Yet Another Excerpt From My Never-To-Be-Published Memoirs
Its morning. And the soft duvet cover tells me Im no longer in America. Grey skies overhead filter through my brain, and I breath, the air being a little older, Victorian. Everything is older here from the switch heater on the shower nozzle to the chain on the WC. As I struggle to remember what the last statement I made last night after a 15 hour flight. The beer was so much stronger here, and I could legally drink.
Marmalade and toast and everything covered in crisp linens. Radio, everyone listens to the radio. An ageless taste prevails. And I can walk down the street with a beer, warm against the sweat of the previous night. The Steak-like presence in my mouth from the Benson and hedges. Gastronomically speaking, I’m jumping through the hurdles. As I begin my first day at the factory, my host father’s whistling as he drives on the wrong side of the road, whirling through roundabouts and whirlygigs. The sun’s out and so is Dexy’s midnight runners. I didn’t know they had more than one hit. It’s a flagrant sort of toe tapping that he does as I stare down at his feet, one that combats a recent divorce, and the burden of having to raise two boys on his own. He’s free to go off to the pub whenever he wants now, and he’s very affectionate with his boys, loves them dearly, would openly resort to violence if it came down to it, but he’s bitter in a hidden way, in the way he taps out his ash on the M4 as we leave Leeds and turn into Middleborough.
The farms remind me of History books alive with a saddening dullness. On my first break there’s breakfast served out of a cafeteria with partitions rolled up and the tangy odor of baked beans, toast and black pudding assail on my nasal passages. It’s alarming how much preparation is involved in this. I buy a paper and sit outside on the picnic tables. Unable to read the Sun (purchased because of the page three girls) I stare out at the fields, spying a partially hidden pathway, which passes by several ancient homes. For a moment, I am in an Edwardian Novel, Thomas Hardy, “Tess of the D’Urbervilles”, an apple falls and while picking it up, I imagine torrid love affairs with farmer’s daughters who live in bungalows. I’m wearing the black hat, the one worn by “The Mayor of Casterbridge.”
But the whistle blows (there’s actually a whistle here?) and I walk back to the smell of sawdust and burning plastic. At lunch I buy a sandwich and read the tabloid I bought earlier that day. I don’t speak to many people, to them I am exactly like them until I speak, which is identical to every other social interaction I’ve had.
They all ask the same questions “American or Canadian?” the way we’d say paper or plastic. And by the end of the day I’m looking forward to the pub opening, which it does twice weekly, another partition removed, run by an affable Irishman who doesn’t dwell too much on my American accent. To Brits, we all talk like Chicagoans; we all accentuate the short e, regardless of region.
I go home on the bus, since my host father is a workaholic, and Redundancies are facing the factory, so there’s job security in it for him. As for me, I’m paid in food and lodging, so I’m, not too motivated. Sometimes I find evangelical ways of slacking off, in order to make the busy feet of my anti-American boss jump with anger. I took a three hour lunch one time, just to see his heart rate increase. I wanted to distract him with misery. He was such an asshole.
On those afternoons on the bus, I experienced what can only be described as an epiphany. As the beginning rays of summer trickled down up on me on the upper deck of the bus, whirring by unknown places and sceneries, I felt more like a figure in constant motion than a static being, haling from one place and headed for someplace else, my path was wide, took up hundreds of miles. It was this interloping feeling that would propel me through next few years. In between where I was and where I came from was thousands of pages of international politics, borders, treaties, land distributed, uncharted depths of hidden undersea volcanoes, speech differentials, knowledge and ignorance exchanging various levels of inventory as the bus came to a halt and I walked through the park on my way home. Even though I was working at a factory, I always felt regal, even if I was more regal reject than subject.
We always ended up in the Deer Park pub eventually. With my fogged head, I would slip the heavy gold coins into the jukebox. They felt so heavy and secure, worth so much in such a miniscule package. A more stable system of currency, this stuff sank when you threw it down the illuminated slots, the ring echoing in my three pint brain as I scanned the lines for songs by The Cure, Happy Mondays, Charlatans UK.
