and not cool, unless no one else was around. I looked back at Candy who had rolled up her sleeves and was ready for battle. Candy asked the right questions. She was part of the sisterhood you could tell.

"How long have you been dating this guy? You need to ask yourself, could you ever trust him again?"

I figured poor ole John or whatever his name was hadn't done much to betray trust so far, he'd just dumped the sad girl, but in the sisterhood you can't side with the dude, so I nodded, and anyway, I felt bad for the sad girl and being part of that sad made me side with her.

"We dated for like, two years, and yeah, I've been asking myself that. I've been crying in my cabin like, all afternoon, and I have no idea what I'm doing anymore, I just need to get away. I'm so lonely in Portland, I'm sure it's a great city but I just don't want t get out and meet new people, I want to sit and have coffee with friends and people who know me and I can talk to, and this has been going round my head and...uuuuh."

My love waits there in San Francisco

"I though he was the one."

She stopped, stared out the window and blinked a little, gulped.

"Sorry."

Candy nodded wisely.

"I see your point, but do you really want to turn your back on a new chapter in your life when you could learn so much from it? How long did you live in San Francisco? I lived there for twenty-three years, in the mission."

"Me too! I lived in the mission. I was in San Francisco for four years, and it took me two years to really settle in and I miss it so much..."

"It'll take you two years to settle in anywhere. Portland is a chance for you to make a new start, and what is this bullshit about needing anyone to make you complete? All you need is yourself. The day my husband walked out on our five year marriage, I swear the light changed in my apartment. It got brighter."

Candy was in her element. Candy kicked ass man. Candy was rocking her vag bigtime. I wanted to be like Candy when I was older. The sad girl kicked ass too, because she was honest. She was sitting with three strange women on a train and pouring her goddamn heart out over microwaved game hen and yellow vegetables that could have been carrots but probably weren't. We found out the dude had a history of running away to long distance women: he called it romantic, Candy called it stupid. He had gone on a date soon after breaking up with sad girl: he'd flown from SF to JFK for the second. Fool, muttered Candy and we applauded with our eyes and attacked the zapped fowl. Our server took our main course away and we ordered Creme Brulee cheesecake.

"You're not going back to him are you? You can't. He's an idiot. Get him into therapy."

I imagined Candy strumming along on her ukelele with a bunch of beatniks: it seemed a choice instrument for her. She liked playing people and she genuinely liked the sad girl, as we all did, wearing lonely and forgotten so tenderly even though we might have taken the opportunity for a kick at that open, bleeding heart. I liked them all, these women. I wasn't used to that but I liked them, and I figured it was something to do with the west coast.

When the train stopped I jumped out and stole a cigarette from two girls from Santa Barbara who had never seen green like they'd seen in Oregon and couldn't stop talking about it, and when I jumped back into the train and walked back to my seat, I passed a carriage full of high-school kids in basketball tops and baggy shorts. They were a football team from Sacramento. One launched himself across the aisle with a laptop and I tripped over the cable and splatted on the floor. I felt my finger crunch and knew it was broke. All the kids went OOOOOOOOOH.

"You OK lady? Shit, I'm sorry..."

I was giggling because I do that when things hurt. "I'm OK," I giggled and giggled off down the carriage to apologies, and one brave soul yelled "YOU STILL LOOK AS PRETTY AS YOU DID BEFORE LADY!"

The kids got off in Sacramento and I spent a night nursing my broken finger. Sarah got nervous and offered me pills and a hospital trip, but I had no insurance so I strapped it up with a popsicle stick, asked if I could sue, found out I couldn't, forgot about the damn thing. In the morning we stopped in Martinez and we all piled out to look at Spanish houses and palm trees, rumpled and yawning and clutching coffee, and the conductor yelled so we piled back onto the train. We got to Emeryville and took the bus to Fishermen's Wharf. San Francisco's golden sun wasn't shining for me, but the Japanese guy who drove me to Columbus and Broadway was laughing like a little dog, you know how those dogs laugh? My finger was swollen some, and the sun wasn't shining in San Francisco, but I didn't give too much of a shit, I didn't care, because California felt like you shouldn't. Somewhere I knew Candy and the sad girl felt the same way.

monster finger! took me ages to write this 'cause of the damn thing so apologies for the shit post.... off to explore san fran...

No. 27 to Portland, OR

2008-06-19T18:51:00.012-04:00

I ate the french toast at The Whistlestop, and on a broken heart it was probably a mistake. That shit was pure batter, fried and pumped with cream. Tyson was working in the kitchen and Jeff was cooking, and it felt rude to leave it on my plate, but it was giving me heartburn to go along with the pulpy cracks leaking sadness throughout, so I hid it in a napkin. I nodded pleasantly to the old lady who was my server so she wouldn't suspect me of disrespecting the french toast. I knew she was my server because she had a button: I AM YOUR SERVER!

I was glad for the heads up.

Dishes clattered in the kitchen and Jeff-the-chef yelled at Tyson and the old lady whose name I didn't know hovered in the background ready to slap the check on the table. The radio was tuned to some old shit, fifties music.

Sha la la la la I looooooove you....

I swallowed hard and left the old lady a two dollar tip so she wouldn't give me a hard time at dinner.

I drove to St Mary's. It was a hard drive. The only stations I could get were country - Kalispell Country serving God, Family and America! - and some Canadian Christian channel.... and Jonny got up there onstage in his wheelchair and sang all five verses of Amazing Grace, but what was special was that Jonny had opened his heart - to God..... I opted for country and listened to a song about daddy's little girl and some guy polishing his gun. It lasted a good while. When it finished I had to turn the radio off and listen to the wind rattling through the window some as I couldn't face more 'momma's gonna be 'shamed'. Then I got to St Mary, turned off for the park, drove aimlessly until I found an interesting trail, pulled in, started to walk.

It was a hot day and the trail was full of people, but I wanted to be around them. I wanted to be exactly where I was, some asshole kid pretending to be Thelma & Louise in a rented Toyota, no one to give a shit where I was, what I was doing, dodging out the difficult questions why you travelling alone? you gotta boyfriend? married? kids? you like being alone? I liked being alone, but I wanted to wallow in other people, so I took that trail and walked through the forest until I hit a waterfall and some people sitting on the rocks. A lady was sitting in the shade gasping a little. She opened and closed her mouth like a guppy, leaned heavily on her stick. She looked like she was called Louise. I felt bad for Louise. She seemed pissed and sad, and she was alone and everyone else had someone to talk to. I sat on a rock near her and she started up, smiled gratefully.

"Can I take your picture? It makes me feel useful. Let me take your picture with the waterfall in the background, so pretty..."

She fussed around painfully, and I wondered how long it had taken her to walk there. Movement was awkward and jolting. She took the picture and we talked awhile. She was from Texas, and she came here every year and did the same trail, but every year it got more difficult. I said goodbye and walked on for a couple miles, but I'd lost my taste for people now and just wanted to get back. I walked back feeling cranky and alone, and passed Louise after an hour, except Louise wasn't alone, she was with some tall lanky kid, and he was helping her patiently up the trail as they chatted aimlessly about family. I guess it struck me then. We want there to be happy endings to everything, for everyone, but sometimes life just sucks. Sometimes you do die alone, never having found your true love, or getting the job you wanted, or traveling the world like you always dreamed of. Sometimes you don't get what you deserve, and life will always be hard and difficult, and while Louise gets a fucking kid to help her walk slowly and painfully along the trail, if you want the same shit you'll have to do it your goddamn self and suck it up. I felt sad then, and being alone was a little bitter and sore, so I drove back to East Glacier and scowled at the Lithuanians in the convenience store when they asked me to pay for wifi. I went upstairs to sit alone in the traveler's lounge, but even that was full of people, like God just wanted to piss me off or something, like I was paying the price for not singing five verses of Amazing Grace and opening my heart to Him. Frankly he seemed a sadistic fuck and I figured with all the grateful cripples opening their hearts the last thing he needed was my curdled, bitter little offering. I ignored the travelers and was headed to my room, but Jeff-the-Chef came by and stopped me.

