Working Stiff Page 3

  Nothing’s quite as emasculating as having an old lady you hardly know defending your honor on the leafy thoroughfares of Ealing.

  “Bloody golliwogs, I’ve a good mind to call the authorities. Get out of the way!”

  “No, he was white!” I said, which immediately seemed to take some of the wind out of her sails. “And I did know what I was doing.”

  “Well, now,” she said, slowly unzipping her jacket and pointing a bony finger into my chest. “You really ought to be a lot more careful.”

  After a cursory leaf through its nonsensical pages, I left the Krishna book on Mrs. Montague’s nightstand as a kind of thank-you for looking out for me. It stayed collecting the flat’s ample dust for three long years.

  Far from the lovefest I’d sort of hoped it to be, university had proved to be a continuation of my invisibility to the opposite sex. That theme had begun so long ago that I wondered if I’d ever successfully shrug it off. I logged countless hours at the student union bar, but in spite or perhaps because of my wounded, lovelorn glares, there was never the slightest danger of a snog.

  Being a city school with its students spread all over London, there was no palpable school spirit at TVU. And certainly no pride, given that in my third year a BBC documentary on what a ridiculous institution TVU was had been televised, as well as numerous tabloid articles about the school offering degrees in making curry. In addition there was a self-perpetuated segregation between the mature students and the teens, the southern Asians and the whites, the Sikhs and the Muslims, the Greeks and the Turks, the Americans and the English, which would in some cases escalate to verbal abuse and physical violence. Still, TVU would often take pains to kid its students that the school was as much a university as the red-brick institutions across the land, and an increasingly apathetic student body was coerced into taking part in what was known on bulletin boards as “TVU Life.”

  To that end, a few times a year the student union bar (called the Dog’s Bollocks) would throw jolly traffic light parties. Attendees would be asked to wear green if they were “totally up for it,” yellow if they would “consider a shag,” and red if they were unavailable or not interested. I took this to be a dress code that everyone would adhere to in the spirit of being young, crazy, and financially subsidized by the government.

  It had taken forever to find a pair of forest green pants, but this being my first traffic light party I didn’t want to give off any mixed messages. I wore a pastel mint button-down shirt and olive tie and began the three-mile walk to campus.

  I saw one of the other new “freshers,” who was disconcertingly dressed in normal clothes, standing outside.

  “Well, you certainly look the part,” he said with a chuckle.

  I walked into the Dog’s, which was only half full. I ordered a Dog’s Bollocks Brew, which only cost a pound a pint, and surveyed the field of battle. It appeared that everyone else had deliberately not worn the slightest hint of green or yellow or red in their outfits.

  “Look, it’s the jolly green not-so-giant!” said one portly northern girl to her group of field hockey friends, who all had a hearty laugh at my expense.

  “Do you think he’s trying to tell us something?” she continued.

  As innocuously as possible, I took off my tie and fed it into my pocket, but I still looked like a Jehovah’s Witness who’d been dunked in chlorophyll.

  “You been having a dry spell, mate?” said the hateful ringleader to my face.

  “Um…I thought this was the traffic light party tonight,” I said, hoping for a respite in her brutality.

  “Yeah, but no one actually dresses up. That’s just fucking”—she looked me up and down—“really sad.”

  She looked over my shoulder.

  “Wait, tell a lie,” said the girl. “There’s a girl in yellow over there. You should go and have a word.”

  I saw the girl in the corner. Aside from her pin-straight, slightly lank-looking hair, she was not terribly unattractive. But I decided to hedge my bets and wait for some other people who weren’t “too cool” to literally wear their hearts on their sleeves. I ordered the undergrad cocktail de choix, a snakebite and black: half a pint of lager, half a pint of cider, with a splash of concentrated black currant juice and a shot of Pernod for good measure. The mix is so potent that it was recently banned in a lot of pubs in Essex, where it is known as a catalyst for violence. There it’s called Diesel or a row in a glass.

