Working Stiff Page 5

  The town stands in the shadows of a huge oil refinery complex on the mouth of the river Thames, thirty miles downstream from central London. Local people like to stop and speculate on how a major explosion at the refineries would blow Corringham “sky high,” then cheerfully go back to whatever it was they were doing. Several members of my family had long careers there, though I only managed to clock up two months at the refinery. This was one of the many jobs I took between ninety-day stays in New Jersey, the maximum time a U.S. tourist visa allows for EU citizens.

  A portion of the refinery was cleared for maintenance, creating a glut of extra jobs that BP rushed to fill. From Monday to Friday, I drove an eighteen-passenger bus around a three-mile circuit of the BP plant, obeying the speed limit of fifteen miles per hour under threat of dismissal. One of my coworkers was Kevin, a forty-year-old man who had lived in Corringham all his life, though, to my ear, he had a strong Afrikaans accent. On my first day, a grease monkey I’d struck up a conversation with told me that Kevin “shits in a bag.” It sounded at first like some perverse compulsion, but it became apparent days later that this was just his colorful way of saying that Kevin had received a colostomy. I took over his rounds as he recovered from the operation by sitting in the subcontractor’s oil-spattered garage, drinking sugary tea.

  Dave was Kevin’s brother-in-law and was about ten years older, with eyes that went in markedly different directions. He worked on the refinery’s broken vehicles. Dave had worked all his life in a slaughterhouse that had recently gone under, which he bitterly blamed on the rise of vegetarianism. I’d only see Dave and Kevin every few days if they happened to catch me driving around at lunchtime.

  I started at 5:45 each morning and finished a little after 8:00 at night. My passengers were engineers, surveyors, grease monkeys, jetty pilots, and Philippine crew members coming ashore to spend their wages on booze, whores, and electrical items in nearby towns.

  Almost half of my shift was spent in total darkness, the remainder under low, heavy, charcoal-gray snowy skies as large, foul-smelling steam clouds belched forth from every nook and cranny of the plant. I’d only have people in the van for a tiny fraction of my countless daily laps, meaning I could listen to the thoughtful mix-tapes Becky was sending me at the rate of one a week. I could pull over and compose letters to her expressing my longing for her and my new American life and, as the weak winter light began to fade, furiously masturbate.

  On Saturday and Sunday I worked twelve-to fourteen-hour shifts in the refinery’s canteen, scrubbing industrial-sized pots and serving up food that would repulse foreign oilmen who hadn’t built up a tolerance to British cuisine. The “chefs” were a posse of hard-drinking, chain-smoking, pink-faced Scots who had spent most of their careers cooking for large numbers of working men on rigs, refineries, or tankers. I spent the latter half of the shift in the pot wash area. My only company at the sinks was a thirty-year-old beanpole of a man named Gazza, working to fund his seventh trip to Thailand for the purpose of having sex with young prostitutes. Over the course of five weekends, I had become an unwitting expert on backpacking, youth hostels, and the Thai skin trade.

  It was during my last weekend that the siren signaling an imminent catastrophe sounded. We were all rushed into a lead-lined, underground shelter, which I overheard a fellow evacuee saying would be “fucking useless” in the event of an explosion. The Scots, who looked, sounded, and acted like latter-day pirates, didn’t seem to care, taking great pleasure that they were being paid to stand around. Other people joined us and busied each other with gallows humor, cheerfully resigned to our imminent death. I, however, was petrified with fear. Of death itself, sure, but more that I would die here, the place I was escaping by inches and under the doomsday circumstances that every local had contemplated so many times. I had kept my imminent escape to America to myself up until I was forced to confront my mortality. Kevin had taken a dislike to me after I mentioned that I had been to college, and I didn’t want to incur anyone else’s hatred for what is known locally as having “ideas above your station.” I longed for Becky and the Garden State. Something no one else here could understand.