"Hey, you from Australia?"

I smiled tightly.

"No. England."

There ensued the usual conversation about the accent, and then Jeff launched into a story about getting Bear Mace on his crotch and how it took three layers of skin off.

"I hope everything's still working," I said darkly, and Jeff looked confused. "Oh no, the mace canister was like, broken. I had to throw it." And everyone else got the joke and laughed while Jeff looked confused. We sat and played checkers for a while, tic-tac-toe and my misanthropy started to lift. The store downstairs closed and the lights went out and Teak, the street-performer, turned up, and Patrick the LA kid sat down, and we started talking about getting beers in. I was the only one with a car, so Jeff-the-Chef came with me and we drove a mile down the road to the gas station. It was closed so we tried the lodge, as the Trailhead Bar was out of bounds because the Indians ran it, and white people couldn't go in there because of the Indians hating the whites, and the whites hating the Indians, and anyway, we went to the lodge, but they wouldn't sell us a six pack to go, so me and Jeff sat down and ordered Moose Drool as we'd gotten there at least, and fuck everyone back at the hostel.

"So what do Europeans think of Americans letting gay guys get hitched and serve in the Armed Forces?" began Jeff.

"Well, I guess they think it's very progressive of you guys...."

"Because I hate gays. Homosexuality is immoral."

There wasn't much to say to that so I just lifted my brows and drank. After a while I asked:

"So who'd you vote for?"

"In the last election? George W. The primaries? McCain. You know Barack is a Muslim? That guy won't even say the pledge of allegiance or stand up before the American flag. He's just wrong. If he wins, this country's going to the dogs."

"He's a Christian."

"He just denounced his church of twenny years! How can you trust a guy like that? Although, you know, I started to realize that George W. was all about the freakin' oil. That dude was all about the oil."

Jeff was from Pensacola and had spent the last ten years working in Alaska. I guess that was his excuse. He was good looking and toned and tanned and fit, but had this mad-eye look about him which made it a good idea not to argue with the dude. I reckon he listened to the Christian channel a lot. I drank my beer quick and made an excuse to get back to the hostel and then went to bed, and woke up remembering that in a fit of magnanimity I'd offered to drive a bunch of people to Two Medicine to hike the mountain there.

A plump, earnest English girl with pale eyelashes came in the front with me, Teak in the back, breathing thickly. It turned out Patrick had a car too, so Shem went with him, but when we got to Two Medicine me and Patrick walked ahead of the rest. Two Medicine was rocky and bleak, less aesthetic than the cute verdant West Glacier, but I liked it more for that reason. Our trail went directly up the mountain, cutting back and forth a hundred times. It was hot and my skin started to singe, salty and brittle. We walked steeper and steeper until we reached snow and our ears popped, and then we had to walk some more. It was only three miles, but it took us two hours of painful uphill plodding. I kept seeing this kid jumping ahead of us like a mountain goat, and when we got to the top he was calmly smoking a roll up, said he was headed off-trail to walk along the peaks between mountains. He got changed into snow clothes and leaped off again, leaving Patrick and me feeling damp and sore in a wind that threatened to blow us right off that damn mountain. I never wanted to leave.

I got on the train to Portland, Oregon seven hours later at Whitefish, and Nim sent me a plaintive text I ignored. I felt sad and I missed the mountains, so I didn't talk for the entire trip. I felt sad and I missed the mountains more even than my heart hurt. I never wanted to leave Montana. I never wanted to leave.

Two Medicine, MT

2008-06-18T00:27:00.001-04:00

Taken about six hours ago.

Whitefish - Missoula - West Glacier

2008-06-16T23:24:00.010-04:00

Whitefish felt like home. Even at midnight it took me only two minutes to find a bar. The bar was full of drunk white kids drinking and smoking and playing poker. After East Glacier it felt a little dirty and I only sat a half-hour before walking back home and sinking into a bath in my motel. In the morning I sat outside and drank coffee with some bikers who offered me a ride to Missoula on their Harleys. I would have said yes, but then I saw the face of the lady they were riding with. She gave me a look. The look said beat it bitch. So I walked to Whitefish Lake instead, and the day started to heat up and it became like summer again. I lay there a while in the sun and forgot about a lot of stuff, and then walked back to town, soaked in the hot tub on the roof of the motel and glared at men in shorts when they clumped up the stairs to see if the tub was free. I wasn’t in the mood for meeting people so I went to Wasabi, the sushi joint, and gave off my talented hate vibes, but it didn’t work because as soon as I ordered the yellow-tail sashimi, the sweet prawn nigiri and the edamame, the whole damn place turned around to look at me.

“You British?”

An Asian guy with a rosy face and wide smile was looking at me.

“Yeah.”

“Man! We were just bitching out British accents! I feel bad, aw hell…”

The guy and his two girlfriends started talking to me. The Asian guy was called Nim Ko Kim Schwartz. He’d been adopted in the 70’s “when Korean babies were fashionable”. He told me all this cool shit about going to Korean adoptee camp when he was a kid to learn about his heritage, but they all hated learning the language and whined at the counsellors until they could go swimming instead. Nim’s girlfriends disappeared after dinner as they were taking thirty high school kids to France at the weekend, and Nim turned to me.

“What you doing tonight?”

“I dunno. Drinking and smoking.”

“Well, let’s go drinking and smoking. My friends are bowling. You wanna come?”

We went drinking and smoking and bowling. Everyone looked at me curiously when I cruised up with Nim: I’d been promoted to ‘date’. I drank to forget this, and talked shit when I wasn’t bowling badly.

“Lemme tell you the story of how I ended up here,” said Nim, just as his friend Lacey got a strike. She had her own bowling ball and a bag to carry it in, not to mention the shoes. The girl was serious. She screamed and high-fived everyone when the strike flashed onscreen.

“So me and Lacey were back in Seattle and just finished college and a friend of ours had a crush on this girl. So this girl says to him one day ‘I’m moving to Whitefish to work in a bar’, and this friend gets it into his head he’s gonna move to Whitefish and turn up at her bar and surprise her. So he asks me and Lacey to come, and we’re like ‘Where the hell is Whitefish? Well, nothing better to do, ok’. So we all move to Whitefish. And this friend, Matt, goes right on into the bar and finds this girl he has a crush on, pretends to be all surprised like he didn’t know she was gonna be there. So she invites him back to her place, he goes over, meets her roommate - and falls for her roommate. Forgets about the original girl. They got married last year, and me and Lacey are still here, ten years later.”

He stopped.

“There was a time when I was one of only 3 colored people in town. We call it ‘White Flesh’. Now there’s maybe ten or so.”

Nim took another swig of beer. He seemed kind of nervous.

“I hate bowling” he said. “You wanna hit a bar?”

I nodded and we got into his SUV, drove back to town. He stopped the car.

“You know, we’re going on the lake tomorrow on my boat. You should come.”

“I’m driving to Missoula,” I said absently and twirled my hair like I do when I’m pissed.

“You could drive there afterward.”

We sat in his SUV a little while.

“You know,” he started. “We could just go back to mine and get in the hot tub.”

“We could.” I agreed. “But I kinda want a beer.”

Nim shrugged and we went to The Great Northern, and two cowboys stood next to us looking uneasy as drunk kids yelled at each other, sang Red Hot Chilli Peppers, moshed on the dance floor next to the band. Nim and me drank our beers quick and he drove me back to the motel.

“Sure you don’t wanna come check out the hot tub?”

“I’m sure,” I said.

“Want me to show you the way to Missoula on a map? You got one in your motel room? I could come up.”

