(1, 2) — Bom Dia, Lisboa

[it’s a monster; take it slow]

*

With a surprisingly soft “click,” the bus door slid shut. Outside, Bob stepped back as the bus knuckled its way up a foot or two, hissing pneumatically and revving its low, throaty engine. The motor coach, fifty-foot bus with “Superior Tours” plastered across the side in vivid, Technicolor inks, fell away from the curb in slow jerks, gathering steam across the smooth blacktop of a deserted dawn-time Baltimore parking lot. From beside his pickup, Bob waved one final time. Unsure if he could see, I waved back, and then, because 6AM is not an appropriate hour to be awake, I slid my nose into the crook of my elbow, muffling one ear, and fell fast asleep.

A smoker’s voice woke me: “Goooooood morningggg!!!” a voice trilled, in the key of Marlboro Red. Blearily, I thumbed my glassed onto my face, casting about for the voice’s owner. “My name,” a small woman said, hunched mischievously over a wireless microphone, “is Gloria, and I said: GOOD MORNING!!!” Gloria twirled the microphone outward, cabaret-style, in time to catch the arthritically slow response of sixty-or-so octogenarians; row upon row of old folks chorused back “good morning!” These people were dangerously awake, and in the fashion of old people on vacation, prone to repeating things that people in uniform said. I took stock of the enemy: swiveling in my seat and peering through the velveteen crack of my front-row seat at the ranks (and ranks) of senior citizenry.

It was a bad scene: Superior Tour’s 6AM bus to New York had netted every lonely grannie south of the Mason-Dixon line, and under the spell of Gloria’s magic wand, their eyes had glazed and their mouths were nearly foaming with excitement. A sea of white buns and salmon visors slipped in-and-out of view as Gloria continued: “we are about to enter the Lincoln Tunnel. The Lincoln Tunnel.” (Once you turn sixty, I assume, you enroll in elder-garten). “There will be two stops this morning,...” Gloria went on, the object of many a jaundiced eye. More instructions were given, in triplicate, as we rolled into the tiled and sodium-lit driving hell that is the Lincoln Tunnel to New York. Time to call Carl.

By the time I finished my text message, Gloria was tapping her toes. Sinatra’s “New York, New York” was being played softly over the loudspeaker, to wake the travelers who were still sleeping. The horns, and Frankie Blue-Eyes, crescendoed from a low pianissimo, until the entire bus was tapping something along to the beat. “I’M LEAVING TODAYYYY” a sixty-year-old man with Down Syndrome (I think) crooned into the silence, right along with Frankie. “GOOD OLDDD... NEW YORKKK!...” the chorus picked up without a pause, until the bus shook with song:

These little town blues, are melting away
I’ll make a brand new start of it - in old New York
If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere
It’s up to you - New York, New York

I couldn’t help it; a broad grin split my face as I took it in. I was on The Road, in the Big Apple; I had tickets abroad; my back-up chorus had probably seen Sinatra live; I joined in for the final line (“New York, New York...”). By the time Carl responded, buzzing my phone in the cup holder, Gloria and the Disabled Man were dancing in the aisle together, absurd in their enthusiasm for the City That Never Sleeps. Tony, our driver, hauled the bus into a sunny New York morning, a whale among taxi-fishes, the spinal shapes of the skyline reflected in the iridescent sheen of his wraparound Oakleys.




*

“Obama is in town,” Carl explained, apologetically, as he handed me the rear-end of a pink hippopotamus cookie. “I hear Midtown is just... stopped.” I nodded throughout my crumbs; my cabbie had sworn about our President’s Glorious Coming in three languages, none of them English. After a quick glass of water, we hit the streets (on foot) in search of a few last-minute odds and ends. We weren’t the only ones: in true Big Apple fashion, the arteries of the city were clogged with protesters, well-wishers, pilgrims, schoolchildren, moms in pantsuits, financial types in tailored suits, and, somewhere near Broadway, a crop of antique Baltimoreans.

“Obama is in town,” Carl’s mom explained, when she, too, had fought her way back to their Upper West-Side apartment. “It’s like this every time we get someone famous. Do you remember when Nelson Mandela...,” she continued, whirling about the kitchen in an elegant black-and-white pantsuit. Over the remains of her [excellent] chicken pot-pie, we planned our attack on the airports. Carl would angle for Newark, I would head for JFK, we would [hopefully] meet in Lisbon. Carl triple-checked his baggage while I tried to give his Dachshund, Mocha, her Lebensraum.

