Furry Tongue

Prologue

The start is not really a great place from which to begin. Sadly, I believe it is traditionally good practice to do so. I’d advise gritting your teeth through this bit and holding out for the amusing stuff that will hopefully follow this dour and uninspiring prologue

That’s what I might have said at the time. Confidence was lower than the mercury in an Eskimos thermometer. The happiness seemed to have been sucked from within me, and I was usually a pretty joyful person. It was partly my own fault, but it had a fair amount to do with The Bitch. I had painted myself into a corner with only her for company, a very silly move (and it wasn’t even good metaphorical paint, it was already peeling and smelling of poisoned fish). I purposely found a job in a bar and worked night shifts so I could be away from her as often as possible (she had a regular nine to five job), but there are 24 hours in a day and some of them had to be shared. Perhaps I should have found a pub a good four hours commute away, that would have helped avoid spending any waking hours in her company.

What I needed was for my tiny, unused testicles to suddenly swell up and become a big, shiny pair of Cahones. Then I could tell her that I was slinging my hook and I had hated the last six months with all of my soul (although there was not much of it left as even that had been worn down). It hadn’t always been bad; the first few months had been very pleasant, but then she had unleashed her real personality and it was a stinker. She bullied, frowned and hissed her way through everything when I was around. She’d once spiked me with the pointy end of a large umbrella. There was less and less sex. She even complained that it hurt her, which I treated as a compliment for about two days until a cold shower reality check knocked me back down to (below average) size.

How could I make the great escape that was so badly needed? Faking my death was completely out of the question, as was organising my mates to kidnap me and stuff me into the back of a Ford Transit, never to be seen again. By her, anyway. If it were right now, I’d simply tell her that she was a total cow and I’d taken to masturbating on her pillow while she was at work. Then I’d hop skip and jump out of the front door, shove two defiant fingers in the air and wish her bad luck in everything she did. What actually happened was possibly the wettest exit since Freddie the Frogman jumped into a lake wearing a concrete oxygen tank.

It must have been around the end of August 2002 that I got the call. This was the catalyst, the real beginning. Time for the action. Time for the adventure. Time for travelling.

When I answered the phone, I was relatively surprised to hear from Gilbert. We’d been mates at University, sure, but not that close. I hadn’t spoken to him since our course had finished earlier that year. It was therefore with some trepidation that I greeted him. Plus The Bitch didn’t like me talking to other people. One time, she looked through my mobile to check my recent call history, and found a random number on it. She shouted at me…

If I call this and some girl answers, then you and me are over

OK, call it then (Please, please be a girl, I’ve got a 50% chance of getting out of this relationship here. And it’s ‘you and I’, not‘ you and me’, although I just started a sentence with ‘and’ which makes me just as grammatically sloppy as you, even if this is only in my head and I didn’t actually say it out loud)

When she called the number it was a bloke who was best man for one of the guys I worked with inviting me to the stag do. Bugger.

Anyway, it was Gilbert on the phone, and he asked me if I wanted to go travelling with him.

I said yes even before he’d finished his sentence. All I needed was ‘Do you want to go…’. Because I did want to go. Anywhere further than I was currently going, that’s for bloody sure – I’d have spent a month cleaning sewers if it meant I’d have a chance to re-establish my self-esteem. I hatched my escape plan and executed it to perfection. I handed in my notice at work, then drove back home and told The Bitch that I was leaving her. Then I continued to live in the same room as her for a week while I served my notice period, before slinking out with my possessions (the ones that hadn’t been cut up or partially burned) and moving back in with my parents. During this week she spent most of her time locked in the bathroom, crying, and saying things like…

You’ll never meet anyone else who will treat you like me…

Which I was very glad to hear indeed, and was the first positive thing she’d said to me in a long while, although she probably didn’t mean it that way.

