The USA is unlike France in every way but one: when you’re there, you can’t help but keep thinking about the fact that you’re there. You’re not just drinking a coffee – you’re drinking a coffee in Paris. You’re not just eating a burger – you’re eating a burger in America. This knowledge alone, with all its fabulous, glamorous connotations – those accumulated over a lifetime of books and stories and songs and late-night Wikipedia trawls – shunts the mundane towards the mythical. I’m blowing my nose – in America!
Annie came back from her gig at 3am. Before she left, in my guilt I told her she could wake me up when she got in for an afterparty. Bundled up on my air mattress – chilly studio, well-intentioned yet ultimately inadequate duvet, legs curled tight up against me, teeth a-knock – I heard Tayler greet Annie at the door. I thought for a moment that Annie might burst into my room and bounce on my bed and demand I drink one last beer with her, but she didn’t, and I was sort of relieved and sort of disappointed.
At 11am I heard Tayler head out of the front door, and I took this as my cue to go through and wake Annie up. My rule about not entering people’s bedrooms when they’re in bed doesn’t apply to Annie – we’ve shared enough hostels and hotels for me to be used to it by now, plus I knew that if I didn’t go in and throw something at her, she’d gladly sleep until the all birds went away and the bats came out.
I woke her up and she said ‘ugh’ and I asked how the gig went and she said ‘fun’. Then we watched cartoons for a bit and she smoked some weed from a pipe. In the early afternoon Tayler came home and we watched something on the TV together, and a bit later Annie and I decided to head out for breakfast. The girls said goodbye to one another on the front doorstep while I waited on the corner outside.
“Goodbye baby, drive safe.”
“I will, I promise. Have a nice morning babe.”
“I’m so excited to celebrate your birthday with you.”
“You’re so amazing, I appreciate it so much. You’re so beautiful and kind. And sexy.”
“You’ll see how sexy I can be later on. Stay focussed on the roads, okay? Look after yourself.”
“And you, babe. Rest easy and have a gentle morning.”
“I love you, girlfriend.”
“I love you so much, girlfriend.”
After about seven minutes of this, during which time two local stray cats wandered over to me and began rubbing themselves against my ankles, Tayler closed the door and Annie thunked down the porch stairs in her combat boots.
“Okay let’s go,” she said.
I stood still, looking at her.
“What?”
“You two say goodbye like you’re going to fucking war.”
She flipped me the bird as she stepped into the street to unlock her car.
“Fuck off Daniel, we’re lesbians. It’s what we do.”
*****
This was the first time since my arrival that we’d actually been outside during daylight hours, and I was dog-delirious with joy to sit in the passenger seat of Annie’s car and watch Oakland roll by. I took photos of things that were, to Annie at least, the most average and baffling things: a shingle-walled house, a street sign, a big cactus, a reach-over traffic light.
But everything just looked so different! The autumn in the UK had already been and gone – the deciduous trees had already flared up in red and gold, and this year, because we had no sun for three weeks, the reds and golds were weak and didn’t last long – I never got my gorgeous blue-sky daylight to fully admire the leaves in their proper colour. But out here, with a clear healthy sky above, the yellows and reds shone like Hollywood, like editing suites. Here in England we crank up the saturation on the BBC – we have to, to pretend everything isn’t grey and washed-out 90% of the time – but in California they needn’t bother. Things just look like that.
The houses were wooden with porches and front yards and wire fences, and sitting in driveways were pickup trucks and 4x4s with front grilles so big and square that if they ran you down in the street you would explode like a snowman before a train. People walked slowly along the pavement – sidewalk – either with dogs or without dogs, shopping or not shopping, a few people fucked up, a few people dressed like cowboys, a few ‘Trust in God’ stickers on driveway car bumpers.
“Waiting For Pairing,” said Annie’s car, in a deep, rumbling transatlantic accent.
Then:
“Paired.”
And again, a moment later:
“Waiting For Pairing. Paired.”
“What on earth is going on?” I asked.
“Ah, it’s the stupid glitchy bluetooth,” said Annie. “It keeps losing my phone.”
“Why does your car talk like Darth Vader?”
Annie laughed. You never know what she will or won’t laugh at, but she doesn’t fake it. If she doesn’t find something funny she’ll just stare at you and say ‘ugh’ or ‘very amusing, Daniel’ or sometimes simply ‘Jesus’. But if something tickles her she laughs helplessly, like a teenager.
I began parroting the speaker every time we hit a bump in the road and the bluetooth lost signal: Waiting for Pairing. Paired. It made us both laugh. When Annie visits the UK, she always ends up speaking in a dodgy English accent for a good chunk of the time, usually sounding like a heavily anaesthetised Gemma Collins. It now seemed the inverse was true: I couldn’t help it. Everything we drove past, I pointed to and pronounced in the car’s James Earl Jones accent.
“Dog walker.” Dawg wokkurr.
“Car.” Caurrr.
“Porch.” Pourrch.
“Beer.” Beeyurr. “I drank sixteen bee-yurrs last night.”
I kept expecting Annie to tell me to knock it off, that I was being annoying, but she didn’t.
