American on Purpose (23 page)

N
ot long after I got the show, Andi and I split up, as she had foreseen, and since then I’d been dogging around Hollywood, enjoying my newfound micro-celebrity. I was dating some well-known actresses, and getting mentioned in gossip columns for dating other well-known actresses that I hardly knew at all.

I suppose I was having a good time, but this kind of thing can get a little lonely and I had a fear of turning into one of those louche old twerps with dyed hair and a brow lift who hang around the Playboy mansion. I thought that was what the future had in store for me until I went to a party in New York City that I didn’t want to go to.

A wealthy and well-connected Scottish émigré who lives in Manhattan named Jeffrey Scott Carroll had invited me, and because I like Jeffrey I went. I couldn’t get there until it was almost over, and by then I was already very tired and grumpy from attending an earlier event that I also didn’t want to go to, but when you’re in New York on a promotional trip, the TV folks like to trot you around a bit.

Jeffrey and I were chatting when the most incandescently shim
mering vision of a woman I had ever set eyes on came over. She said hi to him and he said, “This is Megan Wallace Cunningham.”

I think I actually took a step back. Her long blond hair and her clear green eyes and her dress and her earrings and her smile and I don’t know, everything. I mumbled something like “Hello, you’re lovely, I love you, you have nice hair, let’s get married” or words to that effect. I’m not usually nervous around beautiful women, but I totally lost my cool with this one. I probably drooled or spat or twitched or farted or something. Whatever I did, it made her laugh, and when I saw her laugh I was a goner.

Then we got to talking. She had no idea what I did for a living, although one of her friends staggered over at one point and said, in an upper-class English accent, “Be careful, Megan. He’s on
television!
”

She said “television” like it meant “serial killer.”

Luckily Megan didn’t pay any attention because she had recognized my accent, and her own family was Scottish. She told me that her grandfather had emigrated from Edinburgh, dirt poor as a young man, and had gone on to make his fortune in America. She had been to Scotland many times and knew every obscure cultural reference I threw at her.

I was deeply impressed.

Nothing happened that night between us but we stayed in touch on the telephone, though with her in New York and me in L.A. it seemed we were never likely to meet up, same as when I started dating Helen. After months of long-distance calls I finally persuaded her to come and visit for a weekend. She did and we fell in love, or, perhaps more accurately, we admitted we already had, the moment we met. Then came a year of bicoastal-relationship bullshit, involving too much phone sex and too many air miles. Finally Megan upped sticks and moved to my house in Los Angeles. Our house, I should say, because by the time you read this, we’ll be married. I swore I’d never do it again, and I wouldn’t have for
anyone else but her, which I suppose tells you that it’s the right thing to do. Megan is strong and patient and kind and nurturing and funny and knows about art. She’s sexy and clever and sweet and, well, I love her, and Milo does, too, so we became family. She makes me feel like I’m lucky, and I know because I have her that I am. I’m happy to be her husband, and I can absolutely positively categorically swear that this marriage is definitely-and-without-doubt-I’m-not-kidding-you-I-really-mean-it the last one for me. Megs is fine with that.

T
he late-night game has opened my world up and sent me in directions that continue to surprise me. After years of lying fallow, performing a monologue for the camera every night reawakened in me a desire to do stand-up comedy again.

I cobbled together some old material and started writing some new stuff and got out there and hit the sweaty, low-ceilinged comedy clubs to relearn what I had forgotten. I bounced all over the country, from Birmingham, Alabama, to Bowler, Wisconsin. From Boston to Fort Lauderdale and San Diego to Seattle and all points in between. I returned to my old craft in front of small crowds that pack into these tiny venues every weekend for the chicken fingers and the sarcasm. Some nights I was good, some nights I wasn’t, some nights it was like I was back at the fucking gong show in the Tron Theatre in Glasgow.

Slowly I gained confidence and started to enjoy myself, and with all the traveling I met hundreds of regular Americans I would never have encountered had I stayed in the showbiz confines of L.A. and New York.

The clubs soon got too small to fit everyone in, and I am too damn old to do three shows a night anymore, so I started playing
bigger theaters and reached a level that I had tried and failed to achieve back in the Bing Hitler days.

I also believe it was the act of traveling around the country that cemented in my head the notion that I must finally become a citizen.

It’s not that I hadn’t considered it before. My son, because he was born here, is an American—shit, I’m an American too, I just never really thought about the paperwork. But as more and more people asked me if I was a citizen, I found that I was embarrassed to tell them I wasn’t.

I was eligible for consideration because I’d had a green card for more than five years, so I applied for naturalization, and while I waited for the paperwork to be processed I had some fun with it on the show.

I had mentioned on the air that I’d first tasted catfish in the small town of Ozark, Arkansas, and that the mayor of the town, in gratitude for a national TV plug, had made me an honorary citizen of Ozark. I thought if I could be an honorary citizen of Ozark, then maybe some other towns would also bestow that honor and I could rack up some pressure on the government to look favorably on my application.

I talked about this on the show, and it seemed to touch a nerve. The response to my request was overwhelming, so much so that we started keeping a tally of how we were doing, like an election campaign. There was a big map on which we placed pins where I had been accepted, and poked fun at any city that refused to participate. (There was only one—that’s right, mayor of Portland, Oregon, whatever your name is. I’m calling you out, you pompous oaf!)

The offices of the show were flooded with proclamations and letters welcoming me as an honorary citizen of literally thousands of towns across the U.S. of A.

The tone of the missives was lighthearted—I was made an Admiral of the Nebraska Navy, for God’s sake—and although everyone seemed to be in on the joke, I also got a very strong sense from the sackloads of mail that arrived on my desk that Americans understood and appreciated the emotion involved and the decision process I went through on the way to becoming a citizen. What started as a bit on the show became a way for me to express my gratitude to the welcoming nature of the American people. Everyone was ready for some bipartisan and upbeat patriotism at the tail end of the Bush-Cheney administration.

