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 Atlantic. 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.
The last time I saw Becky was at my twenty-first birthday party. There were about a hundred people crammed into our converted bungalow. Twelve friends had chartered a minibus from TVU to my parents’ house in Essex. I even managed to kiss one of the girls that came, but it wasn’t her.
Becky left Thames Valley University in early December without saying good-bye. I thought that we were close enough to warrant some sort of warning that she was heading back to New Jersey. She purposefully didn’t say good-bye to anyone. She thought it was better that way. I’ve grown to see her point, but at the time I was quite upset by it; I was getting used to my braces and was gearing up to make my move. No one seemed to have her contact information or even knew her last name.
In March of the next year, I began working in the university library for some extra cash. My job was to place the books back in their assigned spots as mandated by the Dewey decimal system. After a few tedious shifts, I figured out that the library had no system for tracking which temp was putting the books back and whether they were being put back correctly. I slotted the books onto random shelves and napped without feeling that guilty about it. As I lay facedown on a desk one blustery damp afternoon, I became aware that someone was asking me a question.
“Are you Grant?” he said. He shook my shoulder.
“Yeah?” I said and wiped the cool drool from my cheek and used my sweater sleeve to wipe more from the graffitied surface. He handed me a crumpled piece of paper.
“Becky is trying to get in touch with you.”
The piece of paper had her name, e-mail, and phone number. I wasted no time e-mailing her. Over the next few weeks the e-mails between us became long, complex, and, if I was reading them right, mildly flirtatious.
After two weeks and dozens of communiqués, I’d invited myself to stay with her for two weeks. Three thousand miles of ocean seemed to relieve me of my usual backwardness in coming forward. I arrived at Newark Airport on Independence Day 1998. I funded the trip with money I’d borrowed from my dad. That money was intended for a suit, a pair of dress shoes, some shirts, ties, and anything else I’d need to fluff up a BA in media studies from a university that had become a national joke during my tenure there.
With rejection a dead certainty throughout my life, I wasn’t in the habit of putting myself out there in any sense, but especially with regards to the romantic. Turning up in another country to woo a platonic friend then was completely anathematic to my character, but I couldn’t shake this strange gut feeling that the endeavor was worth the emotional and financial risk.
As luck would have it, the feeling was correct. Becky felt the same way.
We spent the duration of the two-week stay having sex, making out, and making googley eyes at each other. I took great satisfaction in the idea of imposing my will and getting the girl I had a crush on; rugged individualism at work.
Upon leaving, I promised that I would come back just as soon as I could. We said that we loved each other and hashed out a crude plan: she would begin cosmetology school so that she could become a licensed hairstylist, I would live with her in her parents’ basement until she had her license, and then we would both move to London, a place for which Becky had an affinity. At the time, I just wanted to be with Becky and didn’t care where we ended up. She and she alone was my purpose in life.
To that end I got a temp job at Blue Star Engineering, a metal fabrication plant in the rough little town of South Ockendon. I worked the night shift from 10:00 p.m. until 6:00 a.m. The pay was eight pounds and fifty pence an hour and I saved practically every penny I earned to get back to Becky and New Jersey as soon as I could.
Being met by Becky at the airport remains one of the top three greatest feelings I have ever experienced. Three months of separation in which I worked high-paying but labor-intensive jobs, made and received hugely expensive international phone calls, sent and received thoughtful care packages of photographs, mix-tapes, and dirty underwear (hers) and sweated through a nerve-racking conversation with increasingly suspicious U.S. immigration officials ended here, in the arrivals hall of what was once known as Newark International Airport.
Becky’s parents were presented with somewhat of a fait accompli when they arrived back from a vacation in the Carolinas to find that a foreigner had taken up residence under their house, though they quickly and unreservedly embraced me as if I were one of their own.
Becky’s mother, Angela, was an Italian-American women whose joyous hospitality knew no bounds. The usual number of the house’s inhabitants was often augmented by random foreign businessmen, teens with speech impediments, adult illiterates, and people with various cognitive challenges. These people were students from the various specialist English classes that she’d taught over the years. Angela liked to delegate her hospitality throughout the family, once going as far as setting an eighteen-year-old Becky up on a date with a juvenile delinquent student who’d just been charged with arson. She also famously offered her older daughter Beth’s apartment as a safe house for a foreign student who hinted at being beaten by her husband.
