From the Fork in the Road 2.0 : The Littlest Hobo

The man at the passport control window at Gatwick Airport does not want to let me into the country. Really does not want to let me in. The questioning astoundingly has been going on for a full fifteen minutes. Can facial hair and the lack of a real job be that grave of a threat to national security?

“What is the purpose of your visit to the United Kingdom?”

I smile innocuously as possible. “Just passing through.”

I can tell instantly this not an acceptable answer.

“Business or pleasure.”

“Pleasure.”

Somehow this comes out sounding dirty, confirming his suspicion that I might be a deviant, or some kind of free-lance pornographer.

“What is your … occupation, exactly?”

Tough one. I think oh, what the hell, and tell him I’m a writer.

“A writer,” he repeats.

I see the look on his face. I might as well have told him I was a free-lance pornographer.

* * *

The European Tour began in Madrid, but has since on moved to Barcelona, Lyon, Munich, Belgium, Denmark, and Sweden. Fueled by offers of free accommodations from Malmo to London, the trip has metastasized into a full-fledged tour of the continent, like a third-rate rock band perpetually searching for its next paying gig.

It’s good to have friends. It’s even better to have tolerant friends who will put up with an American ne’er-do-well flopping on their couch for a few days.

The old town of Lyon, France is surprisingly charming, being in a city best known for a variety of potatoes and sauce you pour over steak. There’s nothing here to see, necessarily, in the tourist collector-card sense (“I got Pompeii and The Leaning Tower of Pisa!” “The Eiffel Tower? Oh man, I have doubles of that!”), but that’s fine with me.

I actually stopped collecting cards a while ago. This is not my first European rodeo.

I came to Lyon because it’s on the way to Munich from Barcelona and Madrid. Which is on the way to Brussels, which is on the way to Copenhagen, which is on the way to Malmo. Sort of. Anyway, I wanted to be able to tell people at cocktail parties for the rest of my life that I once drank a Cote du Rhone while sitting on the Cote du Rhone.

Pretty much shows you where my shallow priorities lie.

“Would you like to try some of our regional specialties, monsieur?”

The waitress at the outdoor cafe says this to me in French, followed by litany of food dishes I’ve never heard of. Or at least I think this is what she says to me. Honestly my French is so bad these days she just as likely could have been complimenting my sweater.

“Oui, bien sur.”

This is my usual answer in French, because it serves as a coherent response to both food order questions and sweater compliments. My goal, as always, is to pretend like I know what I’m doing and hope that others believe it. The waitress smiles and nods as she walks away. Mission temporarily accomplished.

The downside to perpetually faking it is that - here, for example - I have absolutely no idea what I’ll be having for dinner. But how bad can it be, right? I’m in France, for God’s sake. It’s the Culinary Capital of the World. I sip my wine, impressed with my growing skills as an International Bon Vivant.

No one told me, however, that in addition to the Lyonnais aptitude for potatoes and steak sauce, they are also apparently quite fond of their organ meats. Ah, I see. The regional specialty.

The chicken liver salad that arrives first is doable. Yes, the livers are whole and yes, the taste is overpoweringly pungent and yes, I have trouble not counting the obscene number of chickens who had to surrender their livers to make this one single appetizer, but I can do it. Not my favorite, won’t willingly order it again, but I’ve eaten worse. Speaking of which, here comes the main course …

I’ve eaten tripe once before in my life, also (not coincidentally) in southern France. But the tripe I had before was stuffed into a sausage and deep fried and otherwise unrecognizable as an animal digestive tract. (As some connoisseur of fine dining once said, you can deep fry an old shoe and it would taste pretty good). The regional specialty of Lyon, on the other hand, is tripe in a tomato-based stew. With each chewy bite, you are keenly aware of exactly what you are eating.

You know how they say every weird food “tastes just like chicken?” Frog legs? Tastes just like chicken. Iguana? Tastes just like chicken.

This doesn’t taste just like chicken. Well, maybe rubber chicken.

I call the waitress. I’m going to need another bottle of Cote du Rhone to choke this down.

