When two or more gays meet for the first time, the conversation always quickly comes round to two topics: when did you realise you were gay, and what's your coming out story. Only the first of these falls within the remit of the Memory Project:
The question of When did you realise you are gay? is for me more a question of When did you first know what it means to be gay?, as I was demonstrating an interest in the gentlemen long before I either knew what that meant or understood that it was (back then) largely frowned upon. My earliest crush was probably Elliot, the boy from ET, who struck me as the sort of handsome, go-getting young man I'd like to spend my life with, and who also spent a lot of time wearing figure-hugging jammies (It should be noted that I was only six, which is one of the few times it's acceptable to lust after an 11-year-old boy).
Looking back with hindsight, I realise the gayness had been manifesting itself long before the age of six. I remember undressing my action men to see them in their swimming trunks and feeling all warm and happy by doing so (the other boys preferred to play violent war games with them). It simply didn't occur to me that this was a significant difference from the other boys, and of course my best friends around this time were John How (he of the Feelers' Club) and Alistair Howtown, both of whom were benders, and so despite the fact I hated football - and loved dressing up and playing happy families with Alistair and his soft toys - I never really twigged that this was remotely unusual.
When I was around nine years old, I started hearing the word "gay" in school, and understood only that it was a swear word bandied around in the same context as "spazz". I was very confused, then, when sitting on the floor by the fireplace watching an episode of George & Mildred with my family. The story climaxed when Mildred announced she was in love with her new lodger, and the lodger pretended to be gay to avoid her advances (purists may note it was Series 2's The Travelling Man, first aired in November 1977).
I couldn't fathom why someone would pretend to be "gay" when that was something which - to my mind - was as undesirable as being a "spazz".
"Mummy" I asked after mulling this over, "what does gay mean?"
My brother was shocked, and scalded me for using a rude word in front of our mother; however, my mum realised that a senisble approach was required and explained that, "When a man is 'gay', he's suffering from a disorder where he's attracted to other men rather than women. It's a shame and it's wrong, but that's how it is."
I knew instantly that this applied to me, and suddenly a major dichotomy ripped through my world where I hadn't previously known to even look for one. Worse still, I realised that it wasn't just the children in the playground who thought gays were bad news, even my mum had said it was wrong.
I knew then I'd have to keep absolutely quiet about this gay thing, and I got so used to doing it over the years that I didn't even think to come out once I'd got to university.
In fairness to my mom, I should probably note that I recounted this story to her when I was 26 and she had no memory of it, but was horrified and extremely concerned that she might have broken my entire childhood and derailed my adult development. Of course, times have changed and she now has nothing against the gays, and is very fond of Paul.
Wednesday 26 August 2009
Saturday 22 August 2009
The Tar Pits of Otley
This memory is fairly notorious, and is recounted here for posterity.
On one rare occasion in the summer of 1994 - when I would really rather have been watching Wimbledon, or reading PG Wodehouse in the garden - I was holed up in my bedroom revising for my A-Levels.
Revision was not strictly necessary for most of my A-Levels. One could pass Economics with an hour of good preparation as it was mostly a multiple choice exam (and Mr Shutt had kindly given me a stack of former papers to memorise). The rest of was a broad essay question - it was sufficient here just to memorise two fairly general articles from the text book, such as What Is Economics and Why Do We Use Money.
Mathematics also required minimal revision, as there are no facts to learn in maths. It's just the application of a few basic rules which are pretty much intuitive, and they even let you take in a calculator and provide you with a key equations booklet. History was more complex, but we didn't need to learn long lists of names and dates as it was by then more fashionable just to study broad themes, which were so broad you could pretty much make them fit anything you were asked to talk about (for our period, 1871-1939, pretty much any waffle about social unrest or international tension covered all bases). Mr Tarbett also advised we learn a few basic quotes to create the illustion of being well read, and it was for this reason that everyone in my class still knows that Nicholas II was a small man lost in the immensity of his realm.
During this feverish revision, two men were working noisily on the roof of the house next door. One was singing and the other shouting instructions, but given this was summer it was too hot for me to close the window to block them out. When you're disturbed by noise it only ever gets more irritating, and when one started with his singing again I soon found myself thinking: "I wish he'd fall off that fucking roof and shut up".
I got half of my wish. Although the worker promptly fell off the roof, he sadly did not shut up. He had been holding a bucket of hot tar, and the contents went all over his face. Instead of shutting up, therefore, he started screaming. This was even more distracting than the singing.
Defeated, I got up and closed the window so I could concentrate.
On one rare occasion in the summer of 1994 - when I would really rather have been watching Wimbledon, or reading PG Wodehouse in the garden - I was holed up in my bedroom revising for my A-Levels.
Revision was not strictly necessary for most of my A-Levels. One could pass Economics with an hour of good preparation as it was mostly a multiple choice exam (and Mr Shutt had kindly given me a stack of former papers to memorise). The rest of was a broad essay question - it was sufficient here just to memorise two fairly general articles from the text book, such as What Is Economics and Why Do We Use Money.
