American on Purpose (4 page)

M
uirfield Primary was loathsome but at least the violence only really came from the teachers. Cumbernauld High School, which I entered at the age of twelve, was a whole new box of crabs.

Because of where my house was situated I was to attend that redbrick gulag even though all of my confederates—and I use that term with a defeated army in mind—would be attending Green-faulds, the town’s other protestant high school. There was also Our Lady’s for Catholics. Only Catholics.

Sectarian lines were still drawn very strong then. The “troubles” in Ireland were raging hotter than ever, and the West of Scotland and the Northern Counties have always been very closely linked. Tensions between Catholic and Protestant factions, though not as extreme as in Derry or Belfast, were certainly there. Fertile ground for street violence among young and not so young men and women. A plump wee proddy dog like me in Our Lady’s would not have lasted two weeks.

In the mid-seventies, Cumbernauld High School’s student body was vast, close to three thousand pupils spanning the ages twelve to eighteen. It was only mandatory to attend school until age sixteen,
but anyone who had hopes of a university education or even of entering a decent trade had to stay on for another two years. Needless to say, the thugs and the losers left at sixteen, so if you could get through the first four years you were in clover. People said that the classes were small and the teachers less jumpy and belt-happy. I wouldn’t know, I never made it that far.

I was terrified from my first day there. None of the other kids in my class had gone to Muirfield and I knew no one. It quickly got out that I was the nephew of a teacher—Gunka James to me, Mr. Ingram to them—putting me in an extremely precarious position, although I could never figure out if I was marked for extra hassle because my uncle was on the staff or whether it would have been worse if he hadn’t been. A bit of both, I suppose, depending on the teacher or the pupil I was dealing with.

Of course my brother and older sister were already at the school, but that was anything but help. They had filled my head with dark imaginings about the likes of Big Jimmy—the assistant headmaster who, my siblings told me, could belt so hard sometimes kids ended up in the hospital, or their hair went white with shock. Rubbish, as it turned out. Big Jimmy did have an arm, but he was one of the decent ones.

To be fair, my sister Janice walked me to school many times in my first year, but I knew that once we were inside the gates she was no longer related to me. She was a fifth-year, and
Head Girl
for God’s sake, with a metal lapel badge and some kind of vague authority bestowed from on high. She was out of my league. My brother Scott was a fourth-year who wore desert boots and listened to Zeppelin. His hair was long and he had a girlfriend with breasts. He was busy.

Neither of them could be seen with the likes of me, and I totally understood. The only time all three of us were together was when my father was on a decent shift and could drive us to school in his used, metallic-blue Vauxhall Victor. Thank God he’d moved on
from the wee red post office van; arriving at school in that would have been asking for trouble.

Gradually I got to know the thirty or so kids in my class. We wandered from lesson to lesson together and were forced to sit wherever the teacher wanted us to sit in any given class. Soon there was a pecking order established, all very incorrect by today’s taste. Popularity for boys was calibrated according to perceived toughness and nothing else; for girls it was looks. The system gradually morphed into something slightly more civilized, but for the first few months that was it.

Ronnie Souter, a fast, whippetlike bright kid who smelled of digestive biscuits, would be best fighter in class; Stewart Laurie, who even the girls knew was prettier than most of them, would be second-best fighter; then came me. Early on, this was all established on bluff, no fights, and I always thought if push came to shove I could have taken Stewart, but before the end of the year Ronnie would prove I was wrong to ever think the same about him.

The faceoff began as we were sitting in science class taught by Mr. Weir, a taciturn ghoul with a lightning-fast belting style. To impress Maxine Hawthorne, the raven-haired class beauty, Ronnie Souter implied that I was a homosexual because my uncle was a math teacher. I said in no uncertain terms that Ronnie was far more likely to be gay, given that he dressed like one of the Bay City Rollers—a condition which he presumably had some control over. Maxine laughed. Ronnie blushed. The gauntlet had been thrown down.

On the way to PE, just outside the boys’ gymnasium, Ronnie jumped me. He pulled my hair, forcing me to bend double, then kicked me a couple of times in the face. It didn’t really hurt as much as you would think, but the shock of the attack and the anxious urgency of the viciousness startled me and left me shaking from the adrenaline rush. I suppose I could have prolonged the fight but he seemed happy to let it go at that and I was just relieved it was over.
I didn’t cry, so I wasn’t viewed as a public disgrace, and Ronnie’s honor was preserved, so it ended there.

