Chewed Up and Spit Out in Auckland

For your sake as much as mine, dear reader, I’m going to gloss over the forty hours I spent flying from England to New Zealand, except to say I touched down in Doha, Jakarta, Sydney, and Christchurch on my way to Auckland and went through security six times over five flights, which is a record for me. I stumbled out of the final airport into beaming sunshine, as fragile as a strung-out 1980s clubkid released from a New York City dungeon in time to greet the Sunday lunch crowd. Fresher than I felt thanks to a shower I took in a handicapped bathroom at the Sydney airport, I was preparing to go on a night out with my friends Britt, Damon, and Sal. Sal was even picking me up. It was a mercy; The lone brain cell I still had firing could barely grasp that the sun was shining like mid-afternoon at seven in the evening, let alone sort out a bus.

Sal was a kiwi citizen by birth but had grown up in the U.S. most of his life. We’d met in Birmingham while he was finishing a doctorate in neuroscience at UAB. Now he was working in a lab with paralyzed rats, installing spinal implants that stimulated them with electric shocks to see if it improved their gait and dexterity. Mostly it didn’t. As we rode in the car toward downtown, he told me he was on call seven days a week and would often be at the lab late at night taking care of them. The whole place, he said, was lit with red light at night because they were blind to it, meaning it didn’t disrupt their circadian rhythms. I conjured a terrifying scene of countless gnashing teeth and red glowing eyes in a dark red room. “Can I come?” I asked.

“Sorry, it’s against the rules,” he said.

Miffed, I wondered whether he was the experiment and the rats just a ploy; I kept waiting for him to whisper something sinister, rat-like under his breath.

He dropped me off at Haka Lodge, the hostel where Britt and Damon were waiting for me, and said he would meet back up with us for dinner. The hostel had a high rating on one or more of those rating websites. It was clean. The beds were comfortable enough. But if I wanted cleanliness and comfort I would stay at a hotel. I choose hostels for personalities and stories. It doesn’t matter who throws up on the carpet in the living room or falls down the stairs, so long as it happens. If I don’t get roped into a conversation at 4 am with a guy smoking the wrong end of a cigarette telling me lizard people live in underground cities, what am I getting out of it? I paid good money. Haka Lodge and most other hostels in New Zealand were expensive enough to price out these types of bridge-dwellers, and I sorely missed them.

I didn’t have a key to the dorm, so I walked a few blocks to meet Britt and Damon who were shopping for a pen. From either side of a crosswalk, we saw each other and waved. There were no cars coming, but kiwi pedestrians wait like they’re in cars at stoplights, so we had to stand there awkwardly smiling and nodding at each other for a couple of minutes.

Britt had black hair and was of Syrian and Spanish descent, which was only apparent from his sickle nose and prodigious facial hair. He was handsome—a bit like Gaston from Beauty and the Beast with a beard. Damon had almost an identical build, but otherwise looked like Mr. Clean without the white eyebrows. I met Damon playing D&D and Britt going to parties thrown by a Birmingham socialite. They got to know each other at the same time and eventually became an item. One of my main friend groups in Birmingham was comprised half by them and half by another couple named Peter and Annie. Though I never ran the analogy by any of them, I’d say we were like a red 1998 4WD Jeep Grand Cherokee with a continental tire case on the back that might be empty or have a flat but no one wanted to check. No prizes for guessing the fifth wheel in that group or the third in this one.

They crossed to my side and we gave each other quick hugs. Not a lot of fanfare. We’d just seen each other a week before in Alabama. “How’d pen shopping go?” I asked.

“We couldn’t find any,” said Damon.

All of us were basket cases after spending two days in the air; I probably wouldn’t have done any better. Stopping back by the hostel dorm before dinner, I took off my backpack and threw it on the ground, then threw myself on the ground, face down, starfished. A girl walked in. As Damon greeted her, I could hear the embarrassment in his voice that his friend was obstructing the walkway. I didn’t care. People who want walkways unobstructed by people lying face down, starfished should stay in hotels. After five minutes, I roused abruptly, thinking of dinner. “Who said laksa?” I asked with my eyes still closed.

“No one,” said Britt. “What’s laksa?”