Let me just set one thing straight though. The Bitch was probably not completely at fault. I surely contributed to my own downfall. I lied to her a couple of times, that didn’t help. I only did it because I knew she’d shout at me if I told her the truth. I never did any serious wrong though. Didn’t cheat, didn’t take class A drugs to get through the day, didn’t hit her back, not even with soft furnishings. I don’t really mind about the year and a half that could be classed as ‘wasted’ with her. It wasn’t wasted at all. I learned a lot – about how to treat people, how to make yourself feel better even when you are in a shitty situation, and how to deflect an umbrella away from your sternum without leaving yourself open to a swift kick to the groin. Without that part of my life, I wouldn’t quite be as strong as I am now. Which is still as frail as an octogenarian with osteoporosis on a balsawood lifeboat in a hurricane, but the doctors tell me I’m getting better.

Chapter 1 – Fight and Flight

Leaving that place and relationship were just the first obstacles I had to get past. There were six months to fill before our journey began. These were also pretty dark times in the scheme of things. I found work in a call centre, which I enjoyed about as much as most people would enjoy being disembowelled with a rusty pitchfork. It also paid poorly, and I needed to save as much cash as possible, or face the prospect of cutting travelling short and returning home to my mother and father’s open wallets. It was certainly a struggle, but there was always that distant light on the horizon of knowing that I was getting the hell out of there soon.

Call centres are not bad places though. I feel like I need to defend them a bit. The people I worked with were all pleasant enough; it was just the monotonous nature of having the same conversation over and over and over again. Imagine if you had to visit your senile grandparents for eight hours a day, five days a week. Eventually the repetition of the same old war stories and tales of tapioca would get right on your tits, I tell you. Most people think of call centres as faceless, dingy holes, who hire annoying staff to lie, cheat or confuse you out of money for an awful product you didn’t actually want to buy. This is sometimes true, but the guys on the end of the phone are mostly just trying to get through the day without being shouted at by a complete stranger, which happened a lot. It happened to me, in New Zealand, but we’ll get to that later…

So that six months was less than perfect, and I was still a bit low. I hadn’t got laid in over a year, which technically made me a virgin again (according to glossy magazines ), and I was touching myself more than a curious, pubescent octopus that realised it had a plethora of different ways to satisfy itself. If my penis could have spoken it would have said…

Cummon mate, dantcha wanna use me proper like?

…as it probably would have forgotten how to speak eloquently, it had been so long since it last received enough blood to function properly.

At long last, the moment arrived. Our travels began on March 1st, 2003. Gilbert had been staying at my parents place for a couple of nights, during which time he had managed to convince them that he would look after me in all situations. My godparents had given me the spooks by saying that I needed to wear gang neutral colours in America (the first country of the trip). This advice was not so helpful, especially since they didn’t expand on which colours were ok and which were provocative. I thought about packing a lot of lavender t-shirts, as surely no-one with any street cred would wear light purple. Gilbert assured my folks and me that this was not really the case and two small, white, private school educated lads were unlikely to be confused for hardened hoods, no matter what the hue of their apparel.

He was a very persuasive man. He still is. By the end of the trip I knew him inside out, but at the very start, he was a bit of an enigma. If truth be told, the entire set of events that unfolded was not really due to anything I did. The story is not about me. It is about other people and places. I just happened to be there. Gilbert was the driver, I was the passenger. More often than not he kept you on the edge of your seat, but that was always the best place to be. If you weren’t living life on the edge, you were taking up too much room.

Sitting on the plane to Miami, we talked a bit about what lay in store for us, and he asked me what I wanted to get out of travelling. Gilbert was always very direct; he could guide you into supplying him whatever information he wanted. He could argue either side of a debate, and would usually take a contrary viewpoint to everyone else just to provide himself with some sport. If he had decided that my name was going to be Ethel for the next eight months, I wouldn’t have been able to alter this. Fortunately, he must have decided that in spending that much time with somebody, it would be a silly move to piss them off from day one.

I replied to his question by stating the standard travellers mantra – I wanted to grow, to experience new things, to learn who I was. Clearly I was a walking cliché. Slightly more honest would have been along the lines of…

I want to have sex and get drunk as much as possible and in several different countries… although this remains a very British stereotype, so the first answer was just as acceptable.