True to form, New York’s trains ran on time, and before I knew it, I was staring somewhat numbly at my departure gate. My flight was connecting through Heathrow, so my company, for the moment, were British. Like most Americans, I’m charmed by the sound of the English voice; it makes me want to be an actor, or wear rubber boots, or say snappy, clever things about tea cozies. To kill time, I called my bank, and let them know I was going over to The Dark Side, (and would they please not freeze my card when I used it?). The woman across from me began knitting. Once safely aboard, I tucked my sweatshirt into the hollow of the window, waved off the woman with the drink-cart, and slipped gently into a dream of waltzing geriatrics.




*

I woke over Pennsylvania. Or, at least, it looked like Pennsylvania: the rural outskirts of London, from above, are ruled into squares of cream and chartreuse by low walls of earth and brick. Sheep dot the landscape like so many crumbs on a quilt; each little knoll swells and rolls into the next in a quaint, storybook way. Without too much ado, the pilot brought us to earth, docking gently against the bedlam and furor of Heathrow Airport.

I began doubting myself over my breakfast; the waitress at the Friday's Express served me steaming “Cajun’-style” eggs, with a glass of orange drink (not, as promised, orange juice). As I fumbled through the Euro-coinage, a little stymied by its Monopoly-Money appearance, I took inventory of my situation. Nothing lost so far. Good. Nothing injured. Good. Still on schedule. Good. “But why,” I wondered, as I wended my way through the pale-faced crowds, “was I in England?” I flicked open my laptop at the gate for Lisbon, and changed my gStatus:

Rob Ryan: had no idea what he was getting himself into.

*

With a start, I awoke again. The power-napping of the road warrior was beginning to futz seriously with my internal clock; it felt like 3AM in Baltimore, but outside, a Mediterranean sun shone strongly on a noontime sea. I craned my head to peer out, for the first time, on Lisbon; my heart, which had been so tired, thumped strongly, and tried to jump into my throat.

An azure sea stretched for miles in each direction, ruffled only by the sleepy wakes of white-masted fishing boats. Our shadow bobbed slightly in the surf, the pale turquoise silhouette of some legendary bird, flitting across a deeper marine pattern of dark cerulean, indigo, and a soulful navy hue. “Cor!” the sharp-nosed bloke sitting next to me said, craning his own head to the other porthole. “Getta load o’ that!” he chirped to his partner-in-crime, an athletic-looking aristocrat, probably a banker, whose misty Savile Row suit and dapper pink pocket square complimented his Roman nose and firm chin perfectly. When we stood to de-plane, the banker reached effortlessly for my overhead bag; it occurred to me that he looked like nothing so much as a racing-breed greyhound in glasses.




*

It was now Thursday, September the Eleventh, and I was grateful to be a grounded American. By now news had reached me of an AeroMexico hijacking; an unhappy event to hear about on an unhappy day. But whatever chilly gloom Heathrow had left on her passengers was now evaporating into the humid, noontime air. The air’s rich tropical heat was melting over everything, and even the legendarily prim British were relaxing into its hammocky feel.

The airport’s marbled floor was flecked in gold leaf and burnished to a shimmer. The silken surface, or my bubbling elation, pulled my luggage for me; I captained my rolly-polly with only a finger and a smile. Swarthy men with ebony, nappy hair called out for me in Portguese, sure that I was Brazilian. For the umpteenth time abroad, I gave thanks to the God of Interracial Children; I was invisibly foreign.

Before we had parted, Carl had given me letterhead with simple instructions to get to our hostel. I brute-forced my way through a conversation with one of the cabbies in Spanish, the instructions clutched in a sweaty palm. Around us, newly-rented cars buzzed past with payloads of cow-eyed Britons. A bus-ride later, I stood in front of a heavy green door, which rested charmingly askew on its white marble lip. I clicked my luggage over the cobblestoned interior, and made my way to the hostel’s second-floor desk. A tanned beauty slid her ivory earphones from behind her ears, and raised her eyebrows in an international “what’s up?”

Rob: “Bom dia! Me llamo Roberto y estoy el compañero de cuarto de Sr. Carl Case. ¿Sabe ud. si el esté aqui?
Maria: “Olá! Si, ha llegado hasta cinco horas, más o menos. Disculpe; me voy a sacar sus llaves.”

She led me past a sunny day-room of couches, TVs, (and, predictably, Americans). Her hand trailed along the wall, a rich cream color, chased in scarlet and maroon. Her slim fingers gestured to a room at the end of the hall, and with an artful twist and a smile, she showed me how to disable the lock. I stepped into the cool, tiled gloom of a vaulted room. The maple rails of two bunk-beds reposed in a corner, cast in shadow by the window’s long, crimson drapes. And on the top bunk, curled against the wall in the knee-bend I know as well as my own name, was Mr. Carl Case.

“Hello,” he said, simply, turning over in the dappled twilight of a humid Lisbon afternoon. He smiled endearingly, and mussed his tousled hair, looking over my bags and newly-smoothed forehead. “Bem-vindo: you have arrived.”