the day en route

Wake at 4.25 Singapore time and turn off alarm before it rings, hoping to get out of the house without waking SKT's sister.  But it's no good; she's set her own alarm and rises to help me.  I wish she wouldn't.  I feel like I'm imposing enough already as it is.  Originally she suggested I get up at 4 am.  I think she was hoping to make me a sit-down breakfast, but I'd rather sleep than eat at that time of the morning.

SKT's sister follows me down on the lift, crosses the road with me and says she'll go back upstairs and call a cab for me if none arrive.  There are heaps of cabs going out to the airport at this time of the morning, so we're fine.

Changi Airport is relatively dark and empty.  No problems with queueing, tho the woman behind the counter notices I had a student visa six months ago and queries why I'm travelling to Uncle Sam-land again so soon.  Gah.  Is this a portent of things to come?  Probably. 

Go to check mail at free terminal -- Heath Ledger is dead. Silly boy, seems he overdosed.  I feel slightly winded by the news, all the same.  Possibly because of similaries to own brother's death, but always that weird sense of loss re: public figures...should one really care about Steve Irwin, Princess Diana, Michael Hutchence, River Phoenix and now Heath Ledger when so many unknown people die terrible deaths every day?  Also -- strange how death of celebrities so quickly becomes inevitable, like doomed figures of tragedy. As if an almost palpable line is crossed from shock to inevitability...when does that happen and why does it seem to happen so quickly with public figures?

Buy two large Hershey bars with last of Singapore $$ in Duty Free.  Time to hit the American chocolate trail again -- I like their slightly bitter and salty chocolate.  I had noble intentions to bring some back for friends last time, but scoffed the lot myself.

Go through Customs ... it's certainly very stringent in Singapore.  No wonder Van Nyugen got copped.  Find myself on plane with two seats to myself behind the Emergency Exit.  This is a pretty good situation.  We fly over the swamplands on the outer edge of Singapore fairly quickly and skim a bed of clouds for the rest of the trip.  The light is too sharp to leave the window open.

Start reading Random Family, one of the few Gopher-recommended books I've been able to buy in an Australian bookshop.  It's good, very good -- almost as engrossing as The Sopranos.  The book traces a fifteen-year period in the lives of two girls in the Bronx, using a novelistic approach. It's immersion journalism with a wealth of detail ... twelve years worth of research went into the book. That's the difference between Balanda and Random Family -- eleven years of research, and it shows. Is that how long you have to research to produce something that good -- yikes.  The writer (Adrian Nicole Le Blanc) really knew her subject well.  And she'\s only two years older than me.  Bitch.  Interestingly, she has degrees from three different disciplines, which I don't find surprising, given the breadth of her work.

Fall asleep on plane.  Watch fragments of crap movies.  Eat strange minimalist food offered by airlines.  United isn't as bad as I thought it might be.  The carrier is a bit more battered-looking than a Qantas one (Tiger definitely a lot more battered), but it seems more spacious somehow.  Also, United have this great innovation, which I've forgotten about but should have remembered -- Economy Plus where you can upgrade to a seat with more leg space without paying for Business.  (It costs about $40 per upgrade, $350 per year.) On the other hand, it seems like some sort of discrimination to expect taller, heavier, etc, to pay for more legspace (there were only white people in the Economy Plus area on the plane I caught to New Orleans).  I've sometimes thought that airlines should automatically allocate seats with more room to people on the basis of height and weight -- surely that shouldn't be too difficult to organise in this computerised age.  At 5'9" with long legs (probably as long or longer than those of slightly taller men), I find anything but the aisle seat agony.

Arrive at Tokyo about five and a half hours later for a plane change.  It's a strange experience, looking out at what must be Japan through the mist.  Some other time.  It's also 3 C, the beginning of the cold.  I'm going from the desert to the tropics to the cold north in the space of days.

I got to a sushi bar in the airport lounge.  It's a little overpriced, to say the least, but has sushi ever tasted better?  (i.e. after aeroplane food). I try and charge my computer in at the wall then realise I've left the appropriate plug in my main bag.  A helpful American with a suspiciously military hair cut comes to the rescue, loaning me a special Austn-Japan plug adaptor.  That's right, soon my reality will be full of polite and helpful Americans (they are polite and helpful: cynics take note). Weird, tho, how they club together in transit lines and start talking to each other: 'Oh, so you're from Seattle?  How often do you travel this route?', etc.  Do they create a sense of home for themselves wherever they go?

Back on the plane for another ten hours to cross the Pacific pond in what looks like a strange unnecessary arc on the inflight material.  I will be in transit for a total of about twenty-four hours though not that long in the air.  This is what happens if you go through Asia (it adds distance vertically, so to speak) and by budget airlines.  Still, I haven't fallen out of the sky yet.  More sleeping, listening to music on iPod (what did we do before MP3 players), reading of Adrian Nicole Le Blanc, watching crap movies, etc.

