The Hell of It All (31 page)
Read The Hell of It All Online
Authors: Charlie Brooker
Tags: #Humor, #Form, #Jokes & Riddles, #Civilization; Modern
Then they read out the results of a survey they’d done, which claimed that, yes, 60% of men trim their pubes. What, really? 60%? Huh? And then they asked the women in the studio if they preferred the male trimmed-pube look – and they all nodded like Churchill the car-insurance dog. First I felt woefully out of touch. Then I simply hated the world a little more. And then an uneasy thought came over me. If the majority of other men genuinely spend hours hoisting their scrotum over the bathroom sink with one hand, nail scissors in the other, meticulously snipping and pruning their man-bush into a tiny ornamental hedge, until their entire pubic region resembles a tranquil arboretum in miniature, albeit one with a cheerful bit of dick poking out of it, then maybe all my ex-girlfriends have been secretly revolted by my comparatively slovenly lower appearance. Did they think I was some sort of wild hobo? I phoned one up and asked her.
‘What the hell are you talking about?’ she asked.
I told her that according to something I’d seen on telly, most men trim their pubes.
‘Well, duh. It was obviously bullshit,’ she barked.
‘Really?’
‘Really.’
Phew. This was a relief. Aside from the icky pubic-hair aspect of the whole thing, no one wants to feel like the odd one out. I didn’t want to be the sole dishevelled caveman in a world full of smooth, sculpted statues. I thought I’d missed a memo.
I’ve missed memos before. For instance I never bothered with scarves for years, because I couldn’t work out how you were meant to wrap them round your neck without the dangling ends getting in the way. And then about two years ago someone showed me the method whereby you fold the scarf in half and poke the end through the loop and – hey presto – it all stays neatly in place. Wow, I thought. Everyone else has known this for years, and I’ve just found out now! I bought a couple of scarves to celebrate, and smugly paraded around in them like a child who’d just learned to tie his own laces.
And then a few weeks later I was sitting (uncharacteristically scarfless) with a friend having a drink, when she suddenly pointed at someone walking past the window in a scarf, and scowled, ‘God! Why is everybody suddenly wearing their scarves that way, as if they’re at university? They look like such tossers.’
I shrank in my seat, wondering how I’d missed not one, but three memos: the one that’d taught everyone else this particular method of scarf-tying, the second one that decreed it fashionable, and the third that decided it was passé.
Fortunately, it seems no pubic-hair memo has been issued at all: on closer inspection, the ‘survey’ that threw up the 60%-trim rating had only asked 50 men, with no indication of how representative these 50 men were. They could’ve been male strippers. Or indie Camden eyeliner types whose black jeans are so tight, they have to shave their minges off just to do up their flies. I wouldn’t put anything past those twats. They probably don’t have human-size testicles anyway. But that’s an argument for another week, because we’re out of space and time. Goodbye.
[29 September 2008]
Take a holiday, said literally everyone I know. You’re not being yourself. The smallest thing stresses you out. Last week you realised you’d accidentally bought some AAA batteries instead of the AA size, and instead of simply taking them back to the shop or buying a new set you ran outside and spent an hour screaming and
slamming a dustbin lid against your garden wall. Try explaining that to the neighbours. Or to us. We’re literally everyone you know, remember? Rarely do we speak in unison like this. Ooh, doesn’t our collective voice sound funny? It’s like a throat organ. Or a choir, but flatter. And more judgemental and needling. Anyway, pay attention to what it’s saying. Obey. Take a holiday.
They had a point. I’d been working flat out on two different things at the same time, both complex, both demanding of time. One was a non-broadcast pilot that required me to watch news coverage of the Russian/Georgian conflict ad nauseam – disc after disc of it, again and again, in search of funny things to say about actual footage of war and bombs and people lying around looking thoroughly killed. And there are funny things to be said – no, really there are – but finding them definitely isn’t good for your head.
