wake up. you’re there. humph. shuffle. so I’ll just stand here stooped under this overhead locker while you all dither around detaching your armstraps and dropping your duty frees on the heads of unsuspecting latvians who are wrestling their super-sized carry-on bags out of the seat in front of them as a million blankets cascade from the aisles and an armful of BA headsets careen up the aisle as backpacked 7 year-olds push through to the exits past the world traveller plus and the nice ladies in club world who are picking up 17 discarded newspapers from each reclined seat as my large russian friend is pulling what looks like a sack of potatos from the space over our heads with a look on her face that says she’s not really very pleased with having spent 9 and a half hours squeezed between 2 armrests with buttons on she’s doesn’t know how to use and all this goes on for about 30 minutes because we’ve stopped taxiing about 50 metres short of the terminal building because the plane the should have already been taking off has still got a pipe sticking out of it and hasn’t made room for flight ba219 so we’re just stuck in this neverland trying not to catch each other’s eye while self-consciously fiddling with the loose change in our pockets that we can’t use in this country anyway and we didn’t put it all in one of those charity envelopes so I guess we’ll just set off some kind of security alarm instead when all we really want to do is get through security and use a proper toilet that doesn’t move around when you’re trying to use it
40 minutes later we’re on the avis bus to the rental car pickup where I let them know I’m a preferred customer and so my car will be ready for me and as usual they can’t find caynes timmr on their palmtop until I point out its with a c and not a k and also its a y not and i and an n not an m and its tim, not timmr which is just a concatenation of tim and mr (ahh! I see!) and anyway sir, we don’t seem to have a car ready for you like they never do for some reason and so I check in with the rental station after being hoofed off the bus and actually, they do have a car for me in slot N9 have a nice day. so this looks like me, the one between all the enormous suvs that have been hired out for a colorado weekend and are about 10 feet tall with full beams on in the parking lot just to let you know just how big and impressive they are, the one that says ‘suzuki’ on it and has done about 38000 miles with the pedal to the floor and never got past 50 miles an hour and its a lovely grey with a name like a ‘gerona’ or a ‘genoa’ or something but its got a walnut dash, so it must be good. righto, let’s hit the toll road and we’ll be at the renaissance in about 30 minutes, which we are, because the toll road is alway completely empty save for the poor souls who man the tolls in the middle of winter and have to deal with the english and their $20 bills and fumbling around in their laptop bags and getting receipts and all that but then you still have a nice day so everything’s alright thankyou sir no problem you drive safely etc.
after picking up 17 complimentary breakfast coupons, 500 free marriot points for standing up straight in the restaurant, free internet access because nobody else is using it right now and a letter about how there really won’t be much inconvenience when we start doing building work on the roof tomorrow morning I’m up to the 7th floor and turning the wrong way out of the lift until I get all the way to the end of the wrong wing of the hotel and consider just hitting the fire escace and getting back in the suzuki and straight back to the airport but instead turn back and hike across the wilderness of the horrible patterned carpet until we’re at 730 and the key works and I’m in and they’ve folded the corners down on everything which is nice so lets think about the rest of the day. ooh, I’d like some of that water, I’ve not really had any for a few hours and that looks nice. $4.50? dammit. where’s the vending machine, ah, down the corridor. right. 2 dollar bills? I spent those of the toll road. dammit. right. where’s the bar?
back though the underworld tunnel and out into the swirling mass that’s terminal 4 concourse on a rainy sunday lunchtime where I’m already on the wrong floor so I’m pressing all the buttons on the elevator again to see where I come out which is thankfully right next to WHSmiths where I need to buy 17 litres of spring water just to make sure I don’t get a flaky nose by the time I’ve coated my face with everyone else’s breath passed through a chlorine filter that has probably come from the swimming pool in greenwich and makes me look like pete burns by the time I’ve landed in Denver and all the indians start wailing at me as I pass them over the walkway that connects BA to CO via TSA and FBI.
so I’ve checked in online and I’m 2 hours early which is a contradiction that BA can’t really deal with, so I proceed to the bag drop to be told that I’m checked in alright but I’ll actually have to drop my bag somewhere completely different like off a cliff or something so follow me and I’ll get that taken care of for you except you don’t know where you’re going do you? still, the bag passed onto the conveyor at the back of the check in area and my confidence in ever seeing it again dropped to somewhere below zero which was rather worrying as I’d packed the tadpole and so all the work I needed to do was in there and never mind you’ve had a wasted trip sir – couldn’t you just do your presentations without the pictures you drew in them? without the pictures? are you mad? they are the presentation. you’re not in marketing are you? anyway, if I never see my bag again, I’m remembering your name, er, steve, and I’ll hold you personally responsible for its safe return. ok, calm down and zip up everything that moves to progress through the security screening and then on to wander aimlessly around the rubbish terminal 4 shopping and almost buy a shirt from pinks for no reason probably. I might just get a ridiculous sandwch from starbucks that takes me about 30 mintues to undo the packaging.