Off the plane at LA for another change.  This will be the moment of reckoning.  I have decided just to tell the powers that be that I'm visiting friends in NY -- which is true.  The mini-res stuff is too complex.  I reckon I'll get through but I'm worried it'll catch up with me some other time.  By the time I reach the counter, I've quite convinced myself of my own story.  There's the usual barrage of questions (thank god I'm used to this by now), but the official is pondering something on the computer...he wants me to step aside for secondary inspection.  Damn.  One of the Canadians told me this happened to her when she went to a journalists' conference in the US (having had a student visa in the past is enough to raise eyebrows, it seems). 

I have to sit for a while in a room like an Emergency dept reception.  I'm worried I'll miss my connecting flight, but I don't have to wait for too long before I'm called (it's better than an Emergency dept).  I'm grilled by a second official.  I try to adopt a casual, polite, slightly bewildered manner.  I remember my sister's advice on how to wag school: 'Just walk out the front gates as though you're meant to be going somewhere.  People will never ask.  We're meant to be good.'

'Do you know why you've been called over here?' The official asks.

'No.'

'There's a mistake on the system.  There's two different dates for when you last left the country.  Not your fault.'

That's a relief.  It's never what you think.

'Have you got any foodstuffs on you?'

'Just a Hershey bar.'

'What, no vegemite?'

I'm through, I'm through.  Hopefully, not for the last time.  These immigration officials always freak me out -- haven't they ever heard of the word 'hypervigilant'?

Another flight, this time across the country.  We fly over snow-tipped mountains and fields of white.  More bad films, food, Adrian Nicole Le Blanc, etc.  We arrive at JFK at about 9 pm.  Getting out of the airport now seems easy, almost as familiar to me as an Australian city.  I catch the airtrain to the subway then hang around on the subway platform with everyone else -- the other commuters, the airport workers going home.  The cold hits me for the first time.  My legs are going to be cold here; the rest of me's okay.

On the subway, I start reading about Heath Ledger in a newspaper that's been left on one of the seats.  There's a drug narrative going here, tho only prescription medicine is being mentioned, along with a tragic Dad story.   (I have a bit of sympathy for this theme; men don't seem to do too well by themselves, probably for reasons of cultural conditioning, but all the same.) There's some silly stuff about how Michelle Williams left him because of his drug problems, which I imagine has been inspired by the means of his death.  It seems his death wasn't intentional, tho, unless he wanted to be found by his masseur soon afterwards.  Prescription meds probably have more bite than we realise, a little worrying for someone like me who mucks around with possible anti-insomnia aids.

Arrive in Harlem at goodness knows when.  I have no idea of time left.  Ok, Harlem, I know.  It's cheap and warm, I have lots of space, a double bed and a desk in my room. I like the hood and it's only ten minutes to Manhattan.

Comments

[M-H]

You capture the bizarre timelessness of long distance travel, the abdication of responsibility, the drifting, floatingness of it. Friends of ours left London recently, got derailed in Saudi Arabia due to 'mechanical problems' and put on a later flight. They literally had no idea what time it would be when they arrived in Sydney; both had a different idea and both were wrong by many hours - one had even predicted the wrong day.

[Francis Xavier Holden]

"Just a Hershey Bar"

Thats really funny.

Coals To Newcastle. Coles to New York.

Where abouts in Harlem? I stayed at Columbia Uni for a while and also at an apartment on 110th not far from St Johns.

[Francis Xavier Holden]

Life is a musical.

http://www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/jackiebrown/across110thstreet.htm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtzRJgZG98I

[Account Deleted]

"should one really care about Steve Irwin, Princess Diana, Michael Hutchence, River Phoenix and now Heath Ledger when so many unknown people die terrible deaths every day?"

In a word, yes...I mean, since we can't mourn every single death, it's only reasonable that we feel more about the deaths of people who've affected our lives in however mediated a way. It's a peculiar flipside of celebrity culture I think, this handwringing over whether celebrities deserve our pity when they suffer. In any case I was much sadder about Heath than any of the others you mention, maybe because I've been following his career pretty much from the start, when he was a pretty, rather artless teenager.

[elsewhere]

FXH -- I'm staying at the Harlem Flophouse on 123rd St W, near the Apollo Theatres. It's a renovated Victorian, a bit like a guesthouse. Lots of obscure books on their shelves. The place is fairly casual, they let you use their laundry and other stuff, no questions asked. Much better atmosphere than a hotel or hostel.

Thanks, Angus...glad to know we can care about Heath.

[Pavlov's Cat]

I'm with Angus. I think we project our own best ideals onto the visibly gifted, beautiful and/or charismatic, and then get a bit deranged when those people crash. I mean, I drank three double Scotches in half an hour when Dorothy Dunnett died* and it didn't even touch the sides.

Nobody was shocked by the grief at John Lennon's death, or James Dean's; everyone understood why they were sad. Maybe it's harder these days because celebrity culture and concomitant media madness, each for its own sake, have become indistinguishable from the fame of the actually gifted like Dean and Lennon and Ledger who through their work had made themselves part of people's personal history.

*Brilliant Scottish historical novelist and thriller writer, whom it was my great good fortune to meet one Writers' Week and sit across the table from for a whole dinner. Beautiful, gifted AND charismatic.

[Mikhela]

Hershey bar
subway
hood

I like the casual way you just toss these into your reportage.

[elsewhere]

And now I'm eating a bagel with cream cheese!