In the middle of this, I wrote a column that struck me as a bit of light-hearted schtick about the comical pointlessness of existence, but which struck almost everyone who read it as a desperate and embarrassing cry for help. Readers emailed advice. Well-meaning zealots sent religious pamphlets. A few warm-hearted humanitarians explicitly urged me to commit suicide, on the basis that I was a prick and my writing was dismal, and that they were therefore owed blood. Hey, it’s nice to know they’re out there.
But friends told me to take a holiday. So I did, and I’m on that holiday right now. Yet somehow I’m also writing this, in a ‘business centre’ and internet hole, in a hotel, at midnight. Turns out I’m not very good at being on holiday, although I can’t work out whether that’s my fault, or the fault of human progress. The internet makes it easier to communicate with the folks back home, but it also brings the folks back home on holiday with you.
Britain doesn’t simply go away when you leave it behind any more. It used to be the case that you’d fly home after a fortnight abroad and suddenly be astonished by a newspaper headline at the airport – BROWN: WHY I RESIGNED, or the suchlike. And you’d feel like you’d really missed out: What do you mean, the world carried on without me? It felt a bit like coming back from the grave, except instead of returning to deliver a haunting message
from the afterlife, you had a few boring anecdotes about that nice restaurant where you had that thing, and a sunburned neck.
Today you can never really leave. For one thing, most of the world looks alike now anyhow. For another, if anything big happens back home, friends will text you. And not just big things either. They’ll tell you who’s been fired on
The Apprentice
. They’ll phone you from the toilet for help in their local pub quiz.
Just to make things worse, shortly before leaving I bought a swanky new ‘smart phone’ aimed squarely at absolute cast-iron wankers. Go on, treat yourself, I thought. Be an unashamed cock and buy it. Turns out it does everything. Email, internet, GPS system, Google maps … there’s probably a can opener on it somewhere. If you’re standing in the middle of nowhere you can push one button to be told precisely where you are and another to find out where the nearest synagogue is. Or sauna. Or both. Punch in a query and it’ll recommend eight local restaurants, cough up their phone numbers and invite you to ring them. Then it’ll give you directions. Since I’m on a road trip, it’s proved incredibly useful, partly for finding last-minute motels and the like, but mainly because gawping and poking at a tiny electronic screen feels a lot like work. In fact it’s not a phone at all, but a pocket-sized job simulator, and this helps with the cold turkey immensely.
Because without an uninterrupted supply of bite-size chunks of work to occupy your head, how the hell are you supposed to stay sane in this world? Even on holiday, there’s no escaping this planet or its people. BlackBerrys, iPhones and their imitators are very much tossers’ playthings, but they’re also providing a vital sociological service: they make their owners feel temporarily useful and important for just long enough to prevent mass suicides in the street. Hey! You replied to my email! For a few fleeting seconds, you really made a difference, buddy.
Now get back to your holiday. You are actually on holiday, aren’t you? These days, it’s hard to be sure.
[25 October 2008]
The following piece originally appeared in the Guardian’s travel section
.
I have a short attention span, so short I even got bored just then, halfway through typing the word ‘span’. This means when planning a holiday, I tend to balk at the prospect of a week or two flopping on a beach. What if I get restless and walk into the sea? More to the point, and going on past experience, what if I get so sunburned on day one I spend the rest of the holiday staggering around like someone who’s just crawled their way clear of a nuclear blast? There’s only so many times you can say ‘ouch’ before you get tired of hearing yourself wince.
That’s why my ideal holiday is a road trip. All that variety! And sitting down! It’s like watching television, but better, because every so often you get to step out into the landscape you’re watching and interact with it. And it’s in 3D! Perfect.