wait up. that’s surely not the queue to get through security. I’m surely not going to have to stand next to this annoying wailing family for half an hour listening to that insidious little twerp rattling on about the computers. excuse me! full body scan! me! me! oh, right, they’re doing the full body scan. I expect it will show up that alien growing inside you. shuffle. nice shoes. shuffle. nice hair. shuffle. you don’t really need a carry on bag that size mate. shuffle. ooh, you’re nice, I hope I sit next to you. shuffle. aah. not you. shuffle. etc. in the end its pretty painless and after putting all my clothes back on and applying some of the cream they kindly gave me, I’m sauntering into the safe haven of a stateless environment, only cluttered up by the loons on their way to paris, oman, brussels, new york, wherever.
godammit, get me on that plane. I’ve been to the bathroom and so I’m ready for my window seat. I hope 29H and 29J had some kind of passport problem and won’t be boarding today so that I can have these 3 seats to myself and move my leg at least 15 degrees off-centre to get some movement in them. oh, hang on. hello enormous russian lady who will be sitting next to me for 9 and a half hours. is that your friend? oh, no, just some unrelated wiry looking black jumpered snippy little man who probably will get his laptop out in a minute. right, so everything set now. perfect. let’s get the sony walkman out and start with maximo park to see me through the first tedious stretch…
as we are a few hours into the flight, we go north just far enough to dip out of the daylight and into the twilight to the point were they meet in the middle and everything goes purple. I was expecting this to happen which is why I had planted myself by a window, but I didn’t really know that everything would look quite so other-wordly as we passed over Iceland in a kind of drug-fuelled luminarium, which is how I like to think of the whole Iceland experience anyway so it was appropriate. as my forehead stuck to the window, I just kind of fazed out for a moment – like I do on conference calls about portal architectures and globalization business models requiring platform enhancements that I hadn’t included in the original brd in 2003 – until everything went blank with my camera whirring in the background and mrs seatanahalfakov dribbling over some story about a tractor factory in the newspaper while mr beaky played poker online via satallite with a young woman called brandy from ohio who was really big dave from east ham but it didn’t really matter becasue we were all playing with complimentary lemon fresh tissues
right mate, terminal 4? right, get off this one and get on that one over there. he’s going to terminal 4 but I’m knockin’ off and I can’t be bothered and as you’re the only one then I don’t really care, right? yeah, this your bag? right, there you go mate. <crash> dave’ll sort you out. dave! terminal 4! I ain’t going, can you take this one! he’s only one! alright, I’ll go, here’s my suitcase, careful with that. <crash> anywhere mate, be about 5 minutes. thanks. hang on. this bus has got leather seats. and it’s got a huge telly at the front that shows you where we’re going. and the aircon works. dammit. I get to sit 4 hours on a sharabang from 1989 with flock wallpaper on the seats and the heating up to 11 with sticky patches on the carpet, which are, incidentally, on the back of the seat and footrests that take the skin off your shins, just because I travel from East Anglia? what’s with that then? this is a nice bus. I want to be on this one all the way, not just the last leg after being ejected by a truculent dolt of a provincial driver who wants to get home for sausages and arsenal.
passing south african airways on the right, a 777 passes overhead at about 50 feet before skidding onto runway 2 and I’m wondering whether booking the hotel closest to terminal 4 is the best idea in the world as we pull up at departures and get hoofed on the concourse, our suitcases cascading out the back of the National Express like it’s a waste collection. the hilton heathrow is supposed to be connected to terminal 4 by a covered walkway which sounds like something out of dr. no, but I’ve a sneaking suspicion it might end up being an experience more like dr crippen judging by the way the day has gone so far. through the terminal building I spy a helpful yellow sign that says ‘hotel’ and realize I’m on the wrong floor and in the wrong elevator and so I press all the buttons at once to see what happens and I get ejected onto level 2 where there’s a tatty looking weatherspoons called ‘the departure gate’ or something ridiculous and just to the left there’s a barely noticable black hole in the wall where the journey to narnia begins through the back of a photo booth where you can get your head superimposed onto michael jackson. again. so this must be it. the otherworld that is the heathrow hilton covered walkway. it’s a tin tube with the occasional window and unsettling fire escape and signs which say that you’re ‘5 minutes from the comfort and luxury of the hilton heathrow’ or something like that, which doesn’t give me a great feling for how long it’s actually gonna take to get me to a bed tonight. the walkway is also suspended over the inner roadway for the airport so the odd rumble of delivery lorries underneath and business class overhead make for a sublime underworld experience. with ‘1 minute to go before the plainly further than that away entrance lobby of the luxurious and splendid hilton heathrow’ I’m beginning to lose confidence and the will to live, but as I round the next corner, I see the portal to the otherworld and I pass through into an ecstatic reception from the queen sized gods of bedroomland. well, I get to the car park anyway, and it’s raining, but hey, there’s the lobby, and what a fine lobby it is…