* * *

"Where will you staying while you're visiting the UK?"

"Tonight I'm staying with my friends Lynda and John."

"Your friends ‘Lynda and John.’” Made-up names if he ever heard them. If only I had friends with exciting, exotic, believable names like Sapphire and Trevor. “And what is the home address of ‘Lynda and John?’"

My inquisitor is a fat-faced man in wire-rimmed glasses, who, I suspect, may have ended up at the passport window as punishment for being an incompetent weasel in some other department. Still, I just don’t get it. Are they on some heightened state of alert? Has there been a recent rash of middle-aged American men sneaking into the country via Scandinavia, to live as squatters and suckle illegally from the teat of the British welfare state?

"I have no idea. Somewhere in North London."

"You have no idea.” He smirks at me. “How are you going to get there?"

The look on his face tells me he thinks he is about to catch me in my own web of deadbeat/terrorist lies. I blink twice.

 "I'm going to call John and meet him in the city,” I say slowly, “and he’s going to take me to his house."

"You're going to call ‘John’ and meet him in the city,” he repeats, “and he’s going to take you to his house.”

This is the tone of voice a person uses if the next words out of their mouth are “Oh this is rich! Rich, I say!” All I want to do is get my passport stamped. Instead I’m trapped in a bad Noel Coward play.

* * *

It’s not something I’m proud of, but I admit that every time I travel into Germany, I subconsciously begin to whistle the theme song to “Hogan’s Heroes.”

The German businessman in the dining car on the train from Strasbourg is not amused. I have to turn to the window and pretend like I’m choking on my spaetzle.

The next day I’m wandering the streets of Munich when I come across a Mexican wedding on the steps of the National Theater. A four-piece mariachi band is playing “La Bomba.” To the best of my knowledge, I am not psychotic or under the influence hallucinogenic mushrooms.

I guess times have changed. At least the band has temporarily driven “Hogan’s Heroes” from my brain.

* * *

“What, are you touring like the Japanese now?”

This insult regarding my current travel practices is casually tossed at me at a restaurant in Brussels’ Place Flagey, a few blocks from where a decade and a half earlier I lived in an a one-room, tree-house apartment as a cheap, lazy graduate student. The more things change, right?

Of course at least then I had an apartment.

My caustic dinner companion is a short, dark-haired woman from Barcelona now living in Belgium, who once played a role in my life more pronounced than anyone in my direct acquaintance could reasonably fathom. To protect identities, I will refer her simply as Crazy Maria.

I was never able to ascertain if Crazy Maria was certifiably crazy, or simply just Spanish. In the end, I found this to be a distinction without a difference. After the countless emotionally overwrought, insane conversations with Crazy Maria, I was always left closing my eyes and rubbing my temples, as if trying to ward off a massive migraine, or head-bursting aneurism.

Tonight would be no different. As I should have expected, the emotional ammunition is being fired across the table with no regard for the safety of innocent bystanders. Some things never change.

“You are always the one who leaves. Aren’t you, Dave? I knew you would leave me, Dave; I knew it! So yes, I was forced to leave you first.”

I last spoke to Crazy Maria four years ago, after she stood me up on a long-planned trip to Ireland less than a week before departure. I went to Ireland anyway and had a great time. Trust me, if there’s any place to tour alone without a crazy Spanish girlfriend in tow, Ireland is place to do it.

“You were so cold to me, Dave. So cold.”

Yes, how dare I get on with my life after you dumped me. I feel the vein in the side of my head beginning to throb. I decide to change the subject.

“So tell me about your trip to America. You said you went there last summer with your boyfriend?”

Crazy Maria begins the account of her recent trip to the U.S. by telling me of the beautiful vistas of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. The majesty of the drive down Highway 1 through Big Sur. The excitement and glamor of Los Angeles. The spectacular lights of Las Vegas rising out the night desert. The awe-inspiring, natural wonder of the Grand and Bryce canyons.

