Kings of the Road

Sir John Falstaff:

‘We have heard the chimes at midnight Master Shallow.’

Shallow:

That we have, that we have, that we have, in faith Sir John we have…Come let’s to dinner,  Jesus, the days that we have seen…’

Henry IV, Part II, Act 3, Scene 2, William Shakespeare.

I wanted to write about a friend, who died five years ago, the 20 July 2015, to be precise. Sterling had been a dear, I suppose my best, friend, since we were about 20, when we’d hitchhiked around America together. I say, ‘around America’, but in reality what had happened is that we flew into New York on a seriously shoestring budget, got hopelessly drunk in Greenwich Village for a few days, before hopping onto a ‘casino bus’, with the grandiose and completely unworkable plan to hitchhike down the Eastern Seaboard of the United States to Florida, where I had family. If you’ve never caught one before – and frankly I hope you never have to – a casino bus runs from states and areas that don’t allow gambling, to those that do. In this case, gambling was prohibited in New York state, but available just across the border in New Jersey, home to the ‘Vegas of the North’, Atlantic City. The seedy reality of this is a Greyhound-style bus chock full of elderly, blue-rinsed gamblers who pay a 50 buck fare, which is redeemable – in quarters only – when you arrive at the casinos. This, for me and Sterling, was the hook – basically a free bus ride. Obviously the casinos are hoping that passengers will simply redeem their bucket of coins by slamming them straight into the fruit machines, and indeed most are happy to oblige. We just poured the coins into our backpacks and walked straight out of the casino, onto Atlantic City’s famous Boardwalk, and headed south.

Somewhere along this iconic wooden walkway, we bumped into a friendly dog walker, who asked us where we were going with our beards and rucksacks. ‘Where are you guys headed?’, he said with an American smile. Oh we’re hitchhiking to Florida we said, and he looked at us as if we were completely insane. Needless to say, we didn’t get far, giving up the ghost somewhere in Delaware, which is pretty much about as far from the Deep South, let alone Florida, as it’s possible to imagine.

Meandering around this frozen part of the world with no money and even less of a clue (it was the tail end of winter in North America, not exactly the smartest time to be hitchhiking), in short order we found ourselves sleeping rough in snowbound fields, vacant car lots and bus stations. To say we hadn’t really thought things through before embarking on this great adventure is to make an understatement of heroic proportions. Thinking back on it all, it is a genuine wonder that we didn’t die of hypothermia or get murdered by a serial killer.

Having since, albeit many years later, been genuinely homeless as a result of life’s vagaries, I’ve often thought back to that time. I recall the nights spent sleeping rough in the States as some of the most miserable of my life. We hadn’t planned things properly, had hardly any money, and ended up with no choice but to sleep rough. To be confronted with no choice when it comes to having shelter is a thoroughly depressing proposition, and one that burns itself into your memory and your lived experience. At the time, Sterling and I tried to joke it off and pretend it was all part of the fun, but in truth it wasn’t remotely funny and the memory of it now is more chilling than warm.

Despite this, and with a bit of luck and some help from my relatives along the way, we did actually end up in the sunnier climes of Florida, where winter doesn’t really happen, arriving there via frozen Minneapolis, where we had literally slept in a garbage dumpster. Logistically, this is a bit like travelling from London to Glasgow via Moscow, and was managed by the dubious method of ‘car freighting’, where you drive and deliver someone’s car to another part of the country, because they can’t be bothered to drive it there themselves. Along the way we narrowly avoided a serious road accident in icy conditions, slept rough on the outskirts of big cities, were menaced by a State Trooper with a big gun and no sense of humour, were picked up by some hillbillies and dumped in the middle of nowhere, rousted by cops everywhere we stopped and generally stared at as if we were aliens, by just about everyone.

When we finally arrived back in the UK, we didn’t speak for about two years, such was the extent of the alienation and misery we felt from our abortive attempt to be Kings of the Open Road, or whatever it was. Nonetheless, speak we eventually did, and with these experiences firmly ingrained in our minds and never to be repeated, we developed a close friendship that endured until life, or should I say death, made its final intervention.

Winding forward many years to the day before I left the UK for Australia, in October 2014, I gave Sterling a hug, and said I’d see him again soon. The intervening years had seen us ride various highs and lows in our lives, but most often accompanied with a great deal of laughter, comradeship and love, and an unbroken sense of loyalty, that continues to this day, even beyond death. Of course, that day I said goodbye to Sterling, I had no idea that I would never see him again, and a year later I was crushed to receive a late night message from his beloved daughter, telling me that her dad had died suddenly, aged only 45.  Me being me, I got drunk immediately and sat miserably in my cups for some time, bereft, homesick and heartbroken. But I was privileged, soon after, to be asked to write the eulogy for Sterling’s funeral, in which I remembered a friend who was funny, warm, sometimes cruel, but always loyal, and fearlessly and joyously rude to everyone he met, a Falstaffian figure if ever there was one. I loved him very much, and I can honestly say that scarcely a day has gone by since his death, that I haven’t thought of him and wished that things had somehow turned out differently. But as is the way of things, life rarely dances to the tune we desire, and we are slaves to its vagaries and caprice.

Looking back on our hard time in the snowfields and car parks of a distant America, my memories of misery and cold are, of course, warmed by the stronger notes of the genuine and enduring friendship we shared after that time. Some time ago, after the deaths of both Sterling and, shortly after, my mother, a wise person told me that, although they are gone from this room, we are still very much in a relationship with the dead. And so it is. I catch his distinctive laugh often, smile at the memory of his immense rudeness and am comforted by the warmth of his great presence, however distant it now may be.

Nick Jordan

In loving memory of Sterling Todd Hug, 18.09.1969 – 20.07.2015