Mathematics also required minimal revision, as there are no facts to learn in maths. It's just the application of a few basic rules which are pretty much intuitive, and they even let you take in a calculator and provide you with a key equations booklet. History was more complex, but we didn't need to learn long lists of names and dates as it was by then more fashionable just to study broad themes, which were so broad you could pretty much make them fit anything you were asked to talk about (for our period, 1871-1939, pretty much any waffle about social unrest or international tension covered all bases). Mr Tarbett also advised we learn a few basic quotes to create the illustion of being well read, and it was for this reason that everyone in my class still knows that Nicholas II was a small man lost in the immensity of his realm.
During this feverish revision, two men were working noisily on the roof of the house next door. One was singing and the other shouting instructions, but given this was summer it was too hot for me to close the window to block them out. When you're disturbed by noise it only ever gets more irritating, and when one started with his singing again I soon found myself thinking: "I wish he'd fall off that fucking roof and shut up".
I got half of my wish. Although the worker promptly fell off the roof, he sadly did not shut up. He had been holding a bucket of hot tar, and the contents went all over his face. Instead of shutting up, therefore, he started screaming. This was even more distracting than the singing.
Defeated, I got up and closed the window so I could concentrate.
Tuesday 18 August 2009
A Cunt Called Colin
I am a relatively temperate person in nature, however this is a story about a boy who remains a figure of intense hatred in my heart.
When I was ten or eleven my mother job-shared at the hospital with another housewife who lived up the road. This woman had a son one year older than me, a curious specimen called Colin Gibbon. Colin and I had nothing in common and regarded each other suspiciously, and yet as fate would have it our mothers decided we should spend every day after school together, under my mother’s care when Colin’s mum was working, and vice versa. This is one of the crueller situations to be forced upon me.
The precise origin of our mutual hatred of each other is long forgotten, but can be summed up in adult terms as follows: he was a total cunt. I remember for example that he would abandon me in his bedroom when he was supposed to be entertaining me, and go outside to play football with his real friends. I was not an innocent child, and revenge was easily had in stealing his pocket money or casually breaking things he liked. Now I think about it, I do hope he wasn’t doing the same things to me.
Colin was an arrogant, rude little man (an only child indeed, which makes sense) and he rubbed me up the wrong way all the time, to the point where I pleaded with my mother to find an alternative arrangement. She refused, as we had little money at the time. Things came to a head one day when the two of us were in the playroom with my brother and Pez, playing a computer game. Colin did something twattish like switch the computer off just as I was doing well, and I stormed from the room. I wasn't just angry at that, but at everything this boy had done to me. I was filled to the very brim with hatred.
My response, looking back, was far from usual for an eleven year old: I decided to write down on a piece of paper precisely how I felt about Colin (indeed, on yellow paper from a large batch stolen from his room). As I say, I was not an innocent child and the letter used every profanity I knew (whether I used them in the correct context I cannot say). The original letter is of course lost in the mists of time, but my best reconstruction would be along the lines of:
Dear Colin,
I wish you would not come to my house. You are a shit and I fucking hate you. And yes, this letter is written on paper I stole from you, you cunt.
Fuck you,
Andrew
Charming stuff, I know. I trotted back down to the playroom and delivered the letter to its intended recipient. Being a cunt, Colin immediately went to my mother and showed her what I had written. If he was expecting any sympathy, he was quite mistaken. My mother had seen her sweet young boy transformed into a Glaswegian drunk by this evil creature before her, and Colin was forever banished from the house and my life. Alternative arrangements were found immediately, and I never spoke to Colin again.
My only regret is that my Godmother, a wonderful Christian woman who I adored, was also visiting and so read the letter, and her eyebrows almost went through the roof. I felt almost as terrible as the time when I was three years old, and pooed all over the sofa while she was cuddling me. The transformation in her emotions on that occasion was just as painful.
There is one last anecdote relating to Colin Gibbon, or to his step-father at least. My mother had occasion to go round to their house one day, and the step-father answered the door. My mother made rapid excuses and left. As she reported it at the time, “he was wearing only a short silk dressing gown, and nothing down below.”
“How do you know he had no underpants on?” my Dad asked innocently. The look on my mother’s face was confirmation that she’d had more than sufficient proof.
When I was ten or eleven my mother job-shared at the hospital with another housewife who lived up the road. This woman had a son one year older than me, a curious specimen called Colin Gibbon. Colin and I had nothing in common and regarded each other suspiciously, and yet as fate would have it our mothers decided we should spend every day after school together, under my mother’s care when Colin’s mum was working, and vice versa. This is one of the crueller situations to be forced upon me.
The precise origin of our mutual hatred of each other is long forgotten, but can be summed up in adult terms as follows: he was a total cunt. I remember for example that he would abandon me in his bedroom when he was supposed to be entertaining me, and go outside to play football with his real friends. I was not an innocent child, and revenge was easily had in stealing his pocket money or casually breaking things he liked. Now I think about it, I do hope he wasn’t doing the same things to me.