“I’m fine,” I said, and kissed him quickly on the cheek and there was that moment when it could have been something more, except I was pissed that he’d turned it into that, when all I wanted was just to hang out, not get back in this shit. I didn’t look around when I walked away, and wanted bad to see the lake the next day, but knew it was the wrong idea.

I slept thick and hot, woke up to a more intense heat, called Budget Cars and got a Toyota. Just before I drove off the motel lady said:

“I heard you was out with Nim last night. He's a great guy. Whadda you do for a living?”

“Write.”

“You should move here, you can write from anywhere, just bring a computer or whatever. Nim’s an awful nice guy. Owns a lot of real estate. Good looking. We’d love to have you here in Whitefish.”

I nodded, smiled politely, decided to drive.

I hadn’t driven in eight years but it wasn’t so bad. I remembered how at least, and I drove down through Kalispell to Big Fork, turned off to take the road to the east of Flathead Lake. I drove and drove, past cherry orchards and azure lake, stopped for buffalo wings served by a sad, beautiful Mexican girl, got back in the car and drove again until I hit Missoula.

I checked into a sad, tired motel called the Bel Aire. Missoula had this unholy whiff about it, stifling and exhausted, a new town already old. It was pretty and I liked it, but it felt off-color. Fat, bitching families argued and screamed in the parking lot of the motel, and some kids ran across hot asphalt in bathing suits and bare feet, pushed through the slide doors, dive-bombed into the soupy green pool and a fat lady in a tent dress gave an almighty shriek as she reposed on a sunlounger, her hair greasy and lank and plastered to a sweating forehead. My room smelled of pee and chlorine. I took a shower then walked around town some. I kept getting stopped by bums. It was real hot by now, and the town felt like it was sulking in the heat, the only inhabitants these misformed monsters who swarmed around panhandling desperately. This lady stopped me on Higgins. She wore teeny gray adidas shorts pulled up to her armpits, towelling socks, a sun visor, spindly white legs with a cartography of veins bulging through transparent flesh. “You gotta quarter?” she slurred, and her mouth was full of yellow and black stumps. They were everywhere, these panhandling spiders: a group of drunks sitting outside a motel hacking and cackling together, two bums shooting up, a lady wheeling a supermarket cart. I’d seen it in New York, in London, in India, but in this clean and quiet town it became more lurid, more shocking, juxtaposed as it was to little herb shops, Hunter S. Thompson outside a café, thrift stores with hipster clothes, second-hand book stores.

It got too much and I found it hard to breathe, so I went back to my motel, and called up Susan. Susan was in Missoula for a couple of months working the clubs there. She picked me up at the Bel Aire Motel and drove me to Fred’s Truckstop Stripclub just outside town.

Happy Strippers. There ain’t nothing like them. These were not the tanned and toned, preened pussies of New York. These were regular hardworking girls with nice smiles, good personalities and impressive pole skills. Me and Susan sat at the bar talking about shit.

“This hot lesbian invited me horseback riding and I kind of want to call her, but you wouldn’t call up a guy you had no intention of sleeping with, so I guess I shouldn’t,” Susan took a swig of soda.

“I guess not.”

“But then maybe lesbians are better at having straight girl friends than guys are.”

We considered a while, glanced back to the stage where some girl was flapping her pussy, gazing absently at the rodeo on TV. Some blond kid came over to gape at Susan. What can I say. The girl had breasts even underneath a plain old t-shirt.

“Wha’ you girls doin’ here?”

I kept dumb. If I opened my mouth it would only have been rude.

“We’re just having a drink,” said Susan politely. The guy gaped some more. He just stood there with his beer, gaping. A girl Susan worked with came over to chat. She was lean and long like a piece of string, had a cute face. There was a high school rodeo in town, apparently. But where she didn’t know. “You could google it,” she said helpfully. “My brother always says that. Google it! You know, you can google just about everything these days! Google google! That’s what they say!” she smiled beatifically and moved away, and Susan and me sat at the stage, where a cowgirl kept pulling her pierced labia right up until I thought it’d snap off with a twang. We left at midnight.

“You ever get asked about the feminism thing?” I asked Susan as we drove.

“Hmm. Not really. I don’t put myself out there like you. Once my Grandma asked. She was one of the first wave feminists. She was like ‘We worked so hard to be taken seriously, what happened?’”

“It’s hard to explain to people though isn’t it?”

“Yeah.” Susan turned off into a street in Missoula, “It’s hard to explain.”

The next day I checked out of the Bel Aire and got into my rental car. I didn’t know where I was going, and had intended to stay near Missoula, but I drove until I was past Bonner, past Flathead Lake, past Big Fork and Kalispell and Whitefish and I was back in the mountains, and then I found West Glacier Park and drove halfway to the Sun, but came back before I hit it because the roads were closed as the snow had not yet been cleared. Then I didn’t know where to go so I went back to East Glacier as it seemed as good a place as any. When I arrived the lady at the convenience store recognized me and wouldn’t let me pay for a room. I went and ate Huckleberry Pie back at the Whistlestop Café and drank a Bud Light. I can’t remember sleeping, but I must have, because I woke in a cabin this morning and through the thin walls heard a guy say loud “AW goddamnit! Goddamnit! AWWWWWW. Ahuh ahuh”.

And then he stopped.

oooh!!

2008-06-14T23:55:00.002-04:00

I thought this was pretty funny. I guess people in St Louis don't get British sarcasm. This lady really has her knickers in a twist about me! Maybe she reads The Guardian.

No. 27 East Glacier Park to Whitefish

2008-06-14T22:53:00.013-04:00

I slept deep but woke frosted and cold. I clunked down the stairs of the lodge to the tiny convenience store underneath, yawning and stiff. The store smelled of coffee and bacon. There was a pale guy behind the counter with white lashes, John from Kalispell. I asked if there was a Laundromat nearby.

“We-ell. I don’t rightly know if it’s open yet. Dee, you think it’s open?”

“I have no idea.”

There was silence. I could see they might be thinking. It took a while. The coffee pot hissed and spluttered.

“I could give you a ride and see?” he said eventually. We got into his RV with an enormous husky called Fat Dog and drive down to Highway 2 and a little bare shack behind the Dancing Bear lodge. John drove off and said he'd be back in an hour to pick me up. The sky bulged with something and smacked me around a bit even the short time I was out in the open. I still had no coat so I bundled my clothes into a washer and headed back to the street and the only diner in East Glacier, which also sold books and hiking gear. I ordered eggs and bought warm tourist clothes with MONTANA emblazoned across the front like the asshole I was.

In the diner a cowboy with a Vets cap sat down next to me, a few hikers, some tourists. We just sat calm and peaceful, and I ate my eggs, walked back to the Laundromat, and John picked me up and drove me back to the hostel. He had this slow way of talking, timid, but he was friendly enough. I noticed there was a marked lack of curiosity in the inhabitants of East Glacier. No one wanted to know where you were from, the question was always, “You here for the season?”.

I went across the road to see Judy at the gas station / car rental / motel. Judy was the big jelly lesbian lady who had given me a ride the night before. An old English sheepdog, shorn and bare, lay sprawled out panting on the floor.

“Can I stroke her?”

“Sure can. She hates men but she loves women. Rescue dog. She sleeps on top of me every damn night.”

Judy gave a whiskery laugh.

“Is there a hike I can do on my own around here?” I asked. Judy spread out the maps.

