Parrot and the Rooster

By Richard Segal

Capaz! This legendary expression of Southern Brazil couldnt do justice to my expectations and promises ahead of a two-and-a-half-week visit to this country. One university, two football teams, three barbecues, four chimas, five cities, six hotels, seven beds, eight pounds in the real for a pair of alpargatasthe whole nine yards. The trip was well timed to coincide with the crescendo of a political crisis and a spontaneous blanket protest march and was amply spaced for reminiscing previous travels to this golden but cursed nation.

However, would I be lucky enough to escape the tribulations of a thinly cloaked English independence campaign, otherworldly business email chains, and nutty correspondence from sharing economy tenants at my summer cottage before they walked off with my front-door knocker? All this and more, as told to a PDA during the morning and evening commute of a careworn Northern Line rider.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Jun 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524636791

Richard Segal

Richard Segal, an American citizen, resides in London, England, and works as an economic and financial consultant. He has written widely about matters relating to global public policy over the years. His most recent novel was The Man Who Knew the Answer.

Book preview

Previously by Richard Segal

The Russian Economy

Crash, Burn, Hurricane

Trilogy Year

Hitting the Tenspot

Nectar of the Lavender

Cookbook for a New Europe

The Great Art Deco Chase

Three Days in July

Return of the Drama Prince

The Victory Walk

Richard’s Eleven

The Day the Muses Died

Uneasy Riding

Surfing the Urban Wave

Polo in the Snow

Birch

PARROT AND THE ROOSTER

RICHARD SEGAL

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AuthorHouse™ UK

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© 2016 Richard Segal. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 06/30/2016

ISBN: 978-1-5246-3680-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5246-3679-1 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

The Parrot and the Rooster, by Richard Segal, is a work of fiction. Any references to real people, living or dead, and actual events, organizations or locations, are intended purely to provide a sense of context or reference point. All remaining characters, places, names, incidents, dialogue and opinions are wholly fictional and their resemblance, if any, to real life counterparts is entirely coincidental. No inferences or assumptions about any personal opinions should be drawn from the material enclosed herein, and no such representations should be made.

To us

CONTENTS

She set off to find the footlights

I set off to find the sky (two weeks later)

Next Up

Lisbon ho? Too slow

It’s a beautiful day

Chopsticks

Time for a system reboot

They don’t play cricket either

Five thirty to six is my preferred time of day

War on want

My chair

And now for my next trick

Leave ’em wanting more

The true cowboys

The Wrong Owen

Montana Red

Restaurant at the center of the universe

Restaurant at the edge of the universe

Another Saturday night

Sunday morning

Full to scale

Picture round, the joy of ‘hosting,’ or, Sale extended

Hooked on a feeling, and not that rainy day feeling

Also showing

The Doha disaster

World play, aka, Skip ad

Atlantic Avenue, Part 2

Ice road truckers, aka, Come sail away

Eu so olhando

At the crossroads

The quiet period

Show more

Falling water

12:30 at the Andaz

The next station is closed

The wheels of steel tour

Home sweet home

Walk left stand right

Life was good

Grêmio or Inter?

On my last trip round the virtuous circle, I convinced myself it would be a good idea to write a full length book which was nothing but dialogue between four characters. This was hopefully the last time I attempt such a stunt, because after five pages I was scratching my own eyes out it was so taxing to contemplate the thought of 195 more. Writing a book which is nothing but dialogue is a serious challenge. It wouldn’t have been worth the effort to type control-A followed by control-C, control-V forty times to see whether it could be done. It was more rewarding to reverse the process with control-Zs until I was back where I started from, write normally and otherwise behave. I made it to the end, eventually. Today, though, I’m embarking on a project which is nothing but narrative, and that’s my excuse and I’m sticking with it. Were we two travelers pretending to be fake poets, with our own language and mock-fey ironic style? No, we weren’t that either. That’s been done, and we wuz all had, but let’s see what I can tell you.

SHE SET OFF TO FIND THE FOOTLIGHTS

T he traffic was bad, very bad, and it was only because of an obstacle, a bottleneck, in which seven lanes of vehicles were trying to negotiate through an opening that was intentionally narrowed to begin with, but encumbered further by an accident the local hegemon opted not to address because it was merely Friday afternoon. With a satellite uplink on your phone or tablet, you’d be able to see that it was free sailing beyond the bend and you’d become calmer, you’d be quite calm. But no, you fear there is congestion all the way to the airport. Not only will you miss your flight by a long shot, you’ll be stuck in front of this traffic circle forever, and your driver can’t reverse because there’s a hundred cars behind you. The only option is to abandon your situation and walk to the nearest public transport, which is several miles away, and commute home like you otherwise might. No, that is no option either, so you stare at your watch, your phone, and search for alternatives. No, there are none, there are no other options to reach your destination that don’t involve thousands of pounds, severals of days and a rearrangement of the vacation days you originally requested.

