I confessed to the taxi driver on the way to the train station that I had no idea what I was going to Texas for. A train journey and some bracing tins of Strongbow Super later, I was in London. Suitably enboldened, I was ready for the onslaught of cross capital travel, and smiled at the familiarness of it all – the predictable ex-lover who you weren’t particularly pleased to see again, but could easily negotiate with. I smirked at the illegal ticket recyclers who waited by the entrance to Kings Cross underground station, and bought a cheap ticket, happy to defraud London Transport for its many failures. On the tube, I thought of some of the things I had answered to people who had asked me why I was going to Texas: to become a professional bodybuilder, to become a boxer, to get a gun, to join alcoholics anonymous, to live in a trailer park. I had a curry with some friends and set off the next morning to the airport.
The last time I had been in Chicago, I had been tasked with drunkenly returning someone’s hire car on the way to the airport. On a whim, I stopped at a firing range, and was amazed that despite being a little unsteady on my feet and stinking of beer, I was allowed with very little ID to rent the biggest hand-gun they had – the Desert Eagle point five-oh. The oh was short for “oh dear”, as I turned heads and bowels in the small range with the meaty hand cannon.
This time Chicago was sober, and the venue for a tedious exercise in getting off a plane, going through immigration, collecting my bags, going through customs, and rechecking my bags to get back onto the original plane to go to Houston. I hadn’t been transatlantic in a while, but I shut out the birds-eye views of ice-flows and coasts to better concentrate on watching a film I’d seen before on a six inch screen stuck twelve inches in front of my face. Surely this was man in control of his environment – stunning scenery blocked by a thin plastic shutter so that people can watch moving pictures of other people acting as other people.
Immigration was relatively painless, despite my fears after being led away and interrogated a few years ago when entering the US. I put it down to wearing my lucky silk shirt – it has buttons, a collar and all the other trappings of respectability. The security inspectors seem to have been to charm school since they last used to prod and poke me with surly faces. One held up a british pound coin and said, “What can I buy for this in England?” I assumed he had been rifling through my wallet, and that he was now asking me trick questions. Lamely I replied,
“A cup of coffee.” and he amazed me by replying with a kind of witty second question, “Would it get me a pound of coffee?” I laughed as politely as a man who has to hold his trousers up as his belt is X-rayed can laugh. I was in the US.
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