American on Purpose Read online

  When the American GIs turned up in Glasgow, en route to Europe, they must have seemed like gods for their white teeth and lack of rickets alone.

  They also brought items that had been forgotten since the war began. Nylons, fruit, laughter, and hope. With America in the war, my parents’ generation began to realize that it would eventually end and that life would go on. Maybe it would get even better, because the GIs brought something else. Something that had to exist before I could. Swing dancing.

  Scottish people love to dance. Only certain types of dancing, though. The kind that comes with a set of rules and instructions. We are, after all, the great engineers. Organized stamping and clapping or structured reels and skips are what Scots want—God forbid anything involving sexiness or free expression, no fluid or sensual movements, please. No squeezy buttocks pushing against groins to a salsa beat, that’s just the kind of thing that leads to people talking about their feelings. The GIs changed all that. Long after that little Austrian fucker was burned up in his bunker and the liberators had returned to their fabled land of cowboys and Coca-Cola, swing dancing and big band music remained. It became known simply and collectively as “the dancing,” or, in the broad Glasgow dialect, radancin.

  Even now, every Friday and Saturday night Glasgow pubs and bars are packed with young people who pound down as much Dutch courage as they can before they head out for radancin to try and find prospective sexual partners or future spouses. Like thousands of Glaswegians, that’s how my parents met.

  My father, Bob, was rake thin when he was young, but he was tall and good-looking, and at six-one a giant for a Scotsman of his generation. Diamond-blue eyes, white-blond hair that was silver by his thirties, a strong nose, and fabulous teeth, though the teeth were something of a cheat since they were dentures. Bob told me he’d lost his own teeth when he was thrown from his Enfield motorcycle at Anderston Cross going eighty miles an hour but it seems improbable because:

  (A) No one can get eighty miles per hour out of a 1945 Enfield dispatch motorcycle.

  And:

  (B) The injuries my father would sustain from such a high-speed accident would surely be more serious than just dental.

  Perhaps he was traveling so fast that his poor old gnashers, weakened from no flossing and a lack of fluoride, were sucked out of his mouth by the relative velocity.

  Nonetheless, the Great Teeth Incident has now become family legend and that’s good enough for me, but the more likely story is that my father lost his teeth at a young age due to the awful diet of his truly Dickensian childhood. He didn’t own shoes until he was eleven years old, and for a few years during the war, in an effort to escape the bombing, he was evacuated from the inner city to one of the notorious childhood labor workhouses—sweatshops in the countryside that kept children safe from bombs, but not from horrifying abuse and mistreatment at the hands of wartime opportunists. My father refused to talk about the details of his wartime experience until the day he died, saying only that it wasn’t fun. I believed him.

  I also believed that he rode a motorcycle, and he rode it fast. After all, he was a telegram delivery boy in Glasgow in the early fifties, round about the time Marlon Brando starred in The Wild One as a troubled and brooding motorcycle gang member.

  “Hey, Johnny, what are you rebelling against?”

  “What’ve you got?”

  The telegram boys of Glasgow didn’t ride Harleys, they rode Enfields and Nortons. Big, British army bikes. They couldn’t afford leathers and silk scarves like their matinee idols, so they wore black post office-issue uniforms, wrapping white linen tea towels round their necks to look like American bikers. Bob looked like Sinatra and dressed like Brando. Bob was cool.

  My mother, Janet—you can call her Netta—was cursed with great beauty and intelligence. In old photographs you can see it. Her hair was raven dark and her eyes as blue-green as Celtic coral. She was luscious and slightly zaftig, a stunning, clever young woman, which I suspect made her a target for jealousy and contempt from the less genetically gifted. It must have been difficult and embarrassing for her, and my mother inevitably developed a hardness, a shell with which to protect herself. I think she also had to hide her brilliance in order to compensate for her looks, and that ultimately made her angry. Netta looked like Elizabeth Taylor, but Netta was tough.

