The Real David Zax

I was thinking recently of the last two posts I left here, one where the majority of visitors to the blog are in Taiwan and the other, the one that looks at liars who are out to reinvent themselves and who are eventually found out because behind their boasting they are still themselves and it doesn't matter how many lies they spin to make themselves look interesting they will be found out because ultimitely they are not clever enough to sustain the lie.

The story that follows involves both of these topics

It's a factual account but I shall make an effort to hide the identity of the central charachter because I don't wish to embarrass him any more than he has already embarrassed himself.
In the end his identity makes no difference, i'm not interested in him but I would be interested to know if anybody has had a similar experience or could offer me any explanation for his unusual actions.
These may appear at first to be blindingly obvious but I have trouble nailing down how he, who I knew to be a rational person could be so delusional. He's a man who refuses to admit to being part of an elaborate story he himself concocted and then chose to tell me.

We'd both been living in Taipei on and off for several years and met regularly in sports bars. He was good to be around when discussing football because he knew what he was talking about and he made sense.

Outside of football we had little in common and didn't spend time together socially.

At the time he told me this story I hadn't seen him for a couple of years and was glad to have run into him on the street.
He was less than enthusiastic when I aked him how he was doing and he asked me if I had a few minutes to hear his story, he wanted to find out if the way he was handling the problem he found himself in was the right way to go, or was he wasting his time and making a fool of himself.
We moved to the side of the footpath sat on a wall and he began talking.

He had been involved with the girl for four years, she was Taiwanese and they had met in Taipei.
During the past year while living together she had become pregnant and the international funster had done the right thing, whisking her back to his mum's house in England where they were married.
She had the baby, a daughter and she stayed home while the dutiful lad went off to a job and they began to settle into a routine.
Well, he did, she was less than thrilled with jousting with his mother in the kitchen with a screaming baby, so one day while he was at work, she cleaned out their bank account, took a change of clothes and the baby and left for Heathrow airport.
When he came home from work instead of finding his wife and baby he was greeted with a note that told him that he was on his own.

Within a week he packed in his job and had flown back to Taipei to find her and convince her to take him back.
When he found her through her friends she was shacked up with the baby and a young man from South Africa, when he went to their apartment to find out what was going on they had told him they were very happy together and would both be grateful if he slung his hook.
So that was his story, he was sobbing openly as he asked me this question:

"What do you think I should do?"

The guy's life was in piececs, what was I going to tell him?
The first question I had was, did he know about this South African, if she had moved so qiuckly into his life with a baby they must have had had some kind of prior relationship.
He said he didn't have a clue.

I told him that the only way she was going back to him was if the South African got tired of her and walked out; in which case she may want to get back with him and that this was a lousy way to kick start the relationship.
How could he in the future ever trust her?

He thought this over and seemed to agree, he wasn't a complete idiot, he must have gone over this scenario hundreds of times in his mind during the time since she had left him.

What I didn't bring up was the glaring fact that there was at least a fifty percent chance that he wasn't the babies' father, and there was a hundred percent certainty to me that as far as I could see, he was round the fucking bend.

He told me that at the time he was back in the same position he had been years earlier when he had first arrived in Taiwan.
He was looking for a job, he was broke and he was living in a dormitory in some shithole youth hostel, i guess he was thirty five years old at the time.

We finished talking and I left him with an encouraging goodbye and we went our seperate ways.

About six months later I was in a sports bar too see a game when I spotted him.
He was in fine form, he'd had a few drinks, his team were winning and he seemed well.
When I had the chance for a quiet word I was staggered at his response.

When I asked him how things had worked out with his wife he claimed that all of the incidents he had related to me those months earlier had not happened to him and that I must have mistaken him for somebody else.

He told me he had never been married, indeed he hadn't had a serious relationship with a woman for five years, he had not been back to England for ten years, his life was on the right track and I was mistaken.
I gave up in frustration, in effect he was calling me a liar.
I continued to watch the game then left for home, I've never seen him again.

After I thought about him I was reminded of a story that had happened to me when I was younger.
The story involved my mother and a nervous breakdown and it was a story that for my mother at the time was so terrible, when she was reminded of it she claimed ignorance of any of the facts which were well known in our family and my childhood nieghbourhood.
She had responded to a terrible incident in her life the same way this English guy who had been taken for a sap had done, they both had wiped the stories from their memories.

My mother's story was one I was close to and it was harder at the time to comprehend.
I was sixteen.
One Sunday morning my mother found proof that my father was having an affair, in less than an hour he had packed and had left with his mistress and her daughter. This had been relatively easy as they lived next door.
He stayed away for three months during which time, my mother experienced a nervous breakdown.
Then one evening he showed up unanounced back at the house begging my mother to take him back and that he had made a terrible mistake, he complained his new life was a nightmare, his clothes were in the car and he wanted to move right back in.
My mother was so delighted to see him she heped him with his luggage, I and my older brother were less than thrilled.
I moved out.
About a year later I wanted to apply for a passport and travel and needed some things from my parents house, this was the first time I'd been back.
It was on the weekend and my mother was alone in the house.
I picked up my stuff and my mother asked me about what I was getting up to, there was nothing in my new life that she approved of, she even went as far as to tell me that it was fortunate that my father wasn't there because he would have been dissapointed in me what with him being such a fine man.
I stopped her nonsense and asked her to explain my fathers three month dissapearence with our next door nieghbour and she claimed to never have heard of the woman's name.

She had known her for twenty years, longer than she had known me, the woman had lived next door to us for a decade, she was my godmother and our families regularly went on vacations together. When I reminded her of this she still claimed to have never heard of the woman.

