Is it humorous, or just pathetic? I got a letter in the mail this week from a literary agent. His letter was dated and postmarked April 2009. He was replying to a query I wrote in June of 2000. Yes, almost nine years ago.
My book was published in 2003. Lucky for me, I didn’t need the Regal Literary agency. But I can’t help wondering about other writers who hope for, or have, representation by Regal Literary. How sloppy are they? Even if they don’t lose mail, or tend to reply after long delays, what about their judgment? Or their attention to detail? Did they fail to notice the date on my letter? Did they decide “better late than never”? Did they have a very large slush pile to plow through? Or were they agonizing about how to break the bad news to me.
I wonder, too, about my SASE. I recognized it immediately: my expensive, 100% rag, gray felt envelope, my own return address in my favorite font, favorite color of laser-printed toner. All designed to impress, and still beautiful today. But what about the stamp? The first class stamp I put on that envelope so long ago was worth only 33 cents then. A letter costs 42 cents to mail now. Still, the letter arrived, and without postage due.
When I lived in the Bahamas, I received a letter bearing a two-year-old postmark and the rubber-stamped message: “Found in supposedly empty equipment.” And today, as I write this, I see a story on a postcard arriving after 47 years, good as new, except for the fact that both sender and intended recipient are dead. In the case of Regal Literary, though, they chose to reply after nine years. WTF?
Should Have Left it in the Hotel—Gisela and Ludvig Horst checked into their Barcelona hotel and immediately got into an argument. Gisela did not feel comfortable leaving their valuables in the room, though Ludvig was insistent that they should. They’d just arrived from Germany for an Herbalife convention. With 30,000 international participants in town, each sporting big I-heart-Herbalife buttons, every Barcelona hotel was fully booked. The Horsts ended up in the same small, semi-seedy inn Bob and I had chosen for our semi-seedy research. We met them at breakfast the morning after.
Thinking back, Gisela remembered a middle-aged man seated alone at a table behind them. Was it him? She also sensed the bulk of a man moving behind her and had assumed it was a waiter. Without warning, her bag was snatched right off her lap.
The Horsts lost everything. Besides the tremendous paperwork hassle, the mood of their trip was ruined and Gisela was badly traumatized. She blamed herself and lost confidence in her judgment, though she was hardly at fault.
Personal security is an art, not a science. Information and awareness are everything. In the Horsts’ situation, I may have done exactly as Gisela did, had I been lacking a suitable suitcase to use as a safe. However, I’d try to split up my goodies, and put as much as possible on my body instead of in a grabbable bag.
So you’ve made it through security. Does that mean you’re in a secure area? Not secure enough to relax your attention. Thieves have been known to buy multi-leg plane tickets and work the gate areas in each airport, never needing to pass security after their initial entry into carefree-land.
You wouldn’t look twice at the couple sitting back-to-back with you in the departure hall. Smartly dressed, stylish bags, composed manner: they look like frequent international travelers—and they are. The troupe arrested in Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport were not French, but South American. They, and other sophisticated gangs of thieves take the same international flights as their victims, stay in the same hotels, and attend the same trade shows, sporting events, and operas. “They’re clever, don’t take chances, and do a lot of damage,” a French police officer said. “They keep the cash and sell off everything else—credit cards, passports.”
“These gangs systematically comb all major international airports on both sides of customs,” said an undercover police officer at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport. “They often fly between five or six airports on round-trip tickets,” explained the crime prevention coordinator for the military police there.
A presumption of safety prevails past security.
Many airports around the world have installed camera surveillance, which has cut theft of bags and theft from bags. In Cape Town, for example, while an inbound visitor stood at a car rental counter with his luggage behind him on a trolley, a thief simply lifted one of his bags, popped into a men’s room, changed clothes, and walked out with the stolen property. After leaving it in a waiting car, he returned to the baggage hall to scout for more goodies. It was all caught on tape.
Trains between concourses are another area where personal property goes missing. On these, as well as in airport shops and restaurants, one must maintain vigilance. This is especially difficult for people who don’t travel often and live in small towns where safety is almost a given. Thieves home in on relaxed attitudes like heat-seeking missiles.
