American on Purpose Read online

  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 frightening, 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.

  From this moment on I would dedicate my life to rock and roll and take as many drugs as possible.

  What could possibly go wrong?

  8

  Running the Gauntlet

  My plan to be a drug-addled American rock star by the time I was sixteen began to fade on the drive to JFK. I was very quiet in the car, I didn’t trust myself to talk without crying, and I didn’t want to take that chance. Just bidding my cousins farewell at the house had caused tears to well up unexpectedly and embarrassingly. I was comforted that Karen and Leslie cried too, although Steven seemed to hold it together pretty well and young Jamie genuinely didn’t give a rat’s ass.

  On the drive, Uncle James asked me if I would ever move to America when I grew up and I gave the stock answer that any thirteen-year-old would give to a direct question.

  “I don’t know.”

  But I did. I wanted to move to New York and smoke marijuana and live in an apartment and play the guitar and make out with girls and mush their boobies together.

  My dad and I didn’t speak much on the flight home and we really didn’t ever speak much about that vacation ever again. I can’t be sure, but I think if things had been different in his own life, my father would have liked to live in the U.S., but my mother would never have left Scotland, and my father never really spoke about things he couldn’t have, he found it pointless. I understand, I’m the same way. I never go window-shopping, unless it’s for windows. Strip clubs don’t appeal to me for the same reason. If I was inclined to seek the company of a bunch of angry drunk women who hated me, wanted all my money, and were determined to tease me but not have sex with me, I would just open a bar in Edinburgh.

  When I got back to school, things were different. Over the summer many of the boys had grown much taller and older-looking, myself apparently included, because my nickname changed to Skinny Ma-linky Longlegs, a delightful transformation from the hated “Tubby.” A lot of the girls had changed shape too—radically—and seemed a lot more confident, sensing the power which they held over the drooling, awestruck boys.

  I gained a little notoriety by being the kid who’d gone to America, and a few of the real hard tickets, guys who were known psychopaths, like Shug McGhee and Billy Thompson, sought me out and included me in their grumpy little mob. I was invited to stand behind the school gym at recess with the bad guys and wild girls and smoke cigarettes. I was happy to be there but I had to be careful not to mention America unless asked about it, lest they thought I was bragging, and for that I would be shamed. This would mean challenging anyone who insulted me to a fight or else I’d lose face, and losing face was a terrible curse. You could end up like Gordon Macfarlane, the skinny kid who was the butt of all jokes and was once spat on by Margaret Cameron, an older girl who had once gotten so drunk she had to have her stomach pumped and, rumor had it, when they were carrying her out to the ambulance Stewart Campbell saw her tits fall out of her bra.

  Smoking cigarettes behind the gym was forbidden by the school, of course, and periodically the teachers would attempt a raid on our little outdoor speakeasy. Anyone they caught would be belted viciously, but it didn’t happen too often because at recess the teachers were usually huddled in the staff room, smoking their own cigarettes.

  Smoking was cool and it was a way to meet the older kids and the great fighters of legend like Stevie McGhee, the aforementioned Shug’s older brother, who was finally expelled for head-butting a teacher, or Gus Armitage, who once beat up three Feinians (Catholics) when they jumped him outside his girlfriend’s house. Gus had supposedly just shagged her, too, though the prevailing wisdom among boys my age was that this was unlikely because the girlfriend was Catrina Royce and she was way too beautiful to permit sex.

  My family didn’t have much extra money to throw around, so in order to pay for my cigarette habit and to purchase the correct high-waisted trousers and garish designer jackets that were so important for a junior would-be thug on the rise, I had to find a job. I didn’t have the nerve for shoplifting, and in any case thievery of that sort was considered somewhat dishonorable. I didn’t have the connections to get the premium occupation available, which was working on an ice cream van, nor had I the money to buy my way into the paper-delivery business. (Established paper routes changed hands at a great price.)

  I eventually found a job delivering milk. Every morning at four-thirty a big flatbed truck driven by a moonfaced dairy farmer called Bob Clyne would show up at my front door and I’d shuffle out, shivering inside my army-surplus nylon parka. The climate in Glasgow in the winter is similar to Moscow’s, so you have to have protection.

  The Cumbernauld area was made up of mile upon mile of tenements, high-rise blocks, and council-rented terraces with no shops or amenities in between, so milk delivery was an essential service to a populace who used a little of it in every one of the billions of cups of tea they drank every day.

  I would sit on the back of the truck with my two teenage coworkers, coughing from the black diesel exhaust and jumping off when the vehicle slowed and grabbing crates of bottled milk and fresh rolls to leave on the doorstep for the occupants to collect when they awoke. It was punishing physical work, and by eight-thirty, when I finished my rounds and headed to school, I was exhausted. It wasn’t too bad on a day when there was a double French or Chemistry class, which I could nap through, but lessons with a teacher who was vigilant were tough.

