Room Service (5 page)

I met the Systematic Traveller in the bar of the Holiday Inn in Albuquerque.

I'd been there for a day or so, in the bar.

‘These things are essential, Blase,' he said, ‘inanimate experience in the mornings – museums and monuments – where you don't have to deal with people and when there is little crowd at things. Never call up people in the morning – no one likes a stranger in the morning.'

It was certainly true sexually.

‘I'll give you a tip, Blase – the famous are often lonely. It doesn't hurt to give them a call.'

I told him my travel problem was getting out of bed in the motel in the morning. I dread the cleaning staff and they dread me. I sometimes stayed most of the morning in those abundant, dial-control American showers. Getting by the bell captain who felt he'd been insufficiently tipped, too, was a problem.

I said I did a lot of my travelling in the bar watching colour TV and talking to the barmen.

The Systematic Traveller shook his head sadly.

‘I classify all conversations into three categories,' the S.T. told me, ‘casual – up to fifteen minutes – extended, and depth-interviews which I record and transcribe. But I also record and summarise the other conversations
– and overheard conversations. I cut things from local publications that illustrate the character of the place, I collect posters, advertising slogans, slang words, transit tickets, labels, empty product packets. I photograph characteristic architecture both commercial and domestic, I do shop fronts, street signs – I search out other statistics like ethnic groupings and I do a chart – history of the city with dates and events from other places – to put it in a world perspective. I have a gastronomic section where regional foods and wines I've tried are listed with my comments – wines and ales.'

I sat hunched, wordless, sulky, hostile, defiant and inadequate.

‘It's really a personal graph of my mood as well as anything else – I see travel as a way of moving “me” as a sensor, through a set of experiences. I create a Gestalt from all the scattered input.'

He noticed my silence. ‘But anyhow, Blase – you've travelled – what's your personal method?'

‘I have talked with many bell captains – I took one to the District Court of New York.'

‘Taxi drivers, barmen (he dropped his voice), I call them “responders” – they tell you what you want to hear – they deal professionally with strangers – no I avoid them – at all costs – very distorting.'

‘Another?' I asked, touching our beer glasses.

‘Yes, thank you, but not the same brand. Just to illustrate my system – I always drink something different. Rarely do I taste the same thing twice. I notice you're drinking Heineken – a Dutch beer – a very good
beer – but here in Albuquerque?! Wrong move. Always try the product of the region.'

I stubbornly ordered another Heineken and he had Beer X (sample 1). ‘I drink Heineken because I can find it anywhere in the world and it's a familiar thing in an unfamiliar environment.'

I could see he was unimpressed with this.

‘But,' I said, ‘you see, I place much emphasis on recording and observing the stress that travel brings to bear on my system. And on passive absorption of street and bar ambience. Anything that happens to you is “experience”. You on the other hand insert yourself too aggressively into the experience. You are too strong a chemical in the mixture.'

He was taken aback, but did not seem to place much value on my opinion.

I went on, ‘I consider travel a random, worthless and unnatural experience. Maybe one of those unnecessary activities imposed by boredom and status and affluence on people like us. A custom. Unless you have a specialised interest in churchyards and gravestones,' I said, recalling my English experience.

‘I simply can't agree,' he said, drinking Beer X with some agitation.

But I was well underway. ‘At least one-third of travel is
learning how to travel
, which is completely inapplicable to your normal life when you return home. There is then the negative experience of looking in the rear-vision mirror of your life – and you learn by travelling just how anxious, alone and defenceless you are. Who
wants to learn that? Travel is for me incapacitation and disorientation. I think that at first I hoped that travel would chase away the overcast cloudiness of my own personal preoccupation. Instead, I found that I was deeper into preoccupation. Staying at home was more
distracting
in that sense. I usually find a
circle of self
inflates around me like a space suit, which prevents the experience from touching me. I bob along. Maybe in recollection – by story telling – the experience of travel comes alive. I find
essence
through repetition not from incessant newness.'

