Fear and Loafing in London

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Carl reflects at the bar. He’s got my hat on his head, a cigarette in one hand, an almost-empty bottle of Corona in the other. His chest towers over me like a personal guardian. Charlotte is standing next to him, beaming in her freckled fashion. I met Charlotte in Peru, traveled with her for a week, and last saw her about 16 months ago on Lake Titicaca in Bolivia.
“London is bittersweet,” says Carl. He’s had a rough couple of years, made all the more harder simply because he has chosen to live in London in the first place.
“Life is bittersweet,” I follow, which is the kind of thing you say after a hard day of drinking under the hot sun of a summer festival.
“London is life,” says Charlotte, or me - it didn’t really matter.
“It’s been emotional,” concludes Carl, and that was that.

Between four days on a stopover in London, and a few days in Vancouver, this was supposed to be my week off. No reports, no gallery, just catching up with friends and family, finding my breath before Montreal breaks my liver, and the West Coast Trail breaks everything else. I lived in London for two years, so writing about my time here would be like writing about my life in general, transforming Modern Gonzo into a personal diary, which quite frankly, isn’t very interesting. So why are you reading this? Well, Minesh remarked that he’d love to read my thoughts on the weekend, even if it consisted largely of sitting in a park surrounded by 30,000 people drinking from a fountain of Pimms and lemonade. London was “emotional” for a number of reasons, and I’ll gladly spare you the drama (or “draamar” as a London drama student might say) suffice to say that I saw friends and family I had not seen for many, many years, visited old haunts to see the ghosts of my past, and met three dozen new friends who I quickly annoyed by asking them to finish my three sentences.

I arrived somewhat bothered by the fact that, according to a popular web forum, I am a racist. Some silly argument about Gonzo journalism had come up, and someone had suggested that Modern Gonzo is “travel writing with the flair of Hunter S. Thompson”. Obviously, I would never make such a claim myself, but a few hundred people did click on the link, leading to a comment accusing me of being a racist. To my defense, someone replied, “that’s quite the accusation! What makes you think that?”

“Dino213b”, who no doubt takes life awfully seriously, lifted a passage from my report in Kuala Lumpur in which I ponder hotel toilet phones, and how they might be used to conduct important business while you’re “dropping off the Cosby Kids”. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that the joke defines toilet humour, but you have to be pretty constipated to connect it to a general hatred for all things non-Caucasian. I should have asked big, black and beautiful Carl what he thought, but he was too busy using his considerable arms to give Charlotte and I a simultaneous bear hug in the dance tent. Having encountered many wonderful people of white, brown, black, pink, yellow, turquoise, red, green and blue persuasion on my travels, it irks me that “Dino213b” sees me as white supremacist. Perhaps I’m just being overly sensitive that this flaking mooch with halitosis and a small penis might call me racist. Especially after talking to a few black guys in St Petersburg and listening in horror to their stories of being beaten up and persecuted by local men (the St Petersburg Times reported that six Russian guys were acquitted after beating a Congolese student to death!)
“I regret studying here,” says Morton from Zambia. Adds his friend Kabunda,
“These people hate us like nowhere else in the world. It may be unsafe for a black man in Russia, but I believe in finishing what I start.” His courage is inspiring, and I hope he survives getting his degree. “Dino213b” is not the first person to get offended by Modern Gonzo, but calling me a racist is like calling scary hairy Bill Bryson a transvestite sex god. Uh oh, that sounds homophobic!

Gonzo Gallery for Fear and Loafing in London

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