When I posed the same insightful enquiry to Gilbert he came back with a far more simplistic response…

I want to find a wife…

And by jingo he almost found several.

**********

I haven’t really gone into detail about Gilberts motivations and character flaws here. This is because, at this time, I had no idea what they were. He was a strange ginger man, who, if not in the thick of some outrageous adventure involving a gold necklace, a dancing bear and the lady acrobat from the Moscow State Circus, was almost certainly in the middle of telling a story about some similar event or encounter. His tales were legendary, mainly because most of them were true, albeit wrapped in a flourish of exaggerated rhetoric. Bafflingly, most of his yarns ended with him blacking out on the rooftop of a three story building and awaking next morning to find himself wearing only a solitary blue plimsoll. Quite how he can recall what had gone on previous to this was a mystery. As the time elapsed over our journey, more fragments of his personality revealed themselves to me, which I shall drip feed in a similar manner.

Once the plane landed, we alighted and made our way to customs. I dislike airports at the best of times, and American security, especially in the wake of 9/11, was understandably watertight. Not that I’d done anything wrong mind, but I always crap myself in the face of an authority that could quite easily say…

I’m sorry Mr Jago, we don’t want your sort here, now fuck off back to England please…

So I was minding my own business and smiling politely at the customs officer, hoping he would let Gilbert and I pass like fibre through the large intestine. But he stopped us, and held me with a piercing glare, before stating…

Do you know that we’ve had our eye on this guy (motioning one eyebrow towards Gilbert) for some time…

Before the first traces of urine could work their way into my best pair of underpants, the guy transformed his expression from a grimace into a grin, and I realised he was just playing with the poor little white boy who had lost his mummy and was a bit scared. And then it happened. I have no idea where it came from, but I suddenly lost the paranoid, nervous feeling that I had called my personality for the last year, and just quipped back…

I should hope so, he’s definitely up to something…

Wow. That felt good. And before the guy had time to take me seriously and tackle us to the floor, we stepped out of the line and into America, with a new sense of purpose and ready for anything it had to throw at us. Apart from the humidity, which had me pissing sweat so fast that a toad laid its spawn in the little pool accumulating by my feet, and before I could muster the energy to take five steps they’d already turned into tadpoles.

Chapter 2 – Jumping Jack Flasher

Big cities were not really the best place for us as travellers, although it took me a while to realise it. We were only in Miami for one night, which was a good thing. There was still time to crap ourselves, as Gilbert had not actually booked a place in the hostel several weeks in advance like he had told me. Instead he had inquired about booking a dorm room, but had been too tight to actually hand over his credit card details. We were fortunate enough that the place was not full, or we could have been left with the ‘Mary and Joseph suite’ outside. Amid the confusion and apprehension, the other minor issue of how we were getting out of Miami was solved when two guys our age offered us a lift up the coast. Two points here:

1) The guys were staying in our dorm room in the hostel and seemed genuinely friendly and not like the kind of people to drive us into the woods and do nasty things with leather straps

2) We were incredibly naive in more than just trusting strangers. We had planned an eight month trip as far as day one, and left the rest to chance.

In the morning we spent a couple of hours at South Beach, which was just long enough for Gilbert to burn his lilywhite Scottish skin. He is a weird jigsaw of a man really. He was born north of the border, but spent much of his infant life in Sussex, before moving back up to Cullen, Scotland. It was a small town, in between Aberdeen and Inverness, right on the seaside. Mind you, not the kind of Miami seaside we were seeing, it was more craggy rocks and frozen whitewash than sun lotion and G-strings. While at school in Cullen, Gil was bullied heavily for having a ‘posh’ English accent. Well, I guess any English accent sounds posh in Scotland. He was physically and mentally tortured, and he responded in a way that tells you a lot about the man he was to become – he developed his English accent until it was so cut-glass it would make the Queen look a bit rough around the edges. In the face of adversity, he stood firm and never backed down. You’d think that he would dislike Scotland after he was treated in that way, but for some reason he embraced it and is ardently Scottish. So much so in fact, that he decided to wear his kilt on our road trip up the Miami coast.