Your dinner plans in Lisbon that evening? Not even close. You don’t consider alternative flights and connections, because there are none. Phone the hotel and see if you can cancel? That’s the last thing on your mind. You buzz the airline, and after 10 minutes of menu items and music hold, a person materializes. If it’s some small solace, you can recognize from his accent that he doesn’t sit in a distant call center. Still, he tells you the flight may close an hour before the departure time, which is not what you long to hear, it’s the last thing you’re anxious to hear, which is something definitive or constructive. However, he recommends you drive to the terminal for completion’s sake, just in case, because each counter has its own guidelines and some might shut their desk and relocate to the gate slightly later, depending on how full the flight is and busy they are. That’s not what you yearn to hear, second most, you ache for him to say ‘don’t worry sir, you’re a valued customer, I’ll ring ahead and ensure you won’t miss your flight. I’ll tell them to wait for you as you’re only as many minutes away as you say you are.’ Never mind that you’re on a special promotional fare, and you haven’t flown on this airline in years, you’re not the class of good customer the airline should bend the rules for, and there’s no case for you becoming its frequent flyer in the future.

The downside of automation is that there’s no mechanism for him to ring ahead, you’re on your own mate, you paid your money you take your chances. You wish he would do something, you wish he could do something, because if he says I could, but then I’d have to do it for everyone, or I could, but it seems like so much effort, then you might have a gamble of talking him into it, of going that extra inch, of earning that good deed badge, but no, he’s not a person who will fight city hall with or without anything to show for his effort, he merely reads from a script. It’s not in his nature to lift a finger, although he’s not a person who would go out of his path to avoid lifting a finger, who refuses to pay a courtesy for that someone because it would be convenient for him. He can only recite to me what’s in his rule book, which is that cross border flights close an hour before the scheduled departure.

Nonetheless, I haven’t wasted my time calling and listening to loops of music hold for ten minutes, because we have inched ten inches closer to the crux of the bottleneck, and boundaries have been set. I know what and what not the customer service department will do, and how clued in this department is to what is happening on the ground. I know how helpful they can never will be for future reference, which is very. If I didn’t, I might have wondered whether I should have, and whether he’d be able to do something, anything, set my mind to rest or give me assurance, or give me closure on the flight that could have been, but when rules clash with practicalities, he doesn’t understand, he’s never been in the trenches, it’s not in his head whether the check-in desk is laid back about practices and procedures, or whether on this particular one they are totally anal and highly nasal. I’m not a good client, but would it matter if I had a brainwave and was a VIP’s assistant about to dial in? No, because no VIPs fly with this airline.

And then it hits me that I’m not hallucinating while writing this chapter, I merely feel I sound as though I am, because I’m writing during my daily commute and two teens are communicating in sign language even though they clearly can speak, they are acting out for the fun of it, and a screaming person has just stepped off. Yes, he stepped off after stepping on one stop ago, followed in both directions by what can only be called a protector. They, the teens, were not traveling poets either, merely traveling.

Writing is reckoned to be my private oasis, but when a screaming person is so intentionally jarring that those dedicated to minding their own business raise their heads and take note, gape, look to the side and gape again, all bets are off. If he’s not mad as a hatter or a lying p.r. official for a politician who claims not to know any better, and got sucked and glued in after agreeing one small favor, he’s in big trouble. As for the young women, the irony is that they could be travelling Aussies pretending to be poets in training, but instead I will nickname them T1 and T2, because B1 and C2 are out there, and you can’t use the same joke three times. This is supposed to be cathartic, writing during my commute, but wouldn’t you know the software is not what it once was, and instead of formal script, it is optimized for the shortest abbreviations possible and the auto-correct function is uber-cruel. This must be the Trekkies’ revenge. If they can’t read, they don’t want anyone else to be able to type traditionally or spell correctly, or make sense. But the design looks nice.

A Johnny-come-later wrenches open the door with his bare hands moments before it closes, because the train that will arrive two minutes later just isn’t so. This is the true madman across the water. It’s another comic book character come to life during my daily routine, but without special powers. The doors of the train are about to close, but rather than allow nature to unfold in due course, he prefers for it to unravel, he prefers to change the course of time. He’s not lithe enough to slip through the doors as they close, like in the movies, neither, so he pries them open and pushes them apart, before stumbling in and waiting for the train to depart, which is delayed again, because the conductor has to walk down and ensure the doors will continue to function. He’d arrive more quickly if he had taken the train that nature had assigned for him. And for what? The strain will take weeks off his life and the only person to have witnessed this act of foolish bravery is someone who will ridicule him. His only hope is that I will lack a signal at this lower level and will forget full details when it is time to transcribe my notes from end-of-the-day brain to key pad.

