Apr 12th, 2004
The Passport
Although Mary had consolidated a flight from London to Paris for the preposterously low fee of 6 pounds sterling per ticket, her catch would be dissolved by a simple five-word question, asked two minutes before arriving at the Victoria Station tube stop.
“Did you remember your passport?”
Instead of responding to her question, my eyes darted to my watch, in order to determine if we would have enough time to go back to her flat near Goodge Street for the passport, return to Victoria station, and take the hour-long bus to Luton airport in time to catch our 7:30 PM flight.
It was 4:30 PM - we had time.
A small sense of relief seeped into me, soon dwarfed by a greater self-awareness of how stupid I could sometimes be.
“I forgot my passport,” I responded and she gave me a look that was 75% amusement and 25% fear.
“You’re joking, right?” she responded.
“It’s still early,” I responded. “We can go back to your flat, pick up the passport, and still make the flight.”
“You’re not joking,” she answered gravely
“I wish I was,” I shot back. Looking down at the God-forsaken suitcase I had been struggling with for the past twenty minutes, I made a feeble attempt to be optimistic, “If one of us stays here, at least we don’t have to lug this thing back and forth.”
“That’s true,” she responded with an exasperated sigh as she handed me her monthly tube pass, which would save me the trouble of having to purchase an additional ticket.
After spending any length of time with me, most people grew to know my thriftiness.
“Do you remember how to get to my flat from the tube station,” she asked with a sense of genuine concern in her voice.
I’ve always thought that there are two types of girls as far as relationships are concerned, and both types will love you for being the man you are.
The only difference is that the first type will love you for the man you actually are and the second type will love you for the man they manipulate you into becoming.
Mary is certainly the first type and has a sort of loving resignation of the fact that I am a complete moron when it comes to direction.
I stared at her blankly for a few moments as my brain attempted to visualize the route.
“Okay,” she began, realizing that I most certainly did not know how to get to her flat from the tube station.
She began giving me directions and it was not long until her words became an incomprehensible jumble of directions, streets, and landmarks. A flood of memories began entering my mind: me at age six, getting lost at a playground that was two blocks away from my house; me at age thirteen, getting lost walking home from school - an epic voyage that encompassed all of one mile; me at age 18, getting lost driving home to Cleveland from DC and almost ending up in Detroit.
“Here,” I said handing the pass back to her as the tube stopped at Victoria. “Maybe it’s better if you get it.”
She nodded in mutual acknowledgment of my dreadful sense of direction and stepped off the tube.
“Where should I meet you?” I asked.
“Meet me at the coach station, where the coach buses depart,” she said and with that, headed off to catch the tube heading in the opposite direction.
“Okay,” I said as I watched her depart.
Tugging at our suitcase, I headed towards the tube station exit, scanning every sign for the word, “coach.”
After a few minutes, my eyes alit upon a sign that read, “Coach Station.” Following the signs, I found myself in a small gallery across from the main train station. Although there were a few buses passing through, this certainly did not seem like much of a departure area.
In a state of confusion, I did what I had told myself thousands of times not to do, and followed my instincts. Heading back towards the main station, I decided to position myself near the information desk, which lay across from the ticket counter.
My theory was that the area where I had exited from was in fact, the coach station. At some point in time, although she had told me to meet her at the coach station, Mary would realize what I had - that the coach station looked dreadfully inadequate and it made much more sense to wait in the main train station. Then she would realize, as I had, that we obviously needed to get tickets. Walking towards the ticket counter, she would see me, waiting for her at the information desk.
I stood there and looked at my watch. It was 4:45 PM and I knew it was going to take at least thirty minutes for Mary to return to her flat, retrieve my passport, and return to Victoria. I had thirty minutes with nothing to do but wait.
It was then that time did a funny sort of thing and slowed down.
Like instinct and logic, time has always been an enemy to me. As I looked at my watch, I could actually see the minute hand decelerate to a crawl.
Boredom began to set in and I made the brilliant decision to wander around in the station.
Glancing around, logic began working its evil machinations once again and whispered in my ear, that it would make much more sense to wait in front of the tube exit in the station. This would be much more direct than waiting in front of the ticket counter.
Although I knew in the back of my mind, that there were about four exits from the tube stop, my instincts told me that Mary would inevitably decide to use the tube exit that lead directly into the station.
I sat in front of the tube exit and looking at my watch, realized about two minutes had passed since the last time I looked at my watch.