Colin was an arrogant, rude little man (an only child indeed, which makes sense) and he rubbed me up the wrong way all the time, to the point where I pleaded with my mother to find an alternative arrangement. She refused, as we had little money at the time. Things came to a head one day when the two of us were in the playroom with my brother and Pez, playing a computer game. Colin did something twattish like switch the computer off just as I was doing well, and I stormed from the room. I wasn't just angry at that, but at everything this boy had done to me. I was filled to the very brim with hatred.
My response, looking back, was far from usual for an eleven year old: I decided to write down on a piece of paper precisely how I felt about Colin (indeed, on yellow paper from a large batch stolen from his room). As I say, I was not an innocent child and the letter used every profanity I knew (whether I used them in the correct context I cannot say). The original letter is of course lost in the mists of time, but my best reconstruction would be along the lines of:
Dear Colin,
I wish you would not come to my house. You are a shit and I fucking hate you. And yes, this letter is written on paper I stole from you, you cunt.
Fuck you,
Andrew
Charming stuff, I know. I trotted back down to the playroom and delivered the letter to its intended recipient. Being a cunt, Colin immediately went to my mother and showed her what I had written. If he was expecting any sympathy, he was quite mistaken. My mother had seen her sweet young boy transformed into a Glaswegian drunk by this evil creature before her, and Colin was forever banished from the house and my life. Alternative arrangements were found immediately, and I never spoke to Colin again.
My only regret is that my Godmother, a wonderful Christian woman who I adored, was also visiting and so read the letter, and her eyebrows almost went through the roof. I felt almost as terrible as the time when I was three years old, and pooed all over the sofa while she was cuddling me. The transformation in her emotions on that occasion was just as painful.
There is one last anecdote relating to Colin Gibbon, or to his step-father at least. My mother had occasion to go round to their house one day, and the step-father answered the door. My mother made rapid excuses and left. As she reported it at the time, “he was wearing only a short silk dressing gown, and nothing down below.”
“How do you know he had no underpants on?” my Dad asked innocently. The look on my mother’s face was confirmation that she’d had more than sufficient proof.
How to Make Friends and Exploit People
This memory is a direct sequel to Southwestern Sales Camp
After a very long and tedious overnight bus journey to Pennsylvania, our Greyhound finally arrived in Carlisle early on the Saturday morning. Our colleagues had other destinations, and so Zack and I stepped out alone onto the deserted streets of the city which would be our home for the foreseeable future.
Arriving unannounced in any city presents certain problems, not least finding somewhere to live. We headed to a local branch of Wendy’s for breakfast and Zack immediately came up with the solution: he’d deploy a ‘Southwestern Tip’, one of many we’d been taught during the previous week’s Sales School. The company had advised us to choose a house we liked the look of, knock on the door and explain our situation, and nine times out of ten they’d invite us in to live with them. It sounds like a long shot now, but back then I guess I was a little brainwashed by the company and it seemed like a really good plan. Zack headed off to find somewhere for us to live while I guarded the bags and drank my coffee. With amazing optimism, he reported that he’d be back in five minutes.
After half an hour he still had not returned, and I began to imagine that perhaps he was enjoying a beer with his new housemates; but after an hour he returned with a very grim face. He had tried every house on the street outside without luck, and so we were still homeless. I was literally flabbergasted that the plan had not worked.
This was in the days before internet-enabled mobile phones, so we were at a certain disadvantage in not having the first clue of where in the city we were, or even how the city was laid out. We thus walked in a random direction until we came across a fire station on a quiet street in the suburbs. After we had introduced ourselves – a lengthy process in Carlisle, as you immediately had to explain why you talked funny and then spend five minutes explaining that, yes, you had indeed on one occasion met the Queen – we explained that we were looking for someone to put us up for a few weeks while we sold books door-to-door.
“That won’t happen in Carlisle,” we were told. “Absolutely no fucking way.”
This was not the news I had been hoping for. I was hot, sweaty and hadn’t slept in 24 hours. I wanted to be told there was a bed out back and a fireman would cool me down with the fire hose before I went to sleep. Utterly disheartened, we resigned ourselves to having to get a hotel (eating into our profit margins, a Southwestern no no) and asked the way to the nearest motel. We trudged there under a dark cloud of defeat, strugging in the summer heat with our horribly heavy bags – operating a relay process, in which each bag would progress ten paces up the street in turn. Our moods soon lifted after we checked in, however, as having a shower and changing my clothing was about the best thing to happen to me all week.
We had hit gold with the Days Inn motel, as they handed out complimentary maps of the city. We stocked up on them and employed Southwestern Tip #2: visit a local gas station to ask for directions, and get the information you need on your sales territory. Somehow believing all of this Company Bullshit, we obediently trekked down the busy turnpike to a distant gas station, where a boy of around 15 sold us a single coke.
“Say,” Zack tried. “Tell me, where do all the children live around here?” The gas attendant looked at Zack – understandably – as though he were a paedophile. Zack did not improve matters by adding, “Not the rich ones, the poor ones. With toys and climbing frames strewn across the garden.”
