A lot of this trip has been coming to terms with who I am as a person now. The first week we were in London I got an email confirming my place as a summer deckhand aboard the schooner Adventuress. This summer would be my sixth year onboard and my third year on as a crew member. I ended last season early after an injury during a rescue drill, and this season I’m being faced with the possibility of not going onboard at all.
I’m taking it a little harder than I feel I should. I never intended to consider sailing as a serious future for myself, but onboard the Adventuress has been where I’ve felt most at home. Lucky for me, one of the many good things about London is that it’s a good place to distract yourself from whatever it is you’re worrying about. One of the vices I’ve given in to on the trip is buying large quantities of books from every bookstore I go into. I’m wildly susceptible to the effects of retail therapy, apparently. These book buying adventures brought me, naturally, to Word On The Water, London’s very own bookstore on a barge. The barge was warm and cozy inside, a nice contrast to the dreary weather outside. Stacks of books line the walls and pile up against cushioned benches, and there’s a woodstove burning away in the corner. There’s already got a stack of ten new books back in my hotel room, and in a rare moment of self-control I decided to walk straight to the benches without picking up any books. I propped my cane up in a corner and settled down into the cushions. The hull creaked as the barge rocked gently against its moorings. I leaned back into the wooden walls and closed my eyes. The warmth and gentle movement of the boat nearly put me to sleep. It wasn’t the same as being on the schooner, but it was similar, something like the feeling of coming home.
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Tonight had taken a serious left turn from where it had started. I had been out to prove a point to myself, and that point was that I was notgoing to enjoy The Roxy. The real reason I was out was to support Eleanor’s need to go dancing, right up until the moment when I had to cough up a seven-pound cover and the bouncer asked me if I “really” needed my cane. From then on I was sure that tonight wasn’t going to be fun and I wasn’t particularly inclined to do anything to fix the situation. When we had first gotten downstairs the dancefloor had been dead and the bar was slow to serve drinks. The neon lighting felt kitschy, designed to inspire countless Instagram pics. There was even a table of mildly creepy forty-something men lurking in the corner across from me, thoroughly convincing me that I was right about exactly how this night would play out.
Things had started to pick up when a wildly drunk girl had shown up on the dancefloor. She was absolutely spectacular. Her understandings of rhythm, dancing, and what’s considered sexy were completely shot. She had no clue what she was doing and was completely unaware of that fact. She was shamelessly, borderline aggressively, taking up the entire dancefloor with her completely unrestrained movements. Her friend was significantly soberer and was dancing in a much more generic way, clapping on the right beat and nailing the finger guns/cash register during “Paper Planes.” The drunk girl took notice of our table and grabbed Eleanor for a dance. Saunder, Chopan, and I stayed behind to watch. By this time the two girls dancing had managed to convince other people to wander out onto the dancefloor. “See, the problem here is that Eleanor can dance,” Chopan said. “The guy in the wheelchair is rocking it. Is he cute? He might be my soulmate.” Chopan turned around to look for me. “Eh, kinda hard to tell.” The drunk girl’s friend came over to our table and grabbed Saunder, whisking her away to the dancefloor. Chopan and I were left at our table, not for want of trying on the two girls’ part. The sober girl had informed us both that needing a cane and being the oldest person on the dancefloor were lame excuses for not dancing. We stayed behind though, content to watch everything unfolding on the dancefloor. Eleanor was dancing with a skinny hipster guy with beautifully long hair now, and the drunk girl had moved on to dancing with the guy in the wheelchair. Saunder and the sober girl were dancing together. A significant crowd had moved onto the floor and the music had switched from anonymous electronic and pop to songs that everybody here, barring the table of older men, would probably know the lyrics to. The red and blue neon lights of the bar were crystalizing in the towering stack of drink glasses that we were curating on our table. I don’t remember which song convinced the drunk girl that her best shot at getting Chopan and I onto the dancefloor involved sexily crawling across the floor towards us. It may have been “Mr. Brightside,” but that doesn’t seem like a song particularly conducive to sexy crawling. It was a song that got everybody roaring the lyrics at each other though, Chopan and I included. Saunder and Eleanor returned to the table to sing “Dog Days Are Over” with us and to finish off the last of their drinks. After a few pictures with the tower of finished drinks and goodbyes exchanged with the drunk girl and her friend we were out on the street, heading back to the hotel. My jaded start to the night had given way to something spontaneous and magical, entirely catalyzed by the drunk girl and her beautiful lack of self-consciousness. I briefly considered going back a few days later, hoping to relive some proximity of that night, but I decided against it. I wanted my memories of The Roxy to stay exactly the way they were, perfectly preserved like the neon light caught in our tower of empty drink glasses. I’m lying on a table in the basement of a streetwear shop getting my third tattoo in two days. Loz, the artist, is bracing my arm against the center of his chest. I can feel the warmth of his body even though he’s wearing a thick sweatshirt. He’s cute, especially when he puts on his gold wire-rimmed glasses to get a closer look at the rows of scales he’s inking on my forearm. I’m starting to question whether I’m really as gay as I say I am, and I’m hoping it’s just the adrenaline and the aching of my new tattoos responding to the facsimile of physical comfort he’s providing.
