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 fin
ger 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.
THE TIME DIFFERENCE
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 div
ide 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.
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