The bar had fallen silent. The other conversations had ceased. The barman had paused in his polishing of the glasses to listen.

‘But how do you get a picture of the places you've been to?' the S.T. said, harriedly.

‘I don't,' I said glumly, ‘I just don't. I can't generalise, that's my problem. I can't wrap up my observations in a dazzling conclusive verbal sachet. After all, travel is a damned expensive way to arrive at inconclusiveness. For instance, others can see clearly whether a country is “happy” or not. My parents, my brothers, my fellow travellers who sit beside me in aeroplanes, buses and so on, can readily tell if a country is “happy”. Once, in Toronto, in the central business district, I tried to count the number of Canadians who were smiling in the street – if they were all Canadians – but I found too many suspect smiles. I had to keep discounting for professional smiles, the wheedling smiles of drunks, the tranced-out smiles of Hari Krishna beggars, courtesy
smiles of motel clerks, the nervous smiles of chance eye-encounters in lifts. A lot of nervous smiles came from people who saw me looking into their faces, searchingly.

The S.T. said that he found the Italians were a race that was either ‘laughing or crying'.

‘That would be easier to observe and count, I suppose,' I said.

‘They are also the most open people in the world.'

‘You mean candid?' I queried, ‘I have been told the Americans talk openly about their personalities and sex problems – at least on the West Coast, or more particularly, Los Angeles – or San Francisco – or maybe just the film people and those from Marin County.'

‘Not like the Americans at all,' he said, grumpily, ‘no, Italians are open in their feelings.'

‘But not their personality problems?'

‘They are a much simpler race than the Americans. More like the Balinese.'

I envied him. I wanted just once to return confident of what I'd seen, to amuse those who cluster around you when you are the returned traveller.

‘I know,' I exclaimed, ‘I have met a lot of friendly liars in all nationalities. “Bullshitting” we Australians call it.'

But really, every time a generalisation begins to form in my mind a school of carp attack it and leave behind a ravaged, fleshless remark.

‘Chileans are given to exaggeration,' I read, ‘they are the kindest, most tolerant, humane people imaginable.'
Just the idea of testing that generalisation made me feel tired; I felt defeated by the idea of setting up a way of testing it at all.

The barman joined in, ‘But you can tell us something about your own people – what about the way they dress – Australians have a reputation of being rather careless in their dress.'

My face must have lit up with enthusiasm about the question – like all travellers, my opinion of my own people, information about my homeland, is eagerly at the service of all mankind. It is the most honourable of patriotisms.

‘I once analysed twenty-four dress styles in Australia into which just about everyone fits, with some interesting exceptions that I'll point out later, but the styles are: elegant-expensive, flash-expensive, respectable-conservative, respect able-daring, cheap-conservative, cheap-flash, respectable-uncaring, cheap-uncaring, trendy-expensive, bohemian-trendy, bohemian-traditional, impoverished, derelict, uniformed civilian-traditional (butchers), uniformed civilian glamorous (rent-a-car staff), arty-sartorial, arty-inexpensive, arty-individual, rural-bourgeois, rural-worker, eccentric rich, eccentric-derelict.'

‘Oh really?' the barman said, his interest dead.

I'm often asked too about street drunkenness in Australia and alcohol. I do know the figures on this – on numbers of arrests for drunkenness, alcohol-related crimes, variations within the States and between the States, committal figures for treatment
of alcoholics, membership of AA, consumption-per-head, impressions of street intoxication city-by-city, sub-cultural customs.

No one had ever heard me through. Do they really want to know about alcohol and drunkenness in Australia or not?

I have always felt, though, that at least I should be able to classify people of the world into rude, polite, friendly. Every other traveller can. I said that the English had not been patronising to me.

‘Ah,' said the S.T., ‘you have missed the subtlety of their rudeness. The British make an art of being rude in a way that you cannot detect.'

‘Well, that's fine by me,' I said, ‘if I miss the concealed rudeness I take away only the impression of excessive politeness.'