  Their relationship was always a mystery to me. When I was young they seemed to fight a lot, and even their affection was wrapped in little passive-aggressive insults that they would send via their kids. In front of us, over a meal perhaps:

  “Yer faither disnae like my cookin’. That’s why he’s makin’ that face.”

  “Aye, yer mither disnae like yer father, that’s why she’s makin’ that face.”

  And then our parents would laugh in an odd sad way and us kids would laugh just because they were laughing, but even now I’m still not sure what the hell was going on.

  Bob drank a fair bit. Lager in the summer, Guinness in the winter, and whiskey all year round. I learned about alcohol from him. I learned that it made him cheeky and funny and different and warm, but if he drank too much he got cranky and weird or fell asleep. Netta never drank, it caused a massive allergic reaction in her. Even a small glass of wine would make her sneeze and trigger a vivid scarlet rash on her neck.

  She did not approve of my father’s alcohol intake but tolerated it most of the time because it was so socially normal and he never let it get in the way of work. He couldn’t. Work, after all, is how my people articulate love, and it’s probably not a bad way to do it. Nobody talked about their feelings or, God help us, their issues, but I don’t believe my siblings or myself ever doubted the love of our parents for us or each other. They proved it daily with their labor. My father put in long shifts as a postal worker, rising in his forty-year career from telegram delivery boy to chief inspector of the main branch in Edinburgh. On retirement, Bob was awarded the British Empire Medal for his achievements. He transcended his own unfortunate background and none of his kids ever walked barefoot to school.

  Netta labored just as hard keeping the house and studying to become a grade school teacher so she could bring home extra income and to give herself a continued sense of purpose once her own kids began to bail out. My parents’ struggles were different from mine. Their enemy was poverty, not the “Oh shit we can’t afford cable” poverty but the “Oh shit we can’t afford food” poverty. So they did the best they could for their family, though it left little time for emotional connection. It was as if too many outward displays of affection were a luxury better suited to the rich, or the English. Add to that the influence, even though it was only minor in my home, of sterile Scottish Presbyterianism (which I can only describe as Catholicism without the elaborate visuals) and you are left with a certain aridity.

  The first openly romantic moment that I witnessed between my parents—that’s not to say they didn’t have them, they had four kids, after all—happened just before my father’s death. It wasn’t so much the moment’s novelty that shocked me, it was the overwhelming sensation I got that it wasn’t novel for them at all. These two people had had moments like this countless times. It is a testament to my own selfishness and self-obsession that I had never noticed.

  Bob died of cancer in a bleak hospital in Airdrie, in central Scotland. (Perhaps the hospital itself was not so bleak, perhaps it was what was happening there to our family.) The cast of characters from my father’s life gathered around him in his final days, coming and going in shifts. He had a full roster of friends and relatives who adored him and just had to say goodbye. During much of this drama and activity I sat in a corner of his busy room, jet-lagged and heartbroken, talking to him sometimes, or respectfully staying quiet when he was talking to someone else, feeling like I was five years old again. Netta would bring him boiled sweets or magazines or whatever he needed from home. She was so intensely focused on him, I don’t think she was always aware of my sisters and my brother and me even being in the room with th
em. She just sat on the bed and stroked his head. (Even aggressive chemo couldn’t get rid of his great hair, it just became soft and downy.) On one of her visits I watched as my parents looked into each other’s eyes and he whispered something to her that only they could hear and she laughed a little bit and kissed him on the mouth.

  On the mouth.

  Like they were young and in love.

  Like he was Frank Sinatra and she was Elizabeth Taylor.

  3

  The Attic

  I was born at 6:10 a.m. on May 17, 1962, in Stobhill Hospital in Springburn, at the northern end of Glasgow. A couple of days later my parents took me home to the small rented apartment a short bus ride from the hospital, where my brother and sister waited. I only lived in that apartment for six months because my parents had already applied for and been granted government housing in the new town of Cumbernauld.

