The first bit

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Why did I go to America? I’d like to say great principles lay behind it but in truth I think I agreed to do it because it would likely be fun and would definitely be better than working. While I was there the World changed. And I don’t mean that like I met some girl with good hair and I wanted to dance and be an acrobat for the rest of my days. I mean the World changed for everyone. Someone flew two big planes into two huge towers and everything went sideways. Yet I think I went there to try new beers and see whether the women did rollerblade in bikinis along Santa Monica Boulevard like the pictures said they did. While I was there it seemed to me that Britain rose in my imagination and my estimation rather than shrinking against the glare of the big brother. Someone said something about ‘careful what you wish for’, I’m not sure that was it exactly but I always felt that the American culture was more mine than theirs. I spent formative years marooned in rural Britain watching films about wide open spaces, grand canyons and shimmering deserts, sun glasses and cadillacs, highways that stretched into the distance and black and white films with men in tuxedos drinking at bars talking nothing like me. America had horizons and an alien landscape that I wanted to explore like an astronaut wants to play golf on the moon. I think I always knew I didn’t want to live there, I knew I wouldn’t fit in and didn’t particularly yearn to be like them, in fact as I got older I became more likely to mock them than aspire to be them, but I knew I wanted to walk amongst it all. I knew it held an appeal that Wiltshire never could for me. I listened to songs that travelled from coast to coast, talked of run down gold rush towns and endless fields, huge mountains and mighty rivers with great names like Mississippi, Missouri and Colorado. I loved the epic quality. I wanted to be awed by the power of it all. I wanted to be Tom Waits in a dust battered suite travelling from town to town meeting tired waitresses in run down diners. I wanted to drive Mulholland Drive with shades and the sun beating through the window. I wanted to swim in whiskey in a dive bar and get into an argument with a used car salesman. I wanted to lose everything at a table in Vegas and get eighty-sixed from somewhere, whatever the hell that meant. I wanted to stand beneath the staggering New York skyline and feel tiny and slow. I wanted to look at what they did. Because they did some weird things. They sued everyone for looking funny at their dog and they re-wrote engineering text books to fire people into space then bring them home when the spaceships malfunctioned. I wanted to care about politicians like they did. I wanted it to matter if a lying cheating arsehole got behind the wheel of the car. I wanted to see what Hunter Thompson had got hold of. I wanted to know what Tom Wolfe spent years looking at. I wanted to cruise Highway 66 and take papers from machines that you unlocked with a quarter and opened at the front. I wanted Chinese take away in a cardboard box and I wanted to be called a “fucking mook” by someone. I knew the iconography and plastic mythology of America better than anything in my own country and I loved it. I watched films and read books and dreamed of a counter-cultural life 40 years too late. The hippy dream had burst when its balloon landed on a railway line but I wanted a feel of it. America was mine. I felt I knew it better than most Americans. I had watched it and listed to it and read it in the kind of detail they rarely did. I lined up my preconceptions and drank them down one by one. The New Yorkers knew what was going on but were too wise-arse or cynical to care about the rest of America. LA’s populous defined the rest of its countryfolk by whether there was a film in them or from them and the volume and direction of their tits, the smoothness of their foreheads and the size of their bank account. And the rest, the rest just sat in trailers in string vest beating their beers and drinking their wives. I wanted to go “Looking for America” with Paul Simon with that wistfulness that you can’t get if you’re stuck on the M25. I felt like I could appreciate America better than any American because I had grown up in the anti-America; small, cold, drizzly, polite, embarrassed England. In truth that wasn’t what happened. Exploring America was a bit like dumping your current girlfriend to go out with Halle Berry. You get her, get to play with her and find out that the vast expanses of flawlessness and grandiosity don’t come close to the little pockets of unusual perfection that come right out of the blue. Going to America made me fall in love with England and America at the same time, which I guess is about as perfect an outcome as any situation can deliver.

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