A colleague and I were in my offme a few days ago when we decided to say hi to an old mutual friend who last year moved to London. I put the call on speakerphone. We were disappointed when we got his answering machine.
But not for long. There was our friend’s voice — well, sort of our friend’s voice. It was him, all right, but he sounded like something off an Avengers rerun. “Double” this and “naught” that, and “give us a bell” and ” nip down the pub,” with a “ta” and a “cheers” thrown in for good measure.
“He’s taken the lorry to the lift to the loo,” said my robustly American colleague.
I was about to pile on with a few aperus on American self-loathing. But then I remembered that speaking normally over there is not without its challenges. When I lived in England for a couple years, preserving my accent was a priority — not just for the petty, selfish reason of sparing myself ridicule, but also for the petty, selfish reason of getting invited back to dinner parties. The English national pastime being amusement at others’ expense, pass-the-butter-please Yanks are far less popular than their gimme- da-budda compatriots.
So I took to saying things I’d never said before, like “golly” and “buddy” and “holy cow.” My preferred greeting was a goofy, “Hey! How you guys doin’?,” always delivered with a broad (American, I thought) smile, which made me look and sound like some demented