Ten minutes later I started walking along a riverbank, through little lodges and wooden houses. I felt sore and aching, but the scenery was rushing through me some, the air, the stinging smell of snow. I walked and walked, over a steep trail, until the snow started getting thicker underfoot, and it was too thick too walk through anymore, but I kept walking. After two hours I stopped and looked around. It felt good. It felt better than good. Sometimes I’m just sick of being me, sick of the past and sick of the future, sick of being a woman and putting up with all this bullshit, sick of smiling like the rest of them: with that hungry komodo dragon leer, eating away at you alive and not giving a damn. Sometimes I just need to get the hell away, far away from everything, and that’s what I did at East Glacier that day on a mountain god-knows-where standing in the snow and listening to nothing. In sanskrit nirvana means to cease blowing; the extinguishment of something, like a flame, a passion, a restless, stirring desire. Somehow in East Glacier it felt like that: like it didn’t matter about clothes and shoes and your bullshit broken heart, your career, the mortgage, that raise, a promotion. It felt like the flame which was consuming us had been extinguished, gentle and undramatic.

At 10pm I caught the train to WhiteFish, and sat next to a 23 year old medical student called Windy who I liked so much it made me sad. It made me sad she was only 23 and had a whole pile of shit to come. Outside we watched as a moose danced into a lake, threw water over itself, danced off. The sun was setting, and it suddenly became inky black, like a switch had flicked. Windy showed me her pictures of camping in St Mary's and told me her boyfriend problems. I told her mine and we each patiently pretended to listen, gabbing away in the black of a night train. Opposite me and Windy were this drunk whitetrash couple swigging wine from a bottle and squabbling in the dark as everyone else swayed in an uneasy suspension that could have been sleep, felt like a nightmare. Fuck you fuckin’ asshole you’re a fuckin’ asshole you fuckin’ AW shut it, tryin’ ter sleep woman Fuck you… The guy left and the woman started fiddling with the buttons above her head. She hit the light and it streamed down on her face, and it was fucking horrible, that face, it was like a mask of death, a twisted, gurning, contorted epileptic miscarriage, and me and Windy both stopped breathing. The woman stared right at me. Turn the light orff, turn it off, it hurts, I kent do it, turn it off I couldn’t move and she started whining more, and Windy leaned over me and turned the light off and we sat there in silence afraid of what was in the dark, because we'd seen it and it was worse than what we could ever have imagined.

"I hope I don't ever see that again," said Windy, and I didn't have the aching heart to tell her that she would, over and over and over until it felt like she would burst, and she would have to stand alone on a mountaintop breathing in snow air just to feel right again.

No. 27 to East Glacier Park, Montana

2008-06-13T12:46:00.009-04:00

When I woke at 9am we were in North Dakota somewhere, and the weather was bad. The lady I sat next to was called Dorothy and was headed to Seattle for a wedding. She was nice, I guess. Everyone’s nice on the train, with their crocodile smiles and their small talk. We pretended to ignore the enormous deerhunter dude lying like a beached manatee four seats ahead, who coughed and snored and spluttered and moaned, and had to shift position with the aid of a walking stick jammed into the overhead lockers, prising himself out of poses his body welded into with painful obstinate weight. His plaid shirt rose up obscenely over his belly, which was pregnant, huge, immense, magnificent almost. He kept emitting these pungent sulphurous smells, and the two pretty, slim African women opposite couldn’t stand it anymore and moved carriages.

I went to the dining car, and sat opposite a couple from Delaware. They were going to Seattle so that they could cycle across the country, hitting maybe 50 miles a day. They were good, clean fun, but made me feel a little unclean with their white, identical smiles, pressed khakis, pristine t-shirts. “We retired last week!” trilled the lady. I forget her name, but you’ve seen her before. They didn’t look old enough to retire. Must be all that cycling. By the end of eggs and grits and coffee I knew how long they’d been married (24, but they married in their forties), what his kids from his first marriage thought (didn’t approve), his job (software engineer). They looked like the kind of couple who still screwed the same as they did before they got hitched: grimly, professing resilient enjoyment, like two frat kids fucking on coke, he never sharing the hard-core pornography he downloaded secretly on his computer in the den (“respecting space is the secret to a long term marriage”) she never thinking to question his sudden interest in anal in correlation to the increased bandwidth on their cable bill. After they’d talked about themselves a good while they wanted to go back to sleeper to have sex in the missionary position. I made that bit up but it might as well be true. They would play Scrabble, dry hump to pass the afternoon, then emerge with their alligator smiles to consume more of my soul at dinner. They took down the name of my book. I told them it was about immigration. I use that line a lot.

North Dakota, North Dakota. The train goes through North Dakota - soulless, lonely, flat. After a while time becomes irrelevant. You just sleep and try not to get swallowed up by the yawning landscape outside. Whenever I found a spare two seats I’d flop onto them and sleep, wake two hours later to some pissed nazi conductor poking me awake. “Where is your designated seat?” “Fuck you, the train's empty!” “You need to get into your designated seat”. I trudged back to Dorothy, who never seemed happy to see me. No one was having fun on this journey. Maybe Miss Olivia down in the lounge.

I’m siiiiiiinging in the rain she yodelled down the intercom when the storm threatened to beat us down too low . Just siiiiiiinging in the rain! I’m brewing COOOOOFFEEEEEE! Mmmm, coffee, rich, robust, strong, masculine, earthy coffee. Can you smell it? It wants you. This coffee wants you. I’m in the lounge car. I’m waiting for you with my enormous coffee pot. MM-mmm!

I hated Miss Olivia even before I met her and the bitch had lied. There was no coffee. I took a diet soda, gave her evils and stared at North Dakota while behind me Miss Olivia sold M&M’s and microwaveable hot dogs. You want your regular? She flirted with all the guys. How can someone have a freakin’ regular on a 24-hour journey? Sick Fucks. Absolut and Cranberry? Comin’ up. And how’s the wife? She asleep? Dang, some of us got work to do… Keep ‘em coming Miss Olivia. Keep ‘em coming. I’m siiiiiiiingin’ in the….

At dinner I sat with the slim African ladies. The mom was from Ethiopia, the daughter was born in Seattle but looked a lot like her mom. Like I said, they were noble and African looking, the kind of African-looking white people like: pale with Caucasian features, digestible for the racist. They were moving from Michigan back to Seattle after the mom had finished college and the daughter had finished high school. The daughter was studying political science at Stanford in the fall, turned down NYU and Columbia to go there. She was clean and clever and sparkly new: how I used to be, or maybe by the time I’d gotten to university I wasn’t anymore. 29 years doesn’t sound so much but a lot has happened. I have problems remembering it all. She asked what I did. I said I wrote books and screenplays and opinion pieces for The Guardian, omitting the fact the Guardian weren't too hot on me of late. “Ah rilly? She write opinion pieces for school newspaper!” the mom butted in excitedly and prodded the girl with her finger. The girl nodded, pushed her glasses up her nose, launched into something long and boring and academic about her beliefs. I didn’t follow it. I had the terrifying realization she was either a lot cleverer than me, or was just plain boring. We had cheesecake for dessert, standard good-ole New York cheesecake. “I’ve never seen cheesecake like this before!” she was delighted. She stared at it before prodding it gently with her spoon, ate it slowly and carefully, relishing and savouring every bite. “Man, this cheesecake is amazing! One day I wanna live in New York, maybe after college. Maybe for grad school. But I wouldn’t live in Manhattan. Brooklyn perhaps. Or maybe upstate.” I decided she must be just boring and felt relieved.

We hit Browning as the check came, and suddenly there was snow outside, and hills and mountains, and they started calling all the assholes getting off at East Glacier, so we stood downstairs with the conductor, Chuck, as he stuck his head out, the cold wind whipping past and the smell of snow getting tangled up in our hair, and a Grizzly ran over the horizon and Chuck got real excited, and Miss Olivia started up again, this time something about a hot, oozing chicken meal…

We get to East Glacier Park, Montana, at 9.43 pm on Wednesday 11th June. According to a 2007 census, there are no convicted sex-offenders currently living in East Glacier Park, Montana (pop. 326). It’s snowing and I have no coat, just a blanket I stole from Virgin airlines way back, so a fat lady gives me a lift to the hostel, says “Hot Bod” when my blanket falls and I’m wearing a tiny kid’s sweatshirt underneath. By 10.30 pm I’m in bed, and my hot bod is cold cold cold in this tiny mountain town with the snow crusting against the windows, and the weathered men walking bowlegged in cowboy boots along Highway 2.