checking in is painless and dutch and I’m soon off to room 217 to unload, unwind and work out where dinner is. get in the room, dump the stuff, take off a couple of layers of day-old clothes and hey, let’s check out the view. hang on. this is looking into the hotel, not out. I can see the restaurant, the bar and the huge atruim in the middle of the huge square hotel. there’s loads of people down there. and they’re all looking up here. at a fat guy with no shirt on picking fluff out of his navel and doing a huge belly-out yawn. this is a mirror right? I mean, a one-way mirror. I can see them, but they can’t see me. I mean, it would be stupid to have hotel rooms on the 2nd floor looking out onto the atrium and everything where everybody out there can see back in while you’re getting undressed and checking out the tv. don’t panic. no sudden movements. just gently sliiide to the back of the room and take a moment. right. so. there’s a cleaner next door, I saw her, so let’s ask her about the windows onto the world
excuse me. sorrie? excuse me. yissss? these windows, they’re just one way, right? I mean, I can see out, but they can’t see in, is that right? I’m sorree, I’mno to understand the windoors? never mind. so I crawl back acorss the floor of my room, peel my shirt of the bed and get dressed again before casually striding up to the window and pulling those curtains across like it’s something I do every day. it turns out, when I’m down in the bar, that you can see directly in to the rooms, which is why the business rooms are on the fifth floor, so you can look down on everybody with just your boxers on and nobody ever needs to know. I spent some time talking to a student on his way back to the Netherlands who wanted to be an IT journalist when he leaves home and travel around the world like I do. except I’m only going to Colorado, I told him and he’d already spent half his life in africa helping staving children with his parent’s charity work, so I wasn’t really much of a role model, but the fact that he was even talking to me was a novelty, so I milked it as much as I could and got him to pay for my drinks with the british airways payout he’d been given for them not having a connecting flight for him. genius.
tomorrow it’s 9 and a half hours to denver, so I’m going to watch match of the day now with the curtains open and write messages on the window backwards with melted chocolate.
go on, its got a raspberry jus and a sugar snap pretzel heart-shaped toothrot stuck in it. what? what do you mean its too loose? what does that mean? right then, I’m off to play liminous indoor golf on my own in an empty movie theatre while rachel sorts me out with lightly kilned golden and a couple of chap sticks. after that we can pile in the space shuttle and watch the series premiere of Flatiron housewives left on 36 while I get heated from underneath and press all the buttons at the same time so chris gets ejected out the tailgate and into the path of the hummer, which is careening around the cark park, looking for a kerb to mount except all the kerbs here are tiny like those steps they make you climb to get to the lobby which are there just to get me out of breath again.
anyway, after debating lossless compression and dlink cables for about 17 hours we all squeezed into the elevator with a short fat bloke from Texas who smelled of donkeys and had an unnerving spatula protruding from his hipsters until some of us spewed out onto the sticky 4th floor carpet and the rest of us stayed for another jager and had a party on the fire escape with an escaped baboon and a bus load of guides. after that the lid came off and I had to clean the carpet with my toothbrush and it was at that point I realized I’d forgotten to pack the adaptor for my adaptor which means by friday I’ll look like an upsidedown man with the wrong head.
denver was a last minute thing. before that, I’d planned for, ooh, a couple of hours, to go back to the flatiron crossing and visit those nice people in PacSun to see if they’d had a delivery of large tshirts with skatetractors on that I could get my hands on. I figured I could probably get all that stuff with ‘Colorado’ or ‘Boulder’ or ‘Flatiron’ printed on it while I was there as well and so I’d only have to take one evening out of the social calendar to visit the mall, eat alone at the Renaissance and actually get to bed before 2 am. so wednesday evening was dedicated to’ project taxable items’ and if I got away from the globalization meetings we had arranged that afternoon which I’d arranged myself but completely forgotten about and had left my UK/US travel adaptor behind and couldn’t plug in the laptop and had the wrong phone and it felt like the wrong head which I had found under a bucket, then I figured I’d probably have a couple of hours and anyway the flatiron’s pretty small except for the enormous empty department sotres at each end/corner/whatever where dirk and sarah are just kind of unloading ties and arranging them in a spiral on a shiny tabel in menswear, because they’ve run out of shoes to arrange and they haven’t actually sold anything for an hour.
so I extricate myself from broomfield 5, turn the wrong way onto interlocken loop, end up at the airfield where a couple of light aircraft spray the car with nerve gas or something and then I take a left and look back over the crest of the hill where broomfield sprawls out beneath me, and I can see foleys and nordstrum about a mile away and so I set off in a straight line, keeping them in my sights all the time. across parking lots, central reservations, golf courses, 4-ways, 3-ways, and anything else the rental fucos can negotiate and in 5 minutes I’ve slammed through a hedge into the empty parking lot and I’m wondering if the flatiron actually closes at 6pm on wednesdays, until I see a middle aged couple with a foleys bag fall through the doors and I realize that I’ve jumped the first hurdle and at least I’m at the mall and its open. I stick the dead laptop in the boot/trunk lock my wallet in the car and set off on my pathetic little quest.
