Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [95]
“Two weeks?”
This is Tasha. She's already on the plane. Luckily, she didn't turn off her phone.
“At least two. I'm completely stuck. What am I going to do?”
“Jeez, I don't know.”
“What's happened?” asks a voice in the background. Jay, I think.
“Cashmatic forgot to bring his green card. He's stuck in the terminal.”
And I swear I hear somebody giggle.
“Look, I have to go,” is her parting comment. “The plane's about to take off. Good luck.”
After a brief good-bye, the line goes dead. What the hell do I do now?
Suddenly I'm that six-year-old child abandoned in the department store all over again. Alone, lost, fearful, trampled by hundreds of strangers, and with nobody there to rescue him. Clueless where to turn, the Bewilderbeest slides down the wall and slumps on his case, the true extent of the trouble he's in only just beginning to hit home.
My next call is to the American Consulate, even though I already know it's a waste of time. Four P.M. on the Friday before Christmas, are you kidding me? The staff's probably been partying for three days already; if it's anything like the office I used to work in, there'll be sex in stationery cupboards by now and people photocopying one another's buttocks.
“You have reached the United States Consulate. Our offices are now closed…”
Told you.
There's one slim chance remaining. Mandy My dear friend from my British radio days, the one who came to visit me at the Trump International during the New York up-fronts. I can call her. She has a flat in London. She'll put me up.
“Hi. Sorry I'm not available to take your call…”
Oh, good grief!
“… I'll be out of town over the weekend, returning Monday. But if you leave a message I'll get back to you as soon as I can. Thanks.”
I'm tempted to hang up without a word. Instead, I stick a finger in one ear to muffle the din and mumble a few mournful grunts into her machine, ending with a glum, begrudging, “Merry Christmas anyway.” Hey, spread a little cheer, why not?
And that's it. I'm right out of options.
Two bleak, empty weeks with no money, no clothes, no clean underwear, and no place I can stay without frittering away half my life's savings—that's what's ahead of me. I don't even have change to buy a train ticket into Central London.
Oh, and by the way, before you say it, I am totally aware of the deep irony of this situation, don't think I'm not, and how, if I had a TV camera trained on me right now and a crew standing close by, things would be very, very different.
If this were the show and not something as tedious and unwatchable as real life, then within minutes of being ejected from the British Airways desk, I'd be inundated by an army of helpers offering to give me food and take me on a whirlwind tour of the city on a big red bus, alighting at the Dorchester Hotel, where the duty manager would hail me with a “Hey, Cash, how are you?” before I'd even introduced myself. And straight away, for no discernible reason other than the fact that he doesn't want to look like a miser on television, he'd offer me his best suite for free, with full privileges. Oh, the time I'd have.
That's the world of reality television for you.
If nothing else, the dire situation I now find myself in has served a very important purpose, proving, in one single microcosmic real-world moment, how incredibly stupid the concept behind our show really is. My friends were right; the e-mailers were right; and, though it pains me to say it, even the bloody New York Times critic was right, bless her heart: when you don't have any money and