It was the summer of love, in Manchester anyway. The dance club the Hacienda had regular visits by the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays, it was the summer it all went criminal as gunfire outnumbered public groping, turning a bona-fide scene into a bloody turf war for the drug dealers. In Leeds however, it was business as usual. No one wanted to go to Manchester, I didn’t know about the violence back in the states. They didn’t mention that in Rolling Stone. In the states I imagined all of Northern England to be one Ecstasy filled rave, but really I wasn’t ready for that anyway. I was only 18. I wanted the sort of instant spiritual awakening these drugs provided as advertised, but in reality, I wasn’t mentally prepared for it. And I hated dancing. What was I thinking?
When one is thousands of miles away from one’s destination, the possibilities in traveling to another country unwrap within the mind. You imagine a reality that cannot possibly exist, one of prioritized fantasy and categorical definition. And when you finally arrive at your previously perceived destination, the newness of discovery mixes with the crushing disappointment creating a perpetual daze that reflects the tumult of geographical conflict.
So I settled for the atomic mushrooms. At the local high school. The kids called it something else. The four of us descended up on the school grounds well after school and after 6 pints of Tetley bitter to a tamed down version of the Manchester dance-rock phenomenon in the Atomic Mushrooms. Named more after their haircuts than any sort of condition there brain might have been in.
It was the beginning of the 12 year window in which youth has motion and wings, space to live out, where living is the main priority and career is far off. Time filled with friends and books, ideas, evenings of endless fascination, days of exploration, and playing cricket in the garden with Australian neighbors; when crushes aren’t methodical weigh heavy and buoyant on us, jubilant and drunk.
It’s having songs remind you of her lips, when it’s 12 years later and you’re in your own country. And you yearn for those pinnacle moments when you matured within a thought, forever cast onto a direct path. You wish you could revisit that mindset, but it is impossible. They stay up late the night we leave the country. Walking home slowly after the pub closed, underneath large trees in the chill of late summer. Probing the depth of our limited experiences, sharing thoughts for the last time, breaking ice introducing new lines of thought, the fleeting sincerity of a moment, that hangs above the trees, above the grey industrial skyline, through parks and pubs and the hardened arteries of Sunday morning pub dwellers, the sticky smell of morning porridge on the moors.
Marmalade and toast and everything covered in crisp linens. Radio, everyone listens to the radio. An ageless taste prevails. And I can walk down the street with a beer, warm against the sweat of the previous night. The Steak-like presence in my mouth from the Benson and hedges. Gastronomically speaking, I’m jumping through the hurdles. As I begin my first day at the factory, my host father’s whistling as he drives on the wrong side of the road, whirling through roundabouts and whirlygigs. The sun’s out and so is Dexy’s midnight runners. I didn’t know they had more than one hit. It’s a flagrant sort of toe tapping that he does as I stare down at his feet, one that combats a recent divorce, and the burden of having to raise two boys on his own. He’s free to go off to the pub whenever he wants now, and he’s very affectionate with his boys, loves them dearly, would openly resort to violence if it came down to it, but he’s bitter in a hidden way, in the way he taps out his ash on the M4 as we leave Leeds and turn into Middleborough.
The farms remind me of History books alive with a saddening dullness. On my first break there’s breakfast served out of a cafeteria with partitions rolled up and the tangy odor of baked beans, toast and black pudding assail on my nasal passages. It’s alarming how much preparation is involved in this. I buy a paper and sit outside on the picnic tables. Unable to read the Sun (purchased because of the page three girls) I stare out at the fields, spying a partially hidden pathway, which passes by several ancient homes. For a moment, I am in an Edwardian Novel, Thomas Hardy, “Tess of the D’Urbervilles”, an apple falls and while picking it up, I imagine torrid love affairs with farmer’s daughters who live in bungalows. I’m wearing the black hat, the one worn by “The Mayor of Casterbridge.”
But the whistle blows (there’s actually a whistle here?) and I walk back to the smell of sawdust and burning plastic. At lunch I buy a sandwich and read the tabloid I bought earlier that day. I don’t speak to many people, to them I am exactly like them until I speak, which is identical to every other social interaction I’ve had.