I was left with bruising on my face and a nasty shiner. But it was 1975. I was to get a much more significant kick in the eye that year.

The next one came from America.

A
man called Freddie Laker changed the course of my life. We’ve never met, I don’t know if he’s alive or dead, I wouldn’t even recognize him in a photograph. I know nothing about him other than that he used to own an airline offering ridiculously cheap flights from Prestwick Airport in Scotland to JFK in New York. They were available only for a short period, but the timing of these flights was remarkably lucky for me.

In the 1970s there was a program open to first-year high school students in Scotland called the “School Cruise.” Parents who paid fifty pence (about a dollar) a week throughout the year—within the meager budget of most but by no means all families—would earn their children a trip at the end of the term.

Pupils from dozens of schools all over Scotland, sailing aboard a shoddily refitted WWII-era British minesweeper (the SS
Uganda
or SS
Nevasa
), were to be ferried around various European ports for a couple of weeks in the interest of making them better citizens of the world. The whole thing was probably a scam by unscrupulous travel agents, but by 1975 it had become a tradition at Cumbernauld High and both my older siblings had been allowed to go. My sister sailed the murky North Sea to Leningrad and brought
home matrioshka dolls and Communist Party propaganda extolling the virtues of Soviet potatoes over their meager, decadent capitalist rivals. My brother went to the Canary Islands and returned with tanned skin, a postcard of a topless girl on a beach, and a comb that looked like a switchblade. The whole idea seemed impossibly glamorous to me. It was the only thing that excited me about going to high school.

When the time finally came my parents sat me down and asked if I would forgo the cruise for a trip to America instead. My father wanted to visit his brother and the nephews and nieces he’d never seen and we could take advantage of those stupidly cheap flights out of Prestwick to N.Y.C. I was thunderstruck and agreed immediately of course. The whole idea of traveling alone with my father was amazing, but to go to America with him was beyond my wildest dreams. The seventies pre-Internet world was much bigger, and to a thirteen-year-old working-class Scottish boy the notion of traveling across the Atlantic was unheard of.

I told the kids at school that instead of going on the cruise I would be going to the U.S. They didn’t believe me, the very idea was too fantastic. They just thought I was another one whose parents couldn’t afford the school trip.

I had to have a passport, so I went to the local post office in my scratchy, Sunday-best tweed trousers, a tight green-and-yellow cable-knit sweater, and a green silk tie, looking for all the world like a pocket-sized plump pimp with crabs. I practiced what I imagined to be my winning smile in the Photo-Me booth and sent the strip of four black-and-white pictures to the passport office in Glasgow. A few weeks later I received my giant dark-blue British passport. I felt like James Bond.

My father sent off for the airplane tickets and when they arrived I was allowed to pin mine up on the wall next to my bed. I would lie in bed at night gazing at the waxy little pamphlet by the light of a luminous plastic model of Count Dracula I had made from a
kit. It had a drawing of the world on the outside cover, red countries on a blue sea. Scotland was tiny and the U.S. was gigantic. My name was printed inside along with miles of wondrous small print about baggage restrictions and regulation quotes from sections of the Warsaw Pact. I read the ticket restrictions over and over again in the pale green glow of Nosferatu.

We left one bright clear morning. Prestwick Airport is situated in one of the more picturesque areas of Scotland, and Scotland is not short of picturesque areas. In the terminal I could hear the American accents of some of my fellow travelers—you could tell which passengers were American before they spoke. They looked so different, with their strangely white teeth crammed together with no gaps and their gum-chewing and gregarious friendly natures not fired by alcohol. My dad let me sit by the window and I watched Scotland get smaller as the big DC-10 lumbered upward. Before the old country could shrink to the size of the map on the airplane ticket cover we entered bumpy dark clouds. A moment of fear and then a bright-blue sky.

