Second Day

Saturday's most memorable moment was in the evening, when we drove over to my mother's friend's son's house. This son had just had twins - well, his poor wife had - and after cooing at the frankly bizarre-looking crumpled babies, he chatted to me about Columbia. "You know, you're in the middle of Spanish Harlem. You gotta be careful."

"What, so I should work out?" I asked. Bearing in mind this guy is a huge beefcake with a crew-cut.

"Hey, it's ALWAYS good to work out. I just mean...be street-smart. Keep your eyes open. Don't go out of your way to help strangers." I realised how right he was, I was so the kind of bumbling Londoner who would run after a drug dealer telling him that he'd dropped his cocaine.

Then this guy goes, "You wanna see something cool?" It turned out 'something cool' was this guy's gun collection. GUN COLLECTION. A man who was about to look after two little twin girls was tapping in his safe combination while excitedly telling me about how rare this stuff was. "It's only thanks to my friends in the military that I have this."

He pulled out a shotgun. It looked like something from 'Doom'. He held it up and beamed proudly. "This is my burglar alarm."

Each weapon he pulled out frightened me, as though each one reminded me of how tiny my penis was. I looked at and handled a sniper rifle with scope, a Walther PPK with silencer and a fucking (you HAVE to prefix this with 'fucking') Magnum with laser sight. He assured me we would go out to the firing range one weekend and try them all out. I had a momentary image of me running naked through the woods crying with five American navy seals shooting at me with Magnums. Just momentary, you understand.

Over dinner we talked about the Middle East conflict again. The son raised a very good point about the lax attitudes in the US before 9/11. He said, chewing on some Chinese food, "if you get some towel-head come up to you and say, 'I want flying lessons', but he doesn't want to learn how to LAND, do you not think there's something WRONG here?' No amount of IR theory could rebuff that line.