cookie smell. its there. good. right. being a veteran of the flatiron having been here once before, I know where I’m headed and stride confidently through foleys, which looks like the kind of place I might come back to one day when I’ve passed 60, lost all my money to online poker and have lost all self respect and have the sartorial elegance of a pig farmer on vacation, and then the world opens up and I’m into main street, or the village, or ‘flatiron street’, or whatever they’ve called the main drag in the mall which in the UK would have actually been a regular street for 800 years but now it’s got a marble tiled floor and an atrium roof and smells of cookies, but I suspect over here in Colorado used to be, well, probably nothing at all but a maybe a place where some animals roamed around or something athough I’m sure that’s completely inaccurate and actually it was a street for 300 years, but a street that had animals roaming all over it, and I know that I should take a left out of foleys, but there’s only straight on as an option, so I’m confused already. oh, but wait, I’ve come out 20 yards from PacSun, it’s just over there. bingo. I’ll be out of here in 20 minutes and then I can get a game sausage and pasta entree in flatz and spend 4 hours reading email and watching drew barrymore in some family channel film about bad love and driving cars up mountains blindfold etc.. brilliant.
‘hi there!’ oh dear. looks like I’m this evening’s customer. don’t they know I’m british? surely they can tell I’m not used to being communicated to in stores unless I’m complaining about christmas lights being put up too early or the rudeness of the staff. ‘my name is christy and i’ll be your server today. rashid is with us in mens today so if you have any questions today, then please today let me know and we’ll see how we can help today sir. is there anything I can help you with today?’ dammit. I was hoping to slip in quietly, pick a couple of tshirts that would be perfect for a 16-year old son but that I’m actually buying for my 38-year old self, bag them and slip away before anyone had noticed. they probably remember me from 6 months ago when I did the same thing. they’ve been brainwashed or something and they have some kind of sinister ESP that they use to gang up on shoppers and make them buy stuff they didn’t want. ‘er, no, i’m just, er, looking’. ‘ok sir, well, give me a holler if you’re needing anything, sizes or styles, ok?’. ‘right, sure’. a holler? what’s that? sure, I’ll give you a holler. I’ll find a tshirt that looks about right and I’ll come up to the counter and shout in your face I THINK I’LL TAKE THIS ONE BUT HAVE YOU GOT IT IN A LARGE, CHRISTY? I’m not sure about this at all. and they haven’t got any tshirts I like, even though rashid pulled a couple down from the ceiling with a huge stick, in case I ‘wanted to check the style’ of them. exit strategy. head down. move to the door, stealthy. nearly there. ‘YOU HAVE A GREAT DAY TODAY SIR’. jesus, she doesn’t have to shout at me on the way out the door, I mean, I was the only person in there. ‘YOU’VE A GREAT EVENING SIR YOU SEE US AGAIN SOON’. oh no, rashid has barked out to me as well. I’m nearly out the door. do I acknowledge them or something? I’m too far out to speak normally, and I can’t turn around without that looking just really awkward. maybe I’ll just ignore them. no, can’t ignore them, that’s just rude. dammit!
in the end, I just kind of weakly raised my hand and gave a kind of backwards wave with my knuckles while pulling a half smile that was only seen by a couple of teenage girls pulling gum out in strings who probably immediately classified me as a danger to the public. so that wasn’t quite how I’d seen this evening going. now I’ll have to do the walk along the ground floor and back along the upper floor because I’ve crossed the invisible threshold which means I’m too far in to simply turn around and walk out and I can’t just stop in the middle and decide it’s all over by looking at my watch and pretending I’m late for a meeting or something even though I appear to be the only person in the mall, which of course, is worse, because that means everybody is looking at me wondering what the hell I’m doing gibbering to myself in the doorway of PacSun waving my limp wrist about with a sickly insipid half-grin on my face. oh well. let’s get it over with. I might find something in the ‘mid thirties man trying to be 18 through inappropriate dressing in guess, stussy and levis’ section in nordstrum where I can have chat with dirk about whether I’m here on business and whether he’ll accept maestro cards or if I’ll have to put it on visa and I’ll wonder why he doesn’t take a pin number or a signature and I’ll go home alone as they pack up the rest of the ties until tomorrow when they’ll finish the spirals and start of the glove trees for christmas. except I don’t. I didn’t find anything anywhere. 40 minutes of my life has passed by in this place and I’m no closer to a purchase than I was during my globalization presentation on monday, where at least I got pizza and donuts. I’ve even been into crate and barrel and considered getting a set of kitchen knives for the hell of it, but homeland security or the tsa might have something to say about that. I know. I’ll just leave. go back to hotel without buying anything. perhaps I’ll go to denver on friday or something (which I do). so, where was the fucos? that’s right, back though the power tools in foleys. right, let’s go.
