Dispatches From a Dilettante

by Paul Rowson

  On the third morning Howie was so stoned that he allowed me to drive. We were loaded with laundry and had been asked to take three freshly baked apple pies from the kitchen in one hotel on our journey round the lakes to be delivered at the other. These were placed carefully on the front bench seat between us. The journey was less than a mile but involved a couple of steep hills. I was quietly and somewhat smugly congratulating myself on getting the hand of this truck driving lark when three hundred metres in, on my driving debut, we approached the first downward slope. A skunk shot across the road in front of us and I instinctively hit the brakes hard. Howie, who had been barely conscious, shot forward and hit his head on the windscreen. He remained barely conscious. This was of no consequence when compared to the fate of the apple pies which had slid off the seat and now resembled a Jackson Pollack portrait on the floor of the cab. I was moved off laundry truck duties and downgraded to dishwashing in the kitchen.

  This move proved to extremely beneficial from a linguistic point of view. Never before, as a callow youth from England, had I heard the words ‘motherfucker’ or ‘cocksucker’. Later on my first day in the kitchen I was to hear them both in one sentence and directed at me.

  The menial duties in my new workspace were exclusively done by black staff. The waiters were all white as were the chefs. In my innocent life to date I had never seen a divide writ so large. It was an accepted division by both parties and all the more repugnant because of that. Minimum wage was better than no wage and even this seasonal casual work was a foot on the job ladder. I quickly became the novelty act in a heaving, hellishly hot, noisy and always overstretched kitchen. Rapidly I came to understand what hard and grindingly repetitive work was like. Huge scorching hot and greasy metal trays were dumped in the sink that I had been assigned to and I washed and scrubbed them…minute after minute and hour after hour. Catering on a mass scale obviously means washing up of a similar volume.

  After three hours solid I went outside for a breather, which was a big mistake. The conveyor belt system had been interrupted and when I got back a mountain of unwashed utensils had spilled on to the floor. At that moment Kenneth B. Phillips Junior came into the kitchen on a rare visit, possibly to see how his English employee was doing after the apple pie truck disaster. As he entered the washing up area so did the chef who, seeing the carnage caused by my unauthorised break turned to him and said, “Kenny… get that motherfucking, cocksucking limey outta my kitchen.” Even Kenneth looked slightly askance at the brutality of this but ‘chefs rule’ and as Kenneth walked off he said in a rather brusque way, “Paul we gotta talk in the morning.” The summer of sixty nine wasn’t turning out the way I had dreamed it and having been relieved of two jobs in four days the next day’s ‘talk’ did not seem to be a meeting that I could look forward to with confidence.

  Feeling vulnerable and a long way from home I arrived next morning for the appointed ‘talk’ and miraculously left it with a new challenge. I say challenge because what transpired as my next assignment could in no way be called a job. Kenneth’s opening question was to enquire whether I played soccer. I confirmed with him that I did, which was the truth. Kenneth went on to explain that in settlement of a bar room argument with the Greek American owner of a similar resort in the Catskills called Lake Mohonk, a soccer match was to be played in three days time between the staff of the two resorts. There was $500 riding on the result and the Greek American had nominated a man, who he assured Kenneth was a qualified referee on vacation in the area, to control proceedings. He turned out to be a Scottish rugby union player who had seen Partick Thistle play once.

  It has to be remembered that in 1969, way before global TV broadcasts, soccer had zero presence in the States even as a college sport. However my remit was to get a pitch marked out, get goalposts erected and select a team. A team that, I was reminded by Kenneth, was to win him $500 bucks. Getting the pitch sorted turned out to be quite easy and by midday there were posters all round the staff quarters, golf course and swimming areas advertising the ‘Soccer Challenge’ with those interested in playing to ‘come to a meeting with Paul at 7pm in the staff canteen.’

  At this point I hadn’t thought to ask about kit, boots or balls. I was informed by Kenneth that we would be having a ‘time out’ in each half. It made it sound like a cigarette break which it turned out, by and large, to be. Thirty two made the meeting more out or curiosity than a serious bid for a place on the ‘roster’ as Kenneth insisted on calling it. We had our one and only practice the next day.

  Somewhere out in America there exists a silent super eight film of that practice and whoever now has possession of it is sitting on a comedic goldmine. I didn’t even attempt to explain the offside rule but tried to use the three players who had played before, one of whom was a fit and intelligent American student of Puerto Rican background (Edward), to coach the others. This being the days before substitutes I then picked a final eleven who were to carry honour or more likely the burden of representing Lake Minnewaska. Quite intentionally I omitted to inform them of $500 side bet on the basis that if I was sick with worry thinking about it they would feel the same.

  There was a loudspeaker system in the trees all round the resort, a la Butlins, which at times made it seem like a prison camp when announcements were made. However the ‘Soccer Challenge’ was given top billing next morning and guests invited to attend. The result was that at half past two when I went down to the pitch there must have been five hundred people there, which was bigger than any crowd I’d played in front of.

