American corrections

I couldn't sleep last night. Some woman was screaming at me. Telling me how offensive I am. Did I mention I've been reading 'The Corrections' by Jonathan Franzen?'?  No? Well I have. It's about an American family. Anyway there's a scene on a cruise ship where a doctor prescribes pills that alleviate shame and it kept going round in my head. The whole thing got mixed up with another family in 'American Pastoral' by Philip Roth who have a mixed up teenage daughter. So I'm wandering round the house groping for the Mountgay when I notice a flickering from what we call the TV room. It's a sort of entertainment center off the main living room. Inside I find Oscar flipping through the channels. He is wearing his Glenn Beck Gangster Vest and nothing else.

"What's up?" I ask. "Can't sleep?" He nods. Obviously not feeling very chatty. He's just slumped there with a bottle in one hand and the remote in the other. The channels flip by. We watch a few minutes of Larry King interviewing Pamela Anderson. She seems like a nice girl. Larry and Pam discuss implants. Then Pamela mentions she's been a bit bored since she split up with Tommy Lee. Ah-hah I think. Now's your chance Dick. Maybe I'll invite her down for the weekend. Next we get a few seconds of Bush going on about nucular weapons. Then it's 'Air America' (Mel Gibson and the girls from the Black Cat Bar in Chiang Mai). Half a minute of some bloke in front of a big map. Strippers...then...out of nowhere...
"Bloody hell Oscar look at that!"
"What?"
"On the telly....what channel's that for fuckssake?" I can't hardly believe my eyes!! There's a group of blokes playing guitar on the telly. One of them is Lemmy Kilmister! Lemmy! There he stands with his bass and there's Dave Gilmour and Mark Knopfler and some other blokes...what's going on here?

Must be French and Saunders I decide. Couple of funny girls they are. Anyway it didn't last long then it was back to casinos in Biloxi, Hunter Thompson's funeral and some bloke flogging blenders. I suppose it must all mean something. I went back to bed.

Grilled barracuda.

Being tied up makes you think. Mainly you think of ways to get out of it. I ran through several possible postmodern scenarios during my own entrammelation.
 
At one point I had Arthur bursting in with a SWAT team. Very unlikely. Or Simon showing up on one of his trips to BVI and stumbling across Oscar’s island by accident. Pamela Anderson shows up for a photo shoot and unties us somehow when Nigel and his gang are asleep.
 
None of those things happened. In fact it was Audrey, Oscar’s cook from Tortola, who found us. The villains had gone taking the Treasure ™ with them of course. I’m not sure what happened to the girls but Oscar’s credit cards were missing too.
 
So that cleared things up a bit. She’s a nice girl Audrey I should say. Four kids, full figure, always cheerful, very good cook. She used to drive a bus on Tortola before she came to work for Oscar. Apart from being a great cook she’s a mine of information about the Virgin Islands. She was at school with many local politicians. She also keeps a close eye on invasive species and any potential inbreeding. She is happy to discuss these and other matters whilst gutting a barracuda.
 
Good old Audrey. She soon had us back to normal. Oscar quickly got back to his old self. Ranting and raving. He was very pissed off needless to say. 
 
“That little prick with his ‘save the world’ crap! Calling me a rich pervert. Jealousy that’s what it is Dick! They want what I’ve got. But they don’t want to work for it. Bunch of parasites that’s what they are. What do they know about the porn business? I was a pioneer in that business. Look how many people I employed and they accuse me of exploitation! Exploitation! Am I exploiting you Audrey?”
“You giving me a headache." says Audrey, " How do you want the fish cooked?” 
"Grilled please Audrey," I say.
​“We’ll get the bastards Dick. Don’t worry. And we’ll get the treasure back. And I’ll fix that Nigel. I know his type. He’s probably some low-level human rights activist working for an obscure NGO. Wants to turn this island into a refugee camp.”
 
And so on. I have to listen to it. He usually cools down but this time he seems set to explode.
“You need to do something physical Oscar.” I say.
“Don’t look at me.” Says Audrey.
 
Later I find him installing the swivel gun on Millie’s bow. Millie is surprisingly undamaged. For some reason Blackjack and his mates didn’t take an ax to her.

Getting real.