  After World War II, the city of Glasgow had to rehouse an enormous number of people. The town had been badly damaged by bombing, and many of the tenement buildings had fallen into disrepair due to slum landlording and urban poverty. The 1950s promise of a “New Dawn” and of a peacetime economic recovery had inspired a generation of architects and engineers. They had schemes for the proles. Housing schemes—vast areas of cheap matchbox houses with none of the attendant luxuries of urban life, like a cinema or a store or a library, just miles of miserable towers built on the edge of the city. They looked and felt not unlike the projects on the outskirts of Moscow or East Berlin, with the added bonus of the damp Scottish climate to up the ante of misery.

  But Cumbernauld wasn’t just a scheme. It was a plan. A big plan. An entire new town built about fifteen miles outside Glasgow itself. One of three, in fact. East Kilbride, like Cumbernauld a satellite of Glasgow and Livingston, was built on the outskirts of Edinburgh. It is hard to convey the dreariness of these gloomy wastelands, of which Cumbernauld was and is undoubtedly the worst. These atrocities were designed by pseudointellectual modernists who believed that the automobile would replace feet sometime in the 1970s. Any money they had left over from making boxlike dwelling hutches was spent on horrendous concrete abstract sculptures, totems to the gods of utter banality, which were placed throughout the town in random locations. There were no sidewalks, pedestrians were instead diverted into tunnels lined with corrugated iron (a cheap way to make them) so as not to interfere with the flow of traffic on the empty freeways. The tunnels became useful later for gang violence and glue sniffing as the new towns crumbled.

  I doubt the Cumbernauld town planners ever saw the finished product but I’m sure it looked a lot better as line drawings on expensive paper. Fairly recently Cumbernauld was named the second-worst town in the United Kingdom, losing worst-of-all honors to the city of Hull, a dowdy seaport on the east coast of England. I dispute the result; I have been to Hull, and while it is undoubtedly an absolute shitheap, it is no match for Cumbernauld.

  Our first house there was on Torbrex Road. I don’t recall much of the place since we left when I was five years old, but I do know that it had a garage. Not attached to the house itself but nearby, lined up with the others, one designated to each dwelling. We actually had a car, well not exactly a car. My father at that time was driving a little red post office van. As an infant, not much more than two or three years old, I would hang around at the garage door waiting for my dad as my mother watched from the kitchen window, keeping an eye on me until my father came home. He was an impressive, reassuring creature who smelled of cigarettes and Brylcreem and always had a little box of chocolate raisins for me. My older brother and sister were already in school, and I remember being on my own a lot. Waiting for Godot, and Raisinets, at the garage door.

  It was at this time, according to family legend, that I first ran away from home. My frantic, pregnant mother eventually found me a mile away, standing on an overpass above the motorway in the pouring rain and singing to the cars, trying to figure out which one was my dad.

  When I was three years old, Lynn was born. I was shunted off to my grandmother’s house while my mother was expecting my little sister and while she was giving birth. Apparently it was a difficult pregnancy so she was away for some time.

  My mother’s mother, Jean Ingram, was one of those giant-arsed Scottish women who could not be intimidated. Whether it was the Luftwaffe or doctors bearing chilling news, all were powerless against her bitter scorn and her hot sweet tea. She looked like an overstuffed sofa covered in a floral apron and balanced precariously on minuscule pink fluffy slippers. She had hands like a longshoreman’s and hair like the cold steel of a bayonet, hard and shiny. She was a stringent woman who terrified me as a child, although she became a friend and guide later. Jean was Presbyterian—all my family are in matters of sex and where babies come from. As a pudgy curious ten-year-old I horrified her when she caught me hiding behind her couch, leering enthusiastically at the ladies’ underwear section of a mail-order catalogue in which pictures of giant matrons in whalebone corsets sent thrilling shock waves through my body. Jean went beet red and called me a “filthy wee bugger”—she wasn’t wrong of course. As a consequence of my family’s shyness about sex, nobody explained where my mother had gone. They said she was in the hospital with “women’s trouble,” which doesn’t mean a great deal to a three-year-old. The hospital, for some reason, had a mad rule forbidding young children from visiting the maternity wards, so according to family legend I got an eye infection from standing and looking at my grandmother’s mailbox for hours on end in the hope my mother would return. This is viewed as an amusing anecdote in my family. It is a miracle I am not in a locked ward eating spiders and yelling obscenities at my testicles.