Actually, I didn't tell them, but I am forced at times to invent generalisations so that I do not diminish the value of travel. I have to invent them at times to prove that I've actually been where I've said I've been.

But the truth of it is I rove the world in an inconclusive state. I am a very bad guest speaker on travel.

‘Well,' the barman said, ‘you'll not find a city soon – outside Australia – where it's safe for tourists.'

‘The problem of mugging is as old as cities themselves, and can be solved,' I told them.

‘Boswell complained of it in London in 1763. The answer is to wear a sword and carry a stout walnut stick. But I have historical figures on street crime …'

The most practised Australian journalistic genre is the Letter from New York, and I thought, Chief, that I should lay down some guidelines (with examples) for the younger members of staff.

It must begin with a quote from a New York cab driver. They are always so racy, pithy, hip, colourful, insightful, and they know who's going to win (anything). But I see that the
TWA Guide to New York
says, ‘Don't be surprised if the New York taxi drivers do
not
regale you with disclosures on the city's labour problems or a critique of the current administration …' Evidently they are tired of being interviewed by Australian reporters (and academics doing an obligatory piece to qualify for a taxation deduction) who arrived at Kennedy Airport. Anyhow, I haven't found a driver who speaks complete English.

 

An insight into the colour question:
In a Western Union office I was sending a telegram when a negro boy about 18, swaggered in and said in a loud voice to no one in particular, to us all in general, ‘Ah is going home, I've had enough of this town. I'm telling my mama I'm coming home.' He took a pile of telegram forms and pen poised, turned to me and said, ‘Say, man, how
you spell Detroit?' I told him. He wrote that down and then turned to me again, ‘How you spell Michigan?' (Maybe that's a literacy-crisis item more than a colour-question item.)

 

Ain't-it-a-tough-city-incident:
Being a warm-hearted and easy-going guy, at ease with the world, I began talking to a black whore in the Biltmore bar. I wasn't interested in doing business with her – I was there, wasn't I, to visit room 2109 where Scott and Zelda had their honeymoon – but nor, on the other hand, was I doing a reporter-who-pays-whore-for-interview-but-does-not-touch-her-story. We talked about the dreams we had for ourselves and our people. She told me how in the 1930s and 1940s coloured people couldn't kiss on stage or screen because it showed they had real human emotion. I said that in Australia men were still not allowed to kiss sheep on stage and screen. She said that she thought men were not allowed to kiss sheep on stage or screen even in New York! The conversation had that relaxing frankness you get with a stranger when you're feeling low and don't give a damn. However, I did keep an alert nerve near my wallet. She complimented me on my sensitivity to her race and to animals. We said goodnight (I was too tired). Back in my hotel room I found that while my wallet was still with me, my American Express card, which I kept separately in another pocket, was missing. She'd stolen it. Since then I've been told that stolen credit cards are worth $500 on the street. I fell into a deep depression
– travellers who lose their American Express card are like police officers who lose their guns.

Prostitutes have taken over the language of radical psycho therapy and call whorehouses ‘sensitivity centres' and the whores are called ‘counsellors'. Seems reasonable to me.

 

How some things are universal and never changing even in New York:
An eight-year-old negro boy in East Harlem to his friend: ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?' The friend said, ‘Because he saw your face.' The eight-year-old said, ‘No, to get to the other side.'

 

A New York subway graffiti story:
Young people still do elaborate illegal decoration of the subway trains with spray paint, although now art galleries and art groups take up the best and market their work. But my carriage was done through with ‘Ricardo is finished with graffiti'.

 

A dinner party in Greenwich Village which sums it all up story:
An academic lives with a woman who is a feminist psychotherapist. She runs a Women's Psychotherapy Referral Service – fifty psychotherapists who have been active in the women's movement and have participated in consciousness raising. At dinner they told me they were going to marry after having lived together, ‘It is the most bohemian thing left to do in New York – getting married'. Someone at the dinner party asked the woman if she were going to invite her group-therapy patients
to the wedding. She laughed and said no, it was going to be a traditional family wedding ‘with vows, the lot'.