  Lake Mohonk arrived by coach and twenty four ‘players’ got off, clearly under the impression that we were playing an American Football squad rotation system. They also had matching kit and worse still four footballs, which they kicked around during the warm up in a way that suggested they knew what they were doing. I lined the team up in four, three, three formation for kick off which was the only time they stayed in that shape throughout the game. The Scottish barman in the back four had instructions to hoof it to Edward and I up front at any opportunity. The only other ‘tactics’ were to get our other American guys, who included some tough nuts from the ground staff, to be as rough as possible and chase for everything.

  We played in purple sashes, most wore trainers and two wore climbing boots. We kicked off. The crown cheered, and generously cheered again as Lake Mohonk opened the scoring after eight seconds. Strangely that galvanised us as we soon realised that, although they could play a little, they were not fit and crucially lacked spirit. As the game wore on they continually bickered about who was going on or off the field, as we had not contested their squad size or their intent to use all of them. The crowd were on our side even if they did cheer for things like goal kicks. Anything that achieved distance was rewarded with an even bigger cheer. At the first time out I found myself talking to a group who hardly knew each others’ names, were not sure what they were playing, but wanted badly to win.

  Disaster struck just before the interval with a freak own goal and at half time we were 2-0 down. I am not of any religious persuasion, but I’d swear on a stack of bibles that what I write next is exactly what happened. Suffice it to say that I scored a second half hat trick and we won 3-2. Two of them were tap-ins after Edward, who had worked tirelessly, set them up. The third was a thumping volley from twenty yards the effect of which was only somewhat mitigated by the fact that I was a good ten yards offside. A photo was taken of female staff holding the leg that scored the winning goal, which luckily was still connected to the rest of me. Kenneth won his five hundred dollars, gave all the players a half day off and I decided life could not get any better at Lake Minnewaska. I quit the next morning, hitched a lift into town with the resort limo driver and headed for Atlantic City.

  America that summer was in political turmoil. The Vietnam war was not going well and when campus kids began to be drafted the middle classes produced an articulate opposition to the war in double quick time. From the anonymity of a Greyhound bus
on the freeway to Atlantic City I read the stickers on car bumpers as they hissed by my window in the rain. ‘America - Love it or Leave it’ said one on the back of a huge Cadillac. Cars were still mostly American manufactured in the US then and large gas guzzlers with it. The first non American vehicle I spotted minutes later was a battered Volvo with the perfect response defiantly posted for all to read… ‘America - Change it or Lose it.’ A Chevy truck swung by with a frightening piece of polemic on the back window ‘Get behind our troops or get in front of them.’ Just as I was beginning to feel depressed by it all as I felt an aspiring hippy should, a middle aged mom overtook the coach gripping the steering wheel of her Ford with a dogged determination. However on the back her humanity was revealed by the sticker… ‘Gimme the chocolate and no one gets hurt.’ I really hoped that it was her car.

  The woman sitting next to me was reading an underground student magazine. Under the title ‘We’ve cracked the code’ there was an article showing how students could use a credit card code to phone anywhere (illegally) in the world free. I was to try it out in a few days with disastrous results. A propos of nothing she glanced up and asked enigmatically “Are you into plants?” The look of disappointment on her face suggested she knew the answer and we rolled into Atlantic City in silence.

  The first impressions were of a town in decline as I was met at the bus station by James Lincoln. We had grown up in the same street in Leeds, had both got pathetic GCE results and scraped into different colleges. We’d travelled together to the States that summer even though our friendship was in inevitable decline. I had begun to realise that we had little in common apart from being a long way from home. However needs must and he took me to a former brothel which served as the staff quarters of the hotel where he was a bus boy. During my first evening spent drinking with some of the American summer staff who were, like me students, I was assured that if I went down to the staff canteen next morning and said that I was ‘working with Joe in maintenance’ it would be ‘no problem’ and free meals would follow.

  ‘No problem’ was a phrase that thankfully had not yet entered the English lexicon and so seemed to carry an authenticity that would allow me to eat gratis. ‘Hell….no one will even notice’ I was assured. Unfortunately it was a big problem as next morning in the canteen I clearly failed to speak with the required conviction when I mentioned where I was working. Or maybe it was because Joe had quit the night before, possibly having been accused of harbouring freeloading workshy students.

  I walked out onto the famous, if somewhat dilapidated, boardwalk to contemplate my options. It was three weeks and two days into a three months working vacation and I was hungry, hung over, broke and jobless. So of course I did what any self respecting man of my age would do and phoned my mum. I hadn’t anticipated being able to phone England during the whole period that I was in the USA. We had only just stopped having a shared line at home and had never made an international call at any point. We would have had to book it through an operator even if we could have afforded it, which is why I decided to use the code that I had read about on the coach. Knowing full well that I was about to commit my first criminal act in the USA (the second bafflingly was to steal a tie from Harvard Co-op which can only be accounted for by the fact that I was in a marijuana induced haze), I entered a phone booth on the boardwalk. In state of high anxiety I dialled the operator. My anxiety I am ashamed to say was not caused by any moral wavering but rather the thought of being caught. Nevertheless the operator answered and I said with as much panache as I could muster,

  “I’d like to make a credit card call to Leeds England”

  Thus far I was rather pleased with myself, particularly as I did not possess a credit card and would have had no idea how to use one.