Apart from one tiny problem. I can’t drive. I’ve done road trips before – in the US, obviously, because that’s the Kingdom of Road Trips – and each time, I’ve had to recruit/con (delete where applicable) licence-holding friends or girlfriends into coming. Since the ideal trip lasts around three weeks, and has a cast of more than two, arranging the details isn’t always easy, particularly when you try to do it at short notice. I don’t know many people prepared to drop everything to spend the best part of a month driving from state to state. Although it turns out I do know one: my improbable friend Aisleyne, tabloid staple and former
Big Brother
contestant. She, preposterous as it sounds, would be my rock, my ‘core driver’, for the duration of the trip. Others would accompany us for different sections: for the first leg, through California, my friend Urmee
and an ex, Cat. For the second half, two other friends: Kelly and Ben, who’d fly out to meet us when we got to Las Vegas.
The whole thing was organised in a blur. It was only when I got to the airport that it struck me: none of these people knew each other. Most of them had never met. And they were a fairly diverse bunch. This was like throwing a bizarre mobile birthday party.
But I wasn’t worried about that. I was worried about the flight. I’m not a good flier. I don’t flip out on board and start hammering at the exits; I just sit there nervily envisaging a death plunge for the duration of the journey. And in the days leading up to take-off, I feel doomy and bleak, like I’m on a self-imposed death row. But this time around I had some valium. I’d never taken it before, and I’m glad I did. Neck the pill and 20 minutes later: bingo. Suddenly nothing really mattered. Instead of gripping the armrest during take-off, I lay back in my seat exhibiting the sort of blissful insouciance you’d normally associate with a man who’s just been tossed off in a massage parlour.
We arrived in San Francisco and picked up our car: an unsexy people carrier the size and shape of an industrial refrigerator. A sports convertible may sound fun, but just try driving through the desert in one: within the hour you’d be hallucinating with sunstroke so badly, you’d swerve off the road, thinking you were traversing the rings of Saturn or driving inside Joan Collins’s face.
Still, there was no driving at all for the first two days. There’s scarcely any point taking a car into San Francisco: it’s a collection of steep hills with no parking spaces. We explored on foot. The first day was spent aimlessly wandering around in a kind of daze as we tried to acclimatise. San Francisco is the US equivalent of Brighton. It’s quaint, it’s a gay mecca, it’s by the sea, and it’s foggy and cold.
I’d taken the precaution of pre-booking tickets for a night tour of Alcatraz (piece of piss: you buy them online and print the tickets yourself). It’s essential to book in advance, and well worth the effort, if only for the bit on the tour where you stand in a solitary confinement cell listening to a former inmate explain how he kept himself sane in the dark by ripping a button off his shirt, throwing it in the air and spending the rest of the night searching for it on his
hands and knees. If you enjoy harrowing glimpses into the dark heart of man’s inhumanity to man, you’ll have a whale of a time. I certainly did.
The next day we wandered around Haight-Ashbury. Once the birthplace of the hippy movement, it’s now a sort of cross between Shoreditch and Camden: all trendy shops and organic cafés. Since I was accompanied by girls, I spent most of my time standing impatiently in clothes stores, listening to them coo over assorted pieces of fabric.
Still, at least I got to eat a gigantic burrito, which, as it turned out, would be my biggest meal of the entire trip. Women don’t eat really, do they? At least, this lot didn’t. All they wanted, every night, was sushi. Sushi, sushi, sushi. Before you accuse them and me of insufferable wankery, bear in mind that sushi in the States is far cheaper and better than in Britain. By the end of the trip I’d inhaled more fish than a sperm whale, but at least I hadn’t clogged my colon with 10,000 burgers and steaks.
Then we got in the car and headed out. First stop: Santa Cruz. Satnav has transformed road trips, skimming hours from your journey time – not so much on the open road, but on the fiddly bits when you’re looking for a motel. Get an address in advance and you arrive effortlessly, auto-piloted all the way to their front door.
I’ve been to Santa Cruz before. That time it was great: a sun-drenched, laid-back surfer’s town with an old-fashioned beachfront fairground complete with wooden rollercoaster. This time it was overcast and all the girls had PMS, so we didn’t hang around. The next morning we stopped in Monterey, checked out its superb aquarium (which features a mind-mangling display of artificially lit jellyfish, hovering in space like tiny galaxies), and decided to tackle the drive down Big Sur at sunset.
