Friends Like These: My Worldwide Quest to Find My Best Childhood Friends, Knock on Their Doors, and Ask Them to Come Out and Play (35 page)

I don’t know why, but I walked in. In front of me were towering piles of T-shirts, stretching the length of the shop. The
ones I could see all seemed to have been modified in some way, updated somehow. Suddenly, I couldn’t be bothered. There were
too many of them. I was hot. The T-shirts smelled musty. I wanted to turn around and walk out, and find a breeze, and something
to take away the taste of Pretzel Dog.

But for whatever reason, I persisted.

And this is when something utterly remarkable happened.

Remarkable to
me,
at any rate. I can only hope you feel the same.

Because I chose a pile at
random.

And I knelt down.

And then I chose a T-shirt at
random.

And I pulled it halfway out.

And I couldn’t quite believe it.

Because I could see the word “Loughborough.”

I froze, slightly, in disbelief.

Was there a Loughborough in America?

But that was only
half
of what was so remarkable.

I lifted the T-shirts above it and pulled it out the whole way.

And this is what it said…

4th Anniversary

McDonald’s

Loughborough

1987–1991

And I just stared at it.

And I was stunned.

Absolutely, totally
stunned.

4th anniversary? McDonald’s? Loughborough?
My
Loughborough?
My McDonald’s?
A T-shirt celebrating
my McDonald’s?

A wise man once told me that coincidences do not exist. And in this moment, I couldn’t help but think he might be right. I
mean… what were the chances? What were the chances that the McDonald’s of my childhood—the McDonald’s which we’d been so excited
about, the McDonald’s I’d visited so many times with Mikey and Anil and Simon, the McDonald’s which had caused me and Andy
Clements to hug so ferociously on hearing of its arrival in our little town… what were the chances of that even
being
on a T-shirt? Much less being on a T-shirt I’m drawn to out of a thousand in a shop I hadn’t planned on visiting in a city
so far from home?

But, more importantly, there were other questions…

4th anniversary? Who celebrates a
4th
anniversary? And who makes
a T-shirt
to celebrate it? Why don’t you wait till the
5th?
And who’s
keeping
T-shirts celebrating the 4th anniversaries of regional fast-food outlets? Why did
Loughborough’s
McDonald’s—out of the 31,000 of them in the world—decide to
make
them? Have you ever seen any
other
McDonald’s celebrate four years of burger mayhem? And how in God’s name did it get from Loughborough to
here?

Was this a sign? A sign that what I was doing was…
right,
somehow? Was this just a billion-to-one coincidence… or was it something else?

I looked at the price tag. $58.

To me it seemed priceless.

The cab driver seemed very friendly, but I wasn’t looking at him. I was still staring at my T-shirt.

“So why are you over here?” he said. “Holiday?”

“Kind of,” I said.

4th anniversary! Why 4th?!

“I’m here to surprise an old friend who thinks I’m an animal.”

“Cool,” said the driver. “That’s cool.”

I’d asked to be taken to the seaside, and we’d set off, driving down the Sunset Strip, with its bars and billboards and clubs.
We passed the Chinese Theater, where I saw a man dressed as Spiderman having an argument with a man dressed as Charlie Chaplin,
while Freddy Krueger smiled for the cameras and waved at passing children.

It was exciting being in LA. Just five minutes in a cab, and I’d already seen
three
celebrities—two of them fictional and one of them
dead!

Finally, in the hot and battering sun, I arrived at Venice Beach, with its palm trees and sand and ocean sprawling out in
front of me. I put the T-shirt away, got out and took in the view. It was the perfect LA cliché: there were people on rollerskates,
a mass of cyclists, kids playing streetball. There were punks, and a Japanese rock band, and artists and psychics plying their
trade. A little further down, a lone, pensionable muscleman lifted weights far above his head in front of astonished children
and a German with a camera. It suddenly dawned on me I’d been seeing these images since I was a kid. This was just a newer
generation of the same people I’d been watching doing the same things since childhood, on the same beach that had been featured
on
CHiPs,
or
The A-Team,
or—during those difficult teenage years—on
Baywatch.
I looked up to see a row of joggers approaching, sweat pouring out of them like they were being squeezed from the inside.
I’ve never really understood jogging. And never really understood why anyone would jog in this kind of heat. What were they
running from? But this was LA. And just as America would always be New York skyscrapers and hot dogs and steam billowing from
manhole covers and shoot-outs in pool halls, it’d also be sun, and palm trees, and Venice Beach. I wondered if Ben Ives had
felt the same when he’d first walked on this beach. I wondered how he’d ended up in America. What brought him here? A girl?
The job? Or maybe as a kid he’d been just as impressed with the States as I was. Maybe this had been his dream. Maybe this
had—

“WHOAREYOU WHATISTHIS?”