I was almost at the entrance to foleys when I took a quick look to my left for some reason. just baskets and things. but hang on, there’s something moving in that one. what is this place? oh. I see. aaaaaaaaaaaaah. it’s a pet shop. not the kind of pet shop you get in the UK which might have a fish and a couple of tired guinea pigs hiding under a shredded free advertiser. no it’s more like the ones in spain that the kids stick their nose up against. the kind of pet shop that has, well, pets in. I’m talking dogs. and cats. and big spiders and lizards and rats and gerbils and geckos and frogs and things that look like sticks that are probably insects, but actually, are just sticks in a spider case without a spider in it. there must of been about 12 glass-sided cases, each with a couple or three puppies in. and these weren’t just your average mixed up breeds of dogs, they were all those wierd ones you only ever see people walking around with under their arms plus a few which would eventually be about 10 feet tall and need their own house. and they were all barking. yapping, to be more accurate. little whiny puppy yaps that were somewhere in between very cute and instant migrane. in the top-right case, was the most striking dog of the lot. it was a white husky puppy which cost about a million dollars and was just kind of slinking about, outstaring everyone that came into the shop. I gave it a go, but after about 5 minutes I had to rush to the bathroom to pour water into my dried-up eyeballs. that dog had the most evil stare. and I swear it had human eyes. I mean, they didn’t look like dog eyes at all, they were bright green, piercing, human eyes, I’m sure of it. there was something strange going on in the back of the store. nevertheless, I stayed for about 30 minutes just watching puppies roll over on metal grills and biting each other’s ears off and I think every customer in the flatiron passed through in that time and stood there going aaaaaah and stuff, so maybe it was just a really nice shop that happened to have a devil husky in one case by mistake and I was reading too much into the little yelping and squelching noises coming from the backroom.
I went for a grilled beef skewered bar meal in the end and watched the bullets on cable in the bar with a couple of flat tires before retiring to the 6th floor and charging up the laptop before falling asleep in front of the scifi channel which had something on which looked like star wars but wasn’t.
after 4 days in Broomfield after 1 day on a plane after 1 night in a hotel with half of the population Lagos after 4 hours on a national express coach with mr cheerful after half a day in the rain I was planning to take a day up in the rockies, seeing how far past estes park I could get in november in the rental ford fucos without any chains and as it had been in the low 70s all week and glorious sunshine when I dribbled out of the bed in the 6th floor executive suite, I figured friday would be splendid and I’d crack on after packing and be in the foothills by breakfast sharing bagels with a yeti and jibbering about software service plans and globalized ecommerce venues until the sun went down and the 777 lifted off from DIA with my ransacked (thanks Transport Security Administration) suitcase lurching around in the hold and me switching my sim cards between triband and dualband handsets which I can’t use
as it turned out, as I pulled back the curtians on a stick and looked over the flatiron crossing and the hills, the hills were nowhere to be seen, as thick grey clouds were just looming over everything like some hideous portent of doom, just kind of laughing in my face because they’d ruined my day already and might even drop some snow later to really get everyone thoroughly pissed. it took me an hour to pack everything extraordinarily carefully, making sure the talin was all wrapped up in a fluffy white renaissance towel I’ve just borrowed in between the jacket I got to wear once and the shoes I forgot I had and the tshirt with the uncomfortable neck I should never have bought anyway (all of which would be taken out, thrown into the air and caught like a stretched sheet at the bottom of the empire state and flung into the suitcase again before returning home anyway – thanks Transport Security Administration), and then I found some breakfast in the corner, turned the gas off, checked the back door, etc., and headed for reception to check out, by which time the clouds has moved into the foyer, like in The Fog, and crusty old seamen were rattling chains at me and asking for their money back.
I decided to go to Denver
I’d driven around it a couple of times, thinking that’s what you do with Denver, just kind of drive around it, trying to judge the distances between the refineries and opening and closing the window appropriately, but I’d never been closer than the highway, so maybe I’d just kill a couple of hours there before driving to the airport 6 hours early because I’ve run out of ideas and I can’t possibly do any work on a friday. so I made a mental note of cherry creek mall where I thought I’d buy some stuff that said ‘Denver’ or ‘Colorado’ on it and headed out of the car park in the fucos and turned left. no, right. hang on. I hate the roads in Broomfield.
it was midday by the time I’d managed to get the fucos pointed south and headed down 36, or 25, or whatever it was to the 70, or 25, or 275, or whatever it was. I knw I wanted to by south of the city, so I took to road that goes in that direction and passed every single intersection and turning until I could no longer see Denver out of my driver’s window and figured I must have ended up in Mexico or something. quick, take the next turn, whatever it is. ooh, there’s coors field. right, this is, um, University. right, and there’s the university. so. hang on. lets take a look at the Avis Denver street map from 1974 and see what gives. screeeeeeech! cherry creek. right there. sorry everyone. I’m a tourist, look! I got a rental fucos and a mad confused look on my face! I managed to negotiate a right turn into the car park, which isn’t as simple as it sounds when you’re used to street names being on the side of the street and not across the street so you’re always thinking you’re on the street you want to be on and not just driving over it and leaving it behind in the rearview mirror. again.
