I’m always sheepish when I see friends for the first time in a while – and it wasn’t even that long of a while! But I don’t know; I’m not very good at hellos, and I’m atrocious at goodbyes. I think as I get older I’m increasingly wary of sentimentality. A cautious counter, I think, to the oversentimentality of years gone by – of alienating people, weirding people out with my emotional intensity. I’ve learned, quite subconsciously it seems, to say less. Maybe that’s what happens to a lot of boys when they’re little – maybe that’s why so many men are so stoic and silent and struggle to know what’s going on in their own heads. For some reason it happened to me much later on. I never know how much emotion is appropriate, so it’s safer to just be pragmatic.
I hugged Annie in the arrivals hall and asked her about her day almost instantly. That’s what I do now, you see – for better or for worse. I feel scared to drop my guard and say ‘I’m happy to be here with you’, so instead I say ‘How’s your day been?’ and move the conversation to ground on which I’m more steady. I like hearing about my friends’ days. Showing interest is how I show affection.
We headed for the car, Annie with her arm around my shoulder for part of the way, and we stopped at a bathroom for a moment. I had a wee in a stall and I looked at the door and I thought ‘oh yeah’ – I’d forgotten how American toilet doors have one-inch gaps down either side so you can see straight out to the sinks, presumably so you can’t shoot up discreetly. Something about that feels very American, though I can’t put my finger on exactly what.
Outside the airport the air was fresh and smelled different and the trees were much taller than at home. I told Annie.
“You’re so easily impressed, boys,” she said. “It’s literally a parking lot.”
“Yeah but it’s just… I’m on a different continent.”
Going to another country and going to another continent are not the same thing – and I know that makes no sense because borders are arbitrary, but whatever. You travel to another European country and things are familiar, mostly, but just sort of… rearranged. Like visiting several bedrooms in the same house. While the human traces may be different, everything else – the plantlife, the birdlife, the clouds, the air – is broadly familiar. Visiting another continent, however, is like stepping out onto another planet. I looked up at an enormous cedar tree, at its ragged bark in rich brown. Give an English kid a crayon and tell them to draw a tree and they’ll draw a brown trunk and green leaves, but if you look closely, tree trunks in England are not brown at all; they’re silver and grey and green. In North America the tree trunks are so cartoonishly brown they’re almost red. And they smell like nothing smells back home. They’re a tang to them, a spice.
And the clouds are different too. African clouds are different to South American clouds, Australian clouds look nothing like North American clouds. In Europe our clouds are low and wan and wide, they cause no fuss, they just get on with it. Across the ocean, changes in the air pressure mean their clouds sweep up into the sky like castles, and the sunlight catches them in different shades all the way up; weighty, dramatic, grand.
We climbed into Annie’s car and I sat in the faint floral musk of old joints.
“Been blazing it in here, have we?” I asked.
“Oops,” said Annie. “Maybe.”
We talked about this and that – my plane ride, my five wines, Napoleon – and I was surprised to note how normal it felt seeing Annie drive a car. Seven years of friendship, seven countries visited together, and this was the first time I’d seen her behind the wheel. I envied her the car – wondered idly how long it would be until I own one myself.
My body clock was telling me it was 2 in the morning, but the sky said 4pm, and I felt a little gloopy as we wound around onto the freeway.
“Everything looks so… American,” I said about fourteen times.
Driving on raised-up stilted highways, we passed billboards backdropped by forested hillsides pocked with homes. I gazed at them in awe and horror as they drifted past.
‘STOP HIRING HUMANS’, said one. ‘SWITCH TO AI NOW AND SAVE’.
‘CHEAPER, FASTER, BETTER: PICK THREE’, said another. ‘AI CUSTOMER SERVICE’.
The brazenness of it made my head swirl. Lawyers, robots, steakhouses, medicines, movie stars.
We passed a thousand Teslas, and I saw more personalised license plates in a one-hour car ride than I’ve seen in my whole life back home: B1G BOI, RED FL4ME, KURT1S. They span me out a bit. People really are different here, I thought. They have different values; they think differently. Suddenly the prospect of spending 10 days here seemed scary, imposing, and I felt my travel anxiety return with a great unwelcome flop. You’re with Annie, you silly sausage, I told myself. It’s going to be fine.
“I’m a bit scared that everyone here has guns,” I said, feebly.
“You’re not gonna get shot, dude,” said Annie. She has this particular firm, practical tone that she uses with me when I’m being all afraid. “This is California, not Texas. Not everyone has guns.”
Then she somehow meandered onto a story of one guy she knows, a gigantic tattooed doorman, who does own a gun, but she assured me he’s a sweetheart.
“I feel like you and I have different definitions of the word ‘sweetheart’,” I said.
We drove past the city and the skyscrapers and I gawped at them until we drove over the Bay Bridge, and then I gawped at that instead. Everything was just massive.
“Oakland’s a little more sketch than San Francisco, but you’ll be fine,” said Annie. “There’s a homeless camp at the end of our street which you’ll see when we drive past, and it’s a little unsightly but they’re harmless. Sometimes we hear one of them wandering down the street yelling at 4am, but that’s it.”