Big Sur is, as any guidebook will tell you, spectacular: all winding roads, cliffs, sheer drops, and the ocean. Being a media-saturated ponce, however, I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that I was in an upscale car commercial, albeit a gloriously beautiful one. Television spoils everything.
Then it got dark. Big Sur takes longer than you think, and driving
around the side of cliffs in the dark is Not Fun. There was, it’s fair to say, a certain amount of screaming, especially when a spooky guy in a knackered van insisted on tailing us for a full hour. He was definitely a murderer. Definitely.
Eventually we made it to San Luis Obispo, to stay in the apparently notorious Madonna Inn: part-motel, part design nightmare. No corner of the Earth could be more gaudy. We sat at the bar. It resembled archive footage of 60s Vegas playing on a TV with the colour cranked up to hallucinogenic levels. Every surface was Pepto-Bismol pink or electric blue. A terrifying giant doll hung overhead, lolling back and forth on a mechanical swing. This is what serial killers see in their heads when they come. I recommend it wholeheartedly.
The next day, still rubbing our eyes, we made for Santa Barbara, a relaxing boutique of a town, clean to the point of artificial, with miles of beach. It’s what you imagine California is like in your head when you’re 12. Accommodation isn’t cheap, but it’s the perfect place to unwind – particularly if you enjoy sunbathing, which I don’t. Disturbing sight of the day: a bikini-clad Paris Hilton-style beach bunny sitting on a towel with the words ‘WHITE PRIDE’ tattooed in gothic script across her lower back. Aisleyne had to be talked out of walking over and lamping her.
Next stop: Los Angeles. Sadly, the hotel we’d booked turned out to be (a) next to the airport, (b) a 40-minute drive from anywhere interesting, and (c) a self-consciously trendy hangout apparently designed to personally annoy me. The lifts played canned laughter when you arrived at your floor. That’s not a metaphor: that’s what they actually did. And the mini-bar didn’t include cold drinks, but did have a packet of radish seeds and one of those little table-tennis bats with a rubber ball hanging off a bit of elastic. Q: What’s the difference between quirky irony and infuriating ‘You Don’t Have to Be Mad to Work Here But it Helps!’ wackiness? A: None.
Sadly, I had work to do in LA. Not high-powered meetings with movie execs. No. Just my usual
Guardian
writing duties. So I had to sit in the hotel room, tapping at a laptop, while the girls went off and swanned around. At one point I had a break and took a cab to
an outdoor mall. Sinatra was being piped in from invisible speakers somewhere in the trees, and everyone was far slimmer than the last time I was here. Suddenly I felt like scum. It made me want to smoke. I quit smoking in February, and now the sheer Tupperware mock-pleasantness of everything surrounding me was threatening to undo my resolve. I bought a pack, lit one, and immediately extinguished it. No. No.
I was happy to leave LA. I was less happy with Cat’s driving. We were heading for Vegas, and she appeared to be in a hurry. Perhaps she’d robbed a bank while I wasn’t looking. Either way, she was hell-bent on squeezing a four-hour drive into 10 minutes. But when you can’t drive, you’re robbed of the ability to complain. Instead I distracted myself by selecting our driving soundtrack from an MP3 player. At least that way I’d be able to listen to the Beatles while the fire crew cut us from the wreckage.
Fortunately it didn’t come to that and we arrived in one piece. Then things instantly turned strange. Knowing I was going to be staying in Vegas, the
Guardian
had sent out feelers to see if anyone was prepared to offer free, interesting accommodation to one of its writers. I’d get a nice place to stay, they’d get some publicity (good or bad, it’s all publicity). That’s how it works.