 

Quaint ideas about Australia story:
A drunken professor of music from Maryland asked me if I had ever screwed a sheep because he'd heard that a bit of that went on down under. I said it was interesting that he should mention that as I had heard a paper in Italy on just that subject. Oh really? he said. He said the thing that intrigued him was how you chose which one to screw when there were 53 million of them. I said that according to the paper it was like being in a lift, there is always one person in the lift you would go to bed with by the time it has reached your floor. But, he said, there was no communication, the sheep couldn't express
its
preferences. I said that speech was not the only band of communication. It was no different to making love with someone who couldn't speak English. He was satisfied by my answers. I said I'd send him a copy of the academic's paper from Italy. I always wanted to ask, he said. ‘One day I'd like to visit Australia.'

 

What's happening in art
(to show that painters are crazy and art no longer makes sense and why don't they get back to painting landscapes and horses): At the downtown Whitney, Agnes Denes has
An Exhibition of Human Dust
, photographic and mixed media. It includes bones, sperm and other human mong. That's called mixed media. In the same exhibition there was a space with the words ‘withdrawn in protest'. The artist
had entered a painting and withdrawn it because he was opposed to galleries. Another exhibit is about a hundred photographs of people cleaning and working in an office building (the building, in fact, where the exhibition was) called,
I Make Maintenance Art One Hour Every Day.
The artist, Merle Laderman Ukeles, wrote to the people who cleaned the building and asked them to consider one hour of their day of regular work to be ‘art'. The artist photographed them during one of these hours. Agnes Denes was lucky that her exhibit wasn't cleaned away during Merle Laderman Ukeles's project.

 

What's happening among the radicals:
There are Demon Dances against the nuclear war. I call them demon dances because they often seem to involve coffins and death and skeletons.

There was a memorial service for the American socialist Eugene Victor Debs who ran for the presidency five times from 1912. He polled at best a million votes – about one-sixth of the votes cast then. He campaigned from jail once where he spent three years for opposing American participation in World War I. I have always liked his remark that people had to make socialism them selves. ‘If ‘I could lead you to socialism someone else could lead you out.' Three hundred old socialists attended the service.

 

What are the intellectuals talking about at parties:
They talk about how great the 1960s were politically, how
committed and alive politics was then. I suggested that they campaign to bring back the Vietnam War.

 

What is the newest current expression:
‘When we come down to the wire.' No one knew where it came from. Maybe the wire is the barbed wire that troops had to face in trench warfare. There is a lot of talk about ‘energy'. On my last trip energy meant fuel and the world energy crisis. Now the word has jumped across to mean ‘creativity', as if the trauma of Americans losing their fuel power, their automobiles, has continued as an anxiety about their personal drive. So everyone wants to mix with energised people, people are frightened about losing their energy – vitamin taking began during the fuel crisis. People are looking for ‘energy foods'. People talk about places where the energy is or isn't. Australia is where the energy is. The Australian film industry is where the energy is. New viruses are feared because they take away your energy. They talk of aerobic energy (from food input) and anaerobic energy (from the body's reserve).

 

What is the latest food fad:
energy foods. Even chewing gum is being advertised as giving ‘a lift' i.e. in energy. I still use neat Jack Daniel's or a Stinger.

 

A New York Jewish story:
One late-middle-age Jewish woman to another, ‘In Israel, tell me, how much to have your mouth rehabilitated?' Before the other woman could answer, the New York woman went on
to say that in New York to have a ‘mouth survey', new teeth and ‘general reconstructions' cost $5,000.

 

But New York is still a very conservative city:
I couldn't get into Regines, the discotheque, because I wasn't wearing a ‘regular jacket and tie'.

The obligatory piece on New York should also include a
Warm-hearted American people story
, and a
Pithy New York bartender remark
and
A piece on the Chrysler Building.