We may have been taught what we were looking for, but we hadn’t been taught to express it well. The boy pretended to find something else to keep him busy in the back of the store, and we left.
Feeling hungry now, we spied a Bonanza Steakhouse across Walnut Bottom Road, a variant of Ponderosa which looked marginally better than the neighbouring McDonalds or Arby’s, so we went in and ordered the cheapest thing on the menu: the all-you-can-eat buffet. This was another massive Company no no – eating out was a waste of money when you could prepare your own food at home. Alas, we had no home, and so instead we learned two very important lessons about America: first, their salad dressings are so creamy and sweet you’ll confuse them for custard; and second, custard tastes utterly foul on salad. The waitress serving us was amused we found the idea of All You Can Eat Buffets and Ranch Dressings so totally alien, and was so taken with our accents I decided I’d have to learn how to speak like an American if we were to achieve anything efficiently in this city (not realising at this stage that our accents would prove our greatest asset).
We returned to our motel reasoning that Day 1 had not been a complete disaster – no one had died, after all – and decided that Day 2 would surely bring some hope. We then phoned Jerry, our team leader, who was appalled. “You have to get out of that motel tomorrow,” he explained. “You are supposed to be making money, not spending it.”
My thoughts were pretty much “Fuck yourself wrongways, Jerry”, but of course I responded politely and hoped the man would get off our backs. We went to explore the motel and came across the gym, where I had my first (largely unsuccesful) go on a treadmill, which to a country boy like me was akin to finding the battleship galactica behind the wardrobe. America really did seem to be a place where dreams could come true.
We slept soundly that night, and I think Imaginary God must have heard our prayers as I pulled open the curtains early the following morning to reveal – bathed in light across the parking lot – a church. The board outside announced in giant letters that morning communion was at 9pm. Perfect, time to implement Southwestern Tip #3: Americans will trust you if you affect a belief in their god.
As per Southwestern Tip #4, we dressed in our preppiest outfits – chinos, crisply ironed blue shirts, nicely polished shoes (not trainers) – and headed down to the church for 8am hoping to catch the priest or pastor or preacher or whatever the hell they’re called and see if he’d mention our appeal during his service.
After confirming to his apparent satisfaction that we were good god-fearing children, the priest said he would be happy to help us. He also suggested we might like to attend the Sunday school bible study class and - not wishing to offend - we immediately agreed. It didn’t once cross my mind that this might be some sort of test to check our credentials.
It is probably worth at this point noting that as two relatively healthy, slim Cambridge-educated men in their early twenties we looked nothing like the men of a similar age who derived from local Germanic stock, who had been brought up on a diet of cream and sugar. We were thus assumed to be around 16, and we did nothing to challenge this assumption. Similarly, we had the edge in bible class as the average 16 year old in Carlisle has not recently graduated with a degree from Cambridge. It was therefore almost impossible not to shine in bible class, depsite never having read or been taught about the bible before.
The class was effectively a basic comprehension exercise in which a passage was read out and then we were asked what had just been said. There were only two local boys in the class, sullen and near mute creatures which made hopeless guesses at the answers. Zack and I by comparison must have seemed about as knowledgeable of matters biblical as the Pope.
This was swiftly followed by church, which was just like chapel in Cambridge only instead of a glug of port followed by a croissant, communion took the form of grape juice and a ritz cracker. I was heartbroken, as the only thing getting me through the service was the thought of a red-wine shooter. It was later explained that we were at the Church of Christ, a wholly abstinent institution which translated the word ‘wine’ in the bible as ‘fruit of the vine’ – as though Jesus might seriously have been celebrated at the wedding in Cana for turning water into a grape. Anyway, afterwards the preacher made an appeal for god fearing peoples to house us, and much to our surprise an elderly couple volunteered.
We met with Dan and Lucy in the car park outside, and they were absolutely lovely. They set the tenancy terms there and then – a dollar’s rent a week each – and they left to prepare their house. In the meantime, the man who’d led the bible study class offered to take us to his house for Sunday lunch. There’s obviously good money in religion, as their house was absolutely huge. His wife was a charming and funny woman, and as we sat down for Sunday lunch with them we met their daughters, one of whom was the waitress from the Bonanza Steak House the night before. Somehow we had gone from being homeless and friendless to having a surrogate family, all in just one day. Perhaps there was something to the Southwestern Tips after all, or perhaps religious people are just very easy to take advantage of.
After a meal of boiled beef and boiled potatoes (okay, so it wasn’t delicious food, but at least it was wholesome) and a pint of ‘sun tea’ brewed fresh in the garden, the husband and wife drove us to K-Mart to buy a few last minute items. The shop was vast and unlike anything I had ever seen before. I picked up a watch for $5 (which is still one of my favourites), while Zack needed to buy a pair of shorts. As I mentioned above, Zack was not of Germanic stock and was not brought up on cream and sugar, and so he ended up having to buy his shorts from the childrenswear department. They were very cute.