For the first month of my stowing away in their basement, the Schumachers were also playing host to a snake-hipped six-foot-seven German grad student named Reiner, who would unleash a shrieking, effeminate laugh at the slightest provocation. The petting-zoo atmosphere in the three-bedroom Colonial made it fairly easy for me to fade into the background.
“It’s like the freaking UN in here!” wheezed Angela cheerfully, rustling up yet another stack of blueberry pancakes and a fresh pot of coffee. It was more like the cafeteria at the Tower of Babel.
Becky’s father, David, though also an educator, could not have been more different from his wife. A literature professor at a nearby university, he was stoic and Germanic, tall, blond, and mustachioed. He looked like Robert Redford, handsome and weather-worn in a manner that a man in his sixties deserves to be. Whatever he had to say was measured, thoughtful, entertaining, and always worth listening to. This wasn’t lost on the hooting, shrieking, stammering linguistic misfits, who fell to reverent silence when he spoke.
Understandably, Mr. Schumacher spent a lot of his free time in his wood shop, where he made hand-carved and extremely ornate scale models of schooners, model airplanes, and once got to work on refurbishing an impossibly long marimba from Central America.
Becky, her parents and I lived in Madison, New Jersey, which is also known as the Rose City. It’s a really charming, tidy little town about thirty miles west of New York City. It has an old-style movie theater with a marquee, an impressive white stone town hall, a picturesque main street with a town clock, and its lampposts have these spherical glass enclosures atop them, giving the town the appearance of being gaslit.
Without a work visa I couldn’t work legally in the United States, so I would have to find under-the-table work. The favorable exchange rate plus living at the Schumachers meant that the money I’d saved from my work at the factory would go a long way. Yet I felt that I needed to hustle for the sake of my incredibly generous adopted family. Becky had begun attending cosmetology school in Denville, leaving me to putter around the house all day. Some weeks passed and I grew self-conscious of my disheveled omnipresence in the Schumacher residence. Mr. Schumacher was on a yearlong sabbatical; we were always bumping into each other around the house and soon I was sufficiently embarrassed to at least appear to earn my keep in some capacity.
At Becky’s suggestion and with his permission, I took Mr. Schumacher’s steel-strung acoustic guitar and auditioned for a gig at a local coffeehouse. They were impressed enough by my performance of “Ziggy Stardust” to offer me a half-hour slot three months down the line, on the condition that I provide my own PA system and a large crowd of fans with a penchant for overpriced lattes and biscotti.
In the meantime, Becky began to keep me busy by having me attend cosmetology school with her four nights a week and using me as her model. I would bring a book to read while Becky quickly honed her styling of finger waves, application of eye shadow, manicures, pedicures, and paraffin hand wax treatments. There were around twelve other girls in the class, who would bring their friends, sisters, mothers, aunts. Half of them, Becky explained, were “royal guidettes”; the other half, near-destitute white trash. Only one other boyfriend was repeatedly subjected to the nightly makeovers. Chip had buck teeth, a dirt-lip mustache, and a thinning flat-top hairstyle. He looked to be around thirty and was incredibly scrawny. He wore a holey, blue New York Yankees sweater with a cream-colored dickey underneath and acid-wash jeans that had an elasticized waistband. By the end of each night, however, his eye shadow was fierce, his skin rid of superficial blemishes, and his hands baby soft. Despite the dark rings around her eyes and missing bicuspid, his girlfriend, Tiffany, was a stunning-looking twenty-year-old, though far too poor to realize it and too luckless to do anything about her situation. She was carrying Chip’s child. On a couple of occasions they hopped into their rusty pickup truck after class and met us at the nearby Applebee’s, blasting Def Leppard all the way. Across the table, Chip and I embarrassingly batted our thick and lustrous eyelashes at each other.