She follows this 45 seconds of praise with a twenty minute diatribe of how the country I come from is a sick, cruel, twisted, “uncivilized” society, where homeless people clog the sidewalk, private individuals are allowed to own beachfront property, grandmothers in pickup trucks carry Kalishnikovs, and employees at a Wendy’s in some unnamed town in Arizona “looked at us as if we. Were. From. Mars! From Mars, Dave!”

I close my eyes and rub my temples, waiting for my head to explode. “Maria …”

“Do you deny it, Dave? Do you deny that you live in a Darwinian society?”

What country am I in again? That’s right; Belgium. We speak French here. At least some of us do. I look around and signal to the waitress, wondering when the next plane leaves for Copenhagen.

“L’addition, s’il vous plait.”

* * *

"How much Pound Sterling are you carrying?"

"I'm not carrying any Pound Sterling."

"You're not carrying any cash? How do you plan to support yourself while in the UK?"

I blink at the passport inspector again. "I'm going to go to an ATM machine, and take money out of my bank account."

Another likely story. He looks suspiciously at my ATM card.

"Do you have any proof of how much money is in your bank account?"

I look at a sign above the booth of the passport control window. "WE WILL TOLERATE NO ABUSE! VERBAL ABUSE OF EMPLOYEES WILL BE PROSECUTED TO THE FULLEST EXTENT OF THE LAW!" I suddenly wonder what conditions are like in the British prison system. Food may not be as good as the Italian or the French. Probably don’t serve tripe, though …

 "You mean am I traveling internationally, carrying copies of my bank statements?"

"Yes."

I bite my lip. "No."

"No?"

"No."

 He peers at me with little piggy eyes over his glasses and makes a note of this on the List of Grievances he is compiling, apparently containing my qualities as an Undesirable. I try to read upside down. No … Proof … Of … Assets …

“Do you have any credit cards?”

“Yes. I do have credit cards.”

“May I see them, please?”

I pull out and hand him Visa and American Express.

“What is the credit limit on these cards?”

Don’t be a smart ass … don’t be a smart ass … “Thirty thousand dollars, and unlimited.” You would think that would last me for a week in the UK, but hey, I may start buying people drinks.

He looks at me sideways as he rubs his chin. “Do you have any proof of those credit limits?”

* * *

I’ve never been attacked before by a tree, but I guess there’s a first time for everything. Makes sense it would be a beautiful, stately, harmless-looking shade tree in the middle of Hyde Park.

What’s up with all this British hostility?

I’m sitting in the park on a warm and sunny Sunday afternoon (“Don’t get the idea that London weather always like this,” John tells me) with John, Lynda and Vicky, as Vicky’s two kids alternate between playing games and proclaiming their boredom. My English friends mention offhand that we’re currently camped under something they call a “conker tree.”

“A conker tree?” I say. “That’s a bizarre name. Why do they call it a conker tr …

As if on cue, a round, green, spiked projectile the size and weight of a billiard ball drops out of the sky and bashes me on the shoulder. Another six inches to the left and my head would have exploded like a watermelon.

“JESUS HOLY F …!” I manage to bite off my expletive as I look to see eight-year-old Sasha looking down at me. “What the hell … I mean, what the heck was that?”

“That’s a conker,” Sasha informs me matter of factly, as if I am an amazingly slow-witted foreigner who needs to have the obvious repeatedly explained. The kid immediately loses interest and turns away as I message the bruise on my shoulder.

“Mummy,” Sasha whines, “I’m so bored!” Apparently killer trees are no cause for alarm or even mild interest among the young here in Britannia.

“So tell me again,” Vicky asks after handing out Chinese paper kites to distract the kids for a few minutes, “what is it you’re doing, now?”

“You mean in addition to recovering from my recent near-death experience?”

She ignores the smart-ass answer. “You were in Brussels staying with Porter, right? Then Peter and Kamilla in Copenhagen and Ola in, where, Malmo? And now you’re here in London with John and Lynda. Where to, next?”

“Edinburgh, I think. Then back to Madrid to live for a while.”

“You’re going to live in Madrid?”

“Yes.”

“Why Madrid?”

