Dispatches From a Dilettante

by Paul Rowson

  Further afield but visible from the square are the pitiful trailer homes of some of the mission residents. Space not being an issue the detritus of life’s struggles can be seen scattered outside…..a pick-up truck on breeze blocks…two broken bikes…an abandoned fridge. The few high rise buildings in the centre of Tucson, which house the usual corporations, can also be seen from here, but the San Xavier Mission looks and feels like an impoverished area of Mexico. This is no surprise as a hundred and fifty years ago it was part of Mexico, and even today the border is only sixty miles to the south.

  We headed down the Ajo Highway and then onto the interstate towards Nogales and Mexico. Ed Vulliamy’s excellent book ‘Amexica’ details the horrific war being waged all along the Mexican American border between drug cartels fighting for turf and crossing points, corrupt police and the Border Patrol. As we arrived at the border, paid our four bucks to park, and strolled through a couple of turnstiles from Nogales Arizona into Nogales Mexico the transformation from first world to third world was stark and instant. Americans used to cross in numbers to buy cheap medicine and have cut priced cosmetic dental surgery. Since 9/11 they hardly come at all although, strangely, I don’t think Osama has been targeting Nogales to smuggle Jihadists into the US despite the hysteria of Fox News.

  I mention our little ramble into Nogales, Mexico because of two small incidents that occurred there. We were the only visitors walking along a street consisting of dozens of shops and stalls selling the usual tourist tat. A knackered old donkey hitched to a trap draped in the Mexican flag had obviously not pulled a tourist around town for some considerable time. The world weary hawker outside one shop had heard us refuse the pitches of other owners to come in and see the goods. As we approached he languidly raised his shades looked us in the eye, and said “Hey gringos…step eento my shop and let me rip you off”. When we declined he muttered something else in Spanish which I didn’t catch but made the other shopkeepers in hearing distance double up with laughter.

  We walked back to the border crossing and went through a long outdoor ‘funnel’ leading to a series of booths with desks in front of the turnstiles which would spin us back into the USA. At these desks those crossing, who were nearly all Mexican day workers, were individually questioned by Border Guards. I was in a separate queue to my wife but she was thrilled to hear the border guard questioning me point across to her and say “Is that your arm candy?” On getting a reply in the affirmative he smiled lasciviously said “nice” and waved me through. This is why Elspeth has always requested a trip to Nogales every year we are in the South West.

  17.

  IRMA AND THE MUDCATS - DALLAS 1982

  When you have spent a lifetime watching soccer, exposed to the elements, in run down rusty old grounds where all the teams were called ‘City’, ‘United’, ‘Town’, or sometimes even ‘Albion’, I regarded what I was about to witness as a reward. The Dallas Ladies team, with the frankly unfathomable name of Irma and The Mudcats (Who was Irma? Was she the goalkeeper, the coach or maybe the manager?), were to play an exhibition match for the delegates of the US Soccer Conference that I was attending. There had been a minor pre match crisis in that one of the team had forgotten their cleats. I was full of empathy, without having a clue what had been forgotten, but when the cleats turned up I realised that they were what many Americans call football boots. The temperature at pitch side was a hundred and ten degrees Fahrenheit, I was overdressed and jetlagged, but remained ebullient simply by having got to Dallas at very short notice.

  My closest pal at the time, who I had known since schooldays, had been a professional footballer and had just retired. Throughout his playing career in the lower divisions he had always remarked on the lack of visual aids to help coach or even give decent half time talks. I was ready to enjoy the long summer break, still being in teaching, and we came up with the idea of manufacturing a portable briefcase sized tactic board. The minor inconvenience caused by the fact that neither of us had any marketing, manufacturing or business skills did not deter us. Gamely we trudged round factories with our idea and eventually a small firm in Batley knocked up fifty prototypes.