We arrived after dark and JFK smelled deliciously of beer, cigarettes, jet fuel, and sourdough pretzels. Outside it was hot and damp in a way I had only experienced on bath night at home. It was fascinating but it was also frightening. My father took my hand as we waited in line for customs. I was way past the age when I would normally have allowed this but I was tired and scared and I think he probably was, too. After a brief interrogation by a ridiculously affable, burgundy-faced Irish customs guard we were through.

The noise of New Yorkers going about their business is a hell of a shock to the uninitiated. To this day when I visit New York City it seems to me that half the people on the street are overacting for an unseen audience or they’ve just seen one too many musicals.

It was easy to spot my other Uncle James at the barrier among all
the anxious yelling faces since he looked just like my father, except his hair was more stylish—his dark-brown locks styled in what my gran would have called a
blowjob
haircut—and he had a
tan
.

I loved James from the moment I met him. He’s the Ferguson family version of Steve McQueen, handsome and tough and doesn’t take any shit from the likes of you. He drinks Dewar’s on the rocks, works outdoors, wears plaid shirts and work boots, and, back then, chain-smoked Marlboro reds. He was the first of my family to emigrate to the U.S., working his way across the Atlantic on a cargo vessel and then using some creative license on his résumé to secure a job taking care of the Blydenburgh family’s parklike estate on Long Island.

James Ferguson has loved only one woman his whole life, my Aunt Susan. They met when they were teenagers and are still happily married. They already had two kids when James sailed for the New World, and the moment he’d made enough money he sent for all three of them. Susan was with him at the barrier that night to welcome us. She is beautiful and confident and she immediately made me feel not too afraid to be away from my own mother. After all, Susan was made of the same stuff—another movie star. James has always said the reason their marriage has lasted so long is that he knew early on he could never do better, and he’s right.

They bundled us into their car and drove us to the family home in Smithtown, Long Island. My first ride in a station wagon. Wood-effect panels, leather seats, automatic transmission—an upholstered land-boat a child could drive. I loved the term itself:
station wagon.
It sounded so American, like the
Wild West,
as if it had something to do with the railroads and avoiding hostile Indians. Thankfully we made the voyage across the borough of Queens unmolested by the local tribesmen.

James and Susan’s family was almost exactly like my own. Of their four kids, Stephen and Lesley were about the same age as my older brother and sister, Karen was a few months older than
me, and young James (Jamie) was born a year before my wee sister, Lynn. We looked alike, too, except the Americans had braces on their teeth and were frecklier from seeing sunshine more than a few weeks a year. Everyone was so friendly and such fun. They all lived in a big white clapboard house on the edge of the estate where James worked as a groundskeeper/handyman. It was an idyllic scene, as if I had traveled to an alternate universe and met the new improved Technicolor version of my own family. The MacWaltons.

For three weeks I got to experience life as a suburban teenager in the U.S., and it seemed a lot more attractive to me than home. Karen and Leslie took me to their junior high school for a day, where one of their teachers put on a peculiar version of show-and-tell in my honor. To my crimson-faced, buttocks-clenching embarrassment,
I
was the show-and-tell. I will forever remember the teacher as a merry buffoon named Glenn. It almost certainly was not his name, although in all other aspects he was most assuredly a Glenn, jocky and stupid. He brought me out to the front of the class and told all the kids that I was from “Scotchland,” where golf had been invented. He asked me to say something typically Scottish, so I mumbled, “It’s a brawbricht moonlicht nicht thenicht.”

The other kids looked confused and Glenn asked me what it meant and I translated for him.

“It’s a beautiful moonlit night tonight.”

I don’t know why I said this, it’s just a stock phrase that Scottish people use sometimes. Men, I suppose, in the company of tiddly, amorous foreign women. It even worked for me, the fleshy out-of-towner. I was immediately popular with the ladies. American women seem to be attracted to the Scottish accent for reasons I have never understood but remain grateful for.

At recess I found myself surrounded by giggling teenage girls. I told them lies about Scotland which they seemed to enjoy. I told
them lies about how I had bested Ronnie Souter in a fight and became, officially, best fighter in my class, how I was thinking of being an astronaut or Egyptologist. Even the boys were friendly. They asked me to play touch football with them and though I didn’t really understand a game called football where everybody ran around throwing and catching the ball with their hands instead of kicking it with their feet, I did my best. I fit right in.

And nobody wanted a fight. Not once.

