Travels with Penny: True Tales of a Gay Guy and His Mother (7 page)

“How do I use it?”

“Read the manual, dummy.”

I held up the thick book and began thumbing through it. “The instructions are thicker than the gadget.”

“You’ll figure it out.”

It took me about an hour to figure out how to turn it on, a day to figure out how to change from DICTIONARY to CURRENCY EXCHANGE and a week to understand how to plug in the formula. With the thrill of a man who had just scaled Mount Everest, I called her giddy with glee.

“I did it!” I bragged.

“Good. You can take care of the money,” Mom said. “Then if I come home broke, I can blame you.”

No sweat. I had it together. Or rather I
thought
I did until we sat on a train somewhere outside of Brugge. We seem to have burned through the British pounds with amazing speed, and I had a strange suspicion that my electronic mastery hadn’t been quite so masterful. Grabbing my reading glasses, I poured through the instruction book again—this time, unhampered by phones, emails and other people to talk to. Thus far on our trip, I had assumed that the value of the U.S. dollar was input first, then the exchange rate; the resulting number would be the local equivalent, which we then could calculate into Euros without the aid of technology. But when the calculator came back with some astronomically ridiculous number, I gave up and handed it off to Mom, who tossed it back to me like some twentieth-century hot potato. Between us, we were able to figure out that we had just spent a week in London giving everyone double the tip we intended. Great … first they forced Margaret Thatcher upon us, then they used us to double their Gross Domestic Product. The U.K.
so
owed us one.

The cab screeched to a halt in front of a narrow brick building standing between what appeared to be two vacant warehouses. The driver nodded to us, then to the building. It didn’t take an Einstein to interpret the body language: We had arrived. As the cab idled and rain poured down in sheets on a night so black I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face, I bent down in front of the cab’s headlights so I could see inside my wallet. Suddenly remembering that I had neglected to calculate the exchange rate, I gave him $40 American. I figured if it wasn’t enough he’d spit on me or whatever it was Belgian people do when insulted. When his face lit up and he started nodding saying, “Danke! Thanks to you! Gracias!” I figured I had just given him a 1,000% tip. Nobody says “thank you” in three languages, not even a cab driver.

As our two traveling companions had evaporated into thin air, Mom and I were left to check into the hostel. Luckily, the young workers knew some English and spoke it clearly enough to inform us that yes, they do rent linens. This was when I learned that, in hostel terms linens are what we Americans call “sheets.” Mom asked about towels, and the workers rolled their eyes.

“No. No towels. Linens.”

“Aren’t towels ‘linens’?” Mom whispered to me.

“Not in Brussels.” I told her.

“We didn’t bring towels?” Mom asked.

“Not me.”

“How are we going to shower?” She asked.

“Showering isn’t the problem. It’s the drying off part that is tricky.” I found it hard to believe that tucked away in a duffle bag the size of a woolly mammoth Mom didn’t have a towel. My mother is the kind who carries one of everything in her purse “just in case.” I think she watched too much TV in the ‘70s and was lead to believe that at any minute the producers of
Let’s Make a Deal
would snatch her off the street and offer her a million bucks for a 1957 penny. How a woman who straps hand sanitizer to her purse would go to Europe without a towel mystified me. I knew why I didn’t—I’m impulsive and reckless. But Mom? Unbelievable.

More surprises awaited us upstairs in the room.

“I thought you said we had a bath?” Mom asked.

“I did.” I looked at the10x10 room. It was utilitarian and clean: a white tiled floor, large window overlooking a dark street, two sets of bunk beds and a sink.

“Where’s the bathroom?” Mom asked

How was I supposed to know that in hostel language, a “bath” means a sink? Apparently, showers aren’t foremost in most European’s minds. Positive that somewhere a shower and toilet were hidden away from the crazed masses of smelly travelers, Mom headed into the hallway with one mission: Find the shower. A moment later she returned, a frown on her face. “There’s one bathroom for the whole floor,” she said shaking her head. “The toilet and the shower are over there.” She pointed across the hallway. “No towels.”

* * *

One of the fun rituals of traveling is investigating the hotel room when you arrive in a new city. Although the rooms vary little from place to place, I find it impossible to resist the temptation to look under the bed, open the drawers and click through the TV stations. This is a childish ritual, as most of the time you find nothing but lint, a Gideon Bible and pay-per-view porn, but I do it nonetheless. One time I found a stash of condoms under the bed and a couple of matchbooks in the drawer. I suppose I should have been repulsed by the lackluster maid service, but I thought it was funny. Kind of like a scavenger hunt without the running around town inviting disaster.