  Through my friend’s connections in the game we did manage to get a silhouette of Glenn Hoddle on the front which was about the only thing we got right. Again via his contacts we blagged our way into an international team coaches’ seminar at Bisham Abbey, which was where the England team then trained. The Finish team manager loved it, The USA Coach though it would sell in truckloads. This was clearly going to be a breeze. Through other connections we got in touch with an ex Sun journalist who had set up a soccer store in the States called ‘Soccerama’. He told us of the upcoming conference and, as I was the only one with an American visa off I went. The prototypes weighed a ton yet, in those pre terrorist days of yore, I managed somehow to get them on the plane as hand luggage.

  Within minutes of arriving at the conference hotel and bathed in sweat from lugging the tactics boards I had met our American contact in the foyer. Immediately after a perfunctory greeting, he grabbed a board from me, showed it to his companion and said “What would you pay for this?” When the reply was ‘five bucks’ I felt like getting a cab straight back to the airport because our ball park sales figure was pitched at around twenty seven.

  The delegates were a mix of the weird and wonderful which is why I fitted right in. There were farmers from Ohio of German decent who ran local teams, there were delegates from Peru who ran semi-professional teams and there were hundreds of delegates from the thriving woman’s college game in the Dallas metroplex. Barkers at the various stalls enticed delegates with phrases like ‘See the world’s greatest save on video’ or ‘See soccer players run seven miles in a game’.

  For a moment it did cross my mind to inform them that Franny Lee had made a perfectly good career at Manchester City by never having run more than a hundred yards in a game and that fifty of those were to get inside the penalty area in order to perform his dramatic falling down routine. Of course I didn’t because in their enthusiastic naivety they had not heard of Franny Lee or indeed would not have cared about him if they had. This was a different game played by a different type of person in a different country and, in a way it was much the better for it. Soccer moms were on the march and even if they didn’t know a centre back from a striker there was a ‘joi de vivre’ about the exhibition games that I had not witnessed for a long time.

  Meanwhile my ‘joi de vivre’ was melting away in the heat as the tactic boards had not created a sales stampede. For once listening properly to well meant advice from a stallholder nearby, I lowered the price slightly on the last day, put a sign saying ‘Last Few’ and another which read ‘Make your team 15% Better if you Buy This’. A Peruvian bought twenty, untroubled by the fact that no team had actually used one thus far, and the rest went before the day was out. Back in my room the phone message light was blinking and news came that Manchester United and Norwich City had ordered tactic boards. Barely pausing to consider the stark reality that we didn’t have any more to sell, I got ready to party secure in my arrogance that global dominance of soccer coaching aids was just around the corner.

  For the conference last night ‘bash’ a Dallas multi millionaire insurance magnate had loaned his ranch set in sumptuous grounds on the outskirts of the city. We were bussed out there, and then in via his gated security, to a plush marquee by a lake. On getting off the buses each delegate was given a red bandana and a Stetson. Several bands were playing live music in various corners of his considerable acreage and free booze was flowing.

  After rather too much of it had flowed my way I found myself agreeing to dance the Texas Two Step. I like to think that it was called that because after two steps you fall down, but somehow I doubt it. Undaunted by my brush with Texan dance culture I continued to imbibe until I was found conscious, but barely coherent, listening to a fabulous fiddle player. Perhaps, had I realised that I was the only one listening to the fiddler, it would have signa
lled to me that the coaches had long returned the delegates to their Dallas hotel, as a ranch hand was now gently informing me.

  “I’ve lost my Stetson” was all I could manage by way of a response as it began to dawn on me that even if I found my recently acquired headgear I had no way of getting it and me back to the hotel. Displaying a generosity of spirit far greater that the occasion demanded, the ranch hand said “I think I need to get you home son” and pointed his flatbed pickup truck. He then whistled his dog up to the passenger seat in the cab and got me to ride outside in the back. This was his attempt to help with the sobering up process which worked a treat as he drove the twenty miles back to downtown Dallas.

  On a balmy night with the breeze ruffling my red bandana we slalomed off freeway exits as I howled at the moon and sang J.J. Cale’s entire back catalogue, safe in the knowledge that nobody could hear a word.