So there we have these incredible stories in these peoples lives that had been totally wiped out.
I know in my own life there are things I would rather forget, but to pretend they have never happened to me would be bordering on lunacy.

If anyone has any thoughts as to why, and indeed how people can blot out traumatic slices of thier lives, I would be grateful if you could pass them on to me, you can send them annonymously and change the names, even the nationalities of the people.
It baffles me how easy it is for some people to turn away from lifes' more unpleasant experiences and so easily claim they never happened, can any experience be so horrible that the person it happens to develop a permanent amnesia without taking a blow to the head?

Yesterday, I installed flagcounter to see where this blog was being read.(It's located on my i-Google page)
I was surprised with what it showed me after twenty four hours.

The counter I installed reacts to and displays over two hundred flags of different nations.
In the past I've assumed that most of the people visiting the blog were from The U.K.
This is because the majority of my correspondence has been with people from Britain.
After a day Ive had ten visitors and seventy nine page views.
The visitors have all been from Taiwan, I'm shocked that my neighbours are so far for the last twenty four hours, a hundred percent of my audience.

I only know that in the past, a few months ago, i received an E-mail from a former employee of mine,the strumming Kiwi, Andrew Marychurch who after I posted a five thousand word post sent me a three word message back in response, something along the lines of:

Hey, not bad.

I didn't think it was worth answering but i know he checks the blog out occasionally.
For anybody else who reads this stuff in Taiwan, my E-mail address is listed so get in touch. I'm really quite the reclusive hermit at the moment, most of my time is spent with a thirty three month old girl, who while being adorable is limited in her view of the world around her.

Go on you scally, don't be shy.

In my last post I raised the question that had been put to me:

How does one go about writing a novel?

I gave a flippant answer.

This is how I actually got around to writing a novel.

First, some background,I'm 57 yers old and have spent over twenty five years travelling, mostly in Asia but also spreading my charms as an international funster on four other continents.

(c) Copyright David Zax, 2009.

About ten years ago I was taking time out in Hong Kong where I had at the time been resident for several months.
One night being a football fan I was sat in a sports bar in Kowloon.
They had a satellite dish and were showing an obscure cup game involving teams from the lower divisions from England in the middle of the night.
I was one of only seven or eight people there to watch the game
At the time I was a drunk and as was usually the case then, I had been drinking too much.
One joke that I used about my drinking at the time was this one:

I'd have been a millionaire if I'd taken all the bottles back.

Tragically this statement had some truth behind it, I've thankfully since given up this infantile hobby.

I was sat at a table with another Englishman who I'd met there on that night who was also on something of a bender.

Before the game began, at half time and after the final whistle, we got into some conversations firstly about football, then travel.

We swapped anecdotes.

This is a common practice when two drunken well travelled men away from home for an extended period meet in a bar.

My contribution to the conversation was a desperately sad story about a young man in India who had stolen some money from me while we travelled on the same bus.
Before the bus reached its destination I realised the theft and while I was trying to get my money back from him some of the other passengers were outraged by finding he had robbed a tourist.
They beat the lad up and held him until the bus pulled in at our destination, the southern Indian city of Madurai, where he was turned over to the police.

The story is a brutal one that ends with the most depraved beating and confinement one could ever make up, the problem here was, I was there and the events were real.
I was witness to the whole wretched unfolding chain of events and it literally made me sick to my stomach.

My story topped the one my drinking buddy had told me and when we split up I could see he was deeply affected by what I'd seen and had told him.
This was not a lighthearted vacation story.

About a month later I was invited to a wedding reception held in a hotel located in the Central district.

After the bride and groom had bounded out of the doors to begin married life I and several other males were sat around a table doing a stirling job getting rid of the last of the free booze.

I only knew one other guest there, we had both been invited to the reception at the same time.

As the alcohol took over, anecdotes were swapped. I had plenty of them and had told some of them several times, but on this occasion I stayed quiet.
The swapping of travel anecdotes is a popular shared activity between travellers who are drunk, but you have to be in the mood to join in.
The stories I told I never shared them outside a bar setting and I only swapped them with other travellers.

It was a shock then to hear one of the guests relating "his story." to the table. It was the one about the Indian boy who who was arrested on the bus and subsequently beaten to a pulp and then.... (you'll have to read the novel Extemadura to find out what happened)

It was the story that had happened to me years earlier.
Even stranger, the man telling the story was an Australian, he wasn't the man I'd told the story to in the sports bar.
In Hong Kong, I had only told that story one time.

I was absolutely stunned to hear this phony getting off telling my story as though it was his own.

Not wanting to cause a scene on what had been an enjoyable afternoon, I waited till I was ready to leave and confronted him off to one side away from the remaining drinkers, I asked him where he had heard the anecdote but he insisted the story was his own personal experience.

This story is one so perverted the punchline so hideous, its impossible that these events happened twice in the same city with the same people being involved with the same names in the same location.

So I left the hotel grumbling and muttering to myself and wended my way back to my rented rooms for a nap.

The thing stayed with me for days' but gradually my anger subsided.

The story is notable for its shocking brutality and at least two people I knew of were touting it around Hong Kong as their own story. This told me that it had some value and that these phonies thought it good enough for them to want to be associated with it, to claim it as their own.

God knows how many of my stories were going around the world possibly told by thousands of liars and phonies who are passing them off as their own experience and on to others who in turn hijacked the story and then pass it on to yet more phonies.

These people are everywhere, don't blink you'll miss one. Look! There's another one! and another!
I'd like to pick them off with a hammer.

My daughter is just old enough to play that game, you know, the one with the crocodile's noses popping up at random out of ten holes in a plastic mould and you have to hit them with a hammer to score.