In one of my earlier books, I created a ‘four letter word’ for one of my characters, Fran, because he got home from work one night only to ask his daughter what she was drawing and she replied that it was her dolly. Of course it was, he commented, but what are those, he asked, pointing at the jellyfish like appendages underneath the dolly’s torso. Those would be her ffing ffing ffing legs, she then replied. From then on, the curse word became ‘mushrooms,’ but after Fran went to that well one too many times, his wife would scold him when the intent of that exclamation became obvious. I have my own expression for such occasions, and the word is Comcast, of which later.

No use watching the e-map over the driver’s shoulder like a cycle route on an exercise machine, because it’s going nowhere. The monitor says 39 minutes to the terminal, and it probably is in normal traffic, but it’s been bouncing back and forth between 38 and 39 for the past twelve minutes at least, and the car is still in the same position on the map. You could walk around the obstacle in four minutes, but there are no taxis on the other side, and you can’t abandon your luggage, where your passport is packed. You don’t want to get out and go home, you want to be on the other side of the traffic jam. The jam has won the battle, but you won’t let it win the war.

There is nothing as stressful as being stuck in endless traffic, nothing as nerve wracking. We get so stressed sometimes, we can’t function, we pull out of parking spaces without looking or signaling, and change lanes erratically. Sorry about that sir, I’m a little bit stressed here. I’m not normally like this. I was blind to the map, but I found the train station easily, it is almost as if it found me, ascertained I was lost and found me. It still took the train ten minutes what should have been two, and would be later that day, but I left myself plenty of time in spite of my fear of being late, and walked into the meeting room the third one there. I can’t believe I’m here, in a suit rather than the civvies I was to begin with in the morning, composed as can be, nobody will detect the stress that nearly consumed me earlier. If you don’t like the forecast, then shop for another one. However, if it will rain it is going to. I should remember that, and prepare, bring an umbrella, wear a raincoat, or stay home. My regular weekday routine was interrupted by an early appointment with an allergy generalist, so early that I felt I could attend in plain clothes, go home and change into a suit for the conference I would assist later. (The Latino form of ‘to attend’ is assistir, and there aren’t enough useful synonyms of ‘to attend’ in English.)

It does, though, the traffic it does clear, and the speed which the remorseful driver Makar can now eclipse is breath taking. It would be a huge relief to be able to travel at this great speed if we didn’t also have this overwhelming awareness of being doomed. It’s like your team scoring points in garbage time when the best case scenario is you lose by 20 points, as if it one day dawns that death is not as painful as it’s cracked up to be. You’re still dead. You should thank Makar for the effort made to date, but it’s OK now, he can ease off the gas pedal, it’s been a valiant effort, but the enemy has surrounded us and drained the moat, and we’ve run out of food. Instead, he speeds up, he’s hydroplaning but without the residue of rain. And then you realize, you’re starring in your own reality TV show, but without the TV.

The radio still plays, no one has the inclination to suggest silence is of the essence, just as it appears the earlier innocence of our take-your-time drive into the deathly traffic detour has befallen someone else, like the glass of bubbly poured, hours before the iceberg was visible on the horizon. We passed the bottleneck at this fatally slow intersection, and exactly as advertised, the traffic cleared like anyone’s business. We were perilously close to the one hour mark at which we would be ruined, but the driver was oblivious to rules, or speed limits for that matter. As much as he was a dolt for gravitating toward the roundabout when it was surely cold hell on four wheels, he was a hero for disregarding all future convention on the highway - and speed limits. He was Franz Klammer on the downhill at the 1976 Winter Olympics, either we would crash spectacularly or we would win the gold. Wait, when you win the gold medal, everyone takes your picture, smiling on the podium, but when all you do is not miss your flight, you only avoid hot hell. Never mind, the speedo has yet to top 90, and there are land speed records to be set. There’s a person in the left lane only driving 77 who believes it’s his rightful obligation to switch into the middle at slightly slower speed without signaling during these fateful minutes? And he chooses to honk when we breeze past? We don’t have the time to respond, because that’s energy wasted and mph sacrificed. We can’t get angry, because that’s a luxury for a Sunday drive. Anyway, we’re the car that is airborne. The stillness of frustration has become the stillness of excitement and exhilaration, deer in headlights become the nail biting finish of a fourth quarter goal line stand, everything on the line. Will we make it after all? Have we cheated the clock, precisely as fortune outwardly cheated us beforehand?

A break to refill the water glass, followed by bad continuity. Can we make it after all? The airport terminal slip road is not ‘that’s my excuse and I’m sticking with it,’ but rather the giant slalom of ‘84 on cross country skis, and to the great good fortune of potential others, it is devoid of Sunday drivers. You arrive at the passenger drop off point and throw in the driver’s direction a fistful of notes, forgetting to slam the door closed, adding an extra tip for Makar to recompense for forgetting to thank him, say good bye or wish him a nice evening, or in some small measure because you didn’t wave him off when he insisted in first instance of following the route his pda