  “America?” spat George, the middle-aged and effeminate catering supervisor huddled next to me in the shelter. He wrinkled his nose in disgust.

  “They say everything’s so much bigger over there, don’t they? No, I’m quite happy here, thank you very much.”

  George had somehow interpreted my plan of a new life as an invitation for him to join me and had declined point-blank. He represented a commonly held view that almost everything about life in America was grossly out of proportion. The cars people drive, the food they eat, their disposable income, the energy they consumed, the volume at which they talked, the number of TV channels they had, the distance between any two places. It’s all sort of valid, but while others took offense at America, I found myself drawn to its bigness, hungry for a heaving slice of it.

  My leaving Corringham happened in gentle increments over a period of almost four years, which helped dull any pangs of homesickness. First there was college: my mother cried when they left me in the care and tutelage of Mrs. Montague, but I soon found myself coming home every weekend. Then, a yearlong period of spending three months in America followed by two or three months at home, working like a dog to fund another ninety-day stint in New Jersey. I’d heard stories of people not being allowed back into the States after overstaying their visas, if only by a day or two. I wanted to make sure there was no reason for being kept out, or worse, deported.

  The contrast between these seasons at home and abroad was brought into sharper focus by how I was spending my time in each. Being at home meant full shifts of manual labor and grabbing as much overtime as I could: unclogging wet cement from turbines at the breeze block factory; pressing shapes or drilling holes into sheet metal on the night shift; saving every penny while my peers were suddenly commuting, buying cars and homes, and getting two-hundred-dollar haircuts.

  In the comparative affluence of Morris County, New Jersey, life felt like an extended vacation: dining out twice a day, trips to the beach, camping, sailing, strolling around the city, making new friends with just my accent, watching art-house movies, all with a vivacious, outspoken American girl whom I loved and who loved me back.

  HOMELAND INSECURITIES

  WHAT ARE YOU planning to do with that guitar?” asked the immigration official.

  “Play it,” I said.

  “For money?”

  “No, just for fun.”

  This was my third entry into the United States in seven months and the immigration questions were getting tougher.

  “Mr. Stoddard, you have already spent a lot of time in the United States in the past few months. What are you doing here and how are you funding these trips?”

  “I’m taking my time seeing the country and my parents are rich.”

  He looked up at me sternly.

  “Then you are a very lucky man,” he said and handed my passport back to me. “Have a nice day.”

  Any residual homesickness had been flushed out of me on this last gray, cold, depressing trip back to England. I knew that I had to somehow find a way to live and work legally in the United States, though the obstacles to that end seemed to be insurmountable. I had no skill set, no specialist training, and no prior work experience. Becky had repeatedly offered to marry me, though I saw it as a last resort, not least because our relationship was beginning to show signs of cooling.

  While I was away in England, I’d been trying to reckon how I would get my immigrant status straightened out. It had become abundantly clear that I wanted to be legally allowed to live and work in New York; I was in the pursuit of happiness and was gaining some serious ground. Another ninety-day visa waiver period would soon elapse and it was likely that immigration officials would not let me into the country easily after two consecutive ninety-day visits.

  Everyone else in the office was dumfounded by the obstacles in the way
of obtaining a work visa for me. Pre-9/11 New Yorkers looked at the people bussing their tables, delivering their lo mein, folding their laundry, messengering their documents, driving their taxis, cleaning their offices, serving their cocktails and assumed that the gateway to America was still flung wide open. The number of illegal immigrants in the United States is more than seven million. These men and women serve to do the jobs that Americans don’t deign to and as a result are largely unhindered by the authorities. Conversely, the INS is well aware that white, college-educated Europeans are not coming to America to scrub toilets and are in fact vying for positions coveted by their own blue-eyed boys and girls.

