Dispatches From a Dilettante (3 page)

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?

However I was happy in my own little world of the prep bay at SALVI Ford and my social life picked up when one of the mechanics asked if I wanted to “go and see one of your English bands this evening”. Wayne informed me that he possessed a ‘Ram Air Cobra’ which, he confirmed, was a car rather than a snake. He drove me in it for seventy miles that evening, at reckless speeds, in order to see Led Zeppelin who were headlining at Hampden Beach Casino, New Hampshire. On the same bill somewhat incongruously, and as their support, were the Beach Boys. However I found out on arrival that Wayne, ever the eternal optimist, had omitted the minor detail of purchasing tickets and the show was sold out.

We mooched listlessly around the foyer for a few minutes and then walked down a side alley by the building. A man, encouraged from above, was climbing up a drainpipe into the venue. Wayne was up after him before the other guy had reached the top. There were several things that should have prevented me attempting such a dangerous manoeuvre – common sense being the overriding one. The others included the fact that I was holding two large slices of pizza that Wayne and I had just purchased, had no strength in my upper arms and was afraid of heights.

The decision was made after considering, for all of two seconds, the fact that we had driven seventy miles and Led Zeppelin were the hottest emerging band in the US that summer. I ditched the pizza and started the climb. Half way up I ripped my jeans and cut my thigh deeply on a protruding nail. After a quiet whimper of pain mingled with fear I inched toward the outstretched hand that eventually dragged me over the window sill and into what, it immediately became clear, was the back of the venue. At that moment a security guard appeared and demanded of no one in particular as to whether illegal access had been gained via the open window. What he actually said was “which of you fucking hippy faggots has been getting through there?” To my immense credit I held his stare as the blood oozed down my inner thigh, pointed vaguely to the front of the balcony and said that I thought it was someone further down in the front rows. Wayne was so impressed with my bravery that he only grumbled about the loss of his pizza slice until the end of the Beach Boys set twenty minutes later.

It was a Sunday evening in Hampden Beach and unbeknown to us there had been a great deal of controversy over the permit granted for this concert. Apart from it being the first rock concert held on a Sunday in the area, there had been some local drug busts the day before and tensions were running high. Thus policeman lined the front of the stage facing the audience with their riot sticks in full view.

The house lights dimmed and a magnificent figure in pink jeans and matching t-shirt could just be made out in the wings. Robert Plant then hit the stage and the band kicked in to ‘Communication Breakdown.’ Having subsequently seen hundreds of gigs, nothing (with the exception of Jimi Hendrix) has quite lived up to that moment. The pain in my thigh was forgotten, possibly aided by the inhalation of the dope fumes from gargantuan amounts being smoked all around me, as an English band in a crumbling former casino transported the audience to a hippy nirvana. The concert was abruptly halted four numbers in as, even in the dark, it dawned on the police what they too were inhaling and benign tolerance turned to random violence. Retreat was the obvious course of action and, using the stairs rather than the drainpipe as our escape route, we emerged blinking onto the street and headed back to Cambridge.

Undeterred by the trauma of seeing the Beach Boys, who were abysmal, I embarked on one further and final ‘rock’ outing with Wayne that thankfully required no driving, no advance ticket purchase and no high tolerance of marijuana. We went to a club called the Boston Tea Party to see a group who were billed as the ‘Santana Blues Band.’ They were supporting Savoy Brown who clearly been granted visas after all. Santana had played Woodstock two weeks before this gig and were about to become a global phenomenon. Savoy Brown, although only ever able to attract a small following in England, could fill big theatres for years in the States. As so many English groups did and continue to do, they’d taken black blues music from the States and interpreted it in a quirky English way which enabled them to return with to the music’s country of origin and make a very good living. I stood next to their bass guitarist, who was watching the Santana set, and had a very meaningful conversation about Crystal Palace’s woeful away form.

Much like Palace’s defence my American experience went off the boil a little as work continued and my return flight date loomed. Upon my return I was reminded of this summer for months, and on a weekly basis, as the Bell Telephone Company hounded me for payment of the enormous bill I had incurred phoning home from Atlantic City. I discovered previously unknown thespian qualities of the highest order as I heard my own voice denying any inkling of my own whereabouts. They were tenacious and phoned my sister and mother. I began to think that they must have had the FBI on the case, but eventually their call frequency diminished, then finally ceased and life returned to normal.