  I needed to be drunk enough to be numbed to the smirks and stares being cast at me from every direction, yet lucid enough to be charming and funny with any other earnest soul clad in yellow or, preferably, green.

  After a half hour I noticed that no one else was adhering to the dress code aside from the Sissy Spacek look-alike sitting on her own in the corner. The girl noticed that I had been leering at her for the past five minutes and seemed to be looking back, playing with her hair, which I’d heard was a good sign. Everyone else in the bar seemed to be aware of the two of us sizing each other up on either side of the room and surveyed the scene with their heads on swivels, as if they were in the first row at Center Court at Wimbledon.

  “Go on then,” said the zaftig hockey lezzer, punching me hard in the shoulder.

  I was probably imagining it but I swear I heard the volume of the music—“Roll with It” by Oasis—dip considerably.

  I put my glass down and started taking confident strides toward her; the throng of undergrads began to part like the Red Sea before me. I was at college, miles from home. A brand-new start.

  “No one knew me here,” I repeated to myself as a mantra.

  No one knew, for example, about the brown stain that was found on my towel in the showers after gym. (As I said at the time, it was the remnants of a melted Kit Kat in my gym bag.) No one knew about when I offered the high school good-time girl a fiver to snog me out of desperation. (She laughed and told everyone. Her hook-nosed cousin said she’d do it for fifteen, but I didn’t have the money.) No one here knew that I was sometimes called “the Jew” because I was one of three kids in my grade who was circumcised, and out of the three of us the only one with foreign lineage and, relative to the other fair-skinned, peg-toothed, sandy-haired, blue-eyed, stubby-nosed pupils, had a vaguely international look about me.

  Anyway, she, the girl in yellow, didn’t know any of these things.

  She seemed to quiver with fear as I walked closer to her, the crowd following my progress with their eyes.

  “Do it! Do it! Do it!” the hockey girls began chanting as I drew ever closer.

  “Do it! Do it! Do it!” The chant caught on and grew louder.

  The girl looked at me coming closer, shook her head, and mouthed “Fuck off” at me. Without breaking pace, I hooked a sharp right turn and scurried out the double doors and out of the student union building.

  She seemed to have known all about the kind of hapless eunuch I was just from my getup. I ran out into the rain and across St. Mary’s Road to the kebab shop. The night was a bust. I ordered a doner with salad and chili sauce and a can of Lilt, a fluorescent green tropical fruit soda that tastes disgusting and is wildly popular in the UK.

  I began walking back to Mrs. Montague’s, when a group of sixteen-year-old girls detected my frailty, which I was learning must be completely apparent to all.

  “Oi, mate!” one of them yelled out to me. I ignored her and picked up the pace.

  “Oi, mate! I is fucking talkin’ to you, innit?”

  I turned around.

  “What?”

  “I’m not being funny, yeah, but does you know that you look like a massive, wet bogie?”

  I turned around and resumed walking.

  “Oi! I’m fucking talking to you!”

  Ridiculed by my peers, humiliated by the girl in yellow, and now victimized by a group of urchins. Only two weeks into further education and I was at a breaking point.

  “Fuck off, slag!” I shouted once I was twenty yards ahead.

  “Yo
u what? Does you know who my bruvvah is, you little cunt?”

  The language! I couldn’t believe it. Reminded me of home.

  “Come back ’ere and say you is sorry,” she shouted. “I’ll ’ave ’im cut you!”

  There’s only so much humiliation I could take in one evening. It was time to stand up for myself for once.

  “Bollocks!” I screamed and began defiantly sprinting away up St. Mary’s Road, leaving steaming slithers of reconstituted lamb in my wake.

  I thought I’d left the girl and her posse behind until I heard the swoosh swoosh sound of her arms pumping against the sides of her puffy jacket. She was just a few steps behind. I may have shrieked at this point but I often like to think that I didn’t.

  The possibility of being kicked to death by a gang of teenage girls for no more a crime than expressing my loneliness in hues of green gave me an added burst of speed that allowed me to break away from her as we headed toward Ealing Broadway, which at nine forty-five was still thick with people.