  While Becky was originally more than prepared to go to City Hall with me and quietly tie the knot, her motivation was becoming more romantic than practical. As a marriage of convenience became a more distinct possibility by the minute, she began leaking our plans to her mother, who started sketching out an elaborate summer wedding with all the trimmings, which had helped fire Becky’s imagination, and the two of them created this feedback loop of flowers, wedding dresses, wedding songs, prime rib, seven-tier cakes, and so on and so forth.

  As I weighed a marriage of convenience against the risk of deportation, Richard Gottehrer came to my rescue. Richard offered to produce a demo tape for me and sign me to a developing artist deal with Orchard Records. Richard’s business partner called in a favor with a family friend in Washington, and within a week I had an approval form for an O-type working visa, which was good for three years. It arrived immediately prior to my ninety-day visa waiver was about to expire.

  Becky was happy to hear my news despite having gotten carried away with the idea of a lavish summer wedding. She had just graduated from beauty school and had been accepted as a trainee at Bumble and Bumble, a trendy midtown hair salon where countless stars came to be coiffed. I returned home for two months to finalize my visa status, tie up some loose ends, and convince my friends that I really was going to live in America for good. I was an émigré.

  “So you’re really going to live out there, are you?”

  Everybody asked me this, having regarded my previous stays in the United States as little more than extended vacations. When I told people of my intentions I unleashed a tidal wave of resentment. When you leave England, people sort of take it very personally.

  I recently read an article in a British daily paper about Kate Moss buying a place in LA that was headlined “Drug-Troubled Model Turns Her Back on Britain,” as if she’d left the rainy little island out of spite.

  Having the visa in hand made it official in my mind as well as everybody else’s.

  While I was at home Becky began searching for a place for us to live in Manhattan, now that we would both be working there. She eventually signed a one-year lease on a tiny, newly refurbished one-bedroom on Attorney Street between Houston and Stanton. Attorney Street had been a one-stop shop for heroin just a few years earlier, but by 1999 represented the easternmost reach of gentrification on the Lower East Side. Until I moved in there with her I had never been east of Essex Street. Because she was still in education of sorts, her parents agreed to pay a third of her $1,400 rent, meaning that Becky and I only had to find a little over $460 a month apiece, which was quite doable, even on my starting salary of $20,000 at The Orchard. Though my official job description for visa purposes was “recording artiste,” I was, in actuality, just a general office assistant, continuing with the same duties I’d always had.

  “What do you do for…The Orchard, Mr. Stoddard?”

  At Newark Airport, I could now answer the immigration official’s questions with confidence and candor.

  “I’m in a rock band.”

  For the first time Becky wasn’t in the arrivals lounge to meet me after I collected my baggage. She eventually turned up after about ten minutes or so. The e-mails and phone calls between us had been shorter and less frequent on this separation. For my part, the approval of my visa meant that living and working in America was no longer bundled together with holy matrimony. Becky had been working at Bumble and Bumble for almost three months and had found a new slew of friends and distractions. My sudden abandonment of our marriage plans upon getting the visa had hurt her.

  Over the phone, Becky had said that the fourth-floor walk-up apartment at 161 Attorney Street was small, but I wasn’t really prepared for quite how tiny it was. The bedroom was big enough for a double bed and about a foot-wide space down one side. The living room was only six feet wide, the kitchen appliances were in miniature, and I’d seen bigger bathrooms on airplanes.

  “Don’t freak out!” said Becky as I looked around. “It’ll seem bigger once everything is in it.”

  “No, it’s…nice,” I said.

  It was certainly not a suitable dwelling for more than one normalsized person, and I immediately felt trapped. I took Becky’s word that some hastily purchased IKEA furniture would give us a better perspective on the place and went downstairs to unload the truck.

  The location certainly made for an easy commute to work. I experimented with a few routes but would usually walk west along Stanton, south down Clinton, west along Delancey, and south down Orchard; a walk of about eight minutes or so.