So while my then-current boyfriend and his sister headed out to find a store for snacks and, if possible, towels, Mom and I explored the room. Three minutes later we sat on the bunk beds looking at each other expectantly. (
Note to self
: the difference between “hotel room” and “hostel” is one dresser and no bathroom.)

“What do we do now?” she asked. I shrugged. There wasn’t a TV to watch, nor a comfy chair to curl up in and read a book. So far, hostels in Brussels were a bust.

Mom opened up her mammoth duffle bag, reached in and handed me a small package wrapped in cellophane. I ripped open the cellophane to reveal a tiny hand-towel brilliantly colored with embroidered red, blue and gold sea life. Along one side was a scene of a cartoon fish underwater billowing cute cartoon air bubbles and on the opposite side, seaweed. It was adorable. It was dry. It was about four inches square.

“It gets bigger when it gets wet.”

“I hope so.” I said, holding up the Barbie-sized towel.

“Try it and see.”

“Where? For what?”

“In the sink.” She motioned to the corner. “I saw them in the store and thought they were cute. I got myself one, too.” She pulled another fabric sample from her bag. “They were on sale!”

“What do we use them for, Mom?” Even if they did grow when they got wet, they’d only dry off a person the size of Mini-Me.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, opening her towel and admiring it. “But I got them two for a dollar.”

Shortly after our discovery of the mini-towels, our traveling companions arrived back from the store with cigarettes, snacks and couple of rolls of paper towels. Mom grabbed a role of paper towels and shrugged.

“What the hell. I’ll pretend we’re camping,” she said, heading across the hall to the communal bathroom.

While the other two unpacked, the movie theatre in my mind ran the coming attractions of Dad’s tantrum when he found out about this leg of the journey. We hadn’t been across the Atlantic for a week and already we’d forced Mom to violate the one cardinal rule she had laid out for us before leaving the States: she didn’t want to share a bathroom.

In the end, we all learned a couple of valuable lessons: It only takes a half roll of paper towels to dry off after a shower; it pays to clarify “bathroom” and “shower” when reserving rooms at a hostel, and those tiny travel towels really do get bigger when they get wet.

“Told you so,” Mom said proudly. “Aren’t you happy I bought them?” she asked after I had showered that night. “Now what do you think about your crazy mother?”

I shrugged and held up the fabric, which had expanded to the size of a kitchen dish towel. “Who knew?”

“Trust your mother,” she said, climbing into the bottom bunk. “Now you have to convince your father that I’m doing fine not staying in expensive hotels. I’m easy. I ain’t cheap, but I’m easy.”

“Dad is never to find out about this,” I said. “He’s already got one strike against me for reserving a hostel instead of a Hilton. If he finds out about the shared bathroom, he’ll kill me.”

“Oh, there’s plenty of other things for him to kill you for,” she said, settling in.

Great, I thought. There’s still two weeks left. Maybe with luck I’ll be kidnapped by a band of Gypsies, face an ancient Belgian curse or be carried off by a crazed Pterodactyl. The Gypsies would be preferable. I look pretty good in loose-fitting clothes.

* * *

When we checked in the previous night, the two college coeds pretending to be front desk clerks informed us that the hostel provided “light food to break the fast.” Their misuse of English was cute: What they lacked in proficiency they made up for in enthusiasm. We assumed “light food” didn’t mean air-puffed junk food like marshmallows and Cheetos, so the next morning we threw on our still-wet clothing and cursed the lack of an in-room coffee maker. Hostels are cheap accommodations geared to young folks who think sleeping in a sheep pasture during a rain storm is quaint, so I didn’t worry about showering before heading down to break my fast. I just shoved a baseball cap on my head and headed out the door. I felt a bit nervous about potentially being the oldest one in the room. Mom, on the other hand, didn’t care.

“I’m old,” she told me with a shrug. “Get over it.” While she didn’t look her fifty-plus years, she certainly didn’t look twenty either. We descended the stairs to the common room where the continental breakfast lay spread out like a days-old salad bar at Sizzler.