The Planet Hollywood Resort and Casino said yes. And because I would be covering it for this piece, they pulled out all the stops. I wasn’t quite prepared for what happened. First, we were introduced to our own personal butler, the instantly charming Bisrat. He took us to our suite, which turned out to comprise four huge individual rooms branching off a massive lounge the size of a fashionable London bar. It had a pool table, a bar, a table football machine, a plasma screen on every available surface, some wacky sculptures, a breathtaking view of the strip, and – right there in the lounge – a free-standing shower with a lap-dancing pole in the middle of it.
Bisrat immediately uncorked a bottle of wine and poured us each a glass. I needed it. Drop me in the middle of opulence like this and I automatically feel like a burglar.
No matter how often I looked round the place, I couldn’t get used
to it. It looked like a set. You could film an entire aspirational drama series about hard-partying city hotshots in there, if you were an arsehole. Suddenly I wondered: what appalling scenes has this place witnessed in the past? How many hookers have twirled round that pole? Did housekeeping routinely wipe it clean each morning? Brrr.
Urmee and Cat flew home. Kelly flew in, followed shortly by Ben. I was talked, somehow, into going to a club. It was called Tryst, and was situated in the middle of the Wynn casino, a horrible slab of money and pretension designed to appeal squarely to absolute wankers. The club was rammed with beautiful women and hideous men. It had a waterfall, expensive drinks, and a dancefloor full of whooping twats throwing banknotes in the air. Good, I thought. The economy is tanking. This looks like the last days of Rome. Then another thought struck me: here I was, with two improbably glamorous women, in Vegas. Everyone thought I’d paid for them. Because that makes sense in Vegas.
Furthermore, going round Vegas with these two was like escorting two female models through a prison. The foul, hollow, forced party vibe I found bleakly amusing on previous trips now felt sickly and threatening. It’s like a permanent New Year’s Eve, my worst night of the year. Everyone pretending to let go and enjoy themselves. All of it fake, as fake as the replica Eiffel tower dominating Paris, the fake French casino. It’s an atmosphere in which idiots thrive. The next day, by the pool, I saw a trio of muscled-up body-fascist lunkheads loudly haranguing an out-of-shape middle-aged man with lots of body hair. ‘Hey dude, you’re totally rocking that mohair sweater,’ they yelled, again and again. They stood right over him. ‘Seriously, it’s awesome.’ They said it over and over, until he left. Shamefully, I did nothing. They’d have killed me.
A few hours later, a drunk buffoon swiped Aisleyne’s camera and took photos of his own spectacularly ugly testicles in a doomed bid to impress the ladies. The perfect metaphor for Vegas.
Back in the suite, while the Bellagio casino’s multi-million dollar fountain display erupted across the road, every plasma screen was filled with Obama and McCain and red flashing numbers and
ECONOMY IN CRISIS. Las Vegas is mad at the best of times. In this context, it seemed downright insane. The trend in recent years has been for swankier and swankier casinos: the Bellagio and the Wynn are essentially
Dynasty
box sets made flesh. Now the credit crunch has left them looking like big, dumb relics. Towering, empty hangovers. They felt underpopulated compared to the downmarket tack-pits which, comparatively, were overflowing. If gloomy economic predictions are correct, Vegas is going to turn very ugly very quickly.
Not that I spent the whole time scowling. After all, I was in the lap of luxury. The food, the service, the furnishings – it was all one unending blowjob. But it felt like a blowjob taking place seconds before a mushroom cloud appears on the horizon. Stupidly – incredibly stupidly – I started smoking, seduced by the novelty of being able to light up indoors, which felt as exotic as smoking underwater. Argh. By the time you read this, I’ll be in the process of my umpteenth 72-hour quitting process. Thanks, Vegas. Once again, I was glad to leave.
By now we were behind on our itinerary. The next few days consisted of near non-stop driving. Another rule of road trips: allow far more time than you think you’ll need. We sprinted through Monument Valley. Amazing landscape, yes: but when you’re in a hurry it’s essentially just another load of rocks. Then a mammoth drive all the way to Albuquerque.
