Read Online Woman in the Making: Panti's Memoir by Rory O'Neill - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Rory O'Neill
Tags: BIO000000
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wanted to die. It was
fabulous
!
But grey, depressed 1989 Dublin was a difficult place to be fabulous and, like most other young Irish people of the time, I was almost expected to leave. London was the obvious choice, but then my friend Helen and I read a book by the travel writer Paul Theroux called
Riding the Iron Rooster
about train journeys through Communist China, and suddenly London seemed like a boring idea. Instead, just months after the Tiananmen Square massacre, and just weeks after the Berlin Wall had come down, we set off by train with our waiter’s tips and a vague plan: try to get into Soviet Russia, somehow find black market tickets for the Trans-Siberian Express, get across Mongolia, through China, and eventually take a boat to Japan where we imagined we could get jobs teaching English. And all this we figured we would just
do
, without visas or (in those pre-internet days) any real information. All we had was the fearlessness and ignorance of youth and a vague rumour we had heard from a friend of a friend of a bloke we’d met in a pub once: a nameless professor at a university in Budapest might help if we could find him.
The weird thing was, I didn’t even like Asian food at the time. In truth, the whole thing was Helen’s idea.
*Stands up and points wildly at Helen*
. She was, and still is, a kind of post-hippie adventurer. (I used to call her and her sister ‘The Bamboo and Snot Sisters’ because they would makeeverything they needed, from clothes to camera bags, out of whatever seemed to be to hand, and I always imagined they’d be very handy if you ever found yourself trapped on a desert island with them. You’d soon be living in tropical splendour in a quirky treehouse with a system of slides and pulleys made from bamboo and snot.) Helen decided this would be a great, why-the-hell-not, possibly-achievable adventure – she just needed someone to go with her. And I, as we already know, am easily led. I was also bored, and being bored was the thing I feared most, and this stupid idea didn’t sound
entirely
boring (except possibly for all the parts where we spent weeks on end in trains) and so I thought, OK, let’s do that instead.
The story I am trying (in my own way) to tell you here is
not
the story of how two kids, with nothing but a pocketful of dreams, recurring conjunctivitis and a lot of blind good luck (in particular, our timing was excellent – the Soviet Union was crumbling and everyone had more to worry about than two Irish kids with home haircuts and no tickets), spent half of 1990 travelling painfully slowly overland from Dublin to Tokyo. So apart from mentioning that I was briefly arrested for trading in endangered animals (or something – obviously I was entirely innocent, and I didn’t speak Mongolian), and a skinny, bespectacled, middle-aged man dressed
Starsky & Hutch
-style pressed his erection into my thigh on a bus in Shanghai – how the hell did Chinese Starsky even know I was gay? – I’ll move the narrative on:
We arrived in Tokyo.
8. Japanti
W E ARRIVED WITH NO EXPECTATIONS , less money and not a single word of Japanese (beyond the shaky ability to count to ten we’d learned on the boat from Shanghai). It was like walking into a world specifically designed to be entirely alien. We had left behind a provincial, recession-battered country that looked determinedly backwards, where the Pope’s visit in 1979 was still regarded as some kind of national high point, where a young person’s ambition extended no further than the ferry to London, where sex between men was a criminal offence, divorce was unavailable, the sale of condoms required a doctor’s prescription, you couldn’t buy a beer in a nightclub, pregnant girls went away for a few months and came back without babies and priests could be famous just for being priests. And suddenly we were standing in the centre of a gleaming, futuristic, forward-looking, cash-rich, crowded, humidmegalopolis with moving
fabulous
!
But grey, depressed 1989 Dublin was a difficult place to be fabulous and, like most other young Irish people of the time, I was almost expected to leave. London was the obvious choice, but then my friend Helen and I read a book by the travel writer Paul Theroux called
Riding the Iron Rooster
about train journeys through Communist China, and suddenly London seemed like a boring idea. Instead, just months after the Tiananmen Square massacre, and just weeks after the Berlin Wall had come down, we set off by train with our waiter’s tips and a vague plan: try to get into Soviet Russia, somehow find black market tickets for the Trans-Siberian Express, get across Mongolia, through China, and eventually take a boat to Japan where we imagined we could get jobs teaching English. And all this we figured we would just
do
, without visas or (in those pre-internet days) any real information. All we had was the fearlessness and ignorance of youth and a vague rumour we had heard from a friend of a friend of a bloke we’d met in a pub once: a nameless professor at a university in Budapest might help if we could find him.
The weird thing was, I didn’t even like Asian food at the time. In truth, the whole thing was Helen’s idea.
*Stands up and points wildly at Helen*
. She was, and still is, a kind of post-hippie adventurer. (I used to call her and her sister ‘The Bamboo and Snot Sisters’ because they would makeeverything they needed, from clothes to camera bags, out of whatever seemed to be to hand, and I always imagined they’d be very handy if you ever found yourself trapped on a desert island with them. You’d soon be living in tropical splendour in a quirky treehouse with a system of slides and pulleys made from bamboo and snot.) Helen decided this would be a great, why-the-hell-not, possibly-achievable adventure – she just needed someone to go with her. And I, as we already know, am easily led. I was also bored, and being bored was the thing I feared most, and this stupid idea didn’t sound
entirely
boring (except possibly for all the parts where we spent weeks on end in trains) and so I thought, OK, let’s do that instead.
The story I am trying (in my own way) to tell you here is
not
the story of how two kids, with nothing but a pocketful of dreams, recurring conjunctivitis and a lot of blind good luck (in particular, our timing was excellent – the Soviet Union was crumbling and everyone had more to worry about than two Irish kids with home haircuts and no tickets), spent half of 1990 travelling painfully slowly overland from Dublin to Tokyo. So apart from mentioning that I was briefly arrested for trading in endangered animals (or something – obviously I was entirely innocent, and I didn’t speak Mongolian), and a skinny, bespectacled, middle-aged man dressed
Starsky & Hutch
-style pressed his erection into my thigh on a bus in Shanghai – how the hell did Chinese Starsky even know I was gay? – I’ll move the narrative on:
We arrived in Tokyo.
8. Japanti
W E ARRIVED WITH NO EXPECTATIONS , less money and not a single word of Japanese (beyond the shaky ability to count to ten we’d learned on the boat from Shanghai). It was like walking into a world specifically designed to be entirely alien. We had left behind a provincial, recession-battered country that looked determinedly backwards, where the Pope’s visit in 1979 was still regarded as some kind of national high point, where a young person’s ambition extended no further than the ferry to London, where sex between men was a criminal offence, divorce was unavailable, the sale of condoms required a doctor’s prescription, you couldn’t buy a beer in a nightclub, pregnant girls went away for a few months and came back without babies and priests could be famous just for being priests. And suddenly we were standing in the centre of a gleaming, futuristic, forward-looking, cash-rich, crowded, humidmegalopolis with moving
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