Working Stiff (3 page)

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 pla
tonic 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.