What works: keep physical contact with your property.
Mala Mala, South Africa— Our mischievous rangers convinced some in our safari group of an old “African tradition” while out walking in the bush. It is a competition to see who can spit impala droppings the farthest. I was horrified to see first one sister,
then another,
select a hard bead of deer doodoo from the ground and place it on her tongue. Who cares how far they spit it? Two of my sisters voluntarily put animal dung in their mouths! Granted, it was hard and dry, but it was on the ground! These two squeamish ones are the type who avoid touching banisters and public doorknobs.
Meanwhile, we all ate caterpillar droppings,
which seasoned our alfresco breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. The stuff fell so steadily from the trees it was useless to fight it. It lodged in hair, tickled down shirts, filled pockets, and sunk to the bottom of our coffee.
“It’s just digested leaves,” our entomologist uncle soothed. Look at the dung beetle: it lives on pre-digested food. Here it works hard to roll perfect balls of fresh elephant dung for later consumption.
Johannesburg, South Africa— I spent a day in Alexandra Township last month, where half a million people live in organized squalor in three square miles. Everyone seemed happy to see outsiders come to visit them. Our guide said it meant that we cared enough to bother.
Some teens danced for us at Joe’s Butchery, where we had lunch. Kids walking home from school crowded around the perimeter to watch.
All day, kids jumped into pictures, then crowded around the camera display to see themselves. They couldn’t get enough of it.
A street-side butcher (through a rainy window). Possibly the source of our lunch?
The people of Alexandra live in extreme poverty. My group was traveling in extreme luxury, what my late brother-in-law used to call “wretched excess.” The dichotomy made me queasy.
I like the Japanese philosophies of beauty and simplicity, love the food, but can’t get used to the unquestioning, obedient nature of the people. Or that all answers are “yes,” even when it means “no.”
High-tech toilets: I like having a warm seat and a control panel. The electronic sound effects are annoying—fake waterfall or babbling brook sounds. The bidet/washing features are—um, too personal for comment.
Steam draws me, always.
I appreciate super-fast Asian internet, but my hotel wifi ate a bunch of my outgoing email without telling me. I prefer slow and reliable.
Cherry blossoms make up for the gray, cold, windy, rainy, dreary weather on the March/April cusp.
Yokohama has no trash cans. None. After I needed one, I kept looking the rest of the day as I crisscrossed the city. I never found one. Yep, there was a little trash on the ground, but only a little.
Natto beans with mustard, ready to top rice.
Breakfast: a bowl of rice with 30 different garnishes, 30 different ones every day. Wonderful. The one constant: natto beans, the love ’em or hate ’em fermented beans with a strong ammonia fragrance, which you whip up into a froth of snotty, stringy, viscous liquid, not unlike the stuff okra oozes. When you eat natto beans, the stuff loops from the chopsticks in long, fine, spiderwebby strings that stick to your chin and do feel like actual spider webs a minute or so later when dry.
Astonishing and confounding, how little English is spoken in Japan, including by the young people. What English exists is often amusing. The woman who was assigned to translate our presentation spoke to me beforehand and, pointing to a bald man, innocently called him a skinhead. I saw shops called “Junk Jewels” and another, “Junk & Antiques.” There’s a chain of mini-markets called “Sometimes Fresh.” Passed the “Pay Up Hotel.”
Pocari Sweat, available on every street corner.
If you’re thirsty on the street, you can stop at a vending machine and buy a bottle of “Pocari Sweat.” Vending machines also sell “Full Supporty” stockings, and tickets for full, hot meals, chosen by plastic display and then picked up from a cook nearby with never a word spoken.
Some very tall pine trees looked like cellphone towers.
A digital sign in front of a tollbooth showed an animated cartoon man waving a flag back and forth.
I’ve been to Japan quite a few times. These thoughts are not cumulative, but specifically from this visit.
Kharem, a pickpocket we\’ve observed in Barcelona since 2001.