I nodded, quietly, thinking ‘what the hell’ in strained internal tones. Everything seems more daunting when you’re unused to it, of course. I don’t bat an eyelid at Brixton anymore, even at the wildest times of night – I just drift through the chaos, headphones in, thinking about my dinner or whatever. Nobody looks twice if you blend in – and in London at least, they barely look even if you don’t. You can get used to anything is a refrain I use when I’m feeling out of whack. Give it time.
Now off the freeway, we drove past a cinema with one of those big jutting-out awning things that show the names of films in bright lights. It looked wonderfully American; I took a blurry photo. Then we stopped at a supermarket and went inside for snacks, but I didn’t know what anything was so I let Annie choose everything. She asked me what beers I like and I said I liked Pabst Blue Ribbon when I visited the US in 2014, but she wrinkled her nose and said Pabst Blue Ribbon is the worst beer anyone could possibly buy. I told her I didn’t mind; I am a man with an underdeveloped palette and simple tastes (a detail that would become increasingly evident over the next few days). At the checkout they add the tax on, so the total is always way higher than it seems when you’re shopping. It was around $80, and I offered to split it but Annie said no – she knows I’m not flush – and paid for everything.
We drove a little further and passed through underpasses filled with the ragged evidence of hard-up humanity. I saw a young black guy lying on a mattress, face up to the stars, asleep or passed out, arms wide to either side like Jesus. Other people, clad in gloves and frayed beanies and jackets spilling white lining, leant against a decomposing RV talking to one another in huddle. The ground was littered with tarpaulin scraps and wire and newspapers and tanks of cooking gas: at attempt, however unsuccessful, at comfort; at something resembling order.
“Jesus,” I said. “That’s… pretty fucking real.”
“Yeah,” said Annie. “Get used to that.”
A few blocks later we arrived outside Annie’s apartment. We got out of the car and I looked around the street, woozy from the jet lag, and tried to orientate myself. I was in America – with Annie, witnessing her world. For many years now, she’s always been the one to hop inside my bubble, a boisterous colourful guest star who once a year handbrake skids into my now-quiet life, throwing up gravel and smoke and dust flecked with glitter. I found myself wondering how she existed on her own turf – and how on earth I would fit into it all.
She lives in a big green house on a street corner, right off what appeared to be some sort of main drag leading into Oakland’s centre a few miles away. Apparently back in the day one family used to own the whole enormous thing, but now, like everywhere else, it’s been broken up into apartments. Annie lives with her girlfriend Tayler on the ground floor (or first floor if you’re a silly American), in a cute apartment that looks very San Francisco-esque in a way that reminded me immediately of the family home in Mrs Doubtfire (or Inside Out, for any Gen Z readers out there).
Tayler greeted me with a hug – I’d met her for the first time in London when they visited a month before – and laughed at Annie’s choice of groceries.
“Why the fuck have you bought Life*?”
*A breakfast cereal that, as far as I can tell, is just shredded wheat.
“I wanted Dan to try it! I asked him what he usually eats for breakfast and he said oatmeal, so I said we’d give him something better.”
“You don’t even like Life.”
“Yes I do! It’s delicious.”
“When have you ever eaten Life?”
“All the time! I had it last week!”
“When, bitch?”
“Last week! Fuck you.”
This manner of talking, I came to realise, is how they flirt. They bicker like this for roughly three minutes, talking over one another at an increasing volume, until one or both of them says ‘fuck you’ and then they kiss and tell each other how hot they are. They explained this away as a simple fact of lesbianism.
I didn’t know that at the time, however, and thought it was a genuine disagreement, and so, not knowing where to look in the meantime, I busied myself with peering at photo frames and prodding ornaments. Their apartment is cosy and tasteful and busy with memories. They have sweet couple’s photos and childhood snaps on the mantelpiece, and many statues of cats posed in various positions. There is also a real cat, named Miel, which means ‘honey’ in French, although I kept forgetting this and calling her ‘Milou’ by accident. I stroked Miel and she cuddled my wrist, but then I must have stroked her too long or wrongly because she hissed and scratched me away; I have never understood cats, and decided it was best to let her be.
Annie had left out a can of beer and some chocolates on the airbed she’d blown up for me in the spare room – her beatnik music studio, replete with miniature Buddhas and incense and complicated music machines and a poster of Jimi Hendrix – along with a colourful handwritten note that read ‘Welcome to America Dan!!! Sorry it’s just as shite as England!’
Then we went out: Tayler drove us up the road to a bar named – get this – ‘Beeryland’, complete with rainbow wooden lettering above the gate. Annie ordered drinks and food for us inside, and we sat beside a man playing pinball on a Beetlejuice-themed machine. We talked about things, as we do, and all the while I couldn’t quite fix it in my head that I was in the USA. It felt like I’d stepped onto the set of a movie – every inch of it, the whole country, one enormous, rolling, unending movie set.
We then went to another place – a dive bar called Stork – and I tried to order the second round by myself and of course I ballsed it up.
“Open or closed?” said the beerwoman.
“Sorry?” I said.
“Are you trying to close it off?”
“What? Sorry? …What?”
“Do you want to pay now or open a tab?”
I said pay now and handed over my card, and a minute later she handed it back to me along with a piece of paper, on which I had to write my chosen tip ($2), the grand total ($20), and my signature.
I must admit, it felt surprisingly antiquated for a place with ‘ACCEPT YOUR NEW AI OVERLORDS’ blaring from every billboard.