Working Stiff (4 page)

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:

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.

AFTER BEING AWAY
from home for three months, I started to get a different perspective on where I'd come from. The threat of random acts of violence was suddenly palpable to me. In New York, I haven't even
heard
of anyone having a pint glass smashed into their face, a pool ball in a sock swung into their teeth, or being thrown through the window of a kebab shop. Not only could you see all this on any given night at a chain wine bar in Essex, you could set your watch to the opening salvos of verbal abuse at chucking-out time. These places require “gentlemen” to wear a dress shirt, formal leather shoes, and dark trousers, purportedly to keep out the riffraff, harkening back to a time when the local shit-kickers couldn't afford to look presentable.

Whatever the feeling is that makes someone want to beat another person until they stop moving, it's contagious and intoxicating in towns that sprang out of the countryside surrounding London after the Second World War. I spent my late teens wary of being its victim and frightened at how easily I could be swept away in the exhilaration of a “good kicking,” albeit from the sidelines. Along with my dress shirt and dress shoes, I slapped on enough of the aftershave I got for Christmas to mask the fear.

The town I grew up in is the perfect petri dish for arbitrary vandalism and senseless violence. Corringham manages to combine the humdrum existence of a country village with all the trappings of urban decay, making the place look like a vandalized Teletubby land. The glass bus shelter at the bottom of our street is shattered, replaced and shattered again every week, the red phone box stinks of stale piss, and the iconic red pillar boxes have all had the word “cunt” painstakingly etched into the paintwork with a school's compass needle. I still get embarrassed just thinking about the white-haired and russet-faced old ladies who have to read it every time they post a letter. You can divide the town's populace neatly in two: those who have come to the town in the past fifty-five years and their descendants are the majority, initially from heavily bombed parts of east London; and then a small and overwhelmed minority of hobbitlike country folk who were there before, presumably from the beginning of time.

Initially a distinction was made between the areas where the original village folk lived and where the interlopers had moved into new housing estates and blocks of flats half a mile away. Now Old Corringham and New Corringham run into each other and are much less distinguishable in both look and feel.

Corringham has changed more in the past fifty years than at any time in its fifteen-hundred-year history. A thousand-year-old church stands next to a centuries-old pub, all adjacent to a farm. A hundred and fifty yards up the road is a parade of around a dozen shops that in my lifetime included an old-fashioned barbershop, a butcher's, a bakery, a place that sold local fruit and vegetables, a fish and chip shop,
a fishmongers, a post office, a betting shop, an old-fashioned druggist, an electrical repair shop, a bank, a bicycle repair shop, and a doctor's office. Lampits Hill now encompasses a tanning salon, a hair and nail parlor, a kebab shop, two Chinese restaurants, an Indian restaurant, a disco and party supplies store (run by my uncle's brother-in-law, a.k.a. Dennis the DJ), a “continental-style” café, and at the very top of the hill, the office of a rather eccentric New Age reflexologist and Reiki healer, who also doubles as my mother.

Whatever it was that possessed her to become the town's shaman took hold shortly after I left for college. I was extremely skeptical about the demand for black magic in a town like ours, but apparently business is booming. My mother's clientele is elderly and plentiful around Christmastime, thanks to her brilliant introduction of gift certificates. I always imagine the look on a dignified yet provincial older lady's face as she steps into a room filled with the sounds of the panpipes and the alien stink of frankincense. The poor old girl had probably expected a pair of slippers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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