Kharem’s Lucky Haul
Kharem, a pickpocket in Spain, sometimes chooses Barcelona’s airport over the rich pickings of the city. When Bob and I again found Kharem at work on La Rambla, nine months after we’d previously interviewed him, we asked how he’d been.
“Supremely good!” Kharem said. He swept his thumbtip against his forehead, fingers fisted, in a quick, subtle gesture.
“He actually said …˜son-of-a-bitch good,'” our translator clarified. Our friend Terry Jones was tagging along on our prowl that day. His own street crime expertise was more in the bag snatch discipline than the pickpocket branch. Although he’d watched the local thieves with fascination and sometimes wrote about them, he’d never interviewed one. Now he translated our conversation, intrigued and electrified by the novelty.
Kharem at work in Barcelona, carrying a coat with which to hide his thefts.
“But haven’t there been fewer tourists?” Bob asked. We’d last met Kharem just a few weeks before September 11. “Let’s get away from the crowd and talk.”
“The work is good at the airport,” he said. “I robbed an Egyptian there. It was son-of-a-bitch good. But yes, there are fewer tourists and it has affected my business. Also, there are more policemen around.”
The four of us ambled up a narrow side street in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter. I tightened my grip on our camera bag. Bob was filming Kharem openly.
“Do the police arrest you more than they did last year?”
“No, they don’t arrest me. They just take the money and let me go,” Kharem said, flipping his thumbtip against his forehead again. “The police are not very good; they don’t have much experience. I’m better than they are, in the street.” He smiled bashfully and looked at the ground.
“Is there more bag snatching?”
“Yes, but they’re young people who don’t know how to work. If all you want is a wallet, you can take it without violence. But these people don’t know how to work clean. They’re young, and some of them are on drugs. Many children have come from Morocco this year, since Spain and Morocco are side by side. These Moroccan children work in a crude and unsophisticated way.”
Kharem, perhaps pleased by our attention, clowns for our video camera. \’Let me be in your movies,\’ he said. Our good friend Terry, right, interpreted.
“I think he’s a little proud of his own skill and style,” Terry added.
“Besides La Rambla, I work in the metro and sometimes at the airport. The Egyptian I mentioned—it was a briefcase I took from him just last week in the airport. It had thousands of dollars in it.”
“How did you take it?” Bob asked.
“I threw some money on the floor,” he said, “let me show you.” He bent to take our canvas bag from the cobblestones where it was safely lodged between my feet. I looked at Bob, but he didn’t seem concerned about letting this known thief and now confessed bag snatcher handle our $15,000 sack of stuff.
Kharem lifted the bag and took two steps away. As if in slow motion, I watched our camera, mixer, mic, and tapes of fresh footage retreat, and waited to see Kharem lunge and dash away with a fine fee for little chat. We’d greeted him like old friends, I recalled; we hadn’t criticized his way of life. Must we show this much trust? He’s not our friend. And we certainly are not his. But the alternative was unpredictable.
It\’s hard not to like Kharem in conversation, but we remind ourselves: he\’s a thief.
I could have stopped him from taking our bag, or snatched it out of his hands, or just said “sorry, I don’t think so.” And what might Kharem have done then? Did we care about preserving a relationship for the future? Or did we just not care to insult a person who’d revealed to us the most intimate secrets of his life?
Kharem set the bag down gently at Terry’s feet, steadying it so it wouldn’t tip. He tossed a couple of €10 notes and Terry twisted to watch them flutter to the ground.
“He bent to get the money and I just walked off with his briefcase,” Kharem said, lifting our bag once again. He smiled, swiped his thumbtip against his forehead, and handed the bag to me.
“Did you know you’re wearing mismatched shoes?” a well-dressed Englishman said to our friend, Brooks, at London’s Heathrow airport one day.
Brooks was talking on his phone, frantic at finding out that he was supposed to be at London’s other airport, Gatwick. He locked eyes with the stranger. “I am not!” he said, refusing to be distracted. “And you’ll not succeed in grabbing my briefcase!”
Brooks had become security-obsessed hearing our tales.