  The money was great, however. Not just the base pay, which wasn’t bad at four quid (about eight dollars) a week, but also the tips which we could make on a Thursday night when we’d go door to door along the delivery route to collect on the weekly amount owed to Clyne’s Dairies by the customer. Most blue-collar workers got paid on Thursdays, so that night was the time to collect, before other creditors, or the pub, beat you to it. I have always found that, co
ntrary to stereotype, Scottish people are very generous, especially to individuals whose jobs seem more menial than their own—like milk boys—so some weeks I could double my basic pay with tips given by grateful, admittedly slightly tipsy, customers.

  Because I was a workingman I always had a few quid in my pocket and I always had cigarettes, which is how I met Stuart Calhoun. I had heard of him, or rather I knew he existed—it was his older brother, Sandy, I had heard of. Sandy Calhoun was a legend, a celebrated warrior who drank whiskey, fought the police when he got arrested, got into real fights with real weapons, and even though he no longer went to school, the teachers feared him. They knew Sandy was just the kind of violent and unpredictable lunatic who might return to settle a score with someone who had belted him when he was younger. He graffitied his tag—“San-D”—all over town like some kind of Caledonian outlaw Trump. Sandy Calhoun both terrified and fascinated all of us. I have no idea where he is today, my guess is he’s either in jail, dead, or heading a large multinational corporation.

  I was hanging out behind the gym one day when Stuart Calhoun asked me if I had an extra cigarette. Normally the stock answer would have been no, but, knowing who his big brother was and being something of a weasely politician, I handed him one of my Benny Hedgehogs and allowed him a light from my plastic Bic.

  Stuart, as it turned out, was nothing like Sandy, or at least not like Sandy was reputed to be. I think Stuart was probably the first natural comedian I ever met. He had a gift for mimicry and a highly infectious sense of fun, and the girls liked him, too. Soon we became friends. We would hang around after school, playing football—the real kind, using our feet—smoking cigarettes, and talking about the violence we’d be sure to dish out if we were to be provoked by, say, Catholics guys, or English guys, or English Catholic guys. We would chat up the really pretty girls, like Dawn Harrison or Maxine Hawthorne, even though they had rumored connections to boys even more dangerous than we imagined ourselves to be. Sometimes we would just sit on a wall and spit.

  There was a lot of spitting. It was the Scottish version of gum. Everybody spat. It looked kind of mean and suggested you didn’t care for the bourgeois attitudes held by people less cool than yourself.

  Stuart and I hung out in a little posse with some other boys. One was David Simpson—a freaky-looking kid with a giant nose who lived in a wealthy part of town and eventually married and divorced Dawn Harrison. Stuart Gillanders was another rich kid who was so blond he was almost albino and had the worst acne I have ever seen on a human. I also hung with the badder kids—Shug McGhee and Billy Thompson, personality types I would later recognize as uncannily similar to characters played by the actor Joe Pesci in Martin Scorsese films. Guys who could be your friend one minute, then turn on you violently for no reason the next. Small evil men who had a kind of bloodlust I didn’t understand. I imagine Stalin and Hitler were pricks like these, on a slightly larger scale perhaps, but with the same essential rottenness.

  The rallying ground for the diminutive tyrants of my neighborhood was that ever-present fertile shiteheap of religious bigotry.

  Sectarian violence was an odd little civil war where I grew up. Kids who you knew and liked could become your enemies under the right circumstances. Protestants supported the Glasgow Rangers soccer team and wore orange in allegiance to Protestant Holland, which had battled with Catholic Ireland in the late 1600s. Catholics supported the Glasgow Celtic soccer club and wore green in support of Catholic Ireland who…etc., etc.,…blah, blah,…late 1600s. It was just an excuse for gang colors really. Morons battling from an early age over medieval religious hairsplitting that they didn’t really know or care about. It’s a popular pastime in many parts of the world.

  There was plenty of encouragement for this hatred from shameful clergy who stoked and provoked the fires of conflict, and from striving needy politicians who used the discord for their own advancement and should have known better. One day during a routine battle with the boys from Our Lady’s High School, with the usual pushing, shoving, cursing, kicking, punching, and sectarian blasphemies, I observed the gear-change from pubescent swaggering to a more mature brutality. I saw Billy Thompson pull a sword from beneath his coat, a giant fucking broadsword, not a toy or a prop. A battle weapon. As he started swinging wildly he cleared a circle around him, everyone desperate to get out of the path of the blade. Billy grabbed a Catholic guy, Paul O’Conner, who I knew a little bit. He was the paper boy for our street and he lived near me, a nice guy, I liked him. Billy threw him down and held the sharp edge to his throat.