It seemed to me that American patriotism had been hijacked by politicians who used it for there own jingoistic ends, and I wanted to use my television show to get away from that. I wanted to get back to the image of the gum-chewing GIs who brought swing dancing, fruit, and hope to Scotland when my parents were kids. I wanted to share the feeling I got when I received my big color poster from NASA in the mail. I wanted as many native-born Americans to understand the thrill and exhilaration that comes from joining the land of the free.

If this sounds trite I don’t give a rat’s ass. I believe in it. America truly is the best idea for a country that anyone has ever come up with so far. Not only because we value democracy and the rights of the individual but because we are always our own most effective voice of dissent. The French may love Barack Obama but they didn’t fucking elect him. We did.

We must never mistake disagreement between Americans on political or moral issues to be an indication of their level of patriotism. If you don’t like what I say or don’t agree with where I stand on certain issues, then good. I’m glad we’re in America and don’t have to oppress each other over it.

We’re not just a nation. We’re not an ethnicity. We are a dream of justice that people have had for thousands of years.

I proudly took the Oath of Allegiance and received my citizen
ship at Pomona Fairgrounds in Los Angeles in January 2008 along with three thousand other new Americans from Mexico, and no others from Scotland.

With a week’s hiatus from
The Late Late Show
I traveled to Scotland just before Christmas 2008 to see my mother. She had been in failing health for a long time; it seemed to me that she never fully recovered from her bout with cancer more than a decade earlier, and since my father died she was never the same. How could she be? They had been together for over fifty years.

I arrived at Glasgow Airport on a Saturday night in freezing fog and drove straight to my mother’s bedside, probably foolish after such a long trip and so long without sleep. The streets were icy and I was out of practice driving on the left side of the road.

When I finally saw her I was shocked. Her condition had gotten worse even as I flew over, she was barely conscious and I could hear the awful sound of pneumonia rattling her bronchi as she tried to get comfortable.

For the last two years she’d been in an assisted-living facility, and while the staff was kind and attentive, it was clear to everyone that this was, at last, the endgame.

I talked to my sleeping mother that night and all day Sunday and on Monday morning, still badly jet-lagged. I kissed her forehead and said I loved her. Then I left her to take a nap, thinking I’d see her later but she died before I got back. The cause of death was listed as pneumonia, plus a kidney infection, but I think she died because she couldn’t live without my dad.

My siblings and I arranged for her funeral to be held a few days later and while waiting for that I threw myself into the completion of this book, hoping that the work would protect me from the sorrow, but the words wouldn’t come.

So I went for a walk.

It was a shockingly clear, bright, and very cold day, atypical of Scotland in December. Everything seemed shiny and sharply in focus, but that may just have been my grief. I walked the streets of the West End of Glasgow, where I had roistered and caroused and caused a few broken hearts, including my own, so many years ago. I walked through Kelvingrove Park where, it seemed, the killer ducks had been replaced by a much friendlier variety. I walked past the magnificent architecture, the sandstone of the Victorian buildings basking warmly in the brightness of the sun. I walked and walked and walked and I couldn’t feel anything, but I remembered that from my father’s passing. Nothing at first, then a relentless build of emotion that rises unremittingly like a winter tide and threatens to engulf you.

Everywhere I looked was achingly beautiful and I couldn’t understand it. People were blushing from the cold, their breath puffing little clouds of life into the ether. The trees were frosted with ice crystals and the cloudless sky crossed with the high vapor trails of distant jetliners.

I stopped on Great Western Road and looked in the window of a closed art gallery at a Peter Howson painting of a shouting man and a barking dog. A short chipper gentleman of advanced years, of which there are a few in Glasgow, came and stood next to me.

“It’s Craig, in’t it?” he said in an accent as thick as soup.

“It is,” I said.

He told me he remembered me from the old days when I was causing trouble in the parish. We hadn’t known each other, he just used to see me around.

“Yer American noo?” he asked.

“I am,” I said.

“Must be nice. Although, you still seem Scottish to me. Nae offense.”

“None taken,” I said.

I felt a surge of affection for the old fella as I watched him walk
toward a nearby pub, his giant old-guy ears pink and shiny from the cold.

Suddenly I was struck by the first broadside of terrible sadness, it sprung up and wrung tears out of me unexpectedly. I rubbed my face pretending my eyes were watering from the cold, which was entirely possible, and walked in the other direction.

I realized that in my desire to be an American, I risked forgetting where I had come from, and that that would be an appalling act of self-robbery. I realized that I loved this place, that I always would, and that I would carry it with me wherever I went.

I am the child of two parents and two countries. My mother put the blue in my eyes and my father gave me grit. Scotland made me what I am and America let me be it.

America gave me everything I have today. It gave me a second chance at life. A life I had previously mishandled so catastrophically. Americans taught me failure was only something you went through on the way to success, not just in the sense of career or wealth but as a person. I learned that failure is only failure, and that it can be useful, spun into a story that will make people laugh, and maybe every once in a while give a message of hope to others who might need some.

For me, becoming an American was not a geographical or even political decision. It was a philosophical and emotional one, based on a belief in reason and fairness of opportunity.

I swore an oath not to be cowed by the authority of kings and churches. I won’t allow any kids of mine to grow up as I did, witnessing casual hatred between children just because it had always been that way.

I didn’t become any less Scottish when I became an American. The two are not mutually exclusive. I am proud of my heritage. I will always be Scottish in my heart, but my soul is American, which means: between safety and adventure, I choose adventure.

Scottish by birth, but American on purpose.