  “Certainly sir what is your credit card number?”

  I hesitantly gave out made up numbers in the format suggested and when asked gave my real name. To my astonishment after a pause, a few clicks, distant sounds from the ether and some static, a phone started ringing in Leeds, England. A mother in Leeds, England answered. It was my mother. She became hysterical and only calmed down when I had convinced her that I was not fatally ill, in prison or hospital. She was obviously so pleased to hear from me that she didn’t enquire as to how I managed to phone her and I couldn’t bring myself to tell her of my current penniless, jobless and frankly hopeless position. Instead I painted a picture of the America that I had imagined I would be experiencing. I told her of the breakers crashing onto the beach at Atlantic City, the barbeques I had enjoyed at our relatives, the great job I had, the money I was earning and the friends I had made.

  The phone call ended and I walked straight out of the phone booth and into another job that lasted eight hours. Next to the booth was an ice cream company who, it transpired, employed five staff to walk up and down the beach selling ice creams from a tray, rather like cinema usherettes. One of them was clearly and loudly quitting on the spot. I walked up and upon enquiring was told it was ten bucks a day if I started immediately. There was no request for a green card, visa or social security number. Mind you the Italian guy that imparted this information was straight out of central casting for a mob film. He then gave me my training which consisted of me having to commit to saying the two compulsory phrases that I was assured would result in sales of vast magnitude.

  “Get a stick for your chick to lick”

  “Get a lolly for your dolly”

  For the rest of the day I strolled, with as much bravado as I could summons, along the beach whispering those phrases as quietly as I could in case anybody heard. When I did speak, the words came out in broad Yorkshire with the result that people looked quizzically at me as I meandered aimlessly in the dappled late afternoon sunlight alone on a beach on the eastern seaboard of the United States of America.

  In what passed for a planning meeting James and I talked and drank late into the night weighing up the options as to what our next moves might be. He was disenchanted with the hotel work and we resolved to set off the next morning for Cambridge, Massachusetts. As far as I can recall we had come to this decision using the impeccable reasoning of the vacuous hedonists that we undoubtedly were. That is to say we could not afford a bus ticket to go any further, James had worked with a girl from Cambridge Mass. in England the previous summer and Harvard University canteen did great food for $5 according to someone who had been listening in to our discussions.

  We checked into the YMCA there eight hours later, started the job hunt the following morning and split up with the intent of meeting again in the evening. After no luck at all I found out that James had fluked a job at the first place he had walked into and would now be making avocado salads in the kitchen of a restaurant just off Harvard Square. I grew increasingly desperate as the next few days brought nothing close to employment. Such was my desperation that I took to slinking around in the alley behind the restaurant where James was working and he, at no little risk, threw out food to me.

  I briefly became a cockroach exterminator in the dark vast basements of the Hotel Elliot. It was survival of the fittest down there and I lasted just long enough to get an advance on my first wage before realising the killer spray that I dispensed was affecting me more than the giant cockroaches. An hour giving blood brought $5. Working for ‘Handy Andy Work Power’ earned me another $12. This involved lining up for two hours at the agency and then being a driver’s mate on a trip to Fall River. We picked up a sofa, drove back and I knew that, whatever job satisfaction meant, it wasn’t this.

  Eventually I did get employment that would last two months, increase my knowledge of the American music scene and enable me to experience the most pain a human being can endure without screaming.

  SALVI Ford was a family owned car dealership. As I sauntered in to the welcome cool provided by the ancient air conditioning unit in their showroom a woman, who turned out to be Mrs Salvi, gave a disinterested nod of acknowledgement. Having been in the business for years it had taken her
but a moment to decide that I was not a potential customer but, on enquiring about job prospects, was quickly met with a smile and told that there was a vacancy in the prep bay.

  A man appeared in a cheap suit and with similar initial disinterest quizzed me. I filled in a form and was given meaningful employment. It transpired that new cars were delivered to the bay to be stripped of all packaging, stickers, protective strips etc. which is what I would be doing. The cars were then hosed down, polished and cleaned before being positioned in the showroom. In the bay was a huge old speaker through which a Boston FM radio station pumped out music all day long. On my first day I heard ‘Lay Lady Lay’ by Bob Dylan nine times and ‘Proud Mary’ by Credence Clearwater Revival nine and a half times. It would have been ten but someone turned the electricity off to signal the end of the shift as I was polishing the wheel rims on a Country Squire. This believe it or not was the name for Ford’s latest estate car which had a bigger square footage than the flat in Liverpool that I had recently vacated.

  By week two I was allowed to drive the cars round to the showroom and in the third week was asked to take a used car from the lot, get the orders from the mechanics, and go to the local coffee shop to pick them up. Redefining the word ‘impressionable’ I went instantly to the local drugstore and bought some shades so as to look cool when driving. This new look may have had something to do with my shunting the car in front of me on the debut appearance of the shades. By a miracle no real damage was caused but it was the second time I had heard the word motherfucker. Who said that Americans don’t appreciate the nuances of language?