We picked our things up from the motel and then headed on to York Road to meet our new family properly. Lucy and Dan were more welcoming than we had any reason to expect, although they did have their quirks (not least several cats tied on leads to the kitchen door, and a home-made electronic alarm that screamed if anyone or thing passed the kitchen window). We had a quick tour of their house which had been extended in piecemeal fashion over the years to create a strange network of little rooms. My favourite space was at the back – the ‘deck’, a large covered platform filled with comfortable chairs and enclosed by bug screens. The deck served as the main living area, while the three living rooms towards the front of the house were dark and cramped and filled with dusty nick-nacks (including Dan’s favourite: a boat carved from the skull of an American GI, its little sail made from said GI’s skin with tasteful tattoo detail, which Dan had picked up when his battalion was sent to Hiroshima to clean up after the atomic bomb).
My room was formerly their daughter’s, and was a lovely airy space with plenty of room. Zack meanwhile was in a box room, sleeping on a bed so soft you sank down through it and onto the floor.
When we called Jerry that evening he was very proud of what we achieved, and gave us a pep talk. On Day 3 – a Monday – we therefore rose enthusiastically at 7am for our cold shower and meagre breakfast, ready for our first day of actual, real sales. Only as I write this do I realise how much I had really been brainwashed by the company. Despite considering myself a sceptic I still at the point actually believed we could be a success.
And so it was that I walked out into the world with a hefty bookbag over one shoulder, settled on the rather charmingly named Gobin Street as a starting point, and followed the Southwestern guidance: I carefully drew the street into my pad, marked on each of the houses and noted any key features (paddling pools, climbing frames). I steeled myself, marched up to the first door, put on my brightest smile, knocked three times firmly, took two steps back and turned to the side and waited.
The door opened.
“Good morning-“ I started, but already the door had been slammed shut. I burst into tears, and it was then that my enthusiasm for the project began to go down hill.
[Time: Summer of 1997]
After a very long and tedious overnight bus journey to Pennsylvania, our Greyhound finally arrived in Carlisle early on the Saturday morning. Our colleagues had other destinations, and so Zack and I stepped out alone onto the deserted streets of the city which would be our home for the foreseeable future.
Arriving unannounced in any city presents certain problems, not least finding somewhere to live. We headed to a local branch of Wendy’s for breakfast and Zack immediately came up with the solution: he’d deploy a ‘Southwestern Tip’, one of many we’d been taught during the previous week’s Sales School. The company had advised us to choose a house we liked the look of, knock on the door and explain our situation, and nine times out of ten they’d invite us in to live with them. It sounds like a long shot now, but back then I guess I was a little brainwashed by the company and it seemed like a really good plan. Zack headed off to find somewhere for us to live while I guarded the bags and drank my coffee. With amazing optimism, he reported that he’d be back in five minutes.
After half an hour he still had not returned, and I began to imagine that perhaps he was enjoying a beer with his new housemates; but after an hour he returned with a very grim face. He had tried every house on the street outside without luck, and so we were still homeless. I was literally flabbergasted that the plan had not worked.
This was in the days before internet-enabled mobile phones, so we were at a certain disadvantage in not having the first clue of where in the city we were, or even how the city was laid out. We thus walked in a random direction until we came across a fire station on a quiet street in the suburbs. After we had introduced ourselves – a lengthy process in Carlisle, as you immediately had to explain why you talked funny and then spend five minutes explaining that, yes, you had indeed on one occasion met the Queen – we explained that we were looking for someone to put us up for a few weeks while we sold books door-to-door.
“That won’t happen in Carlisle,” we were told. “Absolutely no fucking way.”
This was not the news I had been hoping for. I was hot, sweaty and hadn’t slept in 24 hours. I wanted to be told there was a bed out back and a fireman would cool me down with the fire hose before I went to sleep. Utterly disheartened, we resigned ourselves to having to get a hotel (eating into our profit margins, a Southwestern no no) and asked the way to the nearest motel. We trudged there under a dark cloud of defeat, strugging in the summer heat with our horribly heavy bags – operating a relay process, in which each bag would progress ten paces up the street in turn. Our moods soon lifted after we checked in, however, as having a shower and changing my clothing was about the best thing to happen to me all week.
We had hit gold with the Days Inn motel, as they handed out complimentary maps of the city. We stocked up on them and employed Southwestern Tip #2: visit a local gas station to ask for directions, and get the information you need on your sales territory. Somehow believing all of this Company Bullshit, we obediently trekked down the busy turnpike to a distant gas station, where a boy of around 15 sold us a single coke.
“Say,” Zack tried. “Tell me, where do all the children live around here?” The gas attendant looked at Zack – understandably – as though he were a paedophile. Zack did not improve matters by adding, “Not the rich ones, the poor ones. With toys and climbing frames strewn across the garden.”
We may have been taught what we were looking for, but we hadn’t been taught to express it well. The boy pretended to find something else to keep him busy in the back of the store, and we left.