Lying phonies are everywhere, you'll see hundreds of them today even if you don't go out. Just switch on the T.V.

So that was it as far as I was concerned, there would be no more stories told as anecdotes by me to drunks in bars. They were my stories, it was my life and I decided then to record them in a diary, so I'd have them all to myself.
You want a good story? I suggest you get a life first.

From then on whenever I recalled an anecdote I wrote it down in a notebook, in the way that I would have related it if I had been in a bar.

Over the next two years I filled several notebooks.
I seldom read them back after I'd finished logging them.
I guess in the begining it was therapy for me to keep a record.
Whatever the reason I enjoyed putting them down and when I got to completing a hundred stories I figured it was enough and I left them in a box and forgot about them.
I could have gone on to save a thousand but these first hundred were the best.

I was based in Taipei in Taiwan when I eventually put them away.
It was a good city to me, well situated.
I was making a small profit from picking up anything that could turn a profit at the time, this involved travelling regularly to Hong Kong, Korea, The Philipines, Thailand, Penang, Macau, Vietnam, Cambodia, laos.
All of these places were two hours or less flying time from Taipei and it was an ideal base at the time to get to know South East Asia well.

The notebooks stayed in the boxes for another two years until I moved apartments. It was then while sorting through my accumulated odds and ends that I came across the hundred travel anecdotes.

I spent one evening in my new apartment starting with the first notebook and by early next morning I was finished reading them.
Having left the writing for so long, the stories appeared fresh to me. In retrospect I found them interesting and I began to think of how I could take them and work them into a novel.

And that in brief is the story of how I wrote a novel on the back of the inspiration of frauds and liars.
The reason that I had to spend years knocking it into shape was that I had to change the seperate stories into a single plot, I had to rewrite them all, then reconstruct them into a story that moved quickly, kept the readers attention throughout and felt authentic. I also had to introduce a lot of charachters and dialog.

In the begining it was a diary now it's a novel.
All of the stories from the notebooks apart from two, bare little resemblence to how they now appear in the novel.
The first of the two unchanged from the notebooks is the story of the Indian boy on the bus that inspired the book, its unchanged and the second story that remained intact is a look at how undying love can over the course of time turn into slovenly indifference. The story is based on my first serious relationship.
In the novel I changed it to the collapse of a ten year marriage between the central charachter who acts out my part and his first wife. based on my ex.
Both of these stories are seperate chapters.

I meet a lot of frauds, people who are away from home for extended periods and are able to reinvent themselves each time they move location which in some cases is often.
Take my own case as an example.

I'm from England but I always enjoyed leaving it, my first trip was to Morocco,Algeria and Tunisia in 1971 (four months) then a second to Morocco a year later.(six months)
Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan,Pakistan,India and Nepal in 1975 (eighteen months)then India Nepal and Thailand in 1980 (six months) Lebanon, Jordan, Israel in 1982 (one year)and that's when I became sick and tired of returning to a country I loathed and didn't need anymore.
Margaret Thatchers Britain.

By March 1985 I was equipped to leave and never go back, that's when my vacation began, it's still ongoing, I travel constantly and I enjoy it.

I left England half way through Thatchers stint at the helm of a sinking ship navigating rough unforgiving seas.

Unfortunately during this time I have repeatedly run accross liars.
They are everywhere and they are terrifyingly shallow.
Look! There's another one, get the hammer!
They are the types of people who can't forge an interesting life for themselves at home because thier friends and family can see what they do, so in this quick smash and grab instant world where attention spans last less than two minutes where everthing is fast tracked, they leave home in search of a story and after, let's say three months of failing to find an interesting story.
(you'll understand why I choose three months later)
They go about stealing stories of people who they have seen as living admirable lives, then, being away from home they cultivate the stories before going back reinvented to impress their freinds with their awful lies that because they happened thousands of miles away, are difficult to expose.

I see them all the time building stories, they don't care who knows. They have no shame, they need a story, any story to make themselves look better, and they need it fast.

You think I'm exaggerating. Here are two stories chosen from thousands of the shameful liars I've come across over the years. They are acute cases:

The first was a Canadian who I met in the summer of 1972 at the end of my second trip to Morocco.
He was the first really hard core liar I had come across, he was a shameful piece of work.
I was twenty at the time, he was about the same age, I can't remember his age or his name, I forgot both these facts minutes after I left him at Victoria Station in London. keep in mind, it is as I write, thirty eight years ago.
My second trip to Morocco had come to an end after six months when my money ran out. I had enough to get to Alicante, on the way back and from there I had to hitch.
Hitch hiking in Spain and France at the time was a real headache, people had a habit of rolling down their car windows and shouting Beatnick! at you. Many threw remnants of snacks and half filled water bottles.
In Spain which was ruled by the fascist Franco at the time, all three government tv stations showed ads daily warning people not to pick up hitch hikers because they were likely to have their throats slashed and their car stolen.
It took me ten days to get to the port at Calais to try and get onto a ferry to Dover.
Having no money was a drawback but on that hot afternoon when I reached the ferry terminal I was relieved to have gotten there and too tired to bother or to care right then about the problem of paying my fare.

It was he who approached me first. I spotted him in his holiday clothes all fired up looking for someone to tell his story to. It was a familiar one at the time.
He had landed in London and had bought a Eurorail pass. He had bought the longest one issued at the time, a three month ticket that gave the holder unlimited rail travel on the western European network.