Through a friend of Becky’s I began interning at a tiny independent record company on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, about an hour-and-twenty-minute commute from Madison. Becky and I had gone into the city a handful of times, though my first commute alone was incredibly daunting. Due to my childhood experiences with London, I was still unsettled by the very idea of the city, and felt much more at home slinking around the Mall at Short Hills than the mania of New York City. As I walked down to the platform at 34th Street, I couldn’t quite believe that I had summoned up the courage to actually be riding the New York subway system. The perception of the New York subway in England was around ten years out of date. I had been led to believe that being mugged, stabbed, or shot was virtually assured, and despite Becky’s insistence to the contrary, I was practically shaking as I inserted a token into the turnstile, and I nervously chuckled at the ridiculousness of the situation.
Becky had given me a crib sheet of exactly how to get to the Orchard Records office:
Midtown Direct train from Madison to Penn Station.
Take the A, C, or E downtown to West 4th St.
Walk down a level and catch a B, D, F, or Q train to Grand St.
Walk four blocks east to Orchard St., turn south.
45 Orchard Street is between Grand and Hester.
I’d asked Becky if New Yorkers carried compasses, as they always seemed to talk about things being north, south, east, and west; it’s very alien to the English ear as an urban navigational tool.
“If the street numbers are getting higher you are headed north, if the avenues are getting higher you are headed west. Get it?”
I looked at her blankly.
“Look, if you can see the Chrysler Building or the Empire State Building, that’s probably going to be north. If you can see the World Trade Center, that’s almost definitely south.”
I wasn’t confident that I’d get to my destination without incident, so I brought a pocketful of quarters in case I needed Becky to talk me in remotely. Despite the alphanumeric subway lines making little sense, I managed to make it.
The Lower East Side, south of Delancey, looked exactly how the huddled masses had left it. Everything about it was decrepit, musty, and narrow. I’d been to Times Square, midtown, and the West Village, but this was a part of the city I immediately felt a strong affinity for.
Orchard Records was headed up by a gentleman named Richard “Richie” Gottehrer. His name came with the garish and unwieldy prefix of “music industry legend.” Richard cowrote a host of hits in the sixties, including “My Boyfriend’s Back,” “In the Night Time,” “Sorrow,” and “I Want Candy.” He produced “Hang on Sloopy” by the McCoys, cofounded Sire Records with Seymour Stein, had produced the first Blondie records and albums by the Go-Gos.
Chris Apostolou managed almost everything in the office, including the staff of interns, which at the time was really just me. With petty cash, Chris paid for my commute and lunches, and usually found an extra fifty bucks for me at the end of the week. My work was mostly helping with tour support for the seven or eight groups on the label. This meant preparing and sending tour posters, press releases, and CDs to radio stations and venues, plus runs to the bank, post office, print shops, and so on. While running errands around the Lower East Side, I never ceased to be amazed by the insular urban neighborhood feel where Jewish, Chinese, and Hispanic neighborhoods had converged, how their boundaries were constantly being redrawn month to month, with Chinatown encroaching from the west and the hipster contingent pushing down from the north. Yet in this state of flux, many shopkeepers of a bygone era stayed put.
Orchard Records rented half a shop front from Irving and Beatrice Salwen, who sold wholesale umbrellas in the other half. Irving was a ninety-five-year-old man who was as much a fixture of the neighborhood as Gus’s Pickles, Katz’s Deli, and Yonah Schimmel’s Knishes. Irving would sit in a plastic chair outside the store and play his fiddle to the rapidly diminishing number of customers who walked by. Bea, being twenty-five years his junior, ran the store, ran their home, and increasingly ran Irving as he lived out the last years of his long life.
The block was still full of Hasidic men who sold men’s suits or women’s hosiery. I always thought it was odd that though even shaking a woman’s hand was forbidden by their religion, they would spend all day displaying thongs and fishnet stockings in their dusty windows. Every day, five times a day, Israel would try to talk me into a “nice suit.” With the changes on the block, business looked to be waning and everyone was getting the hard sell.
After a surprisingly short period of time, I found myself falling in love with the life I’d fallen into by accident, feeling more at home in a foreign country, in an alien situation, than I ever had done in my hometown. Since arriving in America, I’d been humbled by the hospitality showed to me and found myself wondering what it was about being in New York that made me feel like the “real” me. There seemed, for the first time, to be nothing to stand in the way between me and being truly happy.