I kind of knew the moment I stepped into the mall that I’d made one those mistakes I make when I can’t really be bothered to think about things and I just drift into a mistake. it was like every other mall I’d been into, except it had a saks fifth avenue in it. there was about 5 people, barely audible elevator music, the smell of cookies and a water fountain going off in the corner that the security guard was just kind of looking at sideways. still, once you’re in, you have to walk up one side of the downstairs, take the elevator at the other end, and walk back down the length of the upstairs, occaisionally crossing the way to check out amazing instant sleep pillows in brookstone or ipods in the apple store. then there’s always that moment where you get stuck in mid-crossing and spy that victoria’s secret is on the other side and you’re not sure whether it looks like you’re deliberately crossing to check it out, so you stop and look at your watch or something and try to turn back, pretending that actually, you have forgotten something in gymboree, but realizing halfway that that’s just more stupid, so you head back across toward victoria’s secret anyway, but stare straight ahead with a look on you face that’s trying to say you’re not actually looking at bras but you’re really keen to get to the sony center. but it doesn’t work, and you realize your hands are deep in your pockets as you walk past the pandoras box of lingerie and you try and pull them out quick and look casual, but you’ve just thrown all your change over the marble floor again like you did in the flatiron, you idiot. don’t stop and pick it up. it’s american money, you can’t use it when you get back. just walk away. they’re not staring at you, its the security guard by the water fountain that’s now gushing all over the floor and cascading over the edge of the walkway they’re interested in. honest.
so after I’d escaped unscathed I hightailed it back to the fucos and burned some rubber out of the parking lot, careened over the central reservation and headed downtown on the wrong side of the road. downtown kind of creeps up on you. one minute you’re cruising past old car lots with piles of tyres outside and free lube offers from 1969 and the next you’re outside the convention center, dodging trams and 30-foot blue bears. I squealed round a couple of blocks and found a $12 all-day parking lot, right next to mcdonalds on the corner of 16th street. of course, I had no idea how the parking lots operated, so I had to ask the guy about 4 times how long I could stay (‘salldayman, allday’), and then gave him a $50 bill cos I is a tourist and he had to go to his stash in the back of his lincoln parked on 14th street or something. I mean, I waited for 5 minutes to get my 38 dollars change and then stuck an insignificant pink slip in the windscreen and said goodbye to my personal belongings that I fully expected never to see again and headed up 16th street mall, dodging the evil silent free buses and passing the shop windows that were closing because it was veteran’s day and I always come to the US on a public holiday and find everything closing around me for some reason.
anyway, I got a bunch of stuff that said either ‘Denver’ or ‘Colorado’ on it and also found myself a couple of john deere tshirts in PacSun (‘my name is kathy and I’ll be your server today so can I help you embarrass yourself into a stupid purchase because you look like a toursit dad who will make a really rash decision if I simply say ‘size’ and smile at you’), and even got some instant chicken stuff in an underground food hall that appeared to be full of extras from that film working girl. after that, I thought I might just cruise around the streets. the sun had come out and all the clouds had buggered off, so it has turned into a blisteringly hot afternoon, so I took a layer off, took it back to the parking lot, changed my regular glasses for my prescription shades, dumped the purchases, strapped on the W1 and went on the search for some shots of glass-fronted buildings I could turn into dektops when I’m bored back in the UK when it’s raining outside and I’m just watching people take their dogs to the toilet. it turns out there’s quite a few of those types of buldings in Denver, so I had a pretty good couple of hours pointing my camera at the sky. except for the embarassing security incident and the over-zealous car-park run
the world trade center and a couple of other glass-fronted tower blocks in denver overlap in a pretty nice way when you get the right angle. I found that angle a couple of times and took a few shots and was feeling pretty pleased with myself in a ‘this’ll look nice on flickr’ kind of way, when as I stepped back on the courtyard of another tower block and checked out the direction of the sun, a couple of fat guys in aviators came up behind me and flashed an official looking badge at me and suggested I accompany them into a dark corner. it goes something like this:
‘I’m sorry, is there a problem? I’m a tourist, you know’ ‘what is your purpose here today sir?’ ‘I’m a tourist’ ‘do you have a reasonable cause to be taking photographs in Denver today sir?’ ‘I’m sorry, is that a problem? I’m a tourist’ ‘well, sir, we’re not permitted to let you take pictures of these buildings sir’ ‘right. ok. well, I was just, you know. I’m a tourist. I like taking pictures of stuff. You have a beautiful city’ ‘I’m from Encino. you’re going to have to cease sir and please leave the frontage of the building’ ‘oh, right. I see. I’ll just, well, you know. put this away, right?’ ‘please leave sir’ ‘Encino, is that nice?’ ‘please leave now sir or we shall escort you off, or engage with the local authorities’ ‘bye then’ (50 yards later) ‘fatty’