Feeling hungry now, we spied a Bonanza Steakhouse across Walnut Bottom Road, a variant of Ponderosa which looked marginally better than the neighbouring McDonalds or Arby’s, so we went in and ordered the cheapest thing on the menu: the all-you-can-eat buffet. This was another massive Company no no – eating out was a waste of money when you could prepare your own food at home. Alas, we had no home, and so instead we learned two very important lessons about America: first, their salad dressings are so creamy and sweet you’ll confuse them for custard; and second, custard tastes utterly foul on salad. The waitress serving us was amused we found the idea of All You Can Eat Buffets and Ranch Dressings so totally alien, and was so taken with our accents I decided I’d have to learn how to speak like an American if we were to achieve anything efficiently in this city (not realising at this stage that our accents would prove our greatest asset).
We returned to our motel reasoning that Day 1 had not been a complete disaster – no one had died, after all – and decided that Day 2 would surely bring some hope. We then phoned Jerry, our team leader, who was appalled. “You have to get out of that motel tomorrow,” he explained. “You are supposed to be making money, not spending it.”
My thoughts were pretty much “Fuck yourself wrongways, Jerry”, but of course I responded politely and hoped the man would get off our backs. We went to explore the motel and came across the gym, where I had my first (largely unsuccesful) go on a treadmill, which to a country boy like me was akin to finding the battleship galactica behind the wardrobe. America really did seem to be a place where dreams could come true.
We slept soundly that night, and I think Imaginary God must have heard our prayers as I pulled open the curtains early the following morning to reveal – bathed in light across the parking lot – a church. The board outside announced in giant letters that morning communion was at 9pm. Perfect, time to implement Southwestern Tip #3: Americans will trust you if you affect a belief in their god.
As per Southwestern Tip #4, we dressed in our preppiest outfits – chinos, crisply ironed blue shirts, nicely polished shoes (not trainers) – and headed down to the church for 8am hoping to catch the priest or pastor or preacher or whatever the hell they’re called and see if he’d mention our appeal during his service.
After confirming to his apparent satisfaction that we were good god-fearing children, the priest said he would be happy to help us. He also suggested we might like to attend the Sunday school bible study class and - not wishing to offend - we immediately agreed. It didn’t once cross my mind that this might be some sort of test to check our credentials.
It is probably worth at this point noting that as two relatively healthy, slim Cambridge-educated men in their early twenties we looked nothing like the men of a similar age who derived from local Germanic stock, who had been brought up on a diet of cream and sugar. We were thus assumed to be around 16, and we did nothing to challenge this assumption. Similarly, we had the edge in bible class as the average 16 year old in Carlisle has not recently graduated with a degree from Cambridge. It was therefore almost impossible not to shine in bible class, depsite never having read or been taught about the bible before.
The class was effectively a basic comprehension exercise in which a passage was read out and then we were asked what had just been said. There were only two local boys in the class, sullen and near mute creatures which made hopeless guesses at the answers. Zack and I by comparison must have seemed about as knowledgeable of matters biblical as the Pope.
This was swiftly followed by church, which was just like chapel in Cambridge only instead of a glug of port followed by a croissant, communion took the form of grape juice and a ritz cracker. I was heartbroken, as the only thing getting me through the service was the thought of a red-wine shooter. It was later explained that we were at the Church of Christ, a wholly abstinent institution which translated the word ‘wine’ in the bible as ‘fruit of the vine’ – as though Jesus might seriously have been celebrated at the wedding in Cana for turning water into a grape. Anyway, afterwards the preacher made an appeal for god fearing peoples to house us, and much to our surprise an elderly couple volunteered.
We met with Dan and Lucy in the car park outside, and they were absolutely lovely. They set the tenancy terms there and then – a dollar’s rent a week each – and they left to prepare their house. In the meantime, the man who’d led the bible study class offered to take us to his house for Sunday lunch. There’s obviously good money in religion, as their house was absolutely huge. His wife was a charming and funny woman, and as we sat down for Sunday lunch with them we met their daughters, one of whom was the waitress from the Bonanza Steak House the night before. Somehow we had gone from being homeless and friendless to having a surrogate family, all in just one day. Perhaps there was something to the Southwestern Tips after all, or perhaps religious people are just very easy to take advantage of.
After a meal of boiled beef and boiled potatoes (okay, so it wasn’t delicious food, but at least it was wholesome) and a pint of ‘sun tea’ brewed fresh in the garden, the husband and wife drove us to K-Mart to buy a few last minute items. The shop was vast and unlike anything I had ever seen before. I picked up a watch for $5 (which is still one of my favourites), while Zack needed to buy a pair of shorts. As I mentioned above, Zack was not of Germanic stock and was not brought up on cream and sugar, and so he ended up having to buy his shorts from the childrenswear department. They were very cute.
We picked our things up from the motel and then headed on to York Road to meet our new family properly. Lucy and Dan were more welcoming than we had any reason to expect, although they did have their quirks (not least several cats tied on leads to the kitchen door, and a home-made electronic alarm that screamed if anyone or thing passed the kitchen window). We had a quick tour of their house which had been extended in piecemeal fashion over the years to create a strange network of little rooms. My favourite space was at the back – the ‘deck’, a large covered platform filled with comfortable chairs and enclosed by bug screens. The deck served as the main living area, while the three living rooms towards the front of the house were dark and cramped and filled with dusty nick-nacks (including Dan’s favourite: a boat carved from the skull of an American GI, its little sail made from said GI’s skin with tasteful tattoo detail, which Dan had picked up when his battalion was sent to Hiroshima to clean up after the atomic bomb).