“Pardon me, then. But you are.” The man walked away, intentions defeated, whatever they were.
Brooks finished his telephone call, feeling rather smug that he’d thwarted a thief who’d tried to distract him. Then he looked down at his shoes, only to see one tasseled, one buckled loafer.
Everyone knows not to leave bags unattended in airports and, lest we forget, we are relentlessly reminded by annoying announcements. Bag-stealing strategists are devious, though. Even if you aren’t looking away from your things, you may be connived into doing so. Questions by an apparently confused or puzzled foreigner touch our good-natured core and we want to help. A moment’s distraction is all an accomplice requires. Who would suspect that the pretty girl asking to borrow your pen is merely a diversion as her colleagues snag your bag?
Or, here’s a good one: you’re suddenly paged. Who would page you at an airport, possibly a foreign airport, or a stopover? Who even knows you’re there? You rush off to find the white courtesy phone, befuddled and worried. The accented voice on the line sounds unclear, yet urgent. You may be asked to write down a number, requiring some gymnastics while you extract a pen and find a scrap of paper. Have you looked away from your briefcase? Have you lost physical contact with it? Where is it, anyway?
Earlier, the thief had examined the object of his desire, your bag. Its luggage tag informed him of your name. The strategist paged you. He distracted you. He created his own plausible situation. Or, as Bob would say, he created a shituation.
TSA
Airports give the illusion of safeness, especially now with increased security. The swirling crowd of dazed travelers, lost or rushed or tired, makes a perfect haystack for the needle-like thief. Your bag might disappear before you even get inside, in all the curbside commotion. Long, tedious, check-in lines can be disorderly madness in some airports, inducing inattention when you need it most.
Computers and purses disappear, too, at airport security checkpoints. Guards have their hands full keeping order at the chaotic bottlenecks, and they’re watching for bigger fish than bag thieves. Don’t assume they’ll safeguard your bags.
Practically every television news program has shown this ruse. The scam occurs just after you’ve put your items on the belt. Before you walk through the metal detector, a stranger cuts in front as if in a hurry. The equipment buzzes and he has to back up and remove his watch, his coins, something. Meanwhile, you’re trapped in limboland and your bags are free-for-all on the so-called secure side.
If you’re traveling with another person, make a habit of this: one person goes through security first and collects her and your bags as they appear. The other waits to see that all bags go fully and safely into the x-ray machine, and watches the belt to see that it isn’t reversed, leaving your items vulnerable on the other side. If you’re alone, wait for any crowd at the checkpoint to pass, if you can, or be alert to anyone who barges in front of you after you’ve let go of your things.
1. Traipsing through another airport—where were we, passing through Chicago, maybe?—we mounted a mile-high escalator, going up. (Which is the only way escalators should go, really, otherwise, you’re on a de-escalator? lowerer? why not just moving staircase?) The escalator was at least 100 feet long, maybe more. A man got on the parallel one beside us, going down. Somehow, somewhy, he had his roll-on in front of him, or beside him, and it tipped over, extended-handle first, and shot down the long length of the metal stairs, picking up speed. As he passed us, the man hunched his shoulders in guilty, apologetic mystery.
Lucky no one else was on that escalator.
Lucky no one was passing by the bottom of the escalator. When the suitcase hit bottom, it shot across the shiny floor like a freight train, like a forty-pound bullet, hit a trash can across the hall, and knocked it over.
2. My sister bought a little purse-sized umbrella one recent rainy day in New York. Unwrapping it in the rain, she must have inadvertently pressed its release button. The umbrella became a lethal weapon. Its handle fired off like a missile, flying right between a nearby man and woman. My sister ran over to apologize to them, though neither was touched, and dumped the launcher into the nearest trash can.
3. Bob and I were driving from Florence to Naples. We pulled off the highway for a quick lunch. In a bit of a hurry, we were soon ready to continue our journey. Wait, I said. let me get rid of this garbage. I gathered up some papers and drink cups and walked it over to a trash can. Lucky delay.
