Lot's Road

Want a hot time in the old town tonight? You want Hotwire. After all, you haven't planned things all that well. And ten days in Todenham, Gloucestershire, with its 400 residents and single business (pub) while restful, can get a little lonely when your extrovert cousin heads off to work in London...so maybe London is where I need to be. Where hotels are so expensive as to be almost laughable, especially if one doesn't book ahead. So there's Hotwire. How far wrong can you go? Choose a known part of town and a place big and modern enough to have a swimming pool listed...and there's bound to be a wheelchair-accessible room. So, go for it. Give Hotwire your money. Go ahead, click on Purchase.

In my current life, which everyone describes as grief, not only is planning difficult, but envisioning seems a challenge. That must explain why I managed to set off for London with a single shirt. That is to say, to enter one of the world's grimy, windblown metropolises without a change of upper garment. I discovered this as soon as I opened my bag in the Wyndham Chelsea Wharf. Wyndham is a known hotel chain, but Chelsea Wharf is an unknown location at the most remote corner of the Royal Borough. In fact, I am sure that Hotwire's Chelsea map had to be slightly gerrymandered to include this remote location. It's a stretch. In fact, it's pretty hard in terms of miles to be much further from central London. Furthermore, Chelsea Wharf exists even to this day largely in the mind of whatever developer built it.

I wonder what was here at one point. Doubtless old wharves, timbers crumbling, Dickensian. Now there's a so-called wharf where yachts tie up off the Thames. And the entire area surrounded by modern offices, a vast and these days startlingly empty design center, stark modern flats and, yes, one Wyndham hotel. Some French filmmaker in the 1960s would have found this a great location for a movie about anomie and alienation, people smoking and looking through each other and wandering about a big floodlit empty city of the future. Chelsea Wharf. Not only is the location distant in terms of mileage, it is culturally distant from almost anything one can conceive of as London. And I only had one shirt.

The shirt thing touched a nerve. The nerve is an exposed one these days, and I must give my grief advisors full credit for warning me. Yes, the recently bereaved person can easily flare into anger when forced to take up a task once handled by the deceased. And, no, it's not a matter of the work involved or the lack of assistance. It's emotional, a hot button. Good thing one has Hotwire.

Jake met me at Paddington Station, London. I'm always impressed by the sheer size of the place, the crowds, the railway comings and goings. I'm also impressed by Jake, his persistent good spirits and humor. I find it hard to put on a chatty social front with Jake, my cousin's son. At 26 or 27, he is down-to-earth and hard to fool. I am not in a very good mood, it seems, on my arrival in London. I can't fake it. So we go about tasks. First, down to the Tube level to deal with transport. I queue, produce a credit card and a man gives me an Oyster Card. The latter ensures swift and less expensive entry to tube trains and buses. A man from Transport for London even approaches with a couple of brochures. Moreover, we go to the full-sized tube schematic on the wall and he points out the paucity of wheelchair-accessible tube stations. There are a couple. But virtually the entire West End is still out of bounds for wheelchairs.

Jake and I continue on our way. Our way is complicated. We queue on one side of Praed Street, change our collective minds and switch to the other. It's one bus to Kensington High Street, then another to...no, it's not. There is a Marks & Spencer right there, and I must go inside and inspect the goods. Jake doesn't mind. He is very good at going with the flow. Eventually, we flow aboard the 328 bus for Chelsea. Incredibly, in the same spirit as the shirt packing, I do not have a single document with me that lists the address of the hotel or even hints at its whereabouts. I've seen the thing on a map, feel I'm under control...and in the end, I am more or less correct. We miss the correct turn by only a couple of streets, according to the ruddy-faced man I stop as he emerges from a bar.

We face each other, this man and I, as true aliens. It is utterly foreign to me, Britons' capacity for drink. This man has had quite a bit, and likely decades of having quite a bit, judging by his general flush and the network of veins across his cheeks. I can't help staring at the latter, as intricate and detailed as the Ganges delta. He looks at me in the same spirit. You want Lot's Road, he says, correctly discerning in me something equally distracted and obsessed. It's true, for I am barely listening to him and not taking in much of anything these days, and what he has said, his words and geographic advice have sailed in one neuron and out the other. Still, my mind grabs the last sentence, like the lingering subtitle in a film. Lot's Road I mouth back to him, mechanically. He nods as though approving my admirable effort at comprehension. His eyes let me go, and Jake and I continue.

