On the organized and disorganized tourist

The first scene of The Dud Avocado finds Sally Jay Gorce unexpectedly meeting an acquaintance from America, Larry Keevil, and having a drink with him at a café. He outlines for her the four types of tourists, which fall into two categories. We have:

• The Organized
  • The Eager-Beaver-Culture-Vulture, who has “the list ten yards long, who just manages to get it all crossed off before she collapses of aesthetic indigestion each night and has to be carried back to her hotel”

  • The Sophisticate, “determined to maintain her incorruptible standards of cleanliness and efficiency if the entire staff of her hotel dies trying”
• The Disorganized
  • The Sly One, who wants to “see Europe casually, you know, sort of vaguely, out of the corner of the eye”

  • The Wild Cat, for whom “it’s her first time free and her first time across and, by golly, she goes native in a way the natives never had the stamina to go”

Larry can tell right away that Sally Jay is some combination of the last two. It’s a bit harder to tell how sincere her denial is, especially since she blushes during his description of the Sly One at how closely it resembles some of her recent actions—“I had actually—Oh Lord—I had actually kissed one of the stones at the fountain, I remembered, flung my shoes off, and executed a crazy drunken dance.” Certainly falls under the criterion of “all restraint is thrown to the wind and anything really old enough is greeted with animal cries of anguish at its beauty.” He really has her number, for now at least. She thinks herself far from a tourist, but she is one. By the time she’s not anymore she’s ready to leave.

In fact, Larry’s extended talk of Disorganized tourists very nearly put me off. Can’t blame Sally Jay not wanting to be the Sly One or the Wild Cat when they sound so…disorganized. But it turns out that with the right personality, strong, engaging, innocent but not naive, frank, the disorganized can be loved even by a very Organized type of tourist (such as myself). I can’t place exactly why Sally Jay’s wildness isn’t a turn-off, but maybe it’s because I know it’s genuine, that she really is bouncing from emotion to emotion all day long. And while I might not be quite so emotional, her feelings do make sense, if I imagine an amplified, more compulsive version of myself.