  Back in cloudy Leeds, my bandana was quickly dispatched to the bottom of the clothes cupboard. We realised that although enthusiasm for our product was genuine, the current order book stood at twenty eight, which was precisely twenty four more that we had left and two less than the Peruvian had bought. Time to put up or shut up and we went down without much of a fight. We lacked the nerve or knowledge to gamble on big numbers or to market the board if we did commit to production.

  At about this time my friend got an offer, via a contact I had made in Dallas, to go and coach in the USA. He accepted with alacrity, moved with his family to the States, and I have not seen or heard from him since. For the next ten years I got the odd call from league clubs asking where they could buy a board, but as I have the only one still in existence, and it is high up in the attic, their calls were to no avail.

  18.

  BAR ROOM BRAWLS 1965-1992

  Manual Labour – Nine Days 1969

  The erudite Irish navvy leant on his spade, expertly prepared a roll up, inhaled deeply and said to me “Do you know what I heard yesterday on this very building site?” I confirmed that I did not. “Yer man over there broke his spade in the middle of mixing concrete and shouted ‘Oh fuck, the fucking fucker’s fucking fucked’ – now you’re a student so please tell me which was the adjective, the adverb the noun, and any other parts of speech you’d care to identify”. It goes without saying that I was completely fucked for an answer.

  It was Easter 1969 and in a frantic attempt to raise money for the flight to the USA, or more accurately to pay back my single mother for the loan that secured the ticket, a pal and I were trawling building sites in Leeds looking for work. I was a skinny nineteen year old who had no experience of sustained hard manual labour, but my more ‘worldly’ friend assured me that it was the way to earn big money quickly. The key to getting taken on apparently was to utter the magic words “Any chance of a start?” On hearing this specific phrase any site manager would be convinced that we were itinerant navvies and rush to secure our services.

  After five failed attempts where we never got to see a foreman let alone get ‘a start’, the magic wasn’t working. Things looked up when we got past the perimeter fencing and walked into the rubble of the Leeds Odeon Cinema. The almost finished construction project was part demolition and part refurbishment, and at least we got what might be loosely called an ‘interview’.

  This consisted solely and, rather alarmingly, of the foreman grabbing hold of my friend’s hands and turning them palm upwards. Luckily they were calloused from a paid stint the previous week helping his father dig an extension trench round their house. A cursory glance at mine would have revealed smooth palms untroubled by hard graft and ones that rarely picked up anything heavier than a bag of chips. The foreman would also have noticed upon inspection that I had the upper body strength of an eight year old girl.

  Luck, for some reason, was on our side and without bothering to quiz us further he said “Start tomorrow at eight am, concreting, finish at nine pm for the next nine days”. As he walked away his final and barely audible words were “fifty three quid – cash”. We affected nonchalance, walked off site and round the corner where we screamed our delight to the alarm of passing shoppers. Fifty three quid was a fortune then and, blinded by the riches that were shortly to come our way, it only slowly dawned on us that thirteen hours a day of concreting, would probably be extremely physically demanding.

  We found, within minutes of starting the next morning, the reason we had been given a ‘start’. The contractors were behind schedule, and in nine days time they faced potential default payments which must have been severe as they had actually taken on another five men on the same day they hired us. The building industry is very different now, but then we were given no safety instructions, no protective clothing and no hard hats. The one thing we were handed was a shovel and told in very plain language not to break or lose it – hence the grammatically precise exclamatory remarks which we were to be quizzed on later.

  There was a huge area to be filled with concrete which, inexplicably, could not be reached by the chutes that normally disgorge vast amounts of concrete into big holes on building sites. Thus a crude, uneven and unstable concrete ‘run’ had been constructed from planks on bricks. We wheeled our barrows up to the mixer had them filled and then did the run of about thirty metres to the tipping point – for hour after relentless hour. It was all I could do at first to lift the wheel barrow and turn it round and on the first run I failed to get up the slight incline to the tipping point and had to be helped. I expected derision from the mostly Irish labourers but they either felt my evident inadequacy wasn’t worth their scorn or they were a bunch of really good guys. Thankfully they were the latter and gave me smaller loads for the first couple of days.