'Of course, you know about the construction.' The desk guy from the Wyndham Chelsea Wharf is walking me to my room. There are always reasons why hotels pop up in Hotwire. In a city bursting with summer tourists, where the $600-a-night hotel room is guaranteed to be small, if central, and not necessarily available, it doesn't make sense that the Wyndham isn't jammed. I say nothing about the construction. I don't care. Jake and I have endured a series of buses and my aging body has been sitting in a wheelchair for too many hours. At least I have a room. Actually, it's a suite. After asking Hotwire to intervene, things have worked out well in the access department. There's lots of space, an accessible tub and separate shower...not to mention no less than two plasma TVs and really good digital radio. I turn the latter on immediately. Too bad there's not much time. Jake and I hit the bus road for dinner in Soho.

Lot's Road doesn't have lots going for it. I was too tired to pay much attention on the way to the hotel, but now I am alert enough to notice and to be annoyed. To get up to the bus stop at the Kings Road, I have to go off the footpath several times, go into the street and dodge traffic. All of this would be understandable in a poorer, less recently modernized and developed part of London. But not here. Never mind, for we are back on the bus, and I am getting the hang of it. I do have to rely on Jake to wave the Oyster Card in front of the pay point...a proximity card reader. A wave is all it takes. And a word with the driver. The low-floor bus unfurls a short ramp, and I roll aboard. Although it's not realistic, and my neuromuscular times have changed, I can't help remembering that I used to take the Tube. There's a reason why God invented subway trains, and that reason could not be more apparent now, during the London rush hour. The 11 bus fights its way like a salmon upstream in the Kings Road. Turning into Victoria Street, the traffic flows into a slough. Buses move here like water in a Louisiana bayou. There is a general forward flow, or there seems to be. One isn't sure. The cars could be parked and moving along with continental drift. By Victoria Station itself, the effect is complete. There is no traffic flow at all, but a sort of Brownian movement that drifts familiar landmarks by. There's a good view of Westminster Square. The bus goes right by the famous Abbey.

Jake and I get off here, as the driver advises. And damned if the next bus, the #24, is not right behind us. Jake waves at the driver, and we board in seconds. Incredibly, we make it to the Charlotte Street curry joint more or less on time. There's a big step at the front door, but Jake is a big guy, and he and a couple of waiters lift me inside. It's an ambivalent experience, being lifted, for it punctures the independence fantasy. But it's also reassuring. People care. They care about getting me in front of a curry. And I don't even mind fighting my way between tables, around a corner and into a small banquet room where...Caroline waves and so does a slightly older version of Ian Young. I haven't seen him in...who knows, 15 years? He is essentially and delightfully unchanged, even though he has moved on to late-in-life marriage and kids. Funny, intellectually engaged and, it develops, a reader of my blog. I decide the latter reveals an exquisite taste.

We knew each other 40 years ago, Ian and I, have visited occasionally since. And now we are here, back in Soho curry land, and so is my cousin Sandy and Barbara and Ed and their son Oliver and his new girlfriend Lauren and Marion and Jake. And it's impossible to talk to everyone, and yet I connect, more or less, with each of them. I connect with the past. I connect the past with the present. And it's amazing how people live and die, and sometimes the threads of a life can be drawn across the decades and briefly, even temporarily, be woven into something that surprises and fills the heart.

I am tired by the time the curry draws to its close. Someone flags down a cab for me, and I set off for my first taxi ride. I had sworn to minimize these, to try to go as far as possible on buses. But this is a good moment for a cab. It's just that the moment is a long one, and the £23 ride back to Wyndham Land reminds me of why I was determined to master the bus routes. What I really want to master is the solo flight. How can this have become so difficult? What is so intimidating about boarding and exiting a London bus on my own? This used to be a daily activity. But now in a wheelchair, the whole thing intimidates me. I am afraid I will tip over backwards going up the bus ramp. I'm not sure how to communicate with the driver from the back of the bus. For the old buses are gone now. As is the old neurology

