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Published: January 26th 2010
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Miami skyline.My second Christmas Stateside pretty much as expected came and went in the blink of an eye, a series of celebrations in the form of various Belmont Shore parades and parties preceded a very enjoyable Christmas Day which commenced with a now traditional early morning cobweb freeing run on the beach, continued with presents with the Kirby's, several Skyped conversations to loved ones back home, a steak dinner and an hour or so in the pub and culminated in wine with neighbours on the balcony. The following morning, struggling to remember what a holiday, Christmas or otherwise actually felt like I loaded the winter woollies into the car and with Phil and the girls hit the road North, destination Mammoth Mountain.
Managing my personal finances since my arrival in America has proven to be a bit of dilemma. A desire to travel and to do as I please when I please with scant or little regard for expense has ensured that saving has become not only an improbability but actually more of an impossibility. In other words in recent times my finances haven’t been ‘managed’ at all, my bank balance
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USA's most Southerly point, 4.15am, 1st Jan', '10. We'd have just carried on walking. slowly but surely disappearing like the contents of a bucket with a large hole being refilled by a teacup and a straw.
Agreeing to pay 200 dollars a month to go quarter shares in a Mammoth Mountain Motel room for the winter ski season is a perfect example of my lavish, dare I say wasteful spending. It seemed like a good idea at the time bearing in mind I’d just splashed out a further 600 dollars on a seasonal lift pass but hindsight is a very revealing thing and to this point in time, three months and 600 dollars rent into the season all I have to show is just three nights in a cramped and stuffy single bed with nothing but the snoring sound of the Kirby clan for company.
Any doubts about making the right decision almost completely dissipated however on the first morning I spent up on the piste, the day after Boxing Day.
Christmas holiday week is notoriously the busiest week of the year on the slopes and streets of Mammoth, the mountain taking on a rush hour 405esque feel where queuing is the name of the game and where, much like crossing
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What a disappointment ! the road in Vietnam, only the brave or the daring survive. Thankfully though we were in on the best kept secret in California, discovered last year, that to drive fifteen miles out of Mammoth to sister mountain June will deliver you to a sparsely populated mountain with well groomed slopes that slice through the forests of mountain pine and that make you feel, just as they did last year, that you have the whole mountain all to yourself. Suddenly, halfway down the first run of the day it felt like money well spent.
After a third night in the mountains we returned to Long Beach exhausted to prepare for the real holiday, a four night New Year break in sunny Florida. We were a couple of hours into the long journey home and were crawling though the middle of Owens Valley, a flat desert scrubland sandwiched between the Sierra Nevada and Inyo mountain ranges where summer temperatures soar as high as 110 degrees and winters remain freezing when Phil made an off the cuff remark about the large building and the timber watchtower to our right being where the Japanese POW’s were housed during World War II.
We’d
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Happy New Year. The red shoe, Key West 2010. driven this route several times together and yet he’d never mentioned this fact but my inquisitiveness had been awoken and within seconds we were pulling into the car park of the Manzanar National Historic Site Museum. I soon learned that this was the site of the ‘concentration’ camp where 10,000 West Coast Japanese Americans, not POW’s mind, were rounded up and locked away for the remainder of WWII following the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor, shacked up in row after row of Auschwitz style barracks under the watchful eye of armed guards and all despite the fact that Uncle Sam already had 5,000 Japanese Americans serving loyally within his army ranks. It was all news to me.
The biggest surprise of all however came when a film playing on the museums big screen showed president of the day Ronald Reagan making a sincere and apparently heartfelt public apology on behalf of the American nation and pledging to present the survivors with cash payments for their penance. Old Ronnie always appeared sincere if nothing else, he was an actor after all but a politician admitting wrong doing ! Will Wonders never cease.
Starting a four day trip that bears
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Money well spent. View from June Mountain. every prospect of being restricted in the sleep department with a ‘red eye’ through the night flight is probably not the best preparation and sure enough, when Delta Airlines Flight 1608 touched down in Fort Lauderdale at a dark and chilly 6am neither Phil nor I had managed a wink of sleep. Not that it seemed to matter, the excitement of our little break allied to the pending meet up with our old pal Jamie who’d flown in from the UK was enough to keep us going and when half an hour and numerous back and forth texts later we finally located each other, Jamie having parked patiently on the lower level of Arrivals as we waited a floor above we headed off on the spectacular three hour drive south to Key West. It was still dark as we pulled away from the airport but before long the sun came up and the waters that flanked the single laned highway turned turquoise before our very eyes. Sleep suddenly seemed the furthest thing from my mind.
Key West, the furthest adrift of a chain of narrow islands at Florida's tip is famous for several reasons; Spectacular sunsets, conches and Ernest
Hemingway not to mention for being America’s most southerly point and for possessing what must be close to it’s highest per capita percentage of sexually confused and misunderstood people. It is also widely regarded as being one of the countries top places for celebrating the arrival of a New Year and by the time midnight approached we’d walked the length of legendary Duvall Street innumerable times consuming various tropical concoctions such as 'Swampwater' and 'Rum Runners' as we went and been joined not only by friends John and Kath from back home but also by a reputed 25,000 other revelers. As the clock struck twelve we were crammed sardine like outside the infamous Sloppy Joe’s pub being drenched from above by champers watching the island tradition of a fat transvestite being lowered to the street in a red stiletto shoe !