Minneapolis

2008-06-12T17:40:00.005-04:00

I got to the hostel I was staying at in Minneapolis about 3am: an old Victorian house next to the Art Institute. I called ahead to let them know I would be late, let myself in through the back door with a key hidden under a pot, collapsed on a sofa in front of a TV that flickered mutely. A kid wandered in, cocked his head to one side, and did a funny little jerky dance, rocking back and forth violently for a good half a minute. He stopped. “Hello. Will you come outside and keep me company while I smoke a cigarette?”

We sat on the porch awhile. The night was silky and smooth, warm and effortless, but I felt a little crisped-up inside from the train. The kid said his name was Morgan, was here to find an apartment before starting graduate school at the University of Minneapolis in the fall. “I gotta go to bed,” I said eventually when it got too late. “OK.” He nodded amicably and did the little jerk again, back and forth, back and forth. “You wanna come to Brits bar with me tomorrow to watch the soccer?”

We met at 10.30 am, walked down Nicollett until we hit downtown and the Brits bar. We ordered a coffee, a smoothie each, a vodka-soda which we downed quickly, and then substituted for a bloody Maria. There was a fat kid at the bar, he was maybe 24. Told us he’d served in Iraq, gotten out, was settled down now, expecting his first kid. He supported Germany. Said he was German. We turned to watch the match, then that ended and we were still drinking, so we watched the second, and then Morgan said he had to call this hipster girl he met in the Kit-Kat club, so he called her and we arranged to meet in a dive bar on Nicollett.

When we got there there was a couple at the bar wearing hospital bracelets, arms pocked with scars and scabs. “I like your socks,” I said, pointing to the girl’s Hello Kitty knee-highs. She kind of sneered at me and I noticed there were scars on her legs too. They ordered the momos. The guy behind the bar was Tibetan and had an air of suffering about him. Morgan and I ordered Margaritas, went outside to smoke, and I saw this girl walk over the horizon wearing black and white polyester with shoulderpads: the kind of hideous dress your mom wore back in the 70’s. “Would you look at that,” I breathed in disbelief, and it turned out to be the hipster chick. She was only 21 and had a bad hair style, said she did it herself, worked for Urban Outfitters to pay for school. The night went downhill from there. Some black dude came over and talked to us, Neemah his name was. Morgan kept calling him Nemo, like the fish, but he didn’t seem to mind. He went off to get some chewing gum and I said carelessly, “Bring me a present,” and he did, a candle that smelled of toilet cleaner. We put it on the bar and the Tibetan eyed us sadly, and the crackheads went home, and this man started talking to me. I couldn’t figure him out. Eventually I asked;

“Are you black?”

“Sho am! I look white, but my momma and my daddy are black, whole family’s black, apart from me, maybe took after my grandmomma, she had Indian in her. Lemme show you a picture.”

He got out a picture and it was true, his whole family was black aside from him, but he acted black, if you know what I’m saying. He bought me a drink, told me it was his sixtieth birthday last week, and he threw out his girlfriend because the bitch didn’t show him no respect.

“It’s not like I wanna be single, I wanna have kids you know, but women, I kent get on with the women. They don’t show no respect, you know what I’m saying?”

It got to 11pm and we’d been drinking for twelve hours and we decided to leave, and outside was dry and baked even after sunset, and we walked back to the hostel. The next day some guys I met on the train texted, Matt and Shawn, and we went to Bryant Lake Bowl to drink some more, even though my liver was hurting by this time and I needed to heal. Morgan and the hipster came too. I told her she was a hipster.

“What’s a hipster?” she said in that little high voice of hers.

“Someone who wears dead people’s clothes.”

Matt and Shawn choked into their beers and Morgan and the hipster chick left pretty quick after that. We drank, we bowled, we said our goodbyes, I got a cab home and this English guy was awake when I walked into the hostel, staring at the TV which was always on mute. Said he was an actor, then corrected himself. “Used to be,”. Got too old, the parts dried up, washed up at 23, but ever optimistic, things would work out. He wasn't suited to the real world. He whipped out a little jiffy and started chopping up lines on the table. I doubted it was any good but it made him into even more of an asshole so perhaps it was. “Let’s shag!” he enthused, enthusiastically. I drank water out of a coffee cup and smiled sadly. “Let’s not.” I said, and went to bed.

I slept most of the next day, then sat on the porch some, talked politics to a ginger kid who looked like Oz from Buffy, ate pizza with Margrette the large lady from Kansas whose job it was to officiate bicycle races, packed up my stuff and got back on the train at midnight. I slept some more. I needed it bad.

No. 807 to Minneapolis - St. Paul

2008-06-09T16:31:00.013-04:00

Everyone in Union Station was kind of pissy. The man behind me smelt of old, perspiring leather and lank hair. The family in front clutched pillows and bitched because after ten days in Memphis they were sick of the sight of each other, still had eight hours to go before home and Minneapolis. "Never take a vacation with your family," the brown man said darkly as his three fat daughters went outside to smoke. I trudged onto coach, curled up on a seat and hoped no one sat next to me. Bill the conductor came along and ordered me imperiously to move next to a sad looking woman so some old couple could sit together. I found myself hating the old couple a lot. The sad woman seemed wired, broken.

"You want the window seat? I move around a lot. Maybe you should sit by the window."

Her accent was a potluck of Virginia and the Midwest. I shrugged. "Sure."

Her face was crumpled, like she had no tears left, and her skin was strangely matt and damp. Eyebrows needed plucking.

"Where you going?" she said like she had to, didn't want to know the answer.

"Minneapolis."

"Me too."

"Vacation?" I asked, but I could see the answer was no. She looked quickly away and grabbed a pretzel, nibbling, making it last. She was thin, very thin, but her stomach was swollen and distended through her t-shirt, bulging with something unsavoury.

"My sister's got a week to live. So I have to go home say goodbye. And my brother had a heart attack two days ago. Forty-five years old and he had a heart attack. Geez."

There wasn't much to say to this, so I clucked sympathetically and bags stowed, books opened, we sat and looked away from each other until the train started to move and the lounge car opened. Bill announced the bar was open. With a relieved sigh she got up. I saw her later sitting sucking down Corona staring unseeingly at the landscape with a twisted bitter smile on her face. It started to rain, gently. She saw me looking and waved me to sit down, opposite the short, tan girl with the penetrating blue eyes, an iris ringed with black. The tan girl looked sweet, said her name was Lynette. The sad lady smiled in a twisted kind of way and said reluctantly 'Michelle' like she was giving away too much. Lynette was going to Grand Forks in North Dakota to take a summer semester on linguistics. She said she was learning how to translate the bible so she could bring His Word to a remote tribe in Papua New Guinea. I didn't know who scared me more. It was like sitting between purgatory and Jesus. Lynette was from Indianapolis. She taught kids in Sunday School. "Tell me," she said, and leaned forward still smiling, those blue eyes unblinking and calm. "Does faith have a bad name in England? Do young people feel afraid to admit their faith? To say that they love God?" "Yeah, pretty much" I said, and got up to buy a corn dog.

Everyone in the lounge was playing Dominoes, and suddenly it got dark and the rain and wind started, lashing against the viewing bubble and dripping down through the window seals and when we stopped, bedraggled, drowned people got on. The train slowed to a crawl. There was a tornado warning out. I got up to go to the dining car and bumped into Michelle supping a Corona.