For a while, I stood in front of the stream of people exiting the tube station and thought about how stupid I was for leaving my passport at Mary’s flat.
After looking at my watch again, I then spent some time thinking about how shameful it was that I had asked Mary to retrieve my passport while I waited in the train station.
Although I tried for several minutes, I could not think of one book or movie in which the guy was the one waiting at the train station. In every situation, it was the guy who sent the girl to wait at the train station while he went to settle the score.
“How shameful,” I thought.
Then, my mood brightened a bit as I realized that at least I was being original.
I looked at my watch again and realized that only 10 seconds had passed since the last time I looked at my watch.
Things proceeded in this manner for the next hour, until about 5:45, at which point I started getting a little nervous.
Time sensed my fear and begin accelerating.
As I watched the minute hand speed up, I began to feel more nervous and did what any rational human would do in my situation - take money out of the ATM machine. No matter what was to come in the ensuing hours, I was not going to face it with an empty wallet.
After withdrawing cash and standing around for another fifteen minutes, I decided that something had gone fundamentally wrong and began scanning the station frantically. It was then that my eyes alit on a sign at the far end of the station that read, “Coach Station.”
Again, logic outraced emotion and I began contemplating how much time we had left. It was 6:00 PM and the bus was supposed to take about thirty minutes, which left us with a good hour of leeway.
I darted in the direction of the sign and passed through a series of hallways that lead me in the opposite direction from where I had originally thought the coach station existed.
Continuing to follow the signs, I soon found myself outside the Victoria train station and found that the coach station signs had completely vanished.
Turning to a man selling newspapers nearby, I asked, “Do you have any idea where the Victoria coach station is?”
Nodding his head, he pointed down the street and said, “Two blocks down, on the left.”
Grabbing the suitcase under my arm, I began sprinting in the direction he had pointed me. At the end of the first block, I decided to ask another newspaper vendor for confirmation.
The man muttered something unintelligible and pointed in a direction that was somewhere in between the street the original vendor had pointed down, and the street perpendicular to it.
“I’m sorry,” I responded. “What did you say?”
Opting for quantity in favor of quality, the vendor proceeded to exactly repeat his original grunt and gesture.
For some reason, I flashed back to my time spent teaching English to five-year-olds in Korea as I responded, “Is it this one?” while pointing to the first street, “Or is it this one?” I said while pointing to the second.
The man, now looking visibly perturbed, pointed at his imaginary route once again and grunted louder.
I shook my head in disgust and made the brilliant decision to do the opposite of what my instincts were telling me, and headed off in the direction that the first vendor had pointed, lugging my suitcase as if it were a disobedient, obese child.
It was not long until I spotted a building on the corner of the block with a large sign that read, “Coach Station.”
Mary was waiting in front with a bewildered look on her face.
“Where have you been,” she asked, to which I responded with an incoherent deluge of words:
“Train station. Ticket. Airport.”
“You thought the coach station was in the main train station, waited in front of the ticket counter for fifteen minutes before finally realizing the coach station was located outside the original train station, and are now nervous we aren’t going to make it to the airport on time?” she asked.
I nodded and we headed into the coach station.
The ticket salesperson directed us to a corner down the street, where a bus left for Luton airport every fifteen minutes.
Rushing to the stop, I asked a group of British travelers, “Is this the bus to Luton airport?”
“Yeah,” one of them responded. “It should be here any minute now.”
As if on cue, a bus turned the corner and began heading towards our stop. I looked down at my watch. It was 6:30 PM and our flight left at 7:30 PM. As long as we were there by 7:00 PM, we would be fine.
It was then that I noticed Mary was staring down the street at a bus containing the word, “Express.” The same look that she had given me when I had initially told her I forgot my passport - 75% amusement and 25% fear - reappeared on her face.
“What is it,” I asked.
“Oh, I’m sure it’s nothing,” she answered confidently. “But…”
And that is the point at which I knew we would never make it to the airport on time.
For me, the word “but” is the bridge between truth and pretense and more often than not, confidence is the sound that demarcates which side of the fence pretense is on.
For instance, when someone spends thirty minutes struggling to find the perfect sequence of words to describe how irritating someone is, and then concludes by saying, “but I love him/her,” or ” but he/she is a great guy” in a confident and conclusive tone of voice, I always feel like answering, “then why the hell did you just spend thirty minutes talking crap about them?”
