The Gum Thief - Douglas Coupland [55]
Bethany
c/o YHA London—Hampstead Heath Hostel
4 Wellgarth Road
London, England
VIA FEDEX
Hi, Roger.
You’ll notice I’m using paper and pen again. Screw email. I want to keep our noble storyteller’s tradition alive. Kyle is already homesick and lives in the nearby Internet café, which is beside a kebab restaurant, so it all smells like grease and those spices that normal people buy and put in their spice rack but never use from one decade to the next. Question: Have you ever looked closely at a donair? Answer: Don’t.
It’s been ten days now, and I think I might actually be burning out on London. We spend all our time in subways and standing on corners looking at maps and feeling like hillbilly tourists. Question: Roger, have you ever felt depressed? Answer: Pigeons. Those poor creatures and the lives they lead. I . . . don’t want to go into it. If London is a meal, then pigeons are the parsley on top of it, except instead of being green and crisp, they’re grey and hobbling and missing toes, and while they may appear to be technically cute, they also appear to be riddled with disease and mites.
We’ve been trying to meet locals, but we’re citizens of London’s weird parasitic shadow economy. It’s composed of people like us who have the notion that we can use our grandmother’s EU birth certificate to scam our way into genuine European jobs. The only people we’re likely to encounter are fellow tribe members, none of whom are locals. Mostly they’re foreigners our age with either no job or a sketchy one, who go to these parties that go on all night. It’s dawning on me that there’s not much I’m equipped to do for a living—either here or back home— and so all I have is my attitude and my skin, which has not been touched by the sun for over five years. Today I walked past a Staples on Oxford High Street and broke out laughing: they’re identical to the ones back home.
Do you think Kyle could ever be a provider?
As I write this, he’s emailing everybody he ever went to school with or worked with to fish for more emails in return. I don’t think he’s used to being uncomfortable— this in the man I love. He’s had two stepmoms and he milked them both for all the buy-my-silence money he could—and if you factor in how totally guilty his real mom and his father felt, you can imagine the shower of comfort and trinkets that has rained down on him since the cradle. Was that last sentence too long? He’s used to being a prince, and here he’s merely another lame tourist.
Well, Bethany, Roger thanks you for the champagne flute full of negative energy you just hucked into his face.
*Sorry about that, Roger.*
There are things here that I like! The Museum of Natural History. A small display case filled with ultra-deep sea creatures was worth the admission alone—tiny, monstrous personalities frozen into animal shapes. The museum had a recreation of a dinosaur’s nest, and somebody had put extinguished cigarette butts in it, and it was like that Far Side cartoon of dinosaurs smoking, with the caption, “Why dinosaurs became extinct.”
But enticing golden boy to show a whiff of adventurous spirit is proving hard to do. If nothing else, I want to take the Chunnel to France. I can dream. The hostel is really wearing on me. I think I’m one-point-six years too old to really care about the stuff most of the hostellers care about (cheap beer; cheap tickets; an even cheaper hostel), and even something simple like doing laundry takes roughly the same amount of time, energy and money as buying and assembling a large IKEA bookshelf. And then I walk around the city and see the amazing houses people live in, and I look at my own life and I feel like a hamster.
How are Steve and Gloria? Have we met Kendall yet? And where does Gloria get tonic for her gin? I think that’s a plot point you missed. Maybe her family set her up with a beverage endowment. I’ve met a few trust-fund