  I dropped the kebab completely in the vain hope that my tormentor would skid to her death on it. I could hear a sudden quick burst of footsteps, which I correctly guessed was the girl stopping herself dead in her tracks.

  Victory, I thought as I made for the bright lights.

  Victory was tainted by the sharp yet thudding blow I received to my neck two seconds after. The little cow had thrown a full can of Cherry Coke at me. A few inches higher and I would have been knocked out cold.

  “Aaaarrrggghh!” I screamed, turning heads all around.

  “You better fucking watch yourself from now on,” she screamed.

  Still in a sprint, I turned my head to see her looking at me. Disoriented from the blow, my foot came off the curb and I twisted my ankle.

  “Fuck!” I screamed.

  “I’ll be looking for you!” she shouted out.

  Humiliated, emasculated, injured, and missing a doner kebab, what else could I have to pay for? I limped a few hundred yards down the road until the pain in my foot grew too great and I jumped on an atypically convenient double-decker bus.

  I arrived at the flat to see a number of people leave. It was ten fifteen. It was bridge night.

  I walked into the flat, which was rank with cigarette smoke, old ladies’ perfume, and sweat. There was evidence of some truly manic game play—be-doilyed plates full of cookie crumbs, stained coffee cups, emptied bottles of sherry, and an emotionally spent Mrs. Montague sucking hard on a postmatch luxury-length cigarette, shaking her head and lamenting the terrible hand with which she and her partner, Mrs. Boothroyd, had once again snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

  “Maddening, Grant.” She sighed, her eyes still fixed upon an arbitrary patch of her ratty Persian rug. “Years to learn and a lifetime to master. This game is designed to send one completely around the bend.”

  Bridge, I learned, was not so much a game as a calling.

  “And what on earth has happened to you?” she asked.

  My wet hair was plastered to my head, my tie hung out of my pocket, and a massive chili stain stretched the width of my chest.

  “You look like a sort of weed.”

  Too emotionally beaten down to explain, I simply smiled.

  “What would you say to a nice cup of tea?” she said, making for the kitchen. “I taped EastEnders from earlier on.”

  “That would be lovely,” I said.

  I meant it. Mrs. Montague was old and I was an old soul on the run from the brutality of the modern world, the indignity of love, and the arrested social development of my hometown. Mrs. Montague was my new best friend, gently easing me into a world I hadn’t conceived of living in just a few weeks before.

  AMERICAN GIRL

  I MET BECKY at the beginning of my third and final year at Thames Valley University at a mutual friend’s party. It was the fall of 1997. Reports of university being all sex, drugs, and rock and roll had been greatly exaggerated as far as I could tell. In two and a half years I hadn’t gotten so much as a smooch. Surely, living with a racist geriatric some distance from campus hadn’t helped matters, but even without that knowledge I felt that girls could somehow detect that there was something vaguely rotten about my person. They could smell the fetid odor of desperation. For some reason, Becky could not. After a shaky start—I accused her of being in cahoots with the large and obnoxious Yankee mob—we got along swimmingly.

  The American presence was loud and large at TVU. They were known collectively as the Septics, septic tank being cockney rhyming slang for Yank. The Septics tended to hang out only with other Americans in groups of twenty or more, overtaking the student bars and generally making a red, white, and blue nuisance of themselves. Subsequently, a few of the more vociferous American guys had been badly beaten up by members of the rugby squad and walked around with black eyes and something to prove.

  Becky was smart, funny, engaging, and sexy, with a hint of what I found to be a charming New Jersey accent. She had short and shaggy black hair, a mischievous fun-loving spirit, colorful tattoos, and a tongue piercing. Her breath smelled of Jolly Ranchers. The party ended up with us sleeping on the hard floor, and, after a four-hour conversation, I decided I might love her. There were several points where I might have tried to lay one on her but thought better of it: I had been fitted with braces the previous week and was afraid of lacerating her pink, puffy little lips.