I wish I could talk right now but I’m resting my chin on my shoulder, watching him work, and talking makes my arm move. He asks me a question every once in a while, exactly like a dentist trying to have a conversation while his fingers are in a patient’s mouth. I do my best to nod yes or no without disturbing his work. Last night I spent most of the time asking him about himself and he told me about how he started working in the shop, his favorite designs to tattoo, and the few customers who have been too squirmy to tattoo properly. The design he’s tattooing now is the first actually impulsive tattoo I’ve ever gotten. I made the decision to get an ouroboros last night as I was getting my ankle tattoos. There’s a corkboard with dozens of Loz’s designs hanging on the wall over his table. Most of them are Greek busts cut on a diagonal and curling, intricate snakes, with a few roses and knives thrown in for variety. Yesterday I had asked him if he had any more openings during January, and he had penciled me in for today. Today I’m getting an ouroboros in the shape of a figure eight, Loz’s take on the tattoo from the movie Annihilation.In the movie, the design transfers from one of the main characters to the rest as the alien landscape they’ve been sent to explore starts to change their DNA. Is it a little edgy to get a tattoo from a sci-fi/horror movie? I guess so, but I love the movie and the book it’s based on. I’m trying not to think about whether I’m going to regret this tattoo. Loz’s needle reaches the top of the tattoo, right below the inside of my elbow. It’s almost painless despite how thin the skin is there. After a few more minutes of painstakingly drawing in the scales and evening out the thickness of the outline, Loz is done. I take a moment to move and stretch as he gently rinses off my arm. I have to lay still for a few more minutes as he takes videos of himself uncovering the fresh tattoo and close-up pictures of the thin lines. Being his model for a few minutes is uncomfortably alluring. Being under the bright studio lights while he leans over me, admiring his own work, is intimate in a way that I didn’t expect. He carefully wraps my arm up once he’s done and I hand him a stack of pounds. Loz gives me a hug as I walk out the front door and into the cold London air. I rub my arm through my jacket, feeling the ridges of the plastic wrap and medical tape underneath it. I have a moment of worry that maybe I know too much about myself now, that I’ve done and learned something that I can’t take back. There’s only a few minutes before I’m supposed to be back at the hotel and ready to leave for Swan Lakethough so I take off down Oxford Street, hoping that if I move fast enough I won’t have the time to explore how I feel about tonight. The bass player at the Portobello Market is a tall, thin man, the perfect embodiment of the word “grizzled.” He’s wearing a mustard-yellow knit beanie that matches the color of his thick eyebrows and wiry hair. He’s got a red bandana peeking out from the breast pocket of his denim jacket and his fingerless gloves, one black and one gray, are fraying at the edges. His jeans are cuffed over faded black combat boots.
His bass looks just as worn as his appearance. It’s an old plywood upright with all of the varnish stripped off, giving it a rough, streaked surface. The edges have a mosaic pattern from where the wood has chipped and been glued back on. There’s a golden bell hanging from a red ribbon tied around the scroll of the bass. I’m sitting a few feet in front of him, out in the street, trying to get a good picture. His face is absolutely amazing, contorting with the words that he’s singing, more expression rendered in his black eyes than most people can display with their whole bodies. He’s walking a mean bassline and singing songs that I don’t recognize the lyrics to, his breath freezing in the air in front of him. I only played upright bass for a short amount of time, only around a year, and I played classical, but it’s still enough for me to be able to recognize how hard it must be to play in this temperature. I snap pictures until a car honks at me and I scramble out of the street. I drop a five pound note into his hat as I leave and he effortlessly switches to singing a romantic ballad. When I come back a few minutes later he’s gone, the area where he was standing swallowed by a throng of people waiting for a break in traffic. Later that night I can’t find any songs that match the lyrics he was singing. In Sea-Tac airport the clerk at a Hudson News store if I’m a veteran. I tell her no, no I’m not, and she says, “I was just wondering because we have a discount for that.” She stands up straight again, no longer leaning over the counter to look at my legs.
