Sometimes the different levels of what is going on converge, and these moments of synchronicity, these conjunctures, as William Burroughs called them, can provide a heightened, even mystical experience. I hope you will be able to capture one of these moments, which we are bound to experience, I told Howard. They are the big pay-off of traveling, the epiphanies.

          “And not only that,” I added, “you’re going to have to style the Suitcase. That’s where I need help. How much Michael Moore, and how much Peter Ustinov, should he be ? Should he have his shirt tucked in, or out, lessening the impact of his pot belly and cutting an informal, accessible, comfortable-in-his skin figure ? How much erudition should he exude ? The viewer has to be able to identify with him, to buy his shtick, so it is not just a question of vanity that whenever possible he should be shot head-on, which makes him much more appealing,  than in profile, for instance. The Suitcase is  the ‘I’ of the travelogue, and there undoubtedly all kinds of tricks of cinematography that you know much better than I do, that would help put him over. We have to be on top of these things if we’re going to carve a niche for the Suitcase on cable t.v..” 

       “Just be yourself,” Howard suggested, “and we’ll worry about how it comes out later.” 
 
 
 

       We had a couple of hours layover in London, so we took the tube to South Kensington, where I used to live in the early sixties, in an upstairs flat in the former home of W.S. Gilbert, the librettist of Gilbert and Sullivan, the Victorian musical team, on a quiet, tree-lined street called Harrington Gardens.  The first two floors were rented by the Genealogical Society (royal or British, I don’t remember which). Americans of British descent who had always been told that they were descended from a duke would come here and find out that they were actually descended from the village chimneysweep. One man from Ohio actually staggered out into the street and had a heart attack on the pavement after making this devastating discovery. Our relations with the Genealogical Society deteriorated after I left a bath running upstairs and water leaked through the ceiling and damaged some priceless parish registers. There was a large, lovely garden in back, and a bench out on the street that two Lebanese brothers, who were renting another flat, and I would watch couples making out on summer evenings. Near the bench was a sign  that said, “It is an offense to allow your dog to foul the public footpath.” But it was no longer there.  I loved the eccentric precision of British English. 
There was a poster in the Gloucester Road post office that said, 

KEEP CEASELESS WATCH FOR THE COLORADO BEETLE

What a wonderfully iterative and mobilizing admonition. It made you glance anxiously over your shoulder for one of the nasty little things. It got your immediate attention. 

           I took Howard to some of my old haunts, the Bailey Hotel and the Stanhope Arms pub near the Gloucester Road Tube station, where I used to go for a pint with Geoffrey Stillingfleet and his cronies, even though I was only sixteen and they were in the seventies and eighties. Geoffrey had survived the infamous Japanese prisoner of war camp on the River Kwai. He had been a pilot in the RAF and had been shot down and was one of its first prisoners. When he returned to England and four years in the camp, he found that his fiancée had given him up for dead and had married his best friend, so he  devoted the rest of his life to good food and drink. Having no kin except a brother in Yorkshire, he took me under his wing, to all the classic British sporting events--  Henley for the crew races,  Twickenham for the rugby, Lords for the cricket, Wimbledon for the tennis. But the South Kensington I remembered had been several generations ago and only existed in my mind. The houses were still there, but the smell of the quartier was much richer.  Gilbert’s house was now the offices of an architectural firm and had been spruced up tremendously from since we were there and put on the historic register, as it deserved to be, because the Delft tiling and  dark baroque cabinetwork  and leaded stained glass in the interior were superb.  The soot and grime-covered wallpaper in the stairwell when we were there was now clean white sheetrock. My mother had offered to replace the wallpaper at her own expense, and the landlord had brought in the poet laureate (Betjman I believe) who was an expert on Victorian wallper. Betjman  said that the wallpaper was by William Morris and was priceless, even though its pre-raphaelite floral patterns were impossible to see. So it remained, and we left in l964 for a lighter and larger flat on the much noisier Cromwell Road.  No one there knew what had become of the Genealogical Society.

       I felt like Rip Van Winkle or a peripatetic Proust á la recherché du temps perdu, trying to recover one of the many lives I had forgotten, abandoned, bailed out of, moulted from like a cicada leaving his shell. This one was very remote, from the age of thirteen to eighteen, and only on some winter and spring vacations, because I was still going to boarding school in the States, and sometimes stayed with schoolmates, and in the summers we went to Switzerland. All I could recall were fragments. The anti-nuclear rallies in Trafalgar Square with Bertrand Russell leading the chant, “We don’t want Polaris.” Taking visiting Americans up the Thames to the Tower of London. In one of whose cells, after the umpteenth time, I noticed the words Marmaduke Neville l569 chiseled into one of its stone walls,  and went to the Public Records Office and learning that Neville had been imprisoned and beheaded by Henry VIII for being Catholic, wrote a short story about Neville’s last night in the Tower. In my story Neville had poached the Duke of Rutland’s trout, which I had done inadvertently that summer of my sixteenth year; it had been a capital offense until only a few years before.  That summer I made my way through the early, comedy-of-manners novels of Aldous Huxley, marveling at all the long words he used, looking them up and writing down their meanings and grouping them in synonymous clusters : Laconic, taciturn, reticent; malevolent, malicious, maleficent.    I remembered, for the first time in forty years,  a few snatches from   a  biker song that was a big hit on the British charts. The youth was dividing into Mods and the Rockers, and the Beatles and Stones were about to break out. It was  called “Just For Kicks.” 