  When my mother did finally come home with my baby sister, I was very annoyed. She was a whiney little fartball who constantly stole my thunder, but eventually she grew up to be one of the funniest people I know, although she can still be both farty and whiney.

  She now works as a writer on my television show, where I shamelessly exploit her for my own profit. Sweet revenge.

  The family now numbered six in total, and although financially it must have been a struggle for my parents, the kids were never really aware of it. I knew we couldn’t afford a lot of luxuries, but neither could anyone else around us. It wasn’t as if we lived in Beverly Hills. In fact, when we got our hallway carpeted—a scary vomity-colored tweedish patterned thing supplied by a friend of my father who worked in the shipyards and got a cutting from a luxury liner—neighbors came from far and wide to gaze at its amazing splendor.

  The place on Torbrex Road was too crowded with four kids, so when my parents applied for and got larger council housing, the carpet stayed behind.

  We headed to 12 L Darroch Way, third from the end of a terraced row. It had three levels. There was a small kitchen on the ground floor that opened onto a tiny garden, a sitting room on the floor above along with my sister Janice’s and my parents’ bedrooms, and on the top floor my brother and I shared a room, while Lynn had her own room next to us, and we all used the undersized bathroom. Next to the toilet bowl in that bathroom was a little door, and that little door led to the attic.

  We loved the attic. It was barely the size of a cupboard but roomy enough to fit four kids and some toys, and it was given over to the exclusive use of the children. We crammed ourselves in there for hours on end, hours that went on for years. The attic was about us talking nonsense, fighting, laughing, and playing. Experiments could be carried out away from harsh parental glare. With the help of a cheap chemistry set my brother and I created the worst smell in the world, yet to be topped in my opinion. I still have a scar on my leg because my brother told me that the game of darts was played by one player throwing the darts while the other held the board. I was the holder.

  Lynn and Janice had their dolls up there. Janice favored the more sophisticated Barbie type that drove convertibles and gave off a certain aloof air, while Lynn, who was much younger, played with giant plastic babies that always seem
ed to have shite on them. The attic was our haven from the rough sectarian world outside, a working-class Narnia, Neverland, and Hogwarts all in one.

  After a while Janice stopped coming. She was going to high school and interested in pop music and suddenly seemed to hate the rest of us. Then Scott, her junior by a year, followed suit. They told Lynn and me that after we went to bed, which was of course earlier than they did, the toys in the attic came alive and too bad we would not be allowed to see that until we got older. Just the casual cruelty of teenage siblings typically played on gullible younger ones, but Lynn and I believed it.

  I think we still do. Janice and Scott grew up to have steady lives and reliable incomes. Lynn and I take our chances trying to amuse other people, and I’m not sure either one of us has properly grown up or completely left the attic. Lynn, like me, still believes the toys can talk.

  4

  Astronaut

  I don’t say this to try and impress you but I was a bed wetter until I was around eleven years old. Then I stopped, but not for long. I started drinking alcohol regularly when I was in my early teens, at which point I returned to intermittent bed-wetting until I was twenty-nine. I haven’t peed myself since the 18th of February, 1992, the day I got sober. Therefore I suppose I was a bed wetter until I was almost thirty. But I did stop before I was thirty, and I think my family and the people of Scotland should take a great deal of pride in that.

  I was a fat kid, too. My nickname was Tubby and I had the expected gaseous emissions of a schoolboy who enthusiastically gorged himself on a diet of what was considered nutritious in Scotland in the 1960s—lard and salt. One would think that a nervous, overweight, incontinent boy might be difficult to love, but it didn’t seem any trouble at all for my parents.