My room was formerly their daughter’s, and was a lovely airy space with plenty of room. Zack meanwhile was in a box room, sleeping on a bed so soft you sank down through it and onto the floor.
When we called Jerry that evening he was very proud of what we achieved, and gave us a pep talk. On Day 3 – a Monday – we therefore rose enthusiastically at 7am for our cold shower and meagre breakfast, ready for our first day of actual, real sales. Only as I write this do I realise how much I had really been brainwashed by the company. Despite considering myself a sceptic I still at the point actually believed we could be a success.
And so it was that I walked out into the world with a hefty bookbag over one shoulder, settled on the rather charmingly named Gobin Street as a starting point, and followed the Southwestern guidance: I carefully drew the street into my pad, marked on each of the houses and noted any key features (paddling pools, climbing frames). I steeled myself, marched up to the first door, put on my brightest smile, knocked three times firmly, took two steps back and turned to the side and waited.
The door opened.
“Good morning-“ I started, but already the door had been slammed shut. I burst into tears, and it was then that my enthusiasm for the project began to go down hill.
[Time: Summer of 1997]
Wednesday 12 August 2009
A Fish Whose Middle Name Begins With 'J'
Seamus is disappointed I have not updated my memory project recently, so it is only appropriate I rectify matters by posting my memories of how we first became friends, one blustery September in 1992.
Picture it: Otley, 1992. I had just entered the sixth form, ready to study my A-Levels. While everyone else was allocated to large classes of bright students, I ended up in one which comprised Seamus, Timothy Brabham and around fifteen braying, toothless BTEC students who had somehow stayed in education despite their obvious inability to retain a single fact. There was no question I would avoid the BTECs like the plague, and while I was already good friends with Tim, it was quite apparent I would have to make friends with Seamus or die of boredom.
I had known of Seamus since we first joined the school in 1987, when he was a short and very eccentric smart alec who barked rude questions at the teachers all the time and with whom I thus felt a warm affinity; however, things were never that simple. I had also spent the past five years walking to school with Sheila Polhammer, a somewhat temperamental young girl who was quite enamoured of Seamaus, and who spent half the time singing his praises and the other half - when paranoia (and Seamus's straying libido...) took effect - plotting his torture and eventual death in exquisite detail. I thus had mixed opinions of him.
On Day 1, sitting at our desk in the middle of our form room and twiddling with the gas taps, Seamus idly announced that if we could only conspire to bring to school a handkerchief and a salt cellar, he would show us a magic trick that would blow our minds. Intrigued by the idea, on Day 2 Tim brought in the cruet and I located a handkerchief and Seamus prepared his powers of sorcery.
He wordlessly held up the salt cellar for the audience to inspect, nodding wisely, and then placed it down on the desktop. He then produced the handkerchief and waved it flamboyantly in the air, before carefully stretching it out and laying it across the salt cellar. (I am sure that by this stage, the BTEC crew had as much contempt for us as we did for them). A sudden look of confusion crossed his face, he sneezed and grabbed the handkerchief to blow his nose, knocking the salt cellar to the ground.
"I forgot what I was supposed to do," he said very earnestly, "And then I had to sneeze".
I knew then we could be good friends.
Our friendship developed, as most do, with us sitting on the swings after school discussing the things that made us laugh (things David Harrelson said) and mocking the things we distrusted (David Harrelson). This continued for two years until school ended, and the long vacation before university opened up before us. I suggested that Seamus come up to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe to stay with my brother and, apparently attracted by the idea, Seamus accepted.
I imagine if I had phrased it differently, Seamus might have declined. If I had said, for example, "Come sit in a coach with me for seven hours and I'll say anything that comes into my stupid cunt head". Or perhaps, "Come visit my brother's small and filthy student flat and sleep on a urine-stained matress on the floor of a psychotic Christian". Well anyway, as it turned out we ended up having a lovely time, eating freshly baked bagels, drinking beer in the Pleasance Bar (somehow, back then, we always got a seat) and watching shows of various types such as Travesties, which was super; Equus, which was dull; and gay American comic Scott Capura (with the subtle opening line, "I'm a dick smoker [pause, audience patiently waits for punchline] ... When I say that in the states it gets quite a reaction, but here I guess you're just thinking 'hey, he's a American, how much worse could it get?").
Of course, all of these activities were secretly just ways of avoiding having to go back to the filth of the flat. It is fortunate we are both early risers, as at 7am each morning - upon waking, when our brains finally allowing the stench of my brother's flat to reach our conscious minds - we had no option but to dress and leave immediately. There was no point having a shower, as the bathroom was layered in so much crud we would have come out filthier. We would stay out as late as we could, and ended every evening with the late-night showing of Kenny Young and the Eggplants at the Pleasance Upstairs, guys we'd enjoyed since first seeing them for free at Fringe Sunday.