With Jamie having called it a night an hour or so earlier the evening ended for Phil and I with a walk back to the hotel that almost resulted in wet feet by the buoy that marks the Nation’s southernmost point, a surefire sign that unbeknownst to us we’d been walking in entirely the wrong direction. Drop your
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Ahoy there. Cruiser pulls out of Miami. gaurd and one elegant verandered clapperboard house can quite easily look just like any, especially where 'Swampwater' is concerned.
After a second day that featured a two hour tropical storm in the middle of the afternoon putting an end to all thoughts of returning to Long Beach/Ellesmere Port with the slightest hint of colour, a rather pathetic sun set and a relatively quiet night which ended in the company of a crazed family of wild paddies we headed back to Miami and spent a Saturday night in South Beach before ending the break Sunday with a return to Fort Lauderdale which, I can only think because of the uncharecteristic weather, reminded me very much of a mid February afternoon in Great Yarmouth.
It was all over too quickly and had succeeded in producing a further massive dint into my already dwindling finances but it was good to see Jamie again and well worth the expense not to mention the sleep deprivation. Having risen at 5am to head for the airport we arrived back early afternoon after a five and a half hour flight and I slunk exhausted straight into my pit with a newly created list of New
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Lounging. Year Resolutions which would make it seem that there could be very little else for me to either pack up, cut back on or change. !
Several months ago, last March to be exact I was suddenly overcome with an irresistible urge to have my body decorated in perpetuity for a second time. I say suddenly but that isn’t entirely true as I’d considered adding to my solitary tiny upper arm ‘Pig’ ink on numerous occasions but this feeling was different, this was a definite devil on the shoulder ‘do it’ and after a quick search on the internet and a short Saturday afternoon drive I found myself entering a small but established tattoo parlour in the portside settlement of San Pedro.
The parlour's reception area had the feel of one of those run down taxi offices that you could sometimes find yourself in in the cold early hours of the morning following a night on the town, itching as the effects of the alcohol rapidly disappeared with nothing but a burning desire to simply get home and get to bed. Four paint peeling walls, a low counter tended to by a disinterested nail filing receptionist and a
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Screaming skull. Crystal Head Vodka. Xmas present off Phil. waiting area furnished with nothing but a couple of battered leopard skin print couches.
A large guy who was tapping away on a computer facing the far wall turned and stood on hearing me enter, shuffled to the counter and took the piece of paper containing my design idea from me. After gazing at it for a few expressionless seconds he suddenly commented with more than a hint of enthusiasm that it was a subject close to his heart and told me he could ‘do me’. He handed me his business card, asked me to make an appointment with the inked and pierced girl who was still yet to look up from her magazine and disappeared through to the back of the store.
“Tom’s first available appointment will be Saturday will be 12th December, 4pm” she announced flicking through the diary as she finally came to life.
December 12th ? Bugger me, this was nine months away, who was this I was asking to make etchings on my flesh and why did I have to wait nine month's.? My immediate way of thinking was simple, make the appointment, get out of Dodge and regroup allowing myself more
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Gran marnier, no rocks. than enough time to investigate 'Tom' and more importantly should a change of mind materialize in the ensuing months, to chicken out.
My investigations revealed him to be a highly regarded artist who’d turned to tattooing some years ago, so highly regarded in fact he’d been ‘hired’ by the TV and film industries to design tattoos for several hits, amongst others the back tattoo worn by the Ralph Feinnes’ ‘Tooth Fairy’ in the Hollywood blockbuster ‘Red Dragon’ as well as the full body art displayed in the hit Stateside TV series ‘Prison Break’. This fact alone went some way to explaining the nine month wait for his services not to mention his extortionate rates.
A colleague pointed out to me that this desire/willingness to be branded for life, something I must admit to being totally unaware of at the time, is a surefire sign of my further adaptation into the American way of life. It’s not that I’d never considered having a tattoo before leaving the UK, I’d had one for several years prior and had considered on more than one occasion adding to it, it’s just that out here they are far more commonplace and viewed with
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Desert plains, home of Camp Manzanar. none of the social prejudices relating to the hard man image that are evident in the UK.
I more or less forgot about the booking for the remainder of the year until December when a reminder phone call from the manicurist said it was time to prepare and after a couple of swift Dutch Courage Boddies in ‘The Whale And Ale’ pub with Phil and the girls I found myself nervously removing my shirt and slipping into the chair. The dentist drill like buzz of the needle and the first pin prick scrape on the arm told me that that was it, that there was no turning back and three hours later, the latter part of which was spent in excrutiating pain that felt like a red hot poker being stabbed into a fresh flesh wound I was being greased, patched and sent on my way with the instruction to return for completion.
I did just that four or five weeks later and three hours later Eddie was born again.
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