I shrug. “I like the tapas?”

Vicky was tops in our grad-school class back in Brussels, and she’s way too smart to let me weasel my way out an actual answer. Still, she’s looking for an explanation that I have no real ability to provide.

“Yes but, what is it exactly that you’re doing?”

Lynda leans toward Vicky and points at me.

“He’s The Littlest Hobo!”

John and Vicky laugh and Vicky nods, as if it all makes sense now.

“You’re right. He is The Littlest Hobo.”

I look around in confusion. Everybody gets it but me. “I’m the littlest what?”

I subsequently learn that a certain generation of British kids in the 70s and 80s were entertained on Saturday mornings by a TV show called The Littlest Hobo. Hobo, it turns out, is not an under-sized homeless person as the name suggests, but a stray German Shepherd “who wanders from town to town, helping people in need.”

“Despite the attempts of many people whom he helped to adopt him,” Wikipedia tells us, “[Hobo] appeared to prefer to be on his own, and would head off by himself at the end of each episode.”

I am neither little, nor a German Shepherd. And I can’t say I remember ever actually helping anyone in any town, outside of passing a bowl of pretzels down the bar. But otherwise, if the collar fits …

“Wait,” Vicky says. “How does it go? How does it go?”

Oh, good. They remember The Littlest Hobo theme song.

“Maybe tomorrow, I’ll want to settle down!

Until tomorrow, I’ll just keep moving on …!”

* * *

“Do you have a return plane ticket out of the UK?”

“No.”

“Train ticket?”

“No.”

“Address of hotels you will be staying in Edinburgh?”

“No.”

“Proof of regular income?”

“No.”

“Proof of Insurance?”

“No …”

* * *

I’m on the world’s slowest train returning to London from Edinburgh on a Saturday afternoon, somewhere west of Newcastle. The train moves thirty feet, then stops for thirty minutes. Thirty feet; thirty minutes. All morning like this.

Occasionally a semi-audible explanation/apology is mumbled over the loudspeaker, something about “switching problems” due to “water on the tracks.” It’s true; it had rained the night before. Apparently water falling out of the sky is a contingency East Coast Rail was not prepared for.

Two coaches away is a large pack of beer-guzzling football fans, traveling from Scotland to a 1 p.m. match in Newcastle. They’re not going to make it. When I walk through the car to get some food a couple of hours before it looks like a frat-party kegger on steroids, empty tall-boy cans multiplying like tribbles. Everyone is trashed, and it’s just shy of ten in the morning. I suspect the drinking started sometime before dawn.

I keep looking at my watch, which is moving much, much faster than the train. I’m counting down to one o’clock, waiting for the drunken melee to begin.

* * *

Scotland is beautiful, cold, windy, and wet. You quickly understand the appeal of hunkering down in a pub and drinking until the rain lets up. Except that it doesn’t let up. Hence, lots of drinking in the pub. Until you no longer care that it’s raining.

On one such rainy evening I’m in a pub on Edinburgh’s Rose Street called Dirty Dick’s (a historical name from the 18^th Century, they insist) when I feel compelled to order the haggis, tatties, and neepes. The fact that this compulsion arises within living memory of the Lyonnais tripe incident is a testament to the power and influence of cheap and plentiful Scotch whiskey.

I have only a vague idea of how they make haggis, although I believe it involves sheep, and internal organs. I can’t even venture a guess on tatties or neepes, which turn out to be innocuous potatoes (tatties) and turnips (tur-neepes). I’m ready to choke down whatever comes my way for the sake of a good story. Yet when my order comes out from Dirty Dick’s kitchen, the food on my plate looks … surprisingly not awful. And I swear it actually tastes pretty damn good.

Let’s put it this way: in the Organ Meat Olympics, Scottish Haggis completely kicks the ass of Lyonnais Tripe. I realize it’s not a particularly high honor, but at least let’s give the Scots credit for knowing how to serve up a sheep lung.

