From the Novel Call It In the Air
Gone With the Wind
By: Gregory Light - Jul 22, 2026
(London 1982)
'Gary?' Joey called, his voice slipping into sound in the darkness of his London bedroom. He couldn't sleep. He was seated at his table, flipping his penny. According to the red, glowing digits of the clock radio, it was 3:11 in the morning. 'Gary, listen.' He whispered softly. He didn't want to wake up Joanna. 'Damn it anyway!' he muttered. The roughly two-hundredth toss of the night had missed the table and fallen onto the carpet. He fumbled on all fours for a moment and found it. Heads. So, what else was new? Come on, Gary! Say something.'
It was early March. The gas fires were off, and he felt a chill on his face and hands. He tossed the penny a dozen more times, ticking off the results. 'Gary?' Again, no answer. Joey struggled to fight back a wave of sadness rising from his chest and into his eyes. But the tears soon came; quiet and in one thin line from his right eye. Then McDougal popped into his head. Unbidden. Please, not now. The sadness subsided. As did the anger McDougal had ignited in Joey earlier that evening. George had dropped by for dinner. Again unbidden.
‘I'm not sharing my portion,' Joey whispered to Joanna in the kitchen. Joanna ladled white sauce onto the fish.
'Set another place,' she replied, taking the food to the dinner table.
'Do we have enough cutlery?' Joey said loudly, trying to embarrass McDougal. He glanced into the living room, where George had sprawled across the end of the sofa, but he was gone. Off to the bathroom. Joey could make out the strains of McDougal's heavy stream of piss. How many pints this time? Converted early in his British stay to the thick, dark froth of draught Guinness, McDougal would inevitably return from the "loo" (he loved the word) stating that the only thing he paid for was the colour. The rest he rented. Rented and sprayed into Joey's toilet as if to announce that Joey could collect on the returns the next day.
'Every bloody time! Why can't he close the bathroom door like everyone else? Even Amy's learned that.'
'Relax.'
'Relax? He takes my food. He fills my flat with the sound of his endless jets of? Pheew! It reeks in here.' Joey bolted back into the kitchen, returning a few seconds later with a can of air freshener. He let loose with two long blasts.
'Not on the food!' Joanna shoved him away from the table. She found Joey's irritation more difficult than McDougal's visits. They both knew George wasn't unexpected. It was Monday evening. She had put an extra knife and fork on the counter and had increased the portions of fish just in case. But Joey seemed honour bound to unleash resentment no matter how ridiculous it sounded.
'Do you have pine trees for house plants?' McDougal asked, returning from the toilet, his hands still fumbling with his fly. 'I can smell the distinct odour of Blue Spruce.'
Joey winced. Blue Spruce? George wouldn't know a Blue Spruce from a cactus. 'Hops actually,' he said cynically.
'Ah, a little moonshining on the side,' McDougal said, sitting down at what he had come to claim as his place at the table. 'You'll have to have a party when it's ready.'
Aaggh! Joey wanted to thump him. He was so bloody stupid. Why did he have to ‘pop’ by so often? He knew it wasn't because George found the accommodation comfortable or attractive. He purposely upset Joey by constantly referring to the "quaintly shabby" nature of Joey’s "furnished rooms". ('Flat, George. It's a flat!') George figured they had to be slumming. But then George's tastes were not playing ball in the same park. From his first day in England, he had at his disposal a spacious, recently renovated, stylishly furnished two-bedroom, Hampstead maisonette; arranged and paid for through the financial power of his American employer. And it, George stressed, had all the modern conveniences; the "North American touches" he called them. Yet another of McDougal's recently acquired irksome habits. His home was no longer Toronto or even Canada. It was North America as if that continent were populated by a nation of culturally homogeneous peoples.
'I don't see what you're getting so upset about,' George said calmly, ‘Over here, the two cultures are near enough as to be indistinguishable. What's with the bloated sense of patriotism, anyway?'