Laksa is a Southeast Asian spicy coconut soup with thick noodles, usually served with fish cakes and prawn, a signature dish of Peranakan cuisine popularized among and spread by Malay people throughout Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore—just what the doctor ordered to cure whatever the Hell was going on with me after 40 hours traversing Eurasia and the Indo-Pacific. Moreover, in a cosmopolitan city in Oceania, it was doubtless at the doorstep. All we had to do was walk. I grunted, stood up, and opened the door. As I’d hoped, about 200 meters away was a Malaysian restaurant that had my medicine, printed in bold on the menu. We sat down, Sal joining us. The place was B.Y.O.B., meaning it didn’t have my other medicine. I walked across the street for a bottle of wine from a corner store. The clerk was standing behind the counter with the door open and a waist-high freezer blocking the entrance. I looked at the freezer, then him. He stared back vacantly. I started rolling it out of the way.

“What do you want?” he said, walking over and holding it in place. It seemed to be some kind of anti-theft device.

I nodded toward the wine. He rolled the freezer back enough to let me squeeze through. Perusing the selection long enough to not seem like I was choosing the cheapest bottle, I listened as a band of miscreants approached from the street. There were five of them, dressed grubbily. The nearest one had green dreads and leaned against the anti-theft device, which made more sense now. The clerk sold the guy a pack of cigarettes and me some bottom-shelf chardonnay.

As I walked past the green-dreaded figure, I nonchalantly checked which end of his cigarette he was smoking and tried to glean whether he and his friends were talking about lizardpeople. “Are you guys staying at Haka Lodge?”

They weren’t. Probably under a bridge somewhere. It figured.

When I got back to the restaurant the waiter was setting our food on the table. The spoon he gave me was five times bigger than everyone else’s, revealing emotional intelligence one rarely sees in a server. Before I could thank him the manager told him off and replaced it with a normal one. The laksa was decent, even better given the state I was in, though only mildly spicy rather than blow-your-head-off like I’d ordered. Probably another intervention from the manager. I couldn’t fault her; it was standard protocol whenever a white person asked for the works.

As we sat finishing the wine, our conversation turned to what to do with the night ahead. Amble and carouse—we were all in agreement. I heard the clinking of porcelain and looked around to realize we were the only customers still in the restaurant. Most of the tables had been cleared. “Wow, they close up early here,” I said.

“It’s almost 10 pm,” Sal whispered under his breath, sinister, rat-like.

I looked at the sun and my watch. “This is going to take some getting used to,” I said.

It was a Saturday day-night in Auckland and there was no shortage of interesting looking people wandering the streets; what there was a shortage of was interesting looking places they seemed to be coming from or going to. The way they appeared from nondescript alleys and disappeared into others I mentally added to my stockpile of evidence that we were in a simulation. There was a multitude of bars and clubs along the main street, but most seemed to be empty or closed. I later learned Auckland prides itself on being one of the world’s quietest cities—to my ear, like priding oneself on being one of the world’s quietest rockbands. Two blocks down the road, I realized I’d left my camera behind and told the others I’d catch up. The manager at the restaurant didn’t speak much English, so when she gave it to me we both settled for gesturing oafishly and aping idiocy while smacking our foreheads.  She was a little too good at pretending to be me.

I found Britt, Sal, and Damon sitting at what looked like an outdoor mall foodcourt but with bars. Not crowded enough and most people looked like teenagers, but I agreed it was the most lively spot we’d seen. Realizing the cocktails they’d ordered were twice the price of the wine I’d bought, I went with a cider. “Where’s the bathroom?” I asked.

“They don’t have one,” said Damon.

“Oh cool,” I said, standing up. Surely somewhere was an alley that didn’t have interesting looking people spontaneously generating from it. Down some stairs, I came to a broad tunnel leading to the park and ducked into a small corridor. It seemed like a decent spot, so I unzipped, only to look up and see on the door in front of me, a handpainted sign: PLEASE STOP PISSING HERE THIS IS A FAMILY HOME

Effective messaging. I sighed, rezipped, and walked to the park, trying not to harsh the vibe of a couple of teenagers making out as I scoped a dark spot in the bushes. Back at the bar, they were doing last call. I was nodding off anyway. Sal said he would drive us to a beach out of town tomorrow and show us a Korean karaoke place after.

Back at the hostel, ignoring any pretense of luxury, I fell asleep on top of my folded sheets and blanket face down, starfished, wondering what the bridge-dwellers had gotten up to.