  Thirteen hours is a long time and I had never known fatigue like the utter exhaustion that I felt after day one. My mother was so alarmed at my inability to grip my knife and fork to eat the meal she had warmed up for me on my late return, that she rushed and got a ‘Double Diamond’ to ‘relax’ me. For younger readers this was an alcoholic beverage sold in the late sixties and advertised with the tag line ‘A Double Diamond Works Wonders!” She virtually had to pour it down my throat as my grip reflex had ceased to operate at all. It failed demonstrably to effect any ‘Wonders’ but sleep is of course the great restorer and although bleary eyed and stiff I made it in for day two.

  After a couple of hours there was a break from concreting and we were sent upstairs to rip apart two of the old dressing rooms which were merely to be refurbished rather than demolished and rebuilt. We hacked listlessly at an old cupboard which came apart easily but contained half a dusty cardboard flier. ‘3rdNovember 1963….in place of the usual film programme…one night only…. Exciting, Dynamic, Fabulous THE BEATLES’. Then underneath and clearly second on the bill ‘Britain’s top disc double – The Brook Brothers’. On what remained of the poster you could just make out Peter J…and the rest was lost when someone had ripped it in half. T’internet tells me it was Peter Jay and the Jaywalkers and even at the time I knew the Brook Brothers had been billed as ‘Britain’s answer to the Everly Brothers’.

  Enthused by this ‘find’, which sadly neither of us had the foresight to keep, we hacked away further but nothing else was revealed from what was a rare music show at the cinema. What this little interlude had provided though was a blessed respite from the concreting to which we were soon recalled.

  Nine days doesn’t seem a long time but I nearly packed it in at least twice every day. We made it to the end and on the last night had a glorious drinking session with some of the regular labourers in pub by the market. Delirious with fatigue and alcohol I got off the bus home early to pick up some fish and chips. Thrilled with the focus I had applied to make it as far as our front door, but unable summons the hand eye co-ordination required to get my key out, I knocked loudly. I was in mid vomit when my mother opened the door and then kindly, instead of remonstrating with me, cleared the mess up, while I crashed around before collapsing onto the bed still fully clothed. At some lev
el I think she thought this might be a sign that I could stick at something and on another she knew that her generous loan to fund the flight costs would be repaid which I ‘m sure she had not counted on. My unorthodox homecoming was never mentioned again.

  In the interest of accuracy I should mention that this was, strictly speaking, not the first attempt at manual labour. However as the first lasted two days before dramatic interruption, I think I can be excused. At the tender age of seventeen a friendly neighbour who was a builder hired me in the summer to ‘do odd jobs’. Driving to the site where he was starting to build a house the odd jobs he talked about were to commence with the digging of a foundation trench. Heavy rain prevented much action on day one and on the second day he nearly killed me.

  Diving rather too quickly in a van without seat belts he was forced to brake suddenly and skidded into the car in front. My head hit the windscreen so hard that it actually came free of its’ attachment to the frame of the car. Mercifully it did not shatter but I instantly had a huge swelling on the left side of my forehead, and felt dizzy. I had never heard of the word ‘litigation’ or ‘culpability’ but the builder had understood instantly the implication of my injury, which is why he was incredibly solicitous as to my wellbeing. I spent the rest of the day in the hut on site brewing tea and he paid me for the week and ‘let me go’ after the second day.

  Manual Labour – Thirteen Days 1973

  Life could not be described as glamorous when I lived briefly above a sewing shop in Leigh. It had formerly been the living quarters of my then girlfriend’s parents who had moved out into a new house. Quite understandably they wanted to keep me as far away from their daughter as possible, hence the solo accommodation. One of her college lecturers’ was married to a big property developer in Wigan and I was unemployed. After a campaign by my girlfriend, who was kind intelligent and mature and therefore obviously got rid of me soon after, I was taken on by him for unspecified duties.