At the end of the trip, halfway through the coach ride home, we famously ran out of things to say to one another and we took it in turns to open our mouths as though to speak, only to recall that this particular thought or anecdote had already been shared. Twice. As a sign of how low we had sunk, this point of silence came after we had developed the song about a fish which had become a prostitute*.
We wisely retreated to our own worlds, disappeared into separate folds of Oxbridge and did not seek to make contact again for a full year, by which point thank goodness we had some new anecdotes to share.
* Thus:
SM: "Dikrwu, Dikrwu sing me a song."
RD: "There is a fish whose middle name begins with... C."
SM: "Clarence!"
RD: "Clarence is his name, And he dresses like a dame, And (I have heard from sources close to the subject) he's working on the game."
Picture it: Otley, 1992. I had just entered the sixth form, ready to study my A-Levels. While everyone else was allocated to large classes of bright students, I ended up in one which comprised Seamus, Timothy Brabham and around fifteen braying, toothless BTEC students who had somehow stayed in education despite their obvious inability to retain a single fact. There was no question I would avoid the BTECs like the plague, and while I was already good friends with Tim, it was quite apparent I would have to make friends with Seamus or die of boredom.
I had known of Seamus since we first joined the school in 1987, when he was a short and very eccentric smart alec who barked rude questions at the teachers all the time and with whom I thus felt a warm affinity; however, things were never that simple. I had also spent the past five years walking to school with Sheila Polhammer, a somewhat temperamental young girl who was quite enamoured of Seamaus, and who spent half the time singing his praises and the other half - when paranoia (and Seamus's straying libido...) took effect - plotting his torture and eventual death in exquisite detail. I thus had mixed opinions of him.
On Day 1, sitting at our desk in the middle of our form room and twiddling with the gas taps, Seamus idly announced that if we could only conspire to bring to school a handkerchief and a salt cellar, he would show us a magic trick that would blow our minds. Intrigued by the idea, on Day 2 Tim brought in the cruet and I located a handkerchief and Seamus prepared his powers of sorcery.
He wordlessly held up the salt cellar for the audience to inspect, nodding wisely, and then placed it down on the desktop. He then produced the handkerchief and waved it flamboyantly in the air, before carefully stretching it out and laying it across the salt cellar. (I am sure that by this stage, the BTEC crew had as much contempt for us as we did for them). A sudden look of confusion crossed his face, he sneezed and grabbed the handkerchief to blow his nose, knocking the salt cellar to the ground.
"I forgot what I was supposed to do," he said very earnestly, "And then I had to sneeze".
I knew then we could be good friends.
Our friendship developed, as most do, with us sitting on the swings after school discussing the things that made us laugh (things David Harrelson said) and mocking the things we distrusted (David Harrelson). This continued for two years until school ended, and the long vacation before university opened up before us. I suggested that Seamus come up to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe to stay with my brother and, apparently attracted by the idea, Seamus accepted.
I imagine if I had phrased it differently, Seamus might have declined. If I had said, for example, "Come sit in a coach with me for seven hours and I'll say anything that comes into my stupid cunt head". Or perhaps, "Come visit my brother's small and filthy student flat and sleep on a urine-stained matress on the floor of a psychotic Christian". Well anyway, as it turned out we ended up having a lovely time, eating freshly baked bagels, drinking beer in the Pleasance Bar (somehow, back then, we always got a seat) and watching shows of various types such as Travesties, which was super; Equus, which was dull; and gay American comic Scott Capura (with the subtle opening line, "I'm a dick smoker [pause, audience patiently waits for punchline] ... When I say that in the states it gets quite a reaction, but here I guess you're just thinking 'hey, he's a American, how much worse could it get?").
Of course, all of these activities were secretly just ways of avoiding having to go back to the filth of the flat. It is fortunate we are both early risers, as at 7am each morning - upon waking, when our brains finally allowing the stench of my brother's flat to reach our conscious minds - we had no option but to dress and leave immediately. There was no point having a shower, as the bathroom was layered in so much crud we would have come out filthier. We would stay out as late as we could, and ended every evening with the late-night showing of Kenny Young and the Eggplants at the Pleasance Upstairs, guys we'd enjoyed since first seeing them for free at Fringe Sunday.
At the end of the trip, halfway through the coach ride home, we famously ran out of things to say to one another and we took it in turns to open our mouths as though to speak, only to recall that this particular thought or anecdote had already been shared. Twice. As a sign of how low we had sunk, this point of silence came after we had developed the song about a fish which had become a prostitute*.
We wisely retreated to our own worlds, disappeared into separate folds of Oxbridge and did not seek to make contact again for a full year, by which point thank goodness we had some new anecdotes to share.
* Thus:
SM: "Dikrwu, Dikrwu sing me a song."
RD: "There is a fish whose middle name begins with... C."
SM: "Clarence!"
RD: "Clarence is his name, And he dresses like a dame, And (I have heard from sources close to the subject) he's working on the game."
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