At any rate, it was not long until we found out that the bus we were actually waiting for was to take an hour to arrive at the airport, which would, for anyone keeping track, get us there at 7:30 PM - the same time the place was destined to depart. The last express bus to Luton airport, the bus that only took thirty minutes, had left at 4:30 PM.
In other words, we were fucked.
“What do we do now?” Mary asked, looking totally flabbergasted. The tide had turned and her look was now 75% fear and 25% amusement.
There were really two options at this point in time - gamble that a cab could get us there in thirty minutes, which would give us sufficient time to board the plane, or try to grab the Eurostar.
“How much is the Eurostar?” I asked.
After thinking for a few moments, she responded, “About 35 pounds each.”
Not too bad, considering the circumstances. If we could get out of this only having to spend 70 pounds, I would be happy.
Hailing down a cab, I found that the driver estimated the trip to the airport to be about 80 pounds. Not only was this more expensive than the Eurostar, but we would be taking a gamble with time, which as I’ve already mentioned, is no friend of mine.
I could almost see time lacing up its track shoes: ready to start racing the moment we entered the cab.
“It’s cheaper to take the Eurostar,” I muttered and we headed off to find our fate at Waterloo station.
We arrived with no further mishap on our way to Waterloo and made our way to the Eurostar ticket counter. The departure screen indicated there was one more train heading to Paris in about fifteen minutes.
“Two to Paris,” I told the woman standing behind the ticket counter.
“Well, you just made it,” she said as relief flooded through my body.
“Passports please,” she beckoned. “Are you both younger than twenty-six?”
Although it had been about two months since my twenty-sixth birthday, something - either a sub-conscious refusal to believe I was on the wrong side of my twenties or an institutive belief that younger people pay less for things - compelled me to answer, “Yes.”
“Okay, it will be seventy pounds each,” she stated bluntly as my heart dropped slightly.
Slowly, I reached for my wallet and began to take my credit card out. All the while, I could feel Mary’s eyes on me, full of concern that I was about to have a nervous breakdown.
Time slowed as I handed my card across the counter while the woman behind the ticket counter scanned my passport.
“Are you older than twenty-six?” she asked.
I looked at her blankly, not wanting to answer. After a few uncomfortable moments, I answered lamely, “I’m not older than twenty-six.” Which technically, was a true statement.
Shaking her head in annoyance, she decided to change her line of questioning and asked, “How old are you?”
“I’m twenty-six.”
She then made the sound that Londoners have perfected - a loud sigh that simultaneously tells you first, how difficult their lives are to begin with; and second, how your presences has managed to make their life infinitely worse.
“Well, it’s going to be 140 pounds then,” she said.
“I already knew that,” I answered.
“No, I don’t think you understand,” she responded. “It’s going to be 140 pounds for your ticket, plus the 70 pounds for her ticket, for a total of 210 pounds.”
Doubts about Paris began flooding my mind. After all, hadn’t I heard about how rude the Parisians were? I never really liked French food very much, and museums had always made me feel like I was about to die of suffocation and boredom at the same time.
I then looked at Mary and thought about how she had gotten plane tickets for both of us and made reservations at a hotel for four nights despite the fact she was a student with no income, and had been talking about the trip for the past month.
For some strange reason, a memory flashed in my mind of an evening in San Diego spent at a trendy restaurant with my girlfriend at the time and her roommate, a lovely woman in her mid-thirties named Maggie.
As we were finishing up, I was startled to see we had somehow managed to accumulate a $250 bill. Seeing that her two companions were obviously distraught over the size of the bill, Maggie had grabbed it away and despite the fact she wasn’t in the financial situation to do so, swallowed the entire thing herself.
She silenced both my companion and my demands to chip in with a single phrase - “It’s my choice to spend my money however I want.”
For some reason, her simplistic conclusion seemed overwhelmingly profound. Although I’d be lying if I claimed my own cheapness and secret desire to not pay a dime didn’t have something to do with my acceptance of her statement, there was something in the way she had said it which signified something deeper.
Ultimately, there was not question about what I was supposed to do in that situation. Maybe it was my karma that had put me in the situation, but it was my choice to pay the equivalent of $400 so we could get on the last train to Paris. Somehow, the knowledge that it was my choice filled me with a sense of relief.
Perhaps I would be condemned to a diet of ramen noodles when I returned to the States, but for now, I was heading to Paris.
Looking up from my reverie, I saw the woman staring at me impatiently.
“Do you take MasterCard?” I asked.