I’m sitting on the couch in the lobby of the Ridgemount Hotel on my first day in London, waiting for my room to be ready. Professor Chopan walks in. “What’s up with that?” He asks, gesturing to my cane. We talk for a while, and as I leave he says, “You really know how to rock a disability.” I feel a little better about needing a cane. Eleanor and I walk almost ten miles on our first full day in London – the longest distance I’ve walked since high school. I don’t nap afterwards, and I feel well enough to go out for dinner that night. On January 7thI bring Gabby to the ER for her hurt foot. Whenever we walk into a room together the nurses address me first before realizing Gabby is the one who needs assistance. Later that night I get a tattoo of a wing on each of my ankles. I expect the artist to crack a joke about the design but he doesn’t. The next day I go back to the same tattoo artist to get an ouroboros in the shape of a figure eight tattooed on my forearm. The design is from Annihilation,the tattoo that the characters get as their DNA is changed by the alien landscape around them. Later than night we go to see Swan Lakeand I get teary-eyed twice, once before intermission and at the end when the Prince dies. I’ve never made it through an entire Tchaikovsky piece without shedding a few tears. There’s just something so tragic and moving in a repressed Russian composer’s work being reimagined with two male leads. I find a strange glass decoration at Alfie’s. It’s a woman’s torso rendered in red and orange blown glass, suspended from a metal frame. A metal hook pierces through the glass forming the back of the woman’s neck, right where the top of her spine would be. Anneliese and I stop outside of Greenwich Market to look at a giant ship in a bottle outside of the National Maritime Museum. I tell her the secret to getting a ship in a bottle, how the masts lie flat against the hull, which can fit through the bottle’s neck, and are pulled upright by strings once inside. “Or you can just build the entire boat inside the bottle,” I say. But there isn’t much of a trick to that, just a lot of talent and tiny, long-handled tools. I also tell her that I’ve been accepted to work on the Adventuressagain this summer, and that I’m worried that this year will be my last year there. I’m actually worried that last year will be my last year there, but I’m trying to stay positive about everything. Before going to see Motown a group of us go to Word on the Water together. There’s a woodstove inside and some benches covered in soft pillows. I nearly fall asleep in there. If I can’t be a sailor I’ll just get a book barge in London, I decide. I decide to walk all the way to the top of St. Paul’s. Part of me was hoping that, by some miracle, I would reach the top and be un-crippled in a divine moment of glory. The view at the top is okay—it’s a cloudy day and I’m preoccupied with the sudden remembering of my extreme fear of heights—and I’m so tired that I fall asleep on a bench between the crypts and the gift shop once I get back down all the stairs. Eleanor and I go into Cyberdog after exploring Camden Market. The first basement level is full of fluorescent rave gear and t-shirts with cyberpunk designs printed on them, all topped off by a giant, glowing display of audio equalizer bars moving in time to the music blasting over the speakers. I briefly entertain the thought of publically leaning into my self-identification as an ex-cyborg by buying a stack of tank tops with Geiger-esque spinal column designs on the back. As I leave, no tank tops in hand, I feel a moment of longing for the sensation of defective metal buzzing around my spine, resonating with the music around me. Knowing that I won’t ever feel it again is extremely comforting and a little sad in turns. At The Angel, Ray, an elderly bar patron with about three visible teeth, tells me that I should get myself a sword cane. He says that there’s a place down the road that sells umbrellas, walking sticks, and, apparently, sword canes. “The government’s shut down,” I say, “so now’s a good time to sneak one through TSA.” Later that night I go to the ER after accidentally doubling my dose of cold medicine and Advil. I let the nurse start an IV in my left arm, the arm I’ve always used for blood draws and IVs, and don’t realize I’ve made a mistake until I try to walk out to the waiting room to send Saunder home. I’ve still got a lot to get used to, as far as having a cane goes. I fly home from London On January 24th. A very young boy at my gate is extremely interested by my tattoos and “pink” hair. He doesn’t speak a lick of English and his Spanish is too fast and jumpy for me to understand well. He traces his fingers over the snake on my forearm and insists on giving me jalapeno chips, even after I tell him I’m not hungry. He asks me why I’m not good at walking and his mom gasps and starts to scold him. I don’t have the vocabulary to reassure him that yes, actually, I am good at walking, so I hand him my cane and walk around our row of seats without it. He claps for me as I sit back down next to him. |
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