When my bird decides to turn up
I’m off to have a burn-up
A burn-up with my bird upon my bike.

Just for kicks
We ride all through the night
My birds hangs on in fright….
 
      In a  second-hand bookstore bulging at the seams (that was my favorite thing about London, so many used bookstores), Howard and I found a book about Dagestan that was one of the People of Caucasus handbooks in a series called Caucasus World, published by Curzon, a small academic house in Surrey. There is also a handbook on the Armenians in the series, that would have been good to have along, had we know about it. 

     We returned to Heathrow and at the gate to the flight to Yerevan rendezvoused with the rest of our party, five young travel writers from New York, all but one of whom were gay, and Cindy Levens, from the pr firm that had put together the junket.  They proved to be delightful traveling companions, very smart and very funny,  except for one, whom we named Anum. I had just received an e-mail joke about changing one letter of a foreign phrase.  E Pluribus Unum becomes E Pluribus Anum,  there’s an asshole in every group. Anum was one of these people who has have a schedule and spends weeks researching and plotting where exactly he is going to go and what he is going to see. He  was all business, taking notes and photographs nonstop.  If it was 3:45 and we weren’t back on the bus when the itinerary Cindy had  given us  said we should be, he got very agitated.
Anum was the complete antithesis of the Suitcase’s spontaneous, adventitious approach, so we were at odds much of the time. He never had anything nice to say. Even  Howard, one of the most imperturbable and generous guys you’ll ever meet,  lost his patience with him once and called him a “bitch.”  But the others were great : David, the bright and hilarious twenty-six-year-old travel editor of the New York Post,  who is writing a novel and a play and a screenplay, who I predict the world will be hearing from soon.  Doug, who had just arrived from Zimbabwe (his father was one of the last white Southern Rhodesians whom Mugabe had not dispossessed, and was still on his farm; he was going to let them have it over his dead body)  and was living way up in Harlem and had filed a hilarious story about New York’s metrosexuals  for the Daily Telegraph; Gretchen, who was part Irish and part native American, from one of the Long Island tribes—the Massapequas, I think. The three of them were all heavy drinkers, seldom without a glass in hand during the entire trip.  I’m sure I would rapidly become a lush if I were a professional travel writer. They kept up a running gay patter, convulsing us with frequent outrageous and raunchy wisecracks. It was interesting  how they saw Armenia—Ah Men Yah !— as David joked--  through the lens of their sexuality. Which only reinforces mu point that we all have  lenses. There is a preponderance of gays in the travel- writing game, just as there is in the fashion and interior  decorating magazine worlds, because it’s a luxury lifestyle thing, an editor told me—staying in five-star hotels, eating in the three-star Michelin restaurants, jet-setting from one destination to the next. But many writers who travel and hard-core explorers are also gay : T.E.Lawrence, Wilfred Thesiger, Bruce Chatwin, my great-uncle the lepitopterist, Tobias Schneebaum (one of my favorite Amazon books is Keep the River to your Right, in which the Brooklyn-born Schneebaum is abducted by some cannibals who turn out to be gay, and he has the time of his life), Colin Turnbull (who lived in the Ituri Forest and wrote the classic The Forest People, about the Bambuti pygmies, who never suspected his orientation, even after he returned with his black American companion), Jan Morris (who is now a woman). There are undoubtedly a lot of reasons for this. Maybe not being accepted by the mainstream of their own society, being a persecuted subculture themselves, contributes to being more open to other cultures, more cosmopolitan and magnanimous and adventurous. Not having family obligations or having the illusion that you are perpetuating yourself through children makes your one time around more intense, poignant, and detached. You’re sort of home free. You’re here, but it isn’t about you.  This is why many traditional societies like the Zuñi and the Tarahumara revere their gays as special, highly-realized beings. We all have to come to terms with the fact that we are alone. Gays have a head start. But my position is that there aren’t only two sexes. There are about fifty of them. 

     So I learned as much about the New York gay scene on our long weekend as  I did about Armenia or the Armenians.  I learned  that a “fluffer” is someone who sucks the dick of a porn star  so that it will be erect and ready to perform  when the camera starts rolling, and that there is a gay travel magazine called Out and About. We decided to start our own rival publication called Laid Over, for which I would contribute a column called the Peripatetic Pederast (when I told this to my second son, who graduated from Yale last spring, I was expecting him to be amused, but he struck out on both words; now I know I’m a dinosaur)  or maybe the Hapless Hetero. Our  fellow junketeers were the surprise ingredient—besides the many surprises of Armenia itself. Indeed our junket, our long weekend in Armenia, proved to be almost a nonstop surprise. 

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