Morning. On my own. The room is as well-equipped as it could be, all systems are go disability-wise, but my mood is sour. Things start going wrong almost immediately. I can't get the shaver charger plugged in. This is evidence of my utter incompetence. Only a fool.... I press the charger hard into the 110 outlet, aware that this is my last chance. American electricity flows only in American hotels like Wyndham's. And even though my charger is a multi-voltage one, and I even have a plug adapter back in Todenham, for some reason it is essential that I charge my shaver here in Chelsea Harbour. I press the plug in, it jumps out, I press it again. I am stupid. I give the plug a good hard shove and knock the soap on the floor. Now there are both the charger and the soap leering at me, superior in their knowledge of my faults. Everything in the bathroom is laughing at me. Everyone knows I am aging and alone and in mourning, and my need to get dressed and showered and out the door, all of this angers me. It is a task too many and a bridge too far. And fuck everyone. The shampoo tumbles to the floor. I lunge for it and feel my feet slip on the slick marble. This is dangerous. I have to settle down.

Fuck it, as I blast the shaver plug with my fist. My blow catches the thing a little off center, and it clatters to the floor also. I put on Radio 4. A good move. The show, Agriculture Today, deals with the issue of trout farming. Only the British could make this interesting, and trout take my mind off angry obsessive things. And I get to hear a lot about trout feces and effluent, which my brain needs. I need as much effluent as I can get. I make it through the shower experience without falling, battle with my socks, and I'm about to get myself up on my feet and out the door for a morning crutch up and down the carpeted hotel hallway. The phone rings. Both telephones are just out of reach, actually three telephones if one counts the one in the bathroom. Furthermore, they issue four short British rings before switching to voicemail...but I discover these details later. For now, I am in a lather, desperate to make everything go efficiently, smoothly and not be the hopeless aging paralyzed widower in the wheelchair who is currently racing to get the telephone by the bed.

On the way, I run over the rubber tip of the crutch leaning by the desk. This would be of no consequence, except for the secret purpose behind orthopedic walking sticks -- actually among the most effective and versatile clown props. Running over the flared rubber tip makes the crutch stand up most impressively and, if one is lucky or unlucky, depending on one's purpose, flip the entire aluminum stick into the air. In a second, still headed for the ringing phone, I run over my own crutch. The phone call turns out to be from Barbara who is on her way to meet me at the National Gallery, and she is slightly delayed. Not to worry, for I now have time for my walk. And as I stand up and clip the steel sleeve of the forearm crutch onto my wrist, I realize that in running over the crutch I have flattened the wrist sleeve. It's hopeless. I don't have the strength to straighten it, of course. I roll downstairs, hand the thing to the concierge, roll back in the door just as the phone begins ringing again. I miss the call, of course. I am now reaching another level of fury, and getting worked up into another froth when things reach their peak. This takes the form, probably as in many miracles, of something plausibly familiar.

The shower has been on, then turned off. And now it is on again. It has turned itself on spontaneously. I am going mad. The shower is on as on can be. Nervously, I roll into the bathroom. Water is pouring from the shower, but not from the shower head. Water is pouring around the light fixture. It is also pouring around the bar outside. Water is pouring through the ceiling. No, there is not a hail of toads, but that may follow shortly. For now, we have the water cataclysm at the ceiling, and that will do. What I do is to phone the front desk. Oh, says the receptionist. That's odd. Someone will come up. The someone proves to be an American. A Wyndham woman. She does not do the understated expensive-British-hotel thing. Wow, she says. Engineers take over, and I go to breakfast.

After Barbara and I have a look at the National Gallery, I finally throw transport caution to the winds. I board the 11 bus and, yes, Barbara waves my oyster card, but she also waves goodbye. I am on my own. The master of my fate. Lot's Road is announced by a recorded voice triggered by the satellite navigation system. And if I miss the West Indian conductors of the old days, swinging down the steps with their change machines and ticket cranks, I don't miss the stop. I press the blue button, the bus halts and the ramp descends. Lot's Road. Lot is not far. His wife has turned into the Wyndham Pillar of Salt, and I am speeding toward her now.

The next morning, on the way out of town, I decide that the £20 Wyndham breakfast isn't worth it. I make it a point to negotiate Lot's Road one last perilous time. I haven't been back in Britain long enough to automatically look right when crossing the drive-on-the-left pavement, but I mostly remember in time. I even find a cheap Italian transport café in the grand British tradition, order the wrong thing and make it back to the hotel in time for checkout. On my own again. On the road again.