This generally involves getting a map and moving from city to city spending a day in a town and then later back to the train station to sleep through the night en route to another town.
The advantages of this of course is the area you can cover and how cheap this form of travel is and also there are tens of thousands of young people paticipating in this every summer. As a ticket holder you will have many chances to get laid and tanked up on cheap supermarket booze and dance in a conga line up and down the length of the train in the wee hours.
The dissadvantages are are many, here's one.
Every day you get fifteen hours to wander round a strange town where you don't understand what people are saying to you smelling bad while supporting a terrible hangover.

Before I could stop him the Canadian bore was half way through telling me every single stop he had made through Europe. His ticket was then valid for this his last day. The next day he was flying back to Canada.
He finished his account and was faced with my silence.
To attract my interest he asked me where I had been.
I only mentioned the word Morocco and he cut me off.
He was swinging his arms wildly and cursing the air around him.
Morocco! Goddam! You've been to Morocco!

He told me he was from a provincial town and of his freinds back home, he had been the first of them to take off alone on an international adventure, he told me without any shame of how he couldn't wait to get back to see how envious his freinds would be of him.
The mention of my trip to Morocco had him feeling some regret that he hadn't taken a more adventurous option. He was sure if he had, his friends back home would have been in complete awe of him.
He began pumping me with non stop questions about where I'd been, names of cities, what currency they used, how much does a hotel cost, everything.
Eventually the ferry was ready to leave and he figured I would be joining him on the trip across the channel.
When I told him I didn't have any money for the fare, he thought about it for a minute and made me an offer.
He would buy me a ticket on the boat and a train ticket to London.
This would mean we would spend a further five, maybe six hours together.
During this time I would sell him my trip and furnish him with my story and coach him so he could appear to his friends to have been on a more exciting adventure when he arrived back home.

At the time I was living in a squat the adress was 113 Gaisford Street Kentish Town N6.
So I agreed, in fact I jumped at the chance to help this lying phoney decieve his friends and himself.

Once on board, I unpacked my shoulder bag and rummaged through everything, there was six months of a trail i'd left there.
A much handled map, several brouchures from hotels I'd stayed at, some loose Moroccan change, stubs of bus tickets, bottles of shapoo and soap with Arabic labels loads of junk that I freely handed over to him.

He had a notebook out and I started describing everything from the ferry from Algeceiras to Tangiers, the hotel I stayed in, the exchange rate, how much a room had cost me ,what I ate, the bus to the high Atlas mountains, dope, freinds, names,girls who became lovers, I sold this creep my entire holiday and gave him the props that would help convince the people back home it was he who had made the trip.
Course, I told him he would have the problem of not having stamps in his passport, he asked me how he could get over this so I suggested he drop the passport into water on the day he got back to Canada, hand it in and apply for a replacement.
His grilling and taking notes from me lasted right up until we split up at Victoria Station.
The guy had supplied me with a constant flow of beer and food and had given me my tube fare to Kentish Town. So I guess it worked out well for me.
What a fucking phony, he wasn't at all remotely embarrassed about what he did. People like him are everywhere. Look! there's one now!

This following story took place some fifteen years after I had sold my vacation to the shameful Canadian.
It was the second time I had sold an entire part of my life to help a liar misslead his family and friends back home to feel good about himself. I coached him for days so he would succeed with the deception.

He was only about eighteen at the time, I was thirty five and about two years into my permanent vacation, I stayed in India that time for four years so I guess it must have been 1987.

At that time I was exploiting a loophole in the tax law and making a profit importing wedding sari's from Sri Lanka into India.
After the loophole was closed I moved on to Thailand.

When I wasn't flying back and forward from Trivandrum to Colombo I travelled extensively throughout India.
I had been in Delhi a dozen times. I didn't care for the city I had used it so often due to its location as a central transport hub as a transit stop. Usually I stayed overnight and was gone the next day.
I'm not sure now but I was probably going to a northern hill station to escape the weather. Once again, this was 22 years ago.
My plans were thrown off when I arrived in the capital in agony shitting blood and mucus.
A trip to a clinic told me what I already knew, I had Amoebic dysentery. I was lucky to be in the city when it struck because without the correct medication stuck in an isolated backwater I would have been, it's fair to say, in deep shit.

The tablets prescribed cleaned it up but I was weak and ended up staying for ten days at a hotel on the Pahar Gange, a long straight narrow road that runs up from the main entrance of the railway station, it's crammed with hotels, mainly cheap ones.
I'd stayed there before. I had an unremarkable room located on the third floor of a twelve story building.

After a few days of not eating and feeling weak I was going batty with boredom. I had some dope that was strong and evil smelling so when I felt up to it I climbed the stairs to scope out the roof and spark up.
There was no elevator and I was exhausted when I eventually dragged myself up there.

I was surprised. There were four rooms and a view.
The roof had been swept and felt like a peaceful refuge there was a table and several comfortable chairs. I sat in one and had a smoke.

That's when I met him, he was a skinny kid in a pair of shorts hanging out his washing.

On his way back he spotted me and came across.
He was English and he hailed from a small village located on the outer reaches of the suburbs of Nottingham.
He joined me, on that day I stayed up there for several hours hanging out with him. over the next couple of days, I spent all my time escaping my drab room up on the roof and I found out his story.

He had spent his life in the village where he lived with his parents.
The Thatcher years were a truly miserable time for many in England. Unemployment in some areas was out of control and apathy for many kids who had left school and had never had a job was rampant, there was very little hope particularly to anybody who was working class and lived north of Watford Gap. That's why I was so determined to get out myself and to stay out. And this was a story I shared with my new young friend, and the reason he too had arrived in India so we both had that in common.
We were both bitter about our recent past and we had a laugh complaining with spite about what was wrong with our country.