Our two new mates were going as far as Vero Beach, which was a ten minute drive away from our intended destination – a town called Sebastian. There’s nothing particularly fascinating or alluring about Sebastian, but it is home to one of the most reputable Sky diving centres in the world, or so I’m told.

I over exaggerated earlier (get used to it, I’ll do it a million times through these pages!). We had actually planned the first week of our trip, not just one day. At least, Gilbert had planned the first week, and I was just so happy to be out of the UK that all that mattered was catching the flight in the first place. The plan was simple – fly to Florida and learn to skydive for a week. Hold on, that was Gilbert’s plan. I had no real urge to jump out of a perfectly functional airplane, so was prepared for getting some first class sunbathing time until Gil had filled his boots with adrenaline and testosterone (which sounds like something that goes on in the toilets of a hardcore gay club).

We were picked up by the Skydive Sebastian people carrier from a gas station in Vero Beach, but not before several people had commented on Gilbert’s attire…

You’re a long way from home sonny. No shit. What gave it away? Was it the ginger hair, or the shortbread he was eating, or the whiskey filled hip flask, or the big purple, blue and green chequered skirt he was wearing?

The drop zone (or DZ as all the cool cats know it) was unremarkable. Apart from the two massive hangars, it would not have looked too far out of place in a shanty town. However, there was a vibe about the place that seemed to add a layer of sheen to everything. It is difficult to describe, but I was intimidated and excited at the same time. Which was very odd as I was only there to sit on the floor and look up at the sky as my mate hurtled towards me at terminal velocity. Gil had warned me that skydivers as a group did not have much time for those who preferred terra firma, but as we arrived at the DZ everyone seemed friendly and approachable enough.

There was an area set aside for camping, and with storm clouds gathering we pitched our tent in record time to avoid a soaking that would have been more thorough than standing in the fountains of the Bellagio hotel at show time. Gil was a very practical bloke, he was a climber, a hunter and always occupying himself with some activity or other. Putting up the tent fast was a necessity to him – it was a challenge, something to overcome. I just didn’t want my hair or clothes to get wet. I learned very quickly to trust him with my life in any outdoors type of environment, be it in the air, on the ground or underwater. At the same time, I certainly wouldn’t have trusted him to put up a self assembly wardrobe, nor to chaperone any of my female relatives. Any of them.

Sharing a tent with someone is a very personal affair. To be fair, we slept in far more intimate locations throughout the journey, but for that first week we were completely in each other’s pockets. That was a great thing for our friendship, if less great for personal hygiene. Gil had many strengths, but washing his clothes was not one of them, and I believe that he must have damaged his nasal receptors at a young age, or been born without any to shrug off the fug that encompassed him. The tent adopted a stale, musty odour that I eventually got used to, and I guess it killed off any bugs as we never got bitten, unlike many of our counterpart campers.

On the first morning we were woken by the sun. Not by the light, but by the intense heat that was cooking us like two boil in the bag travellers (beer flavoured). It was insanely early, not even 10am(!), and there we were sweltering, stuck to the nylon of our sleeping bags, trying to get dressed in one cubic metre of space without touching each other’s sweaty bits. Gilbert emerged first from the tent, which could possibly be described as being the womb of friendship, although now I sound like a psychologist with an LSD patch permanently stuck on his temple. He strode off to the main hangar, and spent the whole day fraternising with the other folk who liked to throw themselves towards the earth from 13,000 feet. I, meanwhile, had a very productive day, which Gilbert interrogated me about as the light faded…

Today I learned how to pack a parachute and have booked my individual training for Monday. What did you do?

Well actually I’ve been busy was my reply. "I went for a run down a long straight road, and then when I got back I gave