Returning via Copenhagen where, for a few hours, I dashed through the city with a resident old friend, making up for lost time, through the Victorian greenhouse with its damp and spindly spiraling staircases, to the outdoor market where we got a cheese plate and beers as the year’s Christmas ales had just come out. Where the cabs were all new Mercedes and the 7-Elevens were like mini Whole Foods with local, artisanal products in glass cases by the register, and the employees spoke English better then I do and who you suspected were on a serious career track here, sharp as young lawyers. Though no one could find a needle or similar which I could use to swap out my SIM card so I could call my friend who I was dropping in on out of the blue, despite a search of the 7-Eleven and the grocery store next door whose manager was called and took the issue as seriously as I did. Fortunately, as a civilized country, the train had free and open wifi, and having tried all the numbers I’d ever had for my friend in all the countries he’d lived, over Skype and Whatsapp, I finally caught him at breakfast. Proudly he informed me he was eating pickled herring. And as I juggled the map on my phone and read out the names of upcoming stops to him, I got off now–
Now?
Now!
Fearing the loss of signal that I assumed would immediately follow with the departing train, fearing that I would not find him, fearing most of all that I would not make it back to the airport where my flight was taking off in a few hours, not knowing the city one bit and not having cell coverage, I nevertheless followed his walking directions and made it to the 7-Eleven, where instantly I felt as if I’d made it. Safe.
7-Elevens have featured large in my travels, perhaps because they’re ubiquitous around the world and they were ubiquitous back home. From the one across the street from the Mormon Church (now a Chase bank, the 7-Eleven, not the church, though give it time), where C and I would ride our bikes despite his mother expressly forbidding it to buy dollar cheeseburgers wrapped in gold foil, held at the perfect temperature in a glass case by the register. To the 7-Eleven down the street from City U in Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong, where after two days and nights of my friends and I sheltering in the Jockey Club House dormitory during the Typhoon (a “Level 10 Black, the worst in seventeen years,” it was said, smashing storefronts and flooding the MTR, the city’s hyper-efficient subway, my first love, where you could, before the turn of the new millennium, before most people in the US had cellphones, get perfect coverage traveling from Central to Tsim Sha Tsiu beneath the harbor), after days of being holed up inside, riding out the wind and rain, and with cigarettes and booze seriously depleted, I lead an expedition of my peers, come what may, to 7-Eleven and resupply. The normally manicured road, the one which divided the university from Festival Walk, the shopping mall with the indoor ice rink, was strewn with trash, and empty of people. The rain fell lightly now, so mildly in fact that the destruction around us, like the metal cages which had once protected the optimistic young trees in the sidewalk with their pinky-thick bars, were splayed like tendons in a dissection gone wrong, everything wrong. It was too quiet and too weird and all the shops were closed and shuttered and hope in our success was beginning to ebb from our little band, but I pushed on, in my father’s twenty year old bright blue rain slicker, holding the hood fast at the neck. And sure enough, 7-Eleven, bathed in its welcoming fluorescent light, was open, and amply stocked.
Because 7-Eleven is always open.
They were open during the riots in Los Angeles after the Rodney King verdict, after city-wide curfew mandated all stores closed, all residents to remain indoors.
They were open across the street from my apartment in Shenzhen, where I daily bought a Snickers and Marlboro Reds, because the Camels, then my brand, didn’t taste right, and Marlboros from 7-Eleven tasted better than the ones the street vendors sold because, as a Chinese friend said, the street ones were counterfeit, whereas 7-Eleven’s were real, if smuggled in from Vietnam.
And they were open in Hong Kong’s Mid-Levels, after the escalator had stopped, the great moving staircase, nearly a mile of segments connecting the markets of Central to the towering apartments of Mid-Levels so the Amas, Filipina domestics, could get up to their employers’ with the shopping, and which shut off at midnight forcing Z and I, both all of sixteen and highly drunk for the first time, after a night of bar hopping from upscale Hollywood Lane to (unknowingly) the red light district, where the US Navy was in port and presenting us scenes for which we only had reference by way of Full Metal Jacket and Platoon — American soldiers with Asian girls under either arm, emerging from the mist, being the tamest. To return, finally, to the escalators, to the Irish pub which sat below it to finish off the night with Guinness, because that seemed like the thing to do, that and roast beef sandwiches. To stumble out of there, up towards my dad’s apartment, finding the escalators turned off, surprised, knowing I shouldn’t be, that they weren’t moving. How long had I stood there before realizing it? I don’t recall. Trudging, stumbling up — escalator steps are not sized for climbing. To the second to last stop, following Robinson Road like a contour line of the island’s steep peak, and almost passed by the 7-Eleven. But, not quite making it beyond the door. As I’d been programmed to stop into every 7-Eleven in Hong Kong due to the sweltering, sticky summers, where you could pop into a 7-Eleven and get blessedly cool and dry air-conditioning, a reverse baptism. So we stopped into this one as well. The cheeseburgers in the glass case of my West LA 7-Eleven had been replaced with small vats of perfectly spherical, perfectly grey “fish balls” floating, sinister, in oily liquid. They were too perfect. Too grey. Too round. Perhaps it was the fish balls that set me off.
The next morning, or more likely afternoon, Z found a wad of receipts in his pocket, when ordered by timestamp, their increasingly disintegrated scrawls provided a map of our own disintegration over the course of the night.
A brief sidenote on the Irish pub beneath the escalator. I would return to Hong Kong later, on my own after my old man had been recalled by his company, and spend many an evening at the bar, chatting with old expat hands in finance or other business, everyone with some scheme going, each scheme a part for me. The bartender, a Nepalese woman not five feet tall, told me to fill my suitcase with Levis next time I flew in. We could sell the jeans and split the profits. I visited her apartment once, strictly on business, and was amazed to find her door hit the bunkbed she shared with a roommate. I’d lived in HK as an expat brat and knew that the tower blocks down the hill were where the rest of Hong Kong’s residents, the millions, the vast majority in the highly divided between rich and poor Special Administrative Region, lived.
At City U, two of my dormmates, a French couple who were as beautiful as they were gracious, moved off-campus to a tiny flat of their own. We spent an evening huddled around a wooden crate in their micro-unit eating the fine vittles they’d only just received and had been desperately awaiting, eating them off the crate’s lid as they patiently explained to me about saucisson and camembert, drinking French wine, slicing off this and that and passing it to me on the blade of a knife.