He couldn't find a job since he had left school and he spent most of his time in his bedroom and hanging around his local bar that was full of his friends he had left school with who were also on the dole.
There were drugs, depressants, and I knew the despondancy he'd felt.
I've never found that hopeless resigned all pervading air of defeat among young people in any other country outside Britain, it was mind numbingly depressing back then, a true living hell.
Recent events I've read in the Guardian Online have not encouraged me that this situation has improved.

He got sick of his pointless life and with so much time on his hands he began to dream of getting out, he spent time reading about India, nobody he knew had ever tried something so ambitious, so when he began telling his mates down the pub of his plans to travel they ridiculed him, telling him nobody ever escaped and the present life they were living, the one where they were frozen in aspic,that was a permanent condition and he should get used to it.

The thing about unemployment then was there were certain factory jobs that you could find if you desperately needed money, places like dye works and asbestos processing plants and generally they offered lots of hours, double shifts, sixteen hour days seven days a week grubbing around up to your neck imerssed in toxic filth.
The reason they had such a high turnover of staff, was that working there was in the long term, an impossible way of life, nobody wanted to work there.
The only benefit was that if you needed money you could put it away easily because your whole life was work, every day, when you weren't working you were sleeping. He was living at home so he had no bills, everything he earned would be used to escape and leave the horrible drabness behind.
He figured out how much money he would need and reckoned if he worked round the clock for four months he could do it.
I did this myself twice for travel money at a rubber factory located on a barren moor miles from where I lived, miles from where anybody lived such was the stinking poison filth the place spewed out twenty four hours a day, every day of the year.

He knuckled down to the four months only taking one Saturday off a month
Of course he went to his local pub where his cynical; defeated mates laughed and mocked him, taunting him that he would never stick it out.
He'd never leave.

This made him more determined and was a great help to him to stick with the plan.

By the time he had been working for three months, his monthly night out had his friends openly hostile toward him due to the fact that it looked as though he was going to get away and leave them behind without hope.
He would leave them to reflect on the fact that it was possible to leave but unlike him, they didn't have the drive to get out themselves, and they never would.

Eventually the day came when he quit his job.
He had the money in the bank, had gotten his passport and was off to London to get a visa and his shots, then buy travellers checks and his return ticket.
He had three days back home to wait for his flight.

He spent the night before leaving down the pub and this time it was he who was mocking and taunting his friends and that night they had nothing to say to him in response. He was escaping and they weren't.

He left with some begrudging good luck wishes and made his way home but he felt alone and afraid.
He was actually going. In thirty six hours, he would be in a bed in India.
He was feeling vulnerable, and for a young man who had never taken a chance it was a big step.
Still the next morning he took a deep breath and set off to catch the London train.

He arrived off the flight in Delhi in June, the hottest month of the year just prior to the annual monsoon when the mercury registers regularly in the upper forties celsius.

The blast of heat as he left the plane slapped him hard in the face and before he reached the terminal building his clothes were soaked in sweat.
His first moments in India were awful, something far outside his previous experiences of eighteen years in and around Nottingham.

At the baggage carousel he waited for his bags and watched his fellow travellers, mostly returning Indians create all manner of havoc while waiting to pick up their bags.
Through immigration and customs he opened a door and was rushed by hundreds of screaming chancers who were camped there looking for a mug.
Taxi drivers, hotel hustlers, pimps and oddballs, all screaming at the top of their lungs directly into his face.
By the time he got into the back of the taxi he knew he was in India and he was terrified.
As the taxi negotiated traffic into the city and near naked children were hammering on the windows screaming at him at every stop, there were dozens of them at every junction.
There was man with leprosy banging the stumps of his hands and pushing his face, the one with no nose up against the glass.

Cows with shit smeared arses crapping in the road and an all pervading stink of piss convinced him he had made a terrible mistake and right then, all he wanted to do was to turn the taxi round and take the next flight home.

His panic increased as the taxi took an hour to reach the hotel, with the adress he had passed to the driver.
He paid the cab off with money he didn't know the value of and bounded up the stairs to reception and a man who smelled bad and had a deeply stained betel nut mouth.
He was given a bland room similar to the one i was staying in on the day he had arrived some weeks later and the traumatised lad locked the door and lay petrified beneath a slowly spinning fly specked three blade fan that hung from the ceiling and melted into the mattress.

That's where he had stayed for a week.

On the ground floor was a restraunt and he ordered food to be sent up to his room three times a day.
He told me he was too afraid to step out into the street and was feeling thouroughly miserable sat in the bottom of the deep hole he had dug for himself.
He desperately wanted to go back home but his life would have been made intolerable by the ridicule of his mates if he showed up there after being away for only a week, he would have never lived down the humiliation.
At the end of the first week he had been reduced to the edge of a nervous breakdown. He had to get out of the room and he wasn't going out of the front exit so he went up to the roof as I had done where he found the rooms.
He spoke to people who lived up there and one guy told him he would be returning to Europe the next day, so the kid went down to reception and reserved the room.

Next day he took his bag and he moved up there.

His life improved, people rarely stayed there longer than a week and the other three rooms were always full so he met a lot of new people, there were plenty of books travellers had left behind and every night after midnight he was usually sat with company around the table drinking beer and sharing dope and their stories.
Because of the constant changing of nieghbours, he didn't have to explain his odd situation of never leaving the roof.

