...
It was decided that we would all crash out on the floor of a hotel room courtesy of Jum's mate Danny. It was ......' hilarious filing in past the guy on the desk, who looked like he wanted to object, but
realising the futility of it obviously reasoned that ignorance was the best bet and went back to his
poorly concealed thrash mag with an air of 'I never saw nuthin''. So there was ten of us in the room, eight on the floor - it wasn't quiet.
Burrito and Fly High decided to have a wrestling match amid all this, and I wondered what the guys in the room below were making of all this. It must've sounded like the mother of all
bachanalian orgies
... I woke up to find I'd
been bitten and nipped to .... during the night - so badly I thought I was scarred for life. At least my acid reflux had been neutralized in advance this time though.
... called a cab for Long Rider Jumkie and I.
As we left the room and entered the lobby they were already serving breakfast buffet. Long Rider and Jumkie without looking at each other immediately seized plates and started demolishing this with such ravenous intensity, I could hardly stand up for laughing. I was pissing myself so much it was all I could do to grab some cheerios and pour a little milk on top.
They were like a biblical swarm of locusts devouring everything in sight, with such an air of nonchalance and compose, that they didn't notice me leaning against the orange juice dispenser doubled up practically in tears. You know when you laugh so hard you can't breath, and it gives you stomach cramps..I don't know why, I just found their outright audacity hilarious.
I'm sorry - I suppose you had to be there - what made it funnier was that they were impervious to my mirth as though this was the norm...and clearly it was
.
To continue the Old Testament analogy, they piled their plates so high, and it was such folly because they couldn't hope to finish them - it was like looking at a gastronomic tower of babel (fish) constructed of a foundation of muffins and bagels, piled with assorted Danish pastry's, and topped with toast and I'm sure there was fruit on the top storey for later. We sat down at a table with another guy wearing an IOM TT t shirt, who within seconds gave up his table and fled outside with his phone. I composed myself when
I noticed a very disheveled looking guy standing in the corner staring our way. Having been half devoured by a parasitic posse of bed bugs during the night, I reasoned that it wasn't beyond the realms of possibility that this guy was the Hotel Manager; he just stood there eyeing us. He had a white baggy untucked shirt on, which could have quite feasibly been a straightjacket, and his hair was sticking up in all directions as if he'd come straight from a shock treatment session. Honestly, he resembled an extra from 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' - either that or some mad surgeon, who'd been in theatre for a week straight. All that was missing was the blood stains up the shirt. I should have obliged with the ketchup. I eventually figured he was the
local ......, who cleaned rooms for a favour and they kept him locked in the closet when the guests were about, but somehow he'd escaped. He was a Mexican version of Christopher Lloyd in 'Back to the Future' minus the wide speed freak eyes. Thinking about it now, chucking several wraps of sulphate in his direction would have been a good idea at this particular juncture, but we weren't to know that at the time! Somehow, and I forget the details how, it transpired that this was our cabbie, and he had been trying to call the room. He came over to our table, I'm not sure how the connection was made, and
we paraded out to the car which was like a big yellow NYC cab, and l looked as though it had been driven over non stop during the previous week arriving the night before from Manhattan itself - judging from the state of the driver it was on balance a fair assumption. Talking of big apples, I was highly amused again to notice that Long rider had bought his breakfast, which by now was more a horn of plenty, which he was adeptly balancing whilst opening the back door of the cab. 'You don't mind if I have a little breakfast in the back?' he said to the cabbie, who looked too exhausted to care, and jumping in he once more set about consuming this breakfast of cornucopian proportions.
Jum sat in the front and immediately engaged the guy in conversation, who turned out in the event to be very amiable. He couldn't understand how he had called Danny's room, and had been talking to him on the phone, (the cab had been booked in his name - so Jum was pretending to be him) whilst we had been simultaneously sitting in the foyer enjoying in our morning feast. There was however a major problem, and it hinged on whether or not this was in fact the
beginning or end of his shift. Jum will recall the details of this, but the guy l
ooked like a walking experiment in sleep deprivation. He did mention that he was planning to head home after he dropped us off to catch up on some much needed 'zeds, but it soon became apparent that short of dropping us off, he began dropping off himself
Jumkie made admirable attempts to keep him talking, as you would someone who's life
was fading in your arms through hypothermia or something, but as we neared the circuit and the traffic intensified, the stop start nature of the traffic and the soporific effect of this ensured that he was nodding with increasing frequency.
At one point I swear he slumped on his wheel and I thought he'd died - I'm not sure if Jumkie jabbed him in the ribs, but he certainly called "dude the traffic's moving again" prompting him to snap out of his slumber with a sort of startled comedic
'where, what who, why...who am I , aww .... that's right I drive a cab for a living' kind of bewilderment. As we sped up I swore that net time we slowed I was out of the door and walking to the circuit,
because it was only a matter of time before he passed out - or passed away and floored the thing. I had visions of Jum leaning over his corpse and desperately trying to veer us through the traffic from the passenger seat with one hand, whilst manhandling his lifeless cadaver out of the open door.
I resolved to chance it, being that I'd already had an encounter with an open door of a moving cab, and I'd probably come off substantially worse in round two. Mercifully - the circuit entrance appeared, and not before time. Thanking him and bailing out at the top of the hill, I couldn't help thinking that his time was running out. Christ knows how long his shift had been the night before......or maybe I was wrong, perhaps the problem had been that he in fact lived at room 364 of the Holiday Inn Monterey!!!