"Didn't you just eat a corn dog?" she said suspiciously, eyeing me for excess flesh. There was a big space between her thighs like they repulsed each other. "Yeah, but I'm still hungry." She looked unconvinced. I sat in the dining car next to an old skeletal dude from Virginia and two Swedish teenagers with big, bovine faces, soft puppy fat on their too-tall frames.

"Why, how fortunate to sit next to three such bee-yootiful ladies," said the skeletal man, beaming, and he chose the Salmon Fillet. We go for the Game Hen. "I must tell you all," he said, flashing yellow teeth, "that I am on my way to Seattle to welcome a new arrival to my family, a grandson! And today is the anniversary of my wife's heavenly departure, a year to the day that she died, but oh no! Please no sympathy! There is reason to God's will, and I have had a year of blessings, a year of blessings, and of course my dear children live close to me and have comforted me, as has my faith."

The bovine girls smiled brightly, though the smaller one's eyes flickered, and she drank her Coke in swift, neat nervous sips. Outside it still rained and it was unclear whether the sun had set or been swallowed by the thick, choking clouds. There was an old man back in lounge giving a running commentary on the landscape. We're heading through the state of Wisconsin ladies and gentleman, and if you look to your right...

The main course arrived and the waiter smiled tightly as a table of fat people growled about the Cabernet. Too inky, they said. Too off.

"And my! What a year it has been for the family. My dear son's wife sadly passed away not a month after my wife, and now I have a 35 year old son learning the intricacies of dating all over again!"

The Bovine girls looked up and smiled inappropriately, and their heads bent over the food, dissecting the Game Hen with clunky amtrak silverware.

"How did she die?" I asked conversationally. He was pleased at the question.

"Well, she went to bed one evening feeling slightly off color, a little fluey you might say, and as the night progressed the symptoms seemed to worsen until she could barely breathe. My son called the ambulance but by the time it arrived - she had departed. Toxic Shock Syndrome."

"No way. Did they have kids?"

"Ah! no. The autopsy showed that she was unable to bear children, so that little mystery was solved. It has been very trying, the investigation into her death, very hard upon my son. As has dating. He's a homebody, likes to go to church and play in the local band, a few rounds of golf occasionally. He doesn't really know how to date, although he does, of course, wish to remarry."

The blond girls pushed the Game Hen around their plate listlessly, looked grateful when it was removed and a cheesecake slapped in front of them. They drank their coke in unison. Sip sip sip.

"But I am talking too much! Now, let me talk to you beautiful young ladies. And what do you hope to see on your trip?"

The bigger girl looked up. "She is older," she said thickly, pointing at her smaller sister, and they both went back to their cheesecake while the skeletal man from Norfolk, Virginia smiled in sad confusion.

In the lounge the sky jerked with vicious flashes of lightning but the rain had stopped, and the sun appeared only to set in a lurid and dramatic flourish, wallowing in a shimmering vivid decline like an actress in a melodrama, a showgirl to the last. The train had stopped and we all sighed and drank beer and waited for it to start again. We were three hours behind schedule. I went back to my seat and Michelle turned up. When she reached above to get to her bag in the locker, her shirt lifted and I stared at that jelly-like egg of a stomach, mottled and gross.

"Smoke break at LaCrosse," she droned.

She draped a powder-blue sweater over skinny shoulders, waited anxiously by the door clutching a Newport. We were thirteen miles from LaCrosse but we weren't moving. A white kid and a black kid were playing together, giggling madly, until the white kid socked the black kid and hell broke loose. I fell asleep and woke at 2.30am to find Michelle reading a Stephen King novel. Outside it looked as if we were approaching a city.

"We're here," she said without looking up. "Minneapolis"

When we stopped I didn't see her leave.

free pork!

2008-06-07T10:30:00.002-04:00

I hung out in Wicker Park with a crazy Chinese friend of my sister's yesterday, and then listened to Blues all evening by Lake Michigan. Bud Light and Free Pork. Perfect!

Here are some cameraphone pics of random people. I like random people. Especially old, fat men. They are my favorite. These guys started wrestling shortly after which was a sight to behold!

No. 49 to Chicago Illinois

2008-06-05T15:58:00.012-04:00

It's easy to leave a city when it rains and roaches start to climb the walls. I left two big fat pregnant bugs in a Gatorade bottle for the roommates, grabbed my suitcase and rattled down the stairs dripping anger and sadness out of every pore, until I got to the bottom and I felt almost normal again. The number 49 to Chicago, Illinois was a little late. Penn Station hummed and buzzed. Fat ladies in nylon dresses leaking huge damp patches held little electric fans and stared at the announcements board, their sticky children perched on wide hips.

Boston - Dover - Washington D.C. - Newark - Philadelphia...

When the signs started to spin crazily and settled on East or West, the crowd lurched together in one effortful vomiting heave, trickled down the stairs to the platform, banging overpacked bags against bruised legs.

There was a man in front of me wearing electric-blue baggy pants which stopped mid-calf, white tennis shoes with a holographic portrait of Al Pacino on the side, a huge, white hooded sweatshirt with grubby sleeves. He reached up to take off his baseball cap with brown, gnarly fingers, put the cap in his bag, retrieved three more of identical design and stood uncertainly, mentally debating which was more appropriate to the occasion. I pushed past him into coach, and sat down in front of the Russian kid who looked like the Roswell Alien. A guy sat next to Roswell and began to talk in a monochrome drone.

"Once I took Amtrak to LA. We had to go along a freight track so it was real slow. And then this lady stalled her car on the tracks. She just sat right on in the car and kept trying to start the damn engine, turnin' the freakin' key. Then we came along, on the freight track, ploughed right on over her and the car. Uh. She died. It was a bitch. Held us up."

Roswell cleared his throat. I couldn't see him but I imagined his Adam's apple bobbing nervously.

"I need a drink," said the guy without waiting for his response. "I need to get fuckin' tanked."

The train pulled out and Kevin the conductor came around for our tickets, a dignified black man with sad eyes. Norman, the old white guy handing out pillows, was pissy and mean, but I didn't hold it against him. I feel that way too, most times.

The No. 49 to Chicago, Illinois left fifteen minutes after its scheduled departure, and as it drew away from the city and slid gracefully along the River, up into the Hudson Valley, the three jelly-like black ladies opposite me fished tupperware containers out of Gristedes bags, and wobbled as they shredded bits of chicken flesh from violent-colored wings, the fat on their fingers glistening and winking in the sun.

I went to the dining car. It was for first class passengers but Benjy let me in. His large hands rested too long on my hips like he needed it bad, but when he saw my face he let go, brought me quesadillas and Merlot. I shared a table with two old ladies, a mother and her daughter, old old. The older one looked in confusion at Benjy, a tall, skinny man with a calm, noble face, and pointed at Eric, the guy tending the bar.

"Is... is .... is he your brother?" she cackled tremulously, her spoon hovering over a fruit salad. "I thought he was you."

"No Ma'am"

"But he's black isn't he?"

"Well, Ma'am, I'm originally from Nigeria and he's American born and raised, we ain't brothers."

She looked suspicious and the trembling increased.

"Oy vey, you all look the same..."

Benjy gave me extra wine. There was something sad in him, in all of the guys working that night, like they were pining for some intimacy, some closeness, some warm body and they didn't care whose it was, so long as it was firm and young and could take some of the sadness from them. I got up to leave, left some bills on the table, and strong hands pressed me back into my seat, and then Eric, the guy behind the bar, sat down close to take his dinner break. It was 8pm and still light outside. No. 49 moved through the Hudson Valley and the sun started to sink into masts rocking gently in the sky.