As he settled in he began to see a way out of his jam. Everybody got very sick at least once in India, the stomach parasites are of such ferocity, they could give a T-Rex a bowel dissorder, many of the people leaving were returning early because of some medical malaise, so he had his solution.
He figured to seem credible when he returned to Nottingham he would have had to have stayed in India for three months, he checked a calender and had pencilled in a departure date three months from the day he'd entered his Indian nightmare.
He could stay up on the roof and be solely in the company of foriegners.
The ones who were leaving behind all the stuff he would need to fabricate a journey he himself had never begun.
Everybody loses weight quickly during the first three months in India and he had lost a lot. This would back up his story of returning a month early because of his illness.
The people back home would be mighty impressed with his rough haggard look

By the time I had arrived he had quite a collection of maps, train tickets, hotel flyers brochures from tourist spots all over the country and he had the anecdotes he'd heard from different people who were only too glad to tell him where they had been and fill him in on a variety of towns cities and tourist spots.
When I'd met him he had a week left before his flight home was due.
Having been up there for three months he felt comfortable and me being on the roof most of the time he'd unloaded his story on me.
He asked me to help put his "trip" together with him, as I was doomed to spend the next week recovering on the roof and I was happy to help him.

The kid was pretty good company but i thought he could have made an effort.
What he hadn't understood about India was that arriving at the airport and his experience there was the worst thing he would have had to encounter.

If he had taken a train to a quiet beach town, he would have had a wonderful time with friendly people, there were so many to choose from and then there was all of that amazing food and life he had missed, he'd put in all the hard work and lost his nerve at the last minute and had hidden himself away.

He had picked up some super strong dope from Manali about three ounces of it.
He'd bought it from a guy who was going back to Europe and was swallowing it wrapped in condoms,
He had tried to get a kilo down but couldn't get make it, he reached his limit and any more was spewed up.

Rather than risk hiding the surplus somewhere else at the airport he'd sold the unswallowed dope to the lad at the knockdown ridiculously cheap price he'd picked it up in the scenic northern valley.
The kid sure didn't want to take it back, he had had enough of India after spending his first hour in the country.
He offered the dope to me as payment and we spent the week crafting my travels with some of the props his neighbours had left behind.
As the day of his departure came he was terrified of going through his awful experience again and talked me into riding shotgun with him in the taxi to the airport.

I said goodbye to him when he walked through immigration. He looked like a kid walking into his first day of school.

We live in a slick tacky impatient world where everybody is famous just because they say they are. It's a place where the easy way out is the first and only option.

Don't have any talent?
No problem, lie.

I like music, remember what that is? When people would spend years mastering an instrument and writing songs.
You don't need to bother with that anymore.

Go out and buy a drum machine for a couple of hundred dollars, find a rythym and then shout over it into a microphone about how great you are, shout about the sex you had last night and how you slapped your bitch after it was over, shout about how everybody is afraid of you, shout about what everybody else shouts about, you don't have to come up with anything original, rip off somebody else.
Learning an instrument up in your bedroom for years? That's for suckers.

You want to be famous now.

You don't need talent, If you can't sing you can pay some fat ugly singer who can't get on stage because of their appearance and then you can lip synch to their voice.
Everybody watching you knows its not you singing but it doesn't matter anymore because your on a stage and you say your famous, so you must be famous.
That's what Madonna did and continued doing. I have never seen a Madonna concert but i'm certain those who have are the most shallow vapid liars on the planet.

Meet an interesting person who has travelled around the world, do you want to be him.
No problem, tell everybody you've been all over the world.
They won't believe you but they wont critise you because they themselves are famous writers or film stars or skydivers or olympic athletes or premiership footballers.

Get tired of one, you can choose a different fame next week, its as easy as changing clothes.

People are now famous because they say they're famous.

You want to be clever?

Crawl through the internet and find something you think is clever.
Copy it, take off the writer name, put your's in its place.

Now your clever and you only wrote two words, your name.

You don't have to feel ashamed that your a liar, Everybody's a liar.

Let me tell you something about myself.
I've got a gas powered television.
Keith Richard stole Satisfaction from me, I wrote that.
I invented the safety pin.
My mother is Sophia Loren.
I got a first in theology at Oxford.
I drive an Aston Martin.......
My dick is four miles long.
I am the CEO of IBM.

I know i'm wasting my time, and i know this problem will get worse with each generation but here's the point of me writing this:

If you're a liar, can you stop lying to yourself and try to create something that is yours?
You wouldn't believe how rewarding it is.

The irony here is, if you are a liar you won't have the attention span needed to get through; and read all the piece, and then find the question.

I am painfully aware of the fact that my announcing here that my novel Extremadura is now on this day finished is of absolutely no interest to anyone.

This minor drawback however can not stop me from bellowing the news of completion as loudly as I possibly can from the towering turrets of castle Zax.

It is a fucking triumph, not for anyone but myself, this i'm ready to admit, but it is still a wonderful feeling.

If you have ever attempted a novel and have actually finished it and are happy with the result, you'll know exactly how I feel.

The torture of working so hard on and off for several years when I doubted I would ever complete work that I would be happy with, those doubts have gone.

There was so much time when I thought I was wasting time, but after I began, I was commited and giving up was never an option.

The last few weeks when I knew I had it nailed have been very satisfying.
The editing was rewarded as the work became tight.

Once again I know this news will be greeted with total and complete apathy but just for today I don't care.

I set out to write a novel and I got it right.

Now all I have to do is sell it.

Over the course of writing the novel, several people asked me this question:

"How do you go about writing a book?"

For a long time I thought the answer was so obvious, I couldn't be bothered to answer them.

The longer I spent writing and searching for inspiration or for the right word that would fit the right line I was writing at the time, the more I thought about how to write a book, here's what I came up with.

First, you'll need a table and a chair, a stack of A4 paper, a sharpened pencil, an eraser and a dictionary.