Joey didn't say anything. He glared at his plate. He wasn't patriotic. He believed overt nationalism to be a sign of stupidity. But how did he tell George that? After living in London for a year, George’s metamorphosis into an American was bloody weird; his accent being the most galling? Every time Joey saw him, there was a new word or a new pronunciation that was strictly American in origin and sound. How to tell him, for example, without sounding incredibly petty, that his recently gleaned habit of pronouncing the letter Z as "zee" was physically exasperating? When Joanna (on Joey's behalf) remarked on it, McDougal simply replied that "zed" sounded strange to him.
'Strange?!' Joey erupted, ‘For god’s sake, George, you grew up saying zed. Over ten million inhabitants of the city in which you now live say zed. How can it possibly sound strange?'
Joey hated himself for being so easily annoyed. He tried telling himself it wasn't George's fault. He was merely adapting. Developing a new identity to ensure his corporate survival in the mercenary capitalist jungle Reagan and Thatcher were busy building. Joey had tried to warn him.
‘Look at that poster. It says it all,’ Joey said to George one night when the latter had finished his last pee of the evening before leaving. Joey was pointing to the large poster he had excitedly bought and mounted on the bathroom wall. It had been there for over six months, but George had not noticed it. ‘Read it!’ Joey physically took George’s head and twisted him around to see. ‘Look! Look at it!’ He insisted.
McDougal complied politely. ‘I don’t get it,’ he said after looking at the poster for well over a minute. ‘A Gone with the Wind poster. Big deal. I never watched the film.’
‘Really?’ Joey was astonished. ‘You don’t see it? Ronald Reagan carrying Margaret Thatcher– ‘
‘I didn’t know Reagan was in the film.
He wasn’t you moron. It’s a parody. He’s carrying Thatcher in his arms. A nuclear explosion in the background.
Read it. ‘He reached his arm out and pointed to the words in large typeface at the bottom of the poster.
McDougal read them aloud slowly: ‘She promised to follow him to the ends of the earth. He promised to organize it.’ Long pause. ‘I still don’t get it.’
‘Really? Really?’ Joey was appalled, ‘He promised to organize it – big nuclear explosion in the background? You don’t get that?’
McDougal turned, ‘Listen, Edwards’ he said, brushing past Joey, ‘this is your game. Not mine.’ He picked up his coat and slipped it on. ‘Say good night to Jo for me. Great meal.’ And he was gone.
Joey shook his head. Game? Whatever game he was playing, it was nothing like the neo-liberal-industrial game McDougal was playing. Winner takes all. You needed to work hard to learn McDougal’s game. Or be left out. (And, make no mistake, there would be a whole lot of people left out.) George’s new associates were experts; carefully teaching him the rules. Not that George wasn’t a perfect candidate. His ability to roll with the punches was why he stumbled in unannounced as often as he did. Every Monday evening.
It turned out the managing director of McDougal's office, his straight-talking, hard-nosed, no-nonsense boss from Oklahoma, did have one passion. Jazz. He was an out-and-out jazz freak with a personal, somewhat cavalier belief that he was an accomplished musician in his own right. Tenor sax. Whenever he had an evening free, he'd sniff out the local jazz haunts, his lips and fingers itching. And accompanying ‘The Man’ (as his boss enjoyed being referred to) on several of these jaunts was one of the corporate survival characteristics which George had acquired. The Man's favourite Monday evening roost was the Tufnell Park Tavern in N.7., situated – ‘Can you believe it?!’ – a few blocks from the tube station and even closer to where Joey and Joanna lived. It was a pleasant pub with a lively clientele, and the bands were considered better than average. After the first set, four pints of Guinness tucked away, The Man’ would approach the bandleader and try to buy his way into the next set. If he was successful and he usually was (a hundred pounds sterling being what it is) McDougal was summarily dismissed.
'This is my party, kid. Beat it.'