Back on the highway, traffic after only a minute, then stopped. Cars began to creep forward. There were shoes on the road. Lots of them, sprinkled evenly over the surface. Shoeboxes, too. Soon we came to the accident. A car had just fallen off the top level of a car-hauling truck. The car driving behind the truck crashed into the fallen car. A delivery truck next in line swerved to avoid the crash, but rolled, spilled it’s load of new shoes, hit the guard rail of the overpass it was on, and lodged cantilevered over the road below. The driver went through the windshield and lay on a grassy hill, below.
4. Close to the same time that the car fell off the car-carrying truck, an escalator at Rome’s Tiburtina train station collapsed, killing a rider, and an elevator in a Texas hospital malfunctioned, decapitating a doctor. We tend to trust things like car-carrying trucks, escalators, elevators, and automatic umbrellas. Should we worry more?
Just back from safari in South Africa—21 of us on a family trip. My sister Shari wrote this report:
We’re driving along a dirt road at Mala Mala and our ranger says…”smell that?” No. was our answer. We kept driving and then saw vultures. He smelled death again. Then we see a hyena. Just one. We follow it off road in the jeep. It doesn’t even care. Eventually it lays down in the tall grass as though it’s saying ok, that’s enough. I’m not going to lead you to MY food. By then the smell is intolerable. Some of us thought it was the fact that we were parked in a grove of rhino shit. But our guide said that’s the least of it. It was definitely carcass.
Seven or eight hyenas fought over this meal of buffalo.
We keep driving in our land rover, just mowing down trees. We stop and shut down the engine. Our ranger says, “hear that.” No. was our answer. He follows the sound and stops again. “Hear that. They’re chewing and ripping.” Yes! we hear it. He keeps on going and eventually finds a small covered cove where three hyenas are chowing down on a buffalo carcass. It’s evening. The light is getting dim. We’re snapping photos, videotaping and even using flash. Then one jumps up and away. And we hear all kinds of hyena growling and howling. Another hyena wanted to join the feast, but there is a ritual, and the newcomer has to ask permission. We stayed quite awhile for a bit more action, more of the pack joining, and a little scuffle, etc. Amazing…and stinky.
 More than a dozen lions frolic after dark, and don't mind being in the spotlight.
We then drive to an open meadow where a pride of lions are lounging. By now is pitch black. We drive right up to them. We’re in an open jeep. We’re in a wide open meadow. We are among at least two mothers, one father, seven cubs and five teens. It is DARK. We shine spotlights right on them. They lounge, they wrestle. But they weren’t hungry. They never left to hunt, but it was great to see, to be right among them. We were just four yards from some of them.
 A magnificent lion at Mala Mala.
Last night we arrived in Singita, our new place. It was a 15 minute plane ride, and the topography is completely different. We are in a privately run portion of Kruger National Park. This portion is many thousands of acres that are only accessible to the lodge guests (which is only our group of 21 family members.) However, although privately managed, they still have to follow some of the National Park’s rules and we are not as free to just hightail it off road any time we please. They are only allowed off-road to track “the big five.” Kruger National Park is the size of Massachusetts.
 The sound of hippos was a constant backdrop. More than one is a raft.
We stopped at the side of the dirt road and took a short walk to the end of some craggy rocks on the edge of a green river filled with hippos. At least 17. We could have watched them do their hippo thing…which is nothing…for hours. I caught one with it’s mouth wide open. I hope it’s not blurry. They’re surprisingly, loudly, vocal (and we hear them all night from our rooms above the river). Later that night, on our way back to the lodge, we saw two hippos out of the water. They look like giant pigs. They’re shy. They ran away fairly quickly. We felt lucky to see them, because they’re in water most of the time.
 Glass box aerie has an outdoor shower and netted bed on back deck.
This lodge is amazing. You should look it up! We’re in Singita at Lebombo lodge. The entire place is built on stilts above ground, and can be completely dismantled and taken away in 30 days, leaving only a few patches of bare ground. Not to piss you off, but it’s one of the top in world. We count ourselves lucky—very lucky—to be here.