* * *

Back on the train, during the past hour we have managed to move another 90 feet or so and crawl into a town somewhere on the outskirts of Newcastle. It’s past 1:30; the soccer game in Newcastle is well underway. I watch with absolutely no surprise as a half-dozen police in yellow vests board the train and jog down the isle past me toward the Car of Drunken Discontent. Let the melee begin.

* * *

The fat-faced, little weasel at the passport window is just about out of questions. He’s pursued every conceivable line of inquiry to expose me as the free-loading/terrorist scum he knows me to be, outside of asking how many pair of underwear I’m carrying.

Eight? How do you expect to live for a week in the UK with only eight pair of underwear?

Unable to come up with any more questions, Weasel Man grudgingly takes my passport and slides it under some kind of electronic scanner. Of course it doesn’t scan. Or beep, or whatever the hell it’s supposed to do. He slides it a second time, then a third. He looks down at the passport, then up at me.

“Where did you get this passport?” he asks me.

“Where did I get it?”

“Yes. Where was it issued?”

Unbelievable. “It was issued in San Francisco, California.”

“Where in San Francisco?”

“Where in San Francisco?”

“Yes.”

“Are you asking me if I know the street address of the passport office in San Francisco?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“No?”

“No.”

Like the worst and least-funny Abbott and Costello routine ever performed, this has gone on for so long that a backup of hopeful émigrés has developed at the passport window and attracted the attention of the apparent supervisor of my pig-faced friend. She comes to the booth and discreetly inquires about the holdup. Weasel Man shows her his List of Grievances, along with my obviously forged passport that doesn’t scan in the machine like it’s supposed to.

The supervisor closes her eyes and nods, as if she’s been through this many before and is trying her best to be patient with an autistic child.

“Remember it’s only a problem if the name has been changed, or does not match the other forms of identification,” she tells him.

“Yes, but …”

“It’s fine.”

“But …”

“It’s fine.”

Weasel Man looks up at me and sneers as he flips through the passport for an empty page to stamp.

You got through this time, Hobo. But I’m on to you. Don’t think you can just come into my country and sit under a conker tree and ride trains and buy beer and haggis without a real job or return ticket and get away with it. We don’t want your kind here!

“… So if you want to join me for a while

Just grab your hat, come travel light

That’s hobo style! …”

* * *

By the time the World’s Slowest Train reaches London it’s too late to do much of anything other than forage for food. John and Lynda are out of town but have graciously given me the keys to their house to spend one more night in the guest bedroom, also known as the Finding Nemo Room (due to the cozy, anemone-like twin beds and leaping cartoon fish pasted on the walls by a previous owner).

Too tired and/or lazy to go very far, I walk along the main drag near their house in Stoke Newington, looking for a late dinner. Because it’s Saturday night most places are packed with drinkers who moved past dinner several drinks ago. The restaurants that aren’t packed with drinkers are mostly Turkish, as Stoke Newington apparently has evolved into the UK’s own Little Istanbul. But having spent a year and a half in the real Istanbul, I just can’t bring myself to eat shish kabab or et doner on a street in North London. Been there, ate that.

I walk a bit further and see a non-Turkish possibility. I look at the menu posted at the door. They serve tapas. As I’m headed off the following day for an extended stay in Madrid, I can’t really see eating tapas in North London, either.

I finally come across a small, dimly-lit place still serving food. It is not quite enough of a bar to be packed, and is neither Turkish nor Spanish. The menu is not extensive or particularly exciting, but also does not appear to involve organ meat. It will do just fine.

I place my food order with an earnest-looking waiter with a wispy mustache who may not be as old as the socks I’m wearing, and ask if they have a beer list.

“Actually, we only have one beer at the moment,” the young man says apologetically. I find it astounding that any restaurant in the world (let alone in the UK) is serving only one kind of beer, but I guess stranger things have happened.

“And what would that be?” I ask.

“It’s an import called Anchor Steam. Ever heard of it?”

Little Skippy apparently is unaware that I honed my drinking skills while perched on a barstool as a regular at Kezar’s at the corner of Cole and Carl streets in San Francisco. Have I ever heard of it.