Monday night bands at the Tavern came to expect the hundred quid as part of their fee and the deal with The Man (as he was soon known to everyone) was eventually fixed before the first set. McDougal, however, was still required company for the mandatory four pints while his boss summoned up his courage, limbered up his lips and fingers and slipped into the beat. As George's dismissal got earlier, he found keeping to the four-pint minimum his boss demanded a strain. When he did finally leave, happy to be cut loose, it was all he could do to stagger the few hundred yards to Joey's flat where he immediately took possession of the toilet.
Joey felt he used the place as a drying-out tank. He slept over on the sofa so often that Joanna had usurped a whole shelf of the end table to put aside a set of sheets and blankets, uprooting Joey's magazines in the process. He'd even been given a towel in the bathroom, something against which Joey had campaigned. Spitefully, Joey had taken to using George's towel to wipe down the toilet after McDougal’s unsteady performances at the rim. On more than one Monday evening when McDougal slopped through the door, dragging the rank odours of drink in his wake, Joey would dash to the bathroom, grab McDougal's towel, re-emerge, and throw it at him. 'Here, wipe your face, there's something on it.' McDougal would give his features a cursory rub. 'No, it’s still there. You need to scrub,’ Joey would say, thrusting the urine-soaked towel into his face.
'Oh!! Pheww! What smells?' McDougal exclaimed finally, pulling his revolted features out of the towel.
'It's your breath, George. When are you going to stop drinking?'
'That bad, huh?'
'Worse.'
McDougal tottered to the bathroom, Joey watching with guilt-ridden joy. Poor McDougal. In more reflective moments, Joey did question the satisfaction he felt from the pranks he vented on the man. Anyone else and he would have been seriously disgusted with himself, but McDougal was different. He asked for it. Awake late at night, Joey still had to stifle a chuckle when he recalled George's face, reshaped by the residence door, quietly swelling. His giggles irritated Joanna so much that he had to get out of bed and leave the room.
'You are pathetic,' Joanna said the next morning.
'It won't hurt him.’ Joey said. ‘He doesn't even know.'
'It's not him I'm worried about. It's you.’ She put her tea on the table and sat down across from him. ‘Urine on towels? You make it clear you are not thrilled with his visits, but to shove urine in his face is beneath you. I'm surprised you haven't peed on every tree and bush in the neighbourhood.' Joey looked away. Out the window. Perhaps he had gone too far. 'Why do you do it?' Joanna asked softly. 'Secretly, you must be happy that he's here. Who else put up with your nonsense?'
Joey didn't answer. How could she suggest McDougal's acceptance of his pranks was a quality of endearment in the guy? It just made him more pitiful. It also made his persistent suggestions of "friendship" more galling. How Joey longed for George to stop using the word.
‘He's never heard me use it,’ he muttered softly to himself. ‘Not once. Can't he see the picture I'm painting?’
Joanna reached out and touched his hand.
Joey didn’t respond. He would gladly stop his pranks if George would stop calling him a friend. He still hadn't mustered the nerve to say it straight out, 'Listen, George, no disrespect or anything, but would you stop using the word "friend"? It bothers me. We are not friends. We have never been, nor will we ever be friends.' He had rehearsed the words in front of his mirror several times. But he always backed away at the last moment. After ten years, he merely succeeded in getting McDougal to drop "best", substituting "good" instead. It was pathetic.
Joanna gently patted his hand a couple of times, then got up from the table. She understood. She knew it was about Gary. But how much longer could she wait for Joey to figure it out?
Later, after Joanna had left for her studies; after he had helped Amy brush her teeth and get dressed; after he had taken her to Mrs. Burtons; and after he had returned to working on his article, he would begin to put it together. But not fully. Not even close. 'Gary?' he whispered, picking up his penny. He waited, listening. 'Gary, hear me out. It’s important.' But there was no answer. Just a deep, empty weeping thumping in his chest. 'Damn it!' Where was he? Where was he?