So what has been going on? Not much I suppose. The last week has just been a series of incidents. I am pretty much living the same routine as I would at home. I spend most of my time at work developing new shortcuts to allow me to clean twice as badly in half the time. I am now reaping the dividends and spend more time pursuing other favourite pastimes such as leaning. A wise man (who saw me as something of a prodigy) once told me 'that if it is time to lean then it is time to clean'. It has taken me longer than originally anticipated but I have finally managed to disprove his theory. Since I have started working I have felt myself become considerably less social. Instead of getting drunk every night I am four metres up reading, writing or watching films. Whilst the netbook has proven very handy for my writing it has also given me a ready made excuse not to socialise. Don't get me wrong, I have friends here, but they are the other members of staff as opposed to guests. I now see guests as I would have previously seen clients. Work.
I have no plans to move on so I am not really bothering to assess if the guests are worth getting to know (i.e to travel on with). I have mates here already and I can't really be fucked forging continuous short term friendships. Sounds miserable and, whilst not strictly applicable, it is basically like being back in the UK on the lifestyle front. It is strangely welcomed to be honest. I am getting a lot of work done and I am living for free pretty much. I can still sunbathe up on the roof in mid November and I sleep on the mother of all captain's bunk beds. When I want to be sociable there are always people around and when I don't it is easy enough to get some peace. I am lacking in sleep and nutrition but I could genuinely get used to this. One guy who had his last day of work here yesterday came for a week and ended up staying for two years.
You certainly get to meet some characters working here. I can be unsociable to an extent but I am also required to be friendly to all guests when off duty. I cannot just duck people so I am having several unwelcomed conversations a day. It is not that I am being selective when being offered an olive branch, I just don't want to encourage further hallway chatter with the annoying ones who are constantly chirping around the place trying to befriend people. I honestly spend most of these conversations trying to remember what their name is, then the rest trying to edge subtly away from them until I'm far enough down the corridor that they have to shout goodbye.
There are some people that are worth meeting though. I hear some pretty amazing stories from the people passing through. I met an American guy earlier in the week who is thirty four and arrived on a motorbike. We got chatting about the bike as I had toyed with the idea, and he told me that he is recently divorced and that tomorrow he was leaving the states via Mexico with the intention of never returning to America. He probably sounds like a spectacularly bitter individual, but he is actually an incredibly cool guy who just happens to be a bit spectacularly bitter.
On Friday after work I went for lunch with the boys. That day felt a bit more like travelling. I got chatting to a lad and girl after asking the lad about his “soccer” shirt. I started chatting with them thinking that they were a couple from Utah, but after a while they told me that they were actually brother and sister – so this was my queue to start drinking. Seven hours later (circa 9pm) I am on the roof of the hostel with them (not supposed to take guests up there – not that they were even guests of the hostel) and the last thing that I remember is the guy turning to me looking disgusted and saying “Dude, have you got your hand on my sisters ass?”. My memory after that is completely blank. We had started drinking double jaegermeisters (which would be quadruple in english measurements) at 4pm and the joint broke me. I woke up the next morning at 9am and I did not have a fucking clue where I was. I was fully clothed and my face was half a meter from the ceiling, pretty freaky. I couldn't piece together the evening and when I got up for work and hour later random guests were laughing at me and asking how I was this morning. I started to get a bad feeling. I did not even recognise any of these people. Some German girl came up to me and told me that she really enjoyed my beatboxing last night. The manager of the place then came up to me and laughed in my face. They have not really seen me that drunk and as I am not going out that much they probably assume that it is hugely out of character. Apparently I was under the impression that it was 3am when it was actually 10pm and people were all pretty much sober. Ho tidy. Everyone who was working was still leathered so we started getting on the vodka again. By the end of the shift everyone was absolutely wasted. This brings me on to saturday night...
One of my favourite members of staff is the guy who works the midnight – 6AM shift. He is a world class stoner who does not officially live at the hostel but is consistently asleep on our sofa in the jungle. He is perhaps not the most professional, but he sort of gets the job done. His job involves trying to force a hostel full of drunkards to bed at 3am. He is impossibly abusive to some of the guests, which I could watch all night long. On Saturday night we all went out with the guests. At midnight he had to go back to man the reception (drunk). I came stumbling up the stairs about 1am after drinking really quite a lot that day - and Carlos begged me to man reception for a while so that he could go back to the club and hook up with some girl. I have never worked on reception before and there is no intention for me to be trained (it is a job for longer term staff). Under no circumstances should I have been behind the desk - but on the other hand I was drunk, so naturally I accepted. I have seen what he does and it does not look complex; as far as I could gather he just sits in the counter and asks to see peoples security cards as they come up the stairs (you need a key card to get into the building then up a flight of stairs to the reception area). I had been sat there for around ten minutes before I heard a shout from the bottom of the stairs “help, you gotta stop this guy, he followed us in.” Oh tidy I thinks to myself. I peer over the counter and some guy comes walking past me calmly saying “where is she?”. He was some long haired psycho type but he had a look of pure terror in his eyes. I literally did not have a clue what to do at this point, then he suddenly legs it up the next flight of stairs and begins screaming “where is she?” There is a gallery layout upstairs with rooms around a central staircase and I was worried that he would wake everyone up, and that Carlos was going to get into shit for leaving me behind reception. Without really thinking I run after him, grab him by his hair and literally drag him screaming down two flights of stairs before I throw him on to the street.