*****
We ate an enormous burrito at a place called ‘La Mission’ near Berkeley, which is another city apparently, despite there being no noticeable change in the cityscape since we left the house. The fact that Annie knew of a burrito place so far away made me realise what foodies the pair of them are; I have never been a ‘food’ guy, and I certainly don’t know of any good restaurants beyond the immediate vicinity of my house. The burrito was fat and tasty, the size of my forearm, and I covered mine in green salsa that I’ve not had since Mexico two years ago (two years ago?!).
After eating (fat belly, sedated) we drove deeper into Berkeley because Annie mentioned that the college campus was nearby and I wanted to see it. It’s something I’ve been intrigued by, weirdly, since I was a mid-teenager, since I first saw American Pie and Superbad and all that stuff. American higher education always looked so grand compared to the UK. The British university experience for most of us (not for Oxbridge students, who eat their nightly dinners in a fucking sorcerers’s castle) consists of cheap, window-barred halls of residence with damp on the walls, wristbanded shot crawls around sports bars, and fluorescent, AA-meeting style classrooms with broken radiators. It’s not a bad experience, per se, but there’s about 200 adjectives I’d use before I got anywhere near ‘grand’ or ‘cinematic’. I don’t often think of my university years, and they certainly weren’t my ‘glory days’. There’s something very Greggs about it all, this side of the pond.
And then we turned onto Piedmont Avenue, the major street that passes through the University of California, which everyone just calls ‘Berkeley’, and unable to help myself I went ‘whoa’. Sitting gigantic off a roundabout was a real-life fraternity, with its own garden and porch and million windows and giant Greek letters daubed on the upper right corner like a postage stamp on a letter. There was nobody outside this particular house, but Annie drove us up and down the street, and a hundred metres down there was a second, larger roundabout with an even bigger house, and outside college kids in blue and yellow American football jerseys were drinking beers beside a barbecue.
“Oh damn,” said Annie. “Must be a game day. We picked a good time to come up here.”
“Holy shit,” I breathed. “I can’t believe it’s all actually real.”
Annie found my amazement amusing – and I suppose I’d feel the same way if she got overwhelmed with joy at the sight of an English polytechnic. But I just couldn’t believe that the American college experience wasn’t simply a fiction, or at least a gross exaggeration for the movies. We drove past frat houses and sororities, some of which were clean and quiet, some of which were mid-party, and some which had clearly been vacated only moments before – red plastic cups and beer kegs littering the balconies and terraces.
Hung from dorm windows on many of the frats were gigantic banners – bedsheets – with slogans scrawled on in paint. ‘Bears shit on trees’ said one of them. ‘Cal smokes trees’ said another. ‘Pussies’ said a third (they had turned the ‘I’ in ‘pussies’ into a tree). All around, girls and boys in blue-and-yellow jackets were talking to each other and yelling to friends, running inside and calling down from balconies and open windows making the house look like a giant busy game of snakes and ladders, and above the sky was clear and the sun coming down was warm, and as laughter rang out across the street and music boomed, I thought: yeah, I can see how these would be your glory days.
A lot made sense, very suddenly, as I watched the college kids relaxing and partying in their picture-perfect micro-world. You could smell the promise of the future in the air – see it written on every young face. Too young to be burdened with responsibilities and regrets, too fresh-faced to care about their health, too clever and too rich by far to ever lose sleep wondering ‘will I make it?’ Of course they would make it; they need only look around for proof. Living in a manor house with their best friends, far from parents, attending one of the best universities in the country. What could possibly go wrong? I understood, suddenly, why Americans are so strange abroad; why they are so intense, so conversation-dominating, so ‘I am an AMERICAN CITIZEN’. How could they not be, growing up in this gleaming paradise, this crisp-aired, golden-houred soft-lit theme-park? Anything else – any slip in quality and privilege – would feel like an assault.
*****
That evening, Annie, Tayler and I went out for dinner with Annie’s family at a restaurant called The Wolf, ahead of her actual birthday later in the week. I was nervously excited to meet Annie’s family at long last – I wanted to make a good impression – but I was particularly giddy about meeting her dad, Gary. Gary is the source of a lot of Annie’s niche interests – a lot of which I share. He’s into Beat literature, he’s travelled to India, Nepal and Tibet, he’s a yoga teacher (as well as a lawyer), and he’s met the Dalai Lama. It was a joy to finally meet him – as well as Annie’s lovely southern mother, Pam (also a lawyer), and her brother (a talented chef and the spitting image of Annie) Clark.
We drank a lot of wine and I ate many things I’d never tried before: octopus, scallops, seabass. After the meal Annie suggested we go around the table and each tell a funny story about her. Her brother told of how, one Halloween when she was a kid, Annie decided she didn’t care what the other kids were doing – she wanted to go as a FedEx truck. When the time came for me to say something, however, I panicked, realising at an instant that I apparently have zero stories with Annie that aren’t wildly inappropriate for a family dinner.
“Hmmm,” I said, trying to keep my expression neutral as a thousand absolutely unacceptable, utterly uncouth stories flicked like film trailers behind my eyes. “I might have to get back to you on that.”