"You got pretty eyes," said Eric tackling the Prime Rib after a brief grace, and I sat there with my Merlot sloshing over The New York Times, a picture of Barack Obama admits he has spent just ten days with his daughters in this election year, and says it is taking its toll on his relationship with his younger daughter. 'Fiiine...' he mimics her talking to him reluctantly down the phone.... "You got real pretty eyes." He stared at me a while longer, and then leaned down to pen something, pushed a note into my hand. "I gotta get back behind the bar afore the passengers kick up a stink," he grinned ruefully. "I finish at 12 though. We could hang out." A woman swept past with silicone tits and lips slimy and aspic. She patted Eric on the arm and sashayed past to the Sleeper Car. He leaned in close and said meaningfully, "She used to be a porn star..." let it hang there in the air, and then got up to work.

I opened the note. Come hang out in my bunk with me at 12. You're hot. He looked at me. "We don't have to... y'know... I have a spare bunk..." I laughed and shook my head no. Eric pretended not to see and shoveled ice into a G&T, and the sun set and we stopped in Syracuse. The passengers piled out, parched wind rough like a dog's tongue, licking us dry when we were already withered and crisp. A half-hour later we got back in. We set off. After a while Norman came into the lounge car and sat down opposite me and Barack.

"Left a woman in Syracuse. She got on the wrong damn train."

He sighed and chewed a Danish morosely. The lounge car started to fill up. Everyone was drinking too quickly like we were en route to Dachau or something. The guy in the electric blue pants sat at my table and Norman shot him a withering look, and went off to hand out pillows.

"Hey there. Ah'm Jason. Ah'm freakin' bored, need me some freakin' coca-caine to liven this shit up," he exploded into an emphysemic laugh and two college kids appeared bearing miniatures of whisky.

"Are you 26?" the white kid asked me.

"29"

He and the Japanese kid high-fived, and downed a miniature. "We got the nationality right. European!"

"When we stoppin' for a smoke break?" groaned Jason, and his pinky fingernail was longer than the others, black with dirt. The white kid saw me looking. "You know why it's long, right?" He mimed snorting a line. Jason grinned and pulled his holdall a little closer. "Kent let go of this baby, got ma life in this shit. Ah ken lose the suitcase, but I ain't losin' this. Anyone up for gettin' fried? You ent Jewish, are you Ruth? You got pretty eyes."

The kids got more drinks in.

"Y'all hear about that stoopid woman got left behind in Syracuse? We were gittin' fried and she was so toasted after one toke on a dooby she got on the wrong damn train!" Everyone laughed and more miniatures appeared, and then voices lowered when this dude walked in.

"He's military," said the white kid with his curiously wise eyes.

"See the scar on his right cheek? Gunshot," said Jason, and that long nail delicately extracted gray, frayed shit from underneath his index, deposited it on a grubby sleeve. A fat girl and a baby walked in and we played with the baby awhile as it gurned happily on a sloppy tabletop. We were drunk now. It was getting toward Buffalo. The military guy came over. He was drunk too, but maybe holding it better. Jason wasn't drinking. Said he only did drugs.

"Can I join y'all? Seems like yous the only ones left in the lounge."

We were. We had been drinking for four solid hours now and it was approaching midnight. We went to the bar and got more miniatures.

"I'm Troy." He shook everyone's hand, caught my eye. He had this look about him. Slightly crazed, dazzled, like behind the eyes was an animal in its death throes, thrashing about, panicked. But on the exterior he looked calm. He looked controlled. He started talking about Iraq. He pronounced it Eye-raq.

"Goin' back for my third tour, you know? Not like I agree with warmongering, I've got no call with warmongering and interfering with these people. I don't wanna turn the world into Americans, but when I was 17 my brother put a loaded shotgun into his mouth in front of me and blew his brains out. I had to explain to my mom. I don't want to have to ever do that again, explain to someone's mom that kinda shit, so I go back to look after my lambs, I call them my lambs. Anyone got any more JD?"

It was midnight and we did. We were in Ohio now and Norman had long gone, replaced by a bossy black woman with enormous bosoms who did not approve of the smoking breaks, so we huddled closer in the darkened lounge and shared miniatures of whisky, and Troy told us how he got shot in the face and never noticed, and half his face was plastic, and when he moved his jaw it made a clicking sound real loud, and there was no cartilage left in his nose, so he could flatten it right down. "I ain't no warmongerer," said Troy. "But I don't have no opinion about the war, its rights or its wrongs. I can't have an opinion, I'm Government Property. See this tattoo? It's cherokee, my mom is half-cherokee, and I came back after my first tour and thought, 'fuck it Troy, you deserve it, you deserve a freakin' medal' and got this done. Nearly got court martialled."

"Why?" I breathed.

"For defacin' Government Property," answered Jason low and unexpectedly bitter. He downed his Sierra Mist, belched and breathed deeply so his lungs wheezed and panted like old broken bellows, and he clutched the hold-all to him tighter. "Fuck, this fuckin' cologne don't mask shit, I can smell weed and all kinds of shit in this bag goddammit."

I stumbled off drunk in the darkened carriage at 2am to find my seat, but there was a fat guy in it, and when the moonlight shone in I saw the pimples and welts all over his hairy legs and decided against closing proximity. I headed back to the lounge car and sneaked quietly in, wrapped myself in a blanket under the table. Jason came over and gently lowered his scummy white hooded top on me.

"You sleep well girl," he said. "Keep smiling."

We woke at 6am for French toast and Ohio, an Amish family standing confused in the aisles of the train. The white kid with the wise eyes grabbed my palm. "You have a long, long life-line, but look at this, the love line. It's broken in lots of places. You'll have many lovers. This line is happiness, you're happy but it doesn't go right to the end. You'll have some sadness. You smile a lot now, but maybe you won't so much in the future." Or in the past, I thought. It smelled of coffee. The broken, knackered men from the night before breathing liquor fumes had gone. In the lounge car were ladies knitting and shrieking pleasantly to one other, enormous breasts straining against pastel T-shirts, tables cluttered with soggy pastries, covered in sickly icing. A lady plucked absently at a wart on her chin, her skin crepey and frail and stretched. Outside, we passed a lone trailer set next to a duck pond, a barn, a chapel, a barbecue, a burned out SUV, blue skies. Troy started talking and my eyes glazed with too little sleep, knowing that soon the No. 49 would get to Union Station, and when we did, I couldn't get away quite as well as I did when we kept moving.

Pics suck but they give you a bit of visuals. I do get bored of being asked if I make this shit up. No, that's what makes it more fun! Turning a random night into a little story.... anyway, I'm WASTED, have managed to do nothing apart from wander along Michigan Avenue, eat pizza and see some fountain and art centre thing today, going to bed early to recover from last night. Pity as the college kids invited me to a party but I'm too darn old and I need bed....

Facebook

2008-06-04T14:14:00.002-04:00

I encourage all facebook stalking, and will reward those who buy the book with a pair of my Snoopy knickers, aged 12-13 from M&S.

I have, like, thirty copies of the book lost somewhere in London. I'm such a retard I don't even own a copy of my own stupid book.

It's out in 3 weeks btw, though a friend of mine emailed me excitedly last night to say he saw someone reading it on the L train yesterday. That was cool. I wish I'd seen it. Martin Amis writes in his memoir about only ever seeing one person read his book on the tube. Probably because after the success of The Rachel Papers and his subsequent books he got cabs everywhere.

IL

2008-06-04T08:12:00.004-04:00

I'm blown away by all the emails I've received in the last few weeks - from dancers, students, divorced single moms, dads, old hippies, career women.... there's a mad-different crazy bunch of you out there reading this thing which is cool, particularly as I'm a lazy sod and don't update so much anymore.

My shit is in storage in Manhattan and I have one bag and a laptop left. This afternoon I go to Chicago. Please keep the suggestions as to where to travel / hang out coming in - I plan to head to LA via North, come back to NY via the South. I'm also totally up for meeting blog readers as long as they are not rapists or stalkers and can tell me some cool stories over a few beers.... (thanks for email Private-School Brit-stripper, may see you in CT!)

I woke up this morning at 6.30am and the heat had been totally sucked up by rain and thunder, perfect leaving weather....