It was only the next day that I realised that this was perhaps not cool. Whilst he was clearly some dodgy crackhead I should perhaps have been a little bit more reasonable. He could have been a bit stabby. Then one of the guests told the manager that I was a bit of a hero last night, and suddenly it became cool again. Instead of being told off for being on reception I was treated like a hero for dragging some bloke down the stairs by his hair. Within an hour everyone was watching it on cctv completely unified in their admiration. Be clear on this, sometimes it does pay off to behave like a total dick. Bouncers, I finally get it.
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| Sleep up here and tell me that you are not afraid of death |
Then I move on to the less favourable members of staff. There was one german girl who could not sound less german. She walks round coughing the entire time. I'm not convinced she is ill, she has been coughing consistently for three weeks. I think it must just be the worlds most annoying tick. I cannot work out if I like the new Turkish lad who joined the staff last week. He looks like a cross between David Villa and Whirly. He feels a little more inclined to talk about his ambitions than I am willing to hear. His nickname is CEO as one day he believes that he will be CEO of a large company. In his first conversation he told me that he is not afraid of death, which is quite heavy for a meet and greet. Whenever he speaks to me I get the feeling that he is trying to sell me something. He is greasy and extremely sexually aggressive around women. He creeps up beside me and looks at the screen of my phone and what I am writing, which would be very annoying in solitary, but he also has horrendous body odour. As I am writing this he is sat on the table behind me and I'm pretty sure he is reading the screen. If you are, EVER HEARD OF DEODRANT? He follows me outside every time I go for a smoke and then just stands there. He does not drink but constantly wants to go to nightclubs. I have had some of the worst nights of my life being sober in a nightclub but he seems to love it. He says some pretty weird things, last night he turned to me and said “Simon, I am feeling strong, strong enough to lift three women”. Every time he sees me he shouts “Hi honey I am home”, what the fuck am I supposed to say to that after the twenty fifth time? Despite all of this there is something almost likeable about him. He is a trier if nothing else. Also he cannot speak much english. If he becomes capable of more detailed conversation then I will have to review the situation.
Unfortunately James and Tom (the two english guys in the jungle) leave on sunday. They are good lads and remind me a lot of myself at their age. I found it difficult to click with them when I first moved into the jungle – they made me feel kind of old. They basically spend eighteen hours a day thinking about and pursuing sex, a couple of hours having sex, and then whatever is left over to sleep (probably dreaming about sex). Being eleven years outside of my prime I have some different priorities. To begin with they did not really seem to get why I would want to read and write in my spare time. I am spending about six to eight hours a day writing, which I guess contributes greatly to the whole unsociable thing. Sorry for the continual drug talk family, but you can get a kind of weed here that literally puts me in the zone for writing. I am churning out all kinds of shit that will probably read like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas when I am done. I find myself cringing when I read some of it the next day, but there is some pretty good stuff too. So I am trading off fun and spending money for weed and productivity. After living with James and Tom for a few weeks we all now get each other, they are a cracking pair of lads and the place will not be the same without them.
Their exit will leave a void in the jungle and the creepy aspect from the first paragraph can be seamlessly resumed here. There has been this guy staying at the hostel for the last few days who creeps me out. Description wise – for anyone who is familiar with Richard 'Joner Engine Room' Jones - then picture Joner but at around five feet tall with a cropped eastern european haircut and an earring. Anyone unfamiliar with Joner then imagine a thinner version of 1991 FA Cup Paul Gascoigne with aids. I have no issue with gay people but I find it very difficult to deal with when they hit on me, which seems to be happening with regularity here (as I said, California is very liberal). I'm not really accustomed to dealing with this. The most civil way to handle it is to try and subtly indicate that I am not that way inclined. This can be straightforward if the opportunity arises to mention the word “girlfriend” in a sentence. It is not always that easy. I find myself self-conscious that I am throwing the word “girlfriend” into a conversation when it is glaringly out of context or premature at best. I don't want to appear to be some backward bumpkin who is scared that every bumder is going to try and bumd me. I suppose more accurately is that I do not want the girls that I am out with to think that I am not cool with gay people. I am cool with it, but at the same time I do not want to be hit on. Conundrum; I usually just end up spitting in their face and wedgying their hotpants. Anyway, I digress, although whilst on the subject of hotpants. The guy who creeps me out in the hostel looks like his entire suitcase will be full of striped vests, hotpants and dildo's, and the way he looks at me and sidles up wherever I am makes my stomach turn. Yesterday he asked me what it is like to work at the hostel, as he is thinking of trying it out. My heart sank, the prospect of him living in the jungle is not one that I would relish. This is not being homophobic – if a girl was behaving in this way who I was in no way attracted to then I would be saying the same. My tactics were the same as if it were a girl who I did not want to work and live with, I just told him how bad the job is (which was a lie, I genuinely love it). So I told him straight – I spend most of my day knuckle deep in shit and this morning I put my hand in some blokes jizz. He starts on Sunday.
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