“That’s it,” I say, “Nigel you’re gone.”

“What?”

“You’re out mate.”

“You mean I’m not going to be in the blog?”

“Right. Piss off. I’ve got too many characters already and you’re a pain in the arse. I’m scrapping you. Good bye.”

“May I remind you Headley you are still trussed up at my mercy. I might even start writing the blog myself”

“You’d never get the tone right.”

 “Don’t be so sure. I will give a full account of your profligate lifestyle. How you and Oscar fly around here there and everywhere while people in the third world starve.”

I should point out that Nigel and his pals Lambert and Blackjack don’t seem to be exactly starving. They know how to use a fridge and stove. They’ve got their feet up on Oscar’s teak table and they’re tucking into what was supposed to be our dinner. Oh well let him have his rant, silly bugger, it won’t last much longer. Reality will catch up with him.

Talking of reality….philosophy alert!....I’ve had a few emails lately from people wanting to know if I’m a real person. It’s a fair question. I wonder about it myself sometimes. I even wonder about ‘reality’. This blog for instance...is it real? How real? And what about the voyage? Is it just a metaphor? And if it is what does that make me? Am I just a figment of my own imagination?

Don’t worry. There won’t be any ontology or even any epistemology but life is strange alright. 

There’s a bottomless pit just off to the side. Le gouffre as Baudelaire called it. Sometimes you need to have a strong grip on reality or over you go.

Other people often ask me if I’m ever afraid. “Are you ever afraid Dick?” other people often ask, “sailing around the ocean on your own like that. Do you not occasionally feel a twinge of trepidation?” “Well no,” I answer, “not really. I have confidence in my vessel and my skills as a yachtsman. Beyond that I simply trust in fate. I thought Cape Fear was scary though. Robert de Niro? Did you see it? That kind of madness is scary. Can’t understand how Robert can do things like that and still get any sleep. Must be on the bottle.”

But generally speaking, let’s be honest, movies aren’t frightening at all. ‘Scary’ isn’t the same as fear. Actually sitting in a cinema surrounded by strange blobs of protoplasm on a planet that is spinning around in space for no apparent reason…now that’s scary if you stop and think about it. Which is why people try not to. That’s the whole point of going to the movies is so you don’t have to think about things like that. You’re much better off concentrating on safe reassuring things like the walking dead. Leave all that cosmic stuff to the philosophers.

And, if you’re still with me, I’m not talking about running up a big overdraft and losing your mortgage here. Or breaking a tooth. I’m talking about real fear. Real mind-numbing existential terror. The kind where you wake in the night trembling and you can’t remember who the fuck you’re supposed to be. You think you’re going to sail off the edge of the world or shrivel to the size of a walnut and just disappear. Maybe that’s what Holly Golightly meant by the ‘mean reds’...“The mean reds are horrible. Suddenly you're afraid and you don't know what you're afraid of. Do you ever get that feeling?” worse than loneliness…or indefinable Angst.

Let’s say you’re a taxi driver in some Canadian city…Winnipeg or Saskatoon, in winter, 40º below and you’ve just driven a bunch of Cree Indians 20 miles out of town up an ice road…out of radio range…nothing but snowflakes in the headlights and black spruce trees out there and they say “Stop here.” Fifty bucks on the meter. They tell you to wait we’ll get your money and they walk off laughing and stumbling into the cold night and all you can do is wait. And you wait about 15 minutes and they don’t come back and you check the gas gauge because you know if the engine stops you will soon be frozen stiff. You need a piss so you get out and listen to the crunch of your boots on the snow. You think you hear a wolf howling. You can’t see where the Cree went and there is no light anywhere. After a while you say to hell with the money and you start to turn the car in the road. Shit! The car lurches and the rear wheels are spinning in the ditch. Now you’re in trouble. Get the shovel out of the trunk. Try to stay calm…where did I put that fucking flashlight? Trunk lock is frozen. Shit. There’s a button under the dash. Fuck. You've locked yourself out of the goddam car now. One of your boots comes off in a snowdrift but don’t panic...it’s not the end of the world...that kind of fear. Maybe dread is a better word.

By the way, the Cree blokes showed up with the money and helped get the car out of the ditch.