Take a sheet of paper and write on it the letters of the alphabet.

When your done tape the paper up on the wall at eye level.

That's it. That's all you need to begin writing a novel.

What you then have to do is to arrange the twenty six letters into words and write them down on hundreds of sheets of A4.

And that's it.

Oh, you would be advised to have lived an eventful life before you begin writing.

(c)David Zax 2009.
The meeting described below takes place in a Tuscan restaurant of some note in the spring of 1986.

The major distraction to such a wonderful evening came from the more vocal of one of the four diners who had been invited to join the chef's table for the staff after hours wind down.

Turned out the disrespectful lout causing the disturbance was a pop star from the city of Newcastle, a grim hard core industrial area where men were at that time, arbiters of family disputes.

The city had been built on the back of the shipbuilding trade and was located on the river Tyne.

Frank had never heard of String.

The songwriter had introduced himself to Frank. He thought the name unusual and asked the performer his real name.

The pop star told Frank his parents had christened him Gordon but for the rest of the evening while in conversation with anybody around the table, he would prefer to be referred to as String.

Frank and Carla had been having a pretty good time until this self important loudmouth had tried to take over the evening with his showing off, Frank got that the guy was a fake inside a minute.

String insisted on telling the rest of the crew who were gathered hoping to enjoy themselves that not only was he a world famous pop star, he was also a master of the ancient art of Tantric Yoga.

He asked if anybody there knew what Tantric Yoga was.
Frank and a couple of the kitchen staff who were sat around the table told him they knew what Tantric Yoga was.

The singer then went on without a pause to explain to them what he thought Tantric Yoga was, and how he practiced his particular form of the yoga.

According to the three chord pop singer, the practice of Tantric Yoga, had thousands of years of history behind it and was a lifestyle that had millions of practitioners.

He said this sexy pop star Yoga had been handed down through generations and was the science of a perfected body that could be obtained only after pushing oneself through hideous physical contortions that would drive weaker men than a man of String's physical stature and mental toughness, completely insane.

The harnessed sexual power, combined with periods of sexual abstinence and the right diet could build within a Tantric yoga devotee, a pair of massive volcanic busting gonads that could effect the Chi of the rest of the world.

String went on to tell Frank and the rest of the diners' what Chi was.
He was quickly sucking all the fun out of the room.

The practitioner of tantric yoga he claimed, could tap into the stored energy at will and fuck the living daylights out of a loved one for days on end while achieving spiritual enlightenment at the same time.

String Frank found out from listening to his bragging was an oportunistic hustler.

He had spent five minutes explaining to Frank a brief outline of the problems caused due to excess logging in Brazil

Frank guessed the popstar and his publisists knew that when he set about on his quest to convince the general public he was clever and to increase his fanbase, that by picking relatively obscure and safe topics, such as deforestation of the Amazon rain forest and the practice of Tantric yoga the majority of people listening to him wouldn't have any real knowledge of what he was talking about and they would accept any crap he served up as fact simply because he was famous and appeared regularly on television.
Camp String could also be certain that nobody would come out in public and actively encourage out of control deforestation of the Amazon, with such a safe argument he already had everybody on his side.

He could then appear to be a sage to anyone who knew nothing of his deluded rantings, and they wouldn't question him about Tantric sex or the raping of the Amazon rain forest, subjects the public had only two views on, they either supported his view or had no view at all, there's no reason for anybody to take a stand against his view that chopping down trees is bad.
Nobody is going to organise a demonstration in support of chopping down trees.

The rest of the population, people who know he's a fool include politicians, career diplomats, academics and people who like to read.

The politicians, they know that this String is an idiot who talks out of his arse but they are wary to mention his lunacy when questioned because to voters, they have to be popular, particularly young voters.

Indeed politicians can't get enough of being photographed alongside celebrities pushing a cause no matter how deluded they are.

Coming out live on TV as a politician and telling your constituents that String and his management are playing you for a chump and you are an idiot for listening to him is not a vote grabber.
So String gets a free pass, even endorsements from politicians.
Frank didn't need to know who String was, the tactic he was using to sell his music was a common one among pop and film stars.

The more obscure the cause, the more people of his ilk can claim to be experts, and the longer these phonies' drag it out, the more exposure they have in the press to talk about their real passion, themselves.

The save the planet singer who loves flitting around the world in his carbon footprint nightmare lear jet; then went on to tell his bored audience, that the spiritual journey he had undertaken in his present incarnation could take many lifetimes to perfect and that his was merely a humble soul an imperfect soul in progress.

Fortunately for him, he had been introduced to an Indian Swami who was at that time down on his luck living in his uncles' basement in Fresno California.

The eastern mystic had fast forwarded String into the express check out counter to Nirvana after ten days spent with him at a house the Swami had borrowed from a friend in Laurel Canyon.

String went on and on boasting of his sexual powers and how, when during periods of sexual abstinence; when he took time away from being the greatest lover in the world, when after meditating before the sun rose to read classic Greek poetry and pacing the grounds of one of his several stately homes around the world he pondered deeply the terrible problems of the more desperate inhabitants of the third world.

Frank had spent plenty of time on the fringes of darker regions of the third world and he knew this String was a fraud who popped into poverty for thirty minutes at a time with a film crew in tow to capture him on film caring and beefy security, he then raced back to The Hilton with the film in the can where he would scrub away the filth from his body in the shower and then soak in the Jacuzzi.
String never spent time around poverty without having a camera crew along.

String told Frank that without him, the dying had no voice.

Frank was reminded of the legend of Mother Theressa.

He said he felt qualified to comment on complex afairs of state and be champion of the underdog on the basis of being able to write a hit single.