They all ask the same questions “American or Canadian?” the way we’d say paper or plastic. And by the end of the day I’m looking forward to the pub opening, which it does twice weekly, another partition removed, run by an affable Irishman who doesn’t dwell too much on my American accent. To Brits, we all talk like Chicagoans; we all accentuate the short e, regardless of region.
I go home on the bus, since my host father is a workaholic, and Redundancies are facing the factory, so there’s job security in it for him. As for me, I’m paid in food and lodging, so I’m, not too motivated. Sometimes I find evangelical ways of slacking off, in order to make the busy feet of my anti-American boss jump with anger. I took a three hour lunch one time, just to see his heart rate increase. I wanted to distract him with misery. He was such an asshole.
On those afternoons on the bus, I experienced what can only be described as an epiphany. As the beginning rays of summer trickled down up on me on the upper deck of the bus, whirring by unknown places and sceneries, I felt more like a figure in constant motion than a static being, haling from one place and headed for someplace else, my path was wide, took up hundreds of miles. It was this interloping feeling that would propel me through next few years. In between where I was and where I came from was thousands of pages of international politics, borders, treaties, land distributed, uncharted depths of hidden undersea volcanoes, speech differentials, knowledge and ignorance exchanging various levels of inventory as the bus came to a halt and I walked through the park on my way home. Even though I was working at a factory, I always felt regal, even if I was more regal reject than subject.
We always ended up in the Deer Park pub eventually. With my fogged head, I would slip the heavy gold coins into the jukebox. They felt so heavy and secure, worth so much in such a miniscule package. A more stable system of currency, this stuff sank when you threw it down the illuminated slots, the ring echoing in my three pint brain as I scanned the lines for songs by The Cure, Happy Mondays, Charlatans UK.
It was the summer of love, in Manchester anyway. The dance club the Hacienda had regular visits by the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays, it was the summer it all went criminal as gunfire outnumbered public groping, turning a bona-fide scene into a bloody turf war for the drug dealers. In Leeds however, it was business as usual. No one wanted to go to Manchester, I didn’t know about the violence back in the states. They didn’t mention that in Rolling Stone. In the states I imagined all of Northern England to be one Ecstasy filled rave, but really I wasn’t ready for that anyway. I was only 18. I wanted the sort of instant spiritual awakening these drugs provided as advertised, but in reality, I wasn’t mentally prepared for it. And I hated dancing. What was I thinking?
When one is thousands of miles away from one’s destination, the possibilities in traveling to another country unwrap within the mind. You imagine a reality that cannot possibly exist, one of prioritized fantasy and categorical definition. And when you finally arrive at your previously perceived destination, the newness of discovery mixes with the crushing disappointment creating a perpetual daze that reflects the tumult of geographical conflict.
So I settled for the atomic mushrooms. At the local high school. The kids called it something else. The four of us descended up on the school grounds well after school and after 6 pints of Tetley bitter to a tamed down version of the Manchester dance-rock phenomenon in the Atomic Mushrooms. Named more after their haircuts than any sort of condition there brain might have been in.
It was the beginning of the 12 year window in which youth has motion and wings, space to live out, where living is the main priority and career is far off. Time filled with friends and books, ideas, evenings of endless fascination, days of exploration, and playing cricket in the garden with Australian neighbors; when crushes aren’t methodical weigh heavy and buoyant on us, jubilant and drunk.
It’s having songs remind you of her lips, when it’s 12 years later and you’re in your own country. And you yearn for those pinnacle moments when you matured within a thought, forever cast onto a direct path. You wish you could revisit that mindset, but it is impossible. They stay up late the night we leave the country. Walking home slowly after the pub closed, underneath large trees in the chill of late summer. Probing the depth of our limited experiences, sharing thoughts for the last time, breaking ice introducing new lines of thought, the fleeting sincerity of a moment, that hangs above the trees, above the grey industrial skyline, through parks and pubs and the hardened arteries of Sunday morning pub dwellers, the sticky smell of morning porridge on the moors.
posted by Kronski | 1:32 PM
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