  “Don’t, Billy, fucking don’t, fucking don’t, man!”

  Everybody was yelling, our guys, their guys. Billy pushed the blade against the skin.

  “Beg for yer fucking life, ya poof!” Billy screamed at Paul, who was white with shock and was crying. Some of our guys laughed. I was terrified but hid it. No one was looking at me anyway. Paul begged for his life.

  “Please don’t kill me, please don’t kill me.”

  Billy looked at him, put his face close, hocked up a giant mustard-colored ball of phlegm, and spat it fiercely into Paul’s face. Then he got up, put the sword back in his coat, and kicked Paul in the head as he walked away.

  “Fucking Feinian prick. Did ye see him? Greetin’ fur his fuckin’ ma!”

  We said we did and ha ha and all that shite but I never ran with these guys after that. I felt that their reaction would have been much the same had Billy killed Paul instead of leaving him relatively unharmed but humiliated on the pavement. I remember thinking then, at around fourteen years old, that if there was any God or church that endorsed and inspired this fucking madness, then I wanted no part of it.

  I still feel the same.

  That’s why I believe in a constitution which separates church from state. I’ve seen what happens when they get in cahoots.

  I avoided the real hard guys as much as I could after that. I stopped smoking at school in order to steer clear of them. My absence was noted, but it didn’t matter much until one Saturday Stuart Calhoun and I were on our way to the center of town to look for girls. We were halfway across the footbridge that traversed the railway line near my school when a crowd of about thirty or so guys, some of them classmates, appeared at the far end of the bridge, singing songs proclaiming their love of Glasgow Rangers Football Club and their hatred of the pope. They had been drinking beer and were on their way back from a soccer match in the center of Glasgow. They were riled up and looking for a fight.

  They saw us so we couldn’t run, they would have given chase and kicked our heads in if they caught us. Flight equals guilt; at least it alarms and angers animals. The only hope we had was to appear delighted at the Rangers victory while expressing our common distaste for the Vatican.

  It didn’t really work out that way.

  When they met up with us a few guys started calling me a shitebag coward because I wasn’t running with them anymore. I said I was just doing my own thing but matters got heated, especially when a few of the guys who I knew (and they knew) I could take in other circumstances were putting it over big on me because they outnumbered us.

  The mob decided that because Stuart’s older brother Sandy was a “good guy” (they were afraid of the crazy bastard) he’d be spared, but that I would have to “run the gauntlet.”

  This meant that they would form two lines of equal length facing each other, creating an aisle that I had to run down. As I ran down the gauntlet they would kick and punch the living shit out of me but if I made it to the end I would be free to go. It wasn’t a great option but it was the only one I had, so I ran as they thumped and yelled and kicked. Animal instinct allowed me to push and move and at least feel the satisfaction of a few punches of my own landing but I’d seen enough gauntlets to know that there was no escape. And the idea of it all being over once you reached the end of the line was rubbish. Violence of any kind, once it starts, is like fucking a gorilla—you ain’t done till the gorilla’s done.

&n
bsp; So I got to the end of the line and jumped over the side of the bridge, dropping onto the sloped grassy embankment, my heart pumping hard. I ran toward the tracks, convinced they would chase after me. I had the tunnel vision of prey.

  I heard the horn before I saw the train, it was deafening. I looked up into the eyes of the horrified driver of a giant British Rail locomotive that could not have been more than ten feet away as I leapt over the rails out of its way.

  I hid in the bushes on the other side of the track until I was sure none of those fuckers was coming after me or were going to throw bottles or rocks on my head.

  I was pretty banged up from the beating and the jump, but I wouldn’t really feel much of that until later, when the adrenaline crashed.

  Stuart was waiting for me on the bridge. Protocol demanded he watch silently as his friend was beaten up.

  “If that train’d hit you you’d be fuckin’ deid, man,” he observed sagely.

  I knew that. It spooked me how close I came to starring in my own neighborhood ghost story.

  I still have dreams where I see the driver’s face.

  9

  Eldorado

  William Blake wrote that “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” and I suppose for me this turned out to be sort of true, although in my case I wouldn’t call it a palace, more a studio apartment. Or maybe just a cabin of understanding rather than wisdom. If I had known just how convoluted and scary the journey to my little shed of enlightenment would be, I don’t think I would have embarked on it in the first place. Not that I had any idea that’s what I was doing. I just wanted to live in America and be cool and have adventures.