  I had a free National Health Service retainer throughout my teens, but it mostly stayed in my pocket and I sat on it a lot. By the time I became self-conscious of my classily English gnashers I was almost twenty-one and no longer eligible for NHS orthodontia. I worked a summer as a credit fraud analyst at HSBC and saved up almost four thousand dollars to have fixed braces, subconsciously paving the way for future Americanization.

  IF AN ANGLOPHILE is a lover of all things English and a Francophile is an admirer of the French, I think it’s odd that there’s no snappy equivalent for people like me: people who are enamored with the people and culture of these United States. As a kid, and I mean a really young kid, I understood that if it was bigger, better, louder, or greater, chances were that it came from America.

  My earliest vivid memories were of a family vacation to visit my uncle Philip in Texas. Like most of my family and a large proportion of the men in my town, he had worked on the messy end of the crude oil refining process. Unlike the rest of them, however, he had managed to work his way up to being a trader and in 1981 was seconded to work for famed oilman Oscar Wyatt at Coastal Oil in Houston.

  It was as a five-year-old, in the hundred-degree Houston heat, that I learned to swim in Uncle Phil’s pool. I experienced a world that had more than three TV channels, Wild West–themed restaurants where the mastication of three-inch-thick steaks was summarily interrupted by staged gunfights, and where glamorous oil wives marveled at my accent and comparatively excellent diction.

  As a young teen, this translated into a thing for American girls. All the ones I’d met in my youth were confident, bubbly, sexy, outspoken, fearless, and athletic. They were almost always sun-kissed, smelled like tropical fruits, and had perfect white teeth. They were, to me, exotic. Most important, they were much more interested in me and whatever I had to say than were any of their English counterparts.

  During a two-week vacation to see family friends in rural South Dakota, these vivacious corn-fed beauties lavished attention on me and referred to me as “cute,” which I found most thrilling. These girls may have had considerable trouble pinpointing Europe on a map or have little notion of what Bastille Day was all about, but at fourteen they were legally allowed to drive cars, which made them appear most worldly and in control to me. Though I didn’t have the guts to accept what I can now see was an open invitation to French a few of them, those family vacations to the American Midwest were the undisputed highlight of my youth. Not a sexual awakening so much as a realization that I was perceived differently, more favorably, by the opposite sex on the opposite side of the At
lantic. In this respect, I often liken myself to Superman; he would have grown up to be an average guy on his home planet of Krypton, but here on planet Earth, he is comparatively superhuman. It’s location, location, location.

  THE NEXT DAY, Becky called me at Mrs. Montague’s flat and invited me to audition with her for parts in The War Zone, Tim Roth’s directorial debut.

  “I haven’t acted before,” I said.

  “So what?” she said. “Neither have I, really. C’mon, it’ll be fun.”

  That was what was so fresh and exciting about Becky and American girls in general: they seemed ready to fling themselves at anything, and in the same spirit of reckless abandonment I rather hoped that she might throw herself at me.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I suppose it will be fun.”

  We met early and took the Central Line tube into central London. We were auditioning for the parts of a brother and sister who were fourteen and sixteen respectively.

  “Aren’t we a bit old?” I said. I saw hundreds of eight-by-ten-clutching debutantes lining up around the block. Becky shrugged.

  “What are they going to do, arrest us?”

  American Studies was my minor at TVU. In a module entitled “Peopling and Settlement of the United States” we had learned about the “rugged individualism” of the pioneers, but I had little understanding of how that concept seemed to have filtered through to everyone some three hundred years later. Becky’s can-do spirit was intoxicating. As different as we seemed to be, I felt that I could understand her fully. Paradoxically, I’d never really had a real connection with the girls I grew up with. They seemed cold, dispassionate, apathetic, and hell-bent on keeping their underwear and myself segregated at all times. Inexplicably, the other boys—even the most feebleminded ones—seemed to know exactly how to break down the icy façade at a young age. It’s as if they all had girl decoder rings and I didn’t.

  Becky and I were photographed out of courtesy, quickly shown the door, and walked around London for the rest of the day. I was officially falling for her.