O wine bearer, bring me forth a cup....

2008-06-03T08:41:00.003-04:00

My new friend A sent me this:

I couldn't stop listening to it last night. Had an interview for New York Magazine. I get nervous about interviews so had to down an enormous chilled glass of Sauvignon Blanc before it, sitting on the balcony as the sun set over 1st Avenue. Journalists are always so terrifyingly professional, but you can hear in their voice they think you're a big ole slut before you start. Ah well, the NY Mag woman was lovely so maybe she'll be OK with me.

Hot day. Yoga. Packing. Coffee. Croissants. Not in that order. Rest of my life begins tomorrow. Leaving is such a great feeling...

me-me

2008-06-02T20:37:00.005-04:00

I'm back in New York and suddenly facing the reality of being 'Mimi' again. When I left last August I was burnt out. I found living in New York City without stripping unbearable. I had the apartment on Mott Street, the nice, clean boyfriend who had nothing to do with my past life, I had the book deal and the great escape not just planned, but realized. But I was a husk and so I left. This is a bit from the book about that morning last August:

3am and a warm wind blew. My bags were packed, the apartment bare and clean, life disposed of in shipping boxes and black plastic garbage bags. After three years, it was surprisingly painless to leave the city. When it came down to it, I doubted New York had even registered my arrival, let alone noticed my departure. On Houston cabs crawled past, slowed perhaps, by the hour, the bliss of a cool morning wind after the treacly heat of the day. A bum emerged from behind a parked car, wandered incoherently over, sat down next to me on the stoop. I recognized his face.

“You leavin’ Manhattan? I seen you around this street, with the English guy. I do workin this block sometimes for Fer, you know Fer, the Super? Yeah, I know everyone on this street.”

His breath was hot and festering, a wet, dead rodent in the heat. “What are you doing up so late?” I asked quietly, a smile that didn’t reach my eyes, glance towards my watch where the fuck is this car

His eyes glimmered, glanced at me sharply, then the focus dimmed and the voice went low, intense.

“I have nightmares,” he shrugged. “Dreams, images, call ‘em what you want. I have nightmares, most nights. Keeps me up.”

“What are they about?” I whispered, and Manhattan was never so quiet as I waited for that answer.

“Things. Violent things. Sad things. I don’t want the nightmares, so I don’t sleep no more.”

He threw back his head and laughed, and in that black, burnt mouth the bitter charred stubs of teeth emerged and the stink, the stink - it was unbearable, like the laugh. “I have nightmares,” he repeated, and he laughed again, longer this time, harder. The car drew up. “Should I tell him you left?” he called after me, as the bags were thrown in the trunk, “He’s gonna miss you, pretty little thing that you are. You said goodbye?” and when I ignored him he let the laugh turn into something that sounded like a stifled scream. We drove off quickly down Houston.

There’s an art to leaving, a perfection, a symmetry. Whilst Mimi squirmed and howled and thrashed away inside me, the exorcism, that ritual purgation of words, was performed almost seamlessly. She left quietly - too quietly - as if one day, she might be back.

--------

I find it weird talking about that time now, as if by writing about life you consign it to a fiction, a story, something so unbearably intimate that has to become remote from your own reality in order to survive. I guess that's how I feel about my three years in New York: that by turning it into a book I changed it from reality into literature divorced from experience. I guess that's how we deal with life when it becomes overwhelming, we writers. We just turn it into something digestible and understandable when really it was never comprehendable, it doesn't make sense.

I keep getting emails from old schoolfriends who knew me when I was a nervy, nerdy, depressive, anorexic fifteen year old. They find the photos first: artfully posed with the correct lighting so I look slimmer and curvier, prettier and younger. You look so different! You look great! Hold on a sec, it's still me. Still the same person who pisses people off and has a huge mouth and offends people and acts like a dick, who oscillates between yoga ascetism and a good old booze up. Maybe you do change though. Grow harder and all that. Certainly life and its disappointments don't seem to matter so much; ideals and hopes become jaded and soured, so that a kick in the teeth can always be swiftly dodged by a wry smile and the thought Oh well, it'll make a good story....

I don't write so much on here anymore. I hate the confessional tomes of online diaries and all that shit, hate the idea that I may get typecast as some sad, neurotic bitch who can only write about her own life. One of the interesting things about my book is how much it's about other people rather than myself. My screenplay agent called it the most unusual love story she'd ever read. Maybe she's the first person to actually get it. My brother called it 'filth' with his raucous Sid James laugh. Maybe he is.

I'm back in New York in my shitty sublet with my roommates who are all young and eager and excited about careers. I like them. Memorial day hit and the weather turned hot and baked, and we sat upstairs on the roof sipping beers talking about the summer, talking about plans. New York feels odd and not right without stripping though, like I've lost some intimacy, I'm hanging out with an ex and we're engaging in conversation but we can't touch and kiss and entwine around each other like we used to. Maybe New York is a lost love for me, or maybe it's about to turn into something else. Who knows. I have these interviews, these screenplays to sell, journalism, the next book, grand plans. I need some shit though. I can't have it too easy. I need some pain and some trouble so I start to feel alive again, not just anaesthitized and numb.

Last night my roommates told me they were sad I was going. It's good living with people. I've learned now how to slip the past into everyday conversation so it doesn't seem extraordinary, though I still get the comments - whore, bitch, porn star, man stealer blah blah blah. Oh the irony! They never see me waking up at 6am for yoga looking bleary eyed like a twelve year old, wiping sleep from my eyes, wandering down Avenue B in faded stretch lycra. I want to dance again because I want to submerge myself away from all the smiley bollocks, the happy-clappy interviews and the stupid articles explaining and analyzing. Sometimes, a lot of the time, late at night when I'm finished sweating over an article and the heat rolls in from 1st Avenue in waves, I just want to be that girl who swung around a pole, pricked by the fear of never getting out, pricked by life, not suffocated by it.

I'm getting my dancer shoes out of storage tomorrow and on Wednesday I'm going to Chicago, on Saturday Minneapolis, and then maybe Fargo to dance, or direct to East Glacier Park, where I'll hire a car and hook up with Susan for some stripping action in small towns where nobody knows my name from stupid articles and publicity BS. I miss my girls. I miss Mimi.

I love that this is all happening. I guess I just don't know how to deal with it and need to do what I do best: write, travel and erm, show my tits. Life's a funny old game.

out of retirement

2008-05-31T20:03:00.001-04:00

I'm getting my heels and lycra out of storage.

Montana stages beckon.

JFK - LHR - JFK

2008-05-28T21:43:00.001-04:00

Apologies for hiatus, have been back in London for meetings and goodbyes, and London sucks for free wireless.

Now in NY again and off to Chicago and Minneapolis next week, en route to Montana....

Very, very jetlagged and tired. Yawn.

cock soup

2008-05-19T16:08:00.003-04:00

My roommate walked in while I was stirring the pot.

"What you cooking?"

He walked over to the stove and stood, perplexed.

"There appears to be a rubber penis in your soup," he said after a while. I shrugged and turned the heat down to simmer.

"They said boil to disinfect."

I gave it another stir. We stood watching it together. And then he went into his room to light a joint.

hollywood

2008-05-18T19:58:00.003-04:00

Everytime I have a bikini wax, I find the kind, efficient, non-English speaking Chinese lady poking around my vagina with a wooden spatula, vaguely depressing. I bet, I can't help thinking, she once dreamed of making a new life in the US, far away from the poverty of the Huang province.

And then she ended up dripping hot wax on my anus for a living.

Yay America, Land of Opportunity.

....and

2008-05-17T17:32:00.004-04:00

...my lovely friend Jon gave me a great write up of the book on his blog. Go poke around his stuff too, he's a fabulous writer and has been entertaining me for months with his stories of geekdom....