undeterred, I headed back toward the convention center which looked like the kind of place I could spend an hour of so looking at bits of curved metal cladding and glass archways. I figured I could probably get a really good straight-on shot of some of the office windows (I like those shots) if I went up to the roof of the car park I was just passing on my left, which looked like it had an open roof about 13 floors up. great, let’s duck in here and take the elevator up while the sun’s still out. damn, no elevator. ah well, let’s take the stairs, I’m not that unfit, and they’re pretty small. I’m quite excited by the prospect of getting a couple of my favourite kind of shots, so I bound up the stairs, a couple at a time and before I know it, I’m at the 7th floor. now, I knew that Denver was the mile-high city, and I always get out of breath coming from the Sun car park at broomfield 5 to the lobby, so I should have probably figured that what I was currently doing was a one brick short of a load kind of dumbass stupid thing to contemplate, but hey, I was already at the 7th floor. which is about where I thought I shoud stop and catch my breath. but, of course, in Denver, there isn’t any breath. you can’t catch any. so as I’m gasping away between floors and my heart is leaping out of my rib cage and I’m seeing my life flash before me (mainly images of trying to look like I’m not interested in victoria’s secret), I’m thinking I probably should have taken a more sedate approach. I walk very slowly up 2 more floors and things are still a bit grim. I’ve just remembered a couple of things from my childhood, so I figure I’m about to drop dead, but hey, I still haven’t got the shot I was looking for. ok, concentrate. just 5 more floors. slowly, quietly, long breaths. I think we can make it…
I did make it, and the top floor of the car park was empty so I walked to all four sides, took a few shots of the Denver skyline and folks in office windows calling the authorities about a lunatic on the roof of the 13th street car park who’s pointing a laser gun or something at the president, probably. I figured it was probably then that as I’d escaped some kind of uncomfortable internment by 2 fat blokes and death by altitude, I should probably get back to the car, head for the refineries, drop the fucos and check in with homeland security at DIA, where my fingerprints have probably changed into Reece Witherspoons. probably
so, I get to go to dinner on the other side of town and eat a bison. not a whole one. just a bit of one. with cheese. the server was sick but continued to put his fingers on our bread until james came along and told us he was now our server and could he help us with anything tonight. yes, you can bring us that fricken infected bread we asked for 10 minutes ago, buddy. and some more water. with straws. dammit, the bison’s here already. do I eat that salad first?
I spend the evening with 2 of my favourite people in the world, and they even give me directions back to the hotel, which I screw up hopelessly and do the loop they warned me about after missing that hard left at nickel. it was worth it though.
Boulder. Norwich. they’re just like the illegitimate children of upper-middle class families separated at birth and rehoused on different sides of the atlantic. I mean, the nucleus of these places is like the result of an illicit conflagration between two drugged-up psychology students from the university on the edge of town, but peel off a few layers and progress a couple of miles into the suburbs and further out to the wilderness, then things get much more like the unfortunate in-bred collision of two disenfranchised and disaffected 15 year olds on crack who stumbled out of elementary with a working knowledge of woodworking and a lovebite on the neck. this is where people start building their own houses out of pieces of wood they salvaged from the local authority rather than getting the thursday edition of the local post and leafing through the property pages thinking about the next progression up the stakeholder lifestyle ladder and how much the difference between what they currently own and what they really need to work from home and walk to school and have an acre and have that one extra room that would make all the difference would be.
and there’s a great big community of hippies that won’t go away. they came to the university in 1975 to study geology and life sciences before there was such a thing as life sciences and they just never went back home. they just moved into the golden triangle with their afghans and tabalas and hung tie-dye on the wall and CND in the window and opened up the alternative pulse shops that Tesco and Walmart are now buying up and turning into drugstore expresses to cater for the burgeoning population of 2005 hippies that come to study, well, geology and life sciences, but have already got cars and mortgages and actually, are soo busy they can’t begin to think about the G8 summit or even cooking their own dinners so they congregate at the microbrewery and pretend to like football and try to shag each other, but in a polite way, cleaning up after themselves.
but always creeping in from the outskirts are the indigenous population of the unintelligable underclass that really own the city. they have been here for generations, often never leaving their own self-made house in the country. mostly they’ve not had any social intercourse outside their own extended family. mostly they’ve had no intercourse at all outside their own extended family. they suddenly appear over your shoulder when you’ve been busy checking out kites in the window of ‘kites and things’, their dribbly grin poking out of their bleached fringe, which is poking out of a baseball hat that you’re wondering just how it could get so unclean. they don’t want anything. they just do that looking at you thing and then gather together again like some idiot mercury in the middle of the high street and laugh. you’re not sure whether it’s at you or just in general, but you check your purse and head into a book shop all the same, because you’re safe in there, if a little grubby after the experience.