  For me, having a relationship period was exciting. Having a long-distance relationship was extremely exhilarating. The separation engenders an incredible longing, the distance sparks creativity in communication, the time difference forces you to shift your perceptions of days, and the day’s date is simply a tally toward seeing one another again, the clear and present danger of being refused entry to the country a nail-biting climax. The time you end up spending together is so precious, the arrivals and departures so fraught with emotion, the days and weeks of togetherness so fleeting. It was like having a protracted holiday romance. I had allowed the romantic drama of our transatlantic love connection to drive our relationship, and I hadn’t realized it until it aged and suddenly ceased to exist, and, instead of our relationship being demarcated by ninety-day periods of togetherness and separation, it was now just us in 250 square feet, time stretching out infinitely before us. We got down to the day-to-day business of living normal lives and it suddenly became clear, to me at least, that the easy, breezy vacation part of our relationship was over.

  It became apparent that Becky liked to hover within the margins of untidy and downright filthy, whereas I was coming out of the closet as a neat freak. At about the same time, she developed a stupefying habit of smoking large quantities of weed. Although I originally thought I might have been imagining it, other girls were beginning to take an interest in me and part of me began to resent that I’d gone from virgin to a cohabitating malcontent with none of the fun, casual, reckless part in between.

  It seemed a terrible shame to be this unhappy with my relationship situation when so much else seemed to be going well. Though it was I who sought out a relationship between us, Becky had subsequently put much more into it, even scrapping our original plan to move back to England on my behalf. Her family had taken me in unconditionally, and as awful as splitting with Becky would be, prying myself away from my adopted family would be even more difficult.

  We spent Christmas back in Madison, and on New Year’s Eve I told Becky that it was over. She cried and then her parents took us to dinner at Benihana on the way back to the city. Becky was inconsolable at the hibachi table, even though the chef pulled out his best shrimp-tail flicking tricks and making the little volcano with slices of onion.

  A week later I moved in with my friend Frank, who lived off the Ditmas Avenue stop, about halfway out to Coney Island. I was there through January and half of a frigid February before Becky called to tell me that she still expected me to pay my third of the rent until the lease ran out in August.

  “I can’t afford to pay two lots of rent money!” I screamed.

  “Well, you agreed to live with me for a year, and it’s sort of not fair on me or my parents,” she said.

  Though I had sort of agreed
to it, my name was not on the lease. Out of respect for Becky’s wonderful parents I felt I had no choice but to move back in with Becky, though this was part of her plan to reconcile. She was going to be spending two weeks visiting her sister in California, then I found an outrageously cheap round-trip fare back to England, so that took care of March. The month of April proved to both of us that there was no way either of us could endure the rest of the summer in 250 square feet of hell and so finally, begrudgingly, she let me go.

  HASIDS AND HAYSEEDS

  IT SEEMED THAT by the late summer of 2000 my allotted quota of American hospitality had been almost entirely cashed. My employer, The Orchard, now owed me almost six thousand dollars in back wages, and seven weeks had passed since I’d last received a full paycheck. It had become apparent that leaving the company meant kissing that cash good-bye for the foreseeable future. In addition, my nefariously acquired work visa allowed me to work only for The Orchard. There was part-time under-the-table work to be had, but I lacked the gumption, confidence, and wherewithal to effectively hunt it down. Plus, the thought of washing dishes nights and weekends while my employer owed me more than I’d paid in rent the previous year made my blood boil. My father had wired me money before but had recently lost his job. He said that he could only give me more money if it was going toward a one-way ticket home. Friends from home were buying property, two-week vacations in the Greek islands, cars, and luxury goods, and it seemed that I would have to go back and, after a good helping of humble pie, play catch-up in a race I didn’t care to run. I was flat broke, but unlike the genuinely poverty-stricken, I was safe in the knowledge that the struggle, the discomfort, the heartache, the occasional hunger could be ended with one collect phone call. Imagining the phone call, the good-byes to my new friends, to the city I loved, the return to my old bedroom, the rain-sodden search for an arbitrary profession kept me from making that phone call prematurely.