I would think about that often in the years that followed back at Cumbernauld High.

My cousins took me with them wherever they went. I went bowling for the first time, feeling like a local in my rented two-tone shoes and sucking on my giant fizzy soda. I ate hamburgers and hot dogs and french fries. I went to a McDonald’s for the first time, this was of course before Micky D’s march to global domination. It was certainly before there was one in Glasgow.

My dad took me to New York City.

Now that…that was love at first sight. I loved it then and I love it still. Even now, overloaded with sanitized bullshit Trump glass towers and condo-yuppie pseudoculture, it is still a complete mindfuck. As a Scottish schoolboy that first time, New York City was the Big Rock Candy Mountain. It was smoggy, bright-hot, filthy, and wonderful. It was Disneyland, Oz, and fucking Jupiter. It was noise and smell and lights and people looking like they were in a movie. Fat cabdrivers chewing wet cigars and talking about the exotic sport of baseball, unbelievably sexy women in outfits that Scottish girls would not have dared to wear even on a carnival float. Individuals wearing colors I had only ever seen on soccer uniforms or sectarian parades. The people themselves were different colors. Black people, brown people. (My dad once told me about a black guy who lived in Glasgow but I had never seen him.) We took the elevator to the eighty-sixth floor of the Empire State Building and looked across Manhattan. North to Harlem, east to the
river and all the airplanes landing and taking off in Queens, west to the Hudson, and south to the colossal new World Trade Center towers.

We took a ferry to Liberty Island and climbed to the head of the statue. It was wicked hot inside the metal goddess—110 degrees the raspy, sweating Fiersteinesque tour guide told us gleefully as we trudged slowly up the iron stairs. We stood in Liberty’s crown and looked out over the harbor as the guide droned on through the heat about the poor and unwashed masses yearning to be free.

I made a promise to myself and told my dad.

“One day I’m gonnae live in New York, Da.”

He nodded and did that half-smile thing of his, but he believed me.

As the holiday progressed I bonded with my American teenage cousins over clandestine nicotine. I had been surreptitiously smoking the occasional cigarette since I was ten years old, thinking myself quite the dangerous bastard, and though certainly there seemed to be other kids in Scotland who shared my love for life on the edge, it was in America that I was introduced to something a little wilder.

My cousins took me to my first-ever rock concert. Blue Oyster Cult at the Nassau Coliseum. We were driven there in the station wagon by James and Susan and my father, who were cool enough to drop us off in the parking lot and go to dinner on their own, arranging to pick us up after the show.

The noise of the huge crowd was audible as we walked across the parking lot. As soon as the adults were out of sight I produced the gold packet of Benson & Hedges (“Benny Hedgehogs”) cigarettes, a British brand that I snuck over in my luggage. We all lit up and walked into the arena, where the air seemed to be blue, the lights from the support band’s meager display shining through a smoky haze. The smell was sweet and exotic and kind of frighten
ing, like the incense joss sticks my brother sometimes burned in our room at home when our parents were out and he was listening to Pink Floyd and trying to be all mysterious and arty.

We met up with some other kids from Karen and Leslie’s school, all of us yelling the traditional abuse at the support band. As the main act arrived onstage—and I confess I had never heard of Blue Oyster Cult before that day—the crowd went wild. Then one of Karen’s friends handed me a joint. I had watched some other kids smoking it, that odd sustained inhale and the holding of the breath. I was a teen and I wanted to fit in so I did exactly what I’d seen them doing. I sucked on that doobie until someone crossly snatched it from me and snapped something about Humphrey Bogart. I knew it was marijuana but I was unaware of any sensation of drugginess. I expected it to have horrifying side effects like all the antidrug horror propaganda said it would, that things would change shape and I would hallucinate angry demons and such. Perhaps I would even drop dead on the spot, but if I wanted to fit in this was a risk I had to take. Of course nothing really happened, but I did start to feel pretty good. And the band sounded great. And everybody was funny. Hilarious in fact. And I was starting to get a little hungry, then really hungry. Karen got us hot dogs and they were the best hot dogs I had ever tasted and this band was fucking BRILLIANT and this was the best night of my life and it was then that I had my satori. My kick in the eye. My sudden and profound realization. My on-the-road-to-Damascus revelation.