I’m only joking of course. I was born here and I’m quite normal.
er, that’s a lovely pickup truck you have there. is that a gun in your pocket or are you just telling me this is a really crap place to stop and take a picture? I’m being ironic, you see? look, all this beauty. and then stuff like you. that’s a classic juxtaposition, ain’t it? it’s really purdy an’ all, but you ain’t from round these parts, are you boy?
well, no. if I was, I would know that you can’t get here from Nederland and then onto Denver Airport in 3 hours, but that’s where I find myself right now, so if you’d be so kind as to get that dog off my leg I really need to be tearing down the 70 at 80 miles an hour, wishing I’d filled up with gas somewhere closer to civilization.
anyway, the picture is here. it’s somewhere between here and here
Nordstrom, Foleys, Nordstom, Foleys, erm, left. No, straight on. will they have socks? of course they will. they’ll have those thin old man socks that cost $15 dollars and have diamonds up the side. right then, Foleys. Left. No, hang on, I can get presents in Nordstrum too. right, Nordstrum it is. ok, left. I think, hang on, ALRIGHT MATE! I’M THINKING!
stick the ceramic aztec trophy in the boot and swish through the doors, straight into Chan in menswear. “is there anything I can help you with today sir?” erm, no thankyou, I’m just being british and stalking around your footwear in a deliberate fashion while hunting for socks I refuse to ask you to locate for me. these shops are always empty when I go in them. I mean, Nordstrom. it’s huge, but there’s absolutely noone in here. is that just me? anyway, I don’t find socks, but upon realizing that flatiron crossing isn’t just 2 huge department stores stuck together in the middle, I head off into the wilderness of thursday evening mall shopping in Colorado. I need a tshirt. I have to fly back tomorrow in a tshirt that was fine when I flew out a week ago but following numerous bar meals in the tap room, with fat tire, slabs of hotel chocolate, lunchtime sushi, nachos, burgers, subways, beer, enchiladas, tubs of lard etc., my uber gut stretches the etnies logo out of shape and I look like I should be sat in a golf cart in florida with a havana in one hand and a colostomy bag in the other. so I just need to scale up slightly for the plane. it’s the altitude you see, it adds 20 pounds because of the air pressure or something, honest. right, banana republic. nope. helly hansen. yeah, right, I really need microfibres that stretch to fit and expose every contour. gap. nope. dick’s sporting goods. ooh, maybe, lets have a look. eh? there’s people wall climbing in here. that’s just stupid, get me out of here. hang on, they’re playing the carpet crawlers by genesis in a sports store in a broomfield mall in 2005. that’s just weird. mind you, I hang on for a couple more minutes to listen and pretend to look at basketballs I’ve no intention of buying. “you gotta get in in to get ou-ou-ou-ooou-out”. nope. abercrombie and fitch. it’s too dark in there. and a man just came out with a sideways head, I don’t like the look of that. pacific sunwear. sorry, Pac Sun. sounds a bit like Pac Man that martin has in his basement. ok, there’s 21 year olds in there I aspire to be like and I desperately want to wear their tshirts and be in their gang, so I’ll take a look, even though I’ve come straight from BRM01 and I’m wearing my meeting clothes so obviously I just look like their dad. or creepy trying-to-be-trendy uncle or something. ah so what. right, over to the shirt rack. ooh, fox, etnies, hurley, mad monkey, wet dog, quiksilver, billabong, rolf harris, and they’re 3 for 2. I have to try one on, because I still don’t know whether a US medium is a UK large or whether that’s just random. “Hi I’m Sara! I’ll be unlocking your changing room door for you today and closing it behind you! If you have any questions in Pacific Sunwear today, please give me a shout!”. er, ok. in the end, medium is medium, and I really need a fat git size today, so large it is. $42 dollars and a withering smile from me that says please let me be in your gang later and I’m out of there.
still no socks though. but now I have a shopping bag with stuff I’ve bought in it. that makes me a shopper. that means I can browse around other shops and for some reason staff completely ignore me, like I’ve been seduced by the dark side and they don’t need to pursuade me to part with my money. I’ve crossed the line. I will spend more, it’s the law. so with me bulging comfort blanket in me right hand and me left hand in my trouser pocket, I head back to victorias secret which I passed by earlier but pretended not to be interested in, even saying something like “ah yes, brookstone” out loud to myself so people thought I was intent on going somewhere else. I can now cross the threshold of this place as a shopper, which means I’m not just gawping at plunge bras like a 15 year old, I might actually buy one as well. for my wife. but actually, victorias secret is just so rampant it all gets too much for me and after doing one circuit, humming to myself apparently nonchalently, I try to stumble out gracefully, but I trip over the electronic tag detector in the doorway and set off the alarm with the magnetic strip on my library card. I think I just about hold it together while I crawl around the floor, picking up the contents of my wallet as it slithers away from me across the polished floor and me glasses fall out of my shirt pocket, where I’ve been keeping them like some professor or something. stand up. shoulders back. walk on. smile. try not to notice the entire staff in there are peering at you around the counter and the stock cupboard door like you’re some kind of pantomime freak on holiday who left his costume on. never mind that they’re all 19 and called Kirsty and they would have been happy to help you if you had any questions in victorias secret today, it’s too late. you’re an idiot. a fat idiot who hasn’t bought any presents and looks like a stupid dad person on vacation, looking for socks and loitering around lingerie shops.
anyway, I did get some socks. calvin klein, $10 each. then I went back to the hotel and sat in the bar on my own watching tv. I’m going to drive to Aspen tomorrow.