He left the impression, this cliched String Fellow, that he was desperate to be seen by people he met as a man of great wisdom, a man of words, and a man of great compassion.

The singer became visibly uncomfortable when he was reminded that he was famous because he wrote popular songs and in Frank's estimation he was deluded to think this talent meant anything outside the pop charts.

Frank asked the strummer what his profession had been before he had begun writing the songs he was famous for and the hitmaker dragged up some of his past life; telling Frank he had formerly been an English teacher, son of a milkman, he told Frank that he was a summoner, a teller of tales.

"Do you know who Billy Fury was?"

"Yes of course I know who Billy Fury was."

"Halfway to paradise, that's one heck of a song.

That Billy Fury, he was a genius, Billy Fury dressed in a gold suit, now there was a sight. Girls' they could never get enough of Billy Fury.
What records have you made? I've never heard of you."

String mentioned the names of half a dozen of his hits.

Frank told him he had never heard of any of them.

String was absolutely furious.

"You've heard of me, I'm really famous! ask any of these people, they know who I am, tell him who I am, tell him who I am!"

Frank looked around the table, he could see in the diners eyes his popularity had soared five thousand percent,that night everybody hated String, somebody from String's crew giggled.

"I've never heard of you. I like Billy Fury, Billy Fury was the real thing, Billy Fury, I know him, he was a famous man, nobody ever saw Billy Fury being asked by a reporter from the Manchester Guardian, what his views on the Suez Crisis were.

Even if Billy Fury had tried to tell the world his take on boiling Middle Eastern tensions nobody would have taken him seriously, and he was Billy Fury for fuck's sake.
The idea would have been laughable, what did Billy Fury know of international diplomacy?

Maybe we should ask Woody, the tartan trousered platformed soled' bass player from the Scottish boy band the Bay City Rollers, his ideas regarding the Marshall plan.

Do you know who Bobby Farrell is?"

"No I've never heared of him."

"He's the little guy, the lead singer from Boney M, the German based supergroup, the glam disco dancer whose hair resembles a washed out old Brillo pad.
He's from Aruba.

He had number one hits all over the world. Studio hits he lip synched to on TV and never sang on during the original recordings.
He came from the same camp that later produced the duo Milli Vanilli, do you think that qualifies him to speak to the United Nations General Assembly on the subject of third world debt?

How come no reputable news agency ever phoned Little Richard in 1962 to get the flambuoyant rockers' opinion regarding Soviet missiles based in Cuba?

Jerry Lee Lewis was never asked by Carl Bernstien at the Washington Post, his opinion on who shot JFK, and if he thought that the event had been a coup that had taken place in front of the world live on TV.
This was because Carl Bernstien knew that Jerry Lee Lewis, although an admirable night club performer had no idea of an insiders view of Washington.

I don't see why being able to write a three minute pop song qualifies anyone to play the role of international statesman.

Do you know Bob Geldof?"

"Yes I know Bob, he's a close friend of mine."

"That's interesting, I was wondering about him and the place he occupies in rock and roll history alongside other rock legends.
Do you think his recorded work is as important as the songs that were written by John Lennon or David Bowie, or Bob Dylan?"

"He's not quite as influencial."

"Not quite as influencial? Bob Geldof is shit. If I brought some friends home and we smoked up some serious dope and I put on a Bob Geldof album, they'd beat me up.

Do you listen to Bob Geldof's music much when you're relaxing at home?"

"Not often, but Bob and his wife are really good people to be around and he's very sincere."

"That's right, Bob Geldof is married to that girl from The Tube, Paula Yates, what's she like, there's a rumour going round that she's Hughie Greene's daughter."

"Paula is a wonderful person."

"I'm sure she has a big future ahead of her, I believe the Geldofs' have a daughter."

"Yes, and with her genes she's going to amount to something in the future, I'm sure she will have a big impact, you should watch out for Fifi Trixabelle Geldof she will be massive."

"I will String. I can hardly wait to see how she turns out. I'm sure the girl will be huge. Does she take after her grandfather, does she resemble the sly gameshow host Hughie Greene at all?"

String ignored the baiting and went right on bragging about his influence on global politics but he knew the game was up that night and the diners around the table were laughing at him when they eventually broke up and left.

Frank figured that his own life had been fine without knowing who this balding heart throb big headed balladeer was; the last thing he needed then was to be around showbizz sideshow hucksters and the filthy indecent suggestion the Geordie pop boy had spit into Frank's ear after he had sidled up next to Frank in the bathroom at a urinal.

What an arrogant bastard.

Can you imagine latching on to a cause you know nothing about and then parading yourself around the world for years on end making a fool of yourself showing your ignorance while speaking alongside career diplomats and world leaders who know what they're talking about live on TV and having millions mock you, and still ploughing on with the charade?

Why does anybody need that level of attention?
To always be on center stage, posing as an expert knowing that you have long ago been found out.

Frank hoped he never crossed paths with that ego on legs again he was tired of him and his kind.

I looked at my blog today and came across several ads that had been posted by my host, Google.
In the main, the advertisements were concerned with writing and publishing, apart from one.
The odd one out that caught my eye was the ad at the top of my blog page that offered help in the treatment of a particularly nasty disorder.
The ad was entitled:

Rectal Prolapse.

I Googled the two words to find ugly images of arses that had exploded and had left behind a foot of intestine hanging out.

The images were one's I had only seen before while walking past dimly lit clinics that had exploding arses plastered all over their front window as a bizarre invitation to go in.

Hey, if you want me to advertise exploding arseholes for you, send me a T-Shirt with the image of an exploded arse on it. I'll wear it everywhere.