To my surprise, the crowd in the huge dining area was anything but college-aged kids. The people gobbling cheese and gnawing on toast ranged from the very young to couples who looked to be approximately Mom’s age.

“I guess it’s not just college kids,” I said to Mom.

“Thank God. That’s all we need—kegger parties and loud music all night.”

“Ma,” I said, “you have insomnia anyway.”

“I know. I’m just jealous they’re having more fun than I am.”

I wanted to ask how she knew about kegger parties, but was afraid of the answer I might hear. A woman who blunders into a Greenwich Village sex shop certainly wouldn’t let a keg of beer and puking college kids intimidate her.

We took our place in line and moved slowly past the yogurt, cereal and fresh fruit.

“I wonder if I can order eggs,” Mom said.

“You can ask,” I shrugged.

“Ah, never mind, it’s okay. I’m easy. I ain’t cheap, but I’m easy.”

Unlike the United States, where sugar or corn syrup is mated with chemicals then added to everything, food in Europe contains vitamins and nutrients. All my friends had warned me not to expect the sugary sweetness of the States, but I didn’t realize how serious they were until the morning after our arrival in Europe. We had just sat down to our first breakfast in Great Britain, and I glanced around the table, unable to identify any of the foodstuffs set out by our host. I honed in on the small plastic yogurt containers. Ah! The familiar pictures of berries and honey I had come to know and love! I ripped open the lid and dug in. Bitter, tongue-curling tartness ripped at my taste buds and set my mouth watering. If this was natural food, I wanted my corn syrup back. Sure it packs on the gelatinous fat, but I’m an American. We like sweet-tasting goodies. Gelatinous fat is what Weight Watchers was invented for.

So when Mom wondered about her eggs, I secretly hoped she’d succeed in finding a chicken. The thought of another breakfast of cold cereal with the taste and texture of cardboard made me want to hurl bangers and mash at the nearest Brit. I meandered over to the table housing the hot foods and my eyes fell upon the Holy Grail of breakfast glory: scrambled eggs mixed with bacon bits. I motioned for Mom to come over.

“Grab us some!” She said, pushing me to the table.

Clutching a plate, I made my way through the throng surrounding the hotplates and elbowed into position. I watched as spoonful after spoonful of eggs disappeared onto the plates of the other guests, who apparently hadn’t eaten in days, judging by the way they piled on the food.

Just as I approached the hotplate, an arm appeared from the other side of the table. It belonged to a husky man with several gold chains around his neck and a thick Rolex watch. I looked at him in disappointment as he spooned out the rest of the scrambled eggs and handed me the spoon before turning to disappear into the crowd. Just then I spotted a hostel worker approaching with a huge stack of toast. I motioned to the empty bowl and he shrugged.

“Eggs gone.”

I returned to Mom bearing an orange.

“That’s okay. I like oranges. I’m easy. I ain’t cheap, but I’m easy,” she said.

* * *

With every step, I felt the echo reverberate through my intestines. My stomach churned and growled so loudly people mistook me for a crazed coyote. We had been hiking through Brussels all day and had totally skipped lunch, so when I suggested an early dinner, everyone agreed. Mom kept saying, “I’m easy. I ain’t cheap, but I’m easy,” and by now I was ready to toss her into the street because she proved this to be a lie; every time I tried to duck into a restaurant along the way, Mom shook her head no. It was her opinion that we had already eaten something similar yesterday, or the menu didn’t look good, or the place looked old and dirty.

“Mom,” I explained, trying to keep from yelling, “this is Europe. Everything’s old.”

“Old, yes, but not dirty.”

“You need to cut them some slack,” I said. “These buildings survived World War Two, for God’s sake.”

“From the looks of them, so did the food.”

I looked around, praying to spot something familiar amongst all the neon. I didn’t bring my travel dictionary and, thus, couldn’t read the street signs, so I could have died from hunger two blocks from a Pizza Hut. I wanted food. I didn’t care about the ethnicity, the price, or the cleanliness of the building’s exterior. My head felt helium-filled and my knees buckled. I was well on my way to joining the Donner Party and Hannibal Lector on the list of “People You Don’t Want To Have Dinner With.” How in the hell did this happen? It’s Europe, for God’s sake, not the Sahara. It’s not like we were stranded in miles of sand looking for an oasis. We’d been passing Burger Kings, McDonald’s and take-away Teriyaki places for blocks.