Eh?

I didn’t quite know what to say. The old woman moved forwards, closer, and shouted it again.

“WHOAREYOU WHATISTHIS?”

And this time, only marginally less startled, I was able to say,
“Wha?”

“THISISIT HERE!” she said, pointing at the floor, her long purple cloak swishing slightly as she did so.

Sometimes there is nothing more terrifying than a mad old woman in a long purple cloak.

“Is it?” I said, trying to remain polite in the face of some quite confusing information.

“THISISIT HERE!” she said, as if I hadn’t understood her, which was fine, because it was true.

“Yup,” I said, attempting to sidle off. I had never sidled before, and didn’t even know if I’d know
how
to sidle, but I turned out to be a natural and talented sidler.

“WHATISTHIS?” she shouted after me.

I shrugged and simply pointed at the floor.

“That’s it there,” I said, still sidling.

She stared at me, looking very annoyed indeed.

I ditched the sidle and broke into a jog.

An hour later, feeling I’d exhausted all the points of interest to be had at Venice Beach—and mainly because I was a little
scared I might bump into that old woman again—I found myself a cab, conveniently parked up on a pavement nearby.

I opened the door and stepped in to find a slightly thuggish-looking man sipping a can of Mountain Dew.

“Yeah, where you like?” he said, and I told him the name of my hotel.

The cab started up and we began to cruise down the street. American cabs have always impressed me. As wide as a train and
as smooth as a slide. I was about to ask a very interesting question about the width of the cab to my driver, but noticed
he’d just dialed a number on his phone…

“Yeah, I need you to do me a favor,” he said, into the phone, in a heavy Russian accent. “Huh? I say I need you to do me a
favor
…”

Out of politeness, I pretended I couldn’t hear him, but it was quite difficult, really, because he’d started to shout.

“I SAY I NEED YOU TO DO ME A FAVOR”—he looked at me in the mirror apologetically—“Yeah… I need you to call Central Casting.”

Central Casting?

“Central Casting, yes! Call Central Casting. Ask them if they need someone like me…”

The person on the other end must’ve asked what on earth that meant. Was he phoning on the off-chance that they’d need a cab?
It seemed a laborious way of doing business.

“I mean, do they need like Mafia, criminal, someone like that…”

Eh?

“Yeah… no, you call them, you tell them how I look, you say I am non-union… NON-UNION… tell them I have limo they can use
too… Okay… bye.”

He hung up and shook his head.

“Are you an actor?” I asked, but what the subtitle in a film would’ve read is: “Please say you’re not in the Mafia.”

“I do little acting,” he said. “I went into Beverly Hills drama course and learn to act emotions. I get diploma. I am in films.”

“Wow,” I said. “What kind of films?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I usually play driver. Or bad guy. Mafia, criminal, something like this. Sometimes cab driver, sometimes
limo driver. I have limo, and I let film use it, if he can let me drive this. I meet many people who help me.”

“Really?” I said.

“Salma Hayek,” he said. “She was very good with me. She is a nice lady. Ice T was also very nice man, but tall.”

I made a face which suggested sympathy towards the situation of meeting someone who was nice but tall.

“Worst one I have ever met… Hip-hop legend Rakim.”

“Hip-hop legend Rakim?”
I repeated, wondering if that was his actual name, or just the way the newspapers described him. “What was wrong with Hip-hop
legend Rakim?”

“Ach,” he said, waving the question away. “Ach.”

Oleg—for that was the name on his ID—didn’t seem to want to discuss Hip-hop legend Rakim anymore, which was a pity, because
I was quite enjoying saying “Hip-hop legend Rakim.” I made a mental note to warn Tarek about him next time I saw him. Oleg’s
phone rang. It was his friend, saying that Central Casting didn’t need anyone like him today. Oleg looked annoyed.

“Here, look with this,” said Oleg, fiddling with his phone. We nearly hit the back of a truck while he turned to hand it to
me.

“That is photo of me in my acting,” he said, and I looked at it. He looked exactly the same. There was literally no point
in showing me this photo. He might as well have just pointed at his face and said, “This is what my face looks like.”

“Oh,” I said, trying to sound impressed.

“Press for next one.”

I scrolled on to the next photo.

“That is also photo of me in my acting.”

He was wearing exactly the same clothes in this photo, too, except now he had a hat on.

“It’s good, yes?”

“Yes,” I said, not really knowing what else to say. “You look like a very good actor.”

To be honest, he looked like a cab driver with a hat on.

“I’m going to be in a film soon,” he said, and I sat forward to listen attentively, but suddenly and with a jolt he jammed
on the brakes and raised his hands and yelled… My hand had slammed onto the back of his seat and I looked up to see a cyclist
with a shocked face… he’d been innocently trying to cross the road but had wrongly assumed Oleg had seen him—Oleg had been
too busy putting his phone away…

“Hey!” the cyclist had shouted, almost against his will.

“WHAT!” shouted Oleg, getting into character—the character in this case being an extremely angry cabbie. All he was missing
was a hat. “WHAT YOU SAY! WHY YOU HAVE BIKE? NO ONE HAVE BIKE IN THIS CITY!”

Uh-oh! I tried to make apologetic eye contact with the cyclist in my best and finest British way, but he was having none of
it. I was just as much to blame for this travesty of traffic-based justice as Oleg. I didn’t know what to do. Oleg did. He
made a quick and rude gesture with his hand and stepped on the gas.

“Anyway, what I say?” asked Oleg, as we moved forward.

“Oh,” I said, a little shaken, “you were saying you were going to be in a film, or something…”

“Yeah.
B’dmutha
.”

“
B’dmutha
?” I said.

“
B’dmutha
is name of film. About drug dealer. He is name of D’B’dmutha…”

“Oh!” I said, delighted. “The Bad Mutha!”

“Badmutha, yes!” said Oleg. “D’B’dmutha!”

“Are you the Bad Mutha in the film?” I asked.

“No,” said Oleg. “I am the driver.”

The lights ahead turned red.

“Bad Mutha!”
I said, as we slowed down. “You know, that’s quite a good name for a film. What’s the—”

And then, through my window, and out of nowhere…

“
ASSHOLE!
WATCH YOUR DRIVING, MAN!”

It was the cyclist! He was
back!
Wild-eyed and curly-haired! He had a sweaty face, as red and round as a tiny Mars. Where had
he
come from? We’d left him back at the last set of lights!

“AH, GO LOSE YOURSELF!” shouted Oleg, obviously thinking he spoke for both of us, which I supported by maintaining a dignified
silence. “GO LOSE YOURSELF NOW!”

The cyclist was about to come back with something, but the lights were changing and Oleg stepped on it before he had a chance.
I turned round and saw with horror that the cyclist hadn’t decided to let this one go just yet.

“He’s coming!” I shouted, worried. “Oleg, he’s coming after us!”

“Is fine!” said Oleg, his eyes darting between his mirror and the road. “Is fine.”

“He’s
chasing
us!” I said.

Oh my God. He was
chasing
us. This was a
car chase!
A car chase through the streets of LA! How much more textbook could my LA visit be? Spiderman, a mad woman, an actor
and
a car chase!

“We lose him, is fine,” said Oleg, but then, up ahead, I could see the lights changing to red again. We slowed to an embarrassing,
painful halt and an agonizing five seconds later the cyclist was at the window again.

“LEARN TO DRIVE, GUY!”

“LOSE YOURSELF!” said Oleg, looking straight ahead.

“YOU DRIVE LIKE SHIT!”

“YOU SHIT! YOU SHIT!”

I didn’t quite know what to do with myself at this point. Usually in car chases, the drivers don’t come face to face every
couple of minutes. It can be a little embarrassing, especially if they’ve not actually got all that much to say to one another.

“FUCK YOU, MAN!”

“YEAH! YEAH! FUCK YOU! YOU LOSE YOURSELF!”

I didn’t think I could really carry on the conversation about
Bad Mutha!
with Oleg at this point, given he was now engaged in his own conversation with the cyclist, so I was pleased to notice an
advert on the seat beside me, for a carpet sale which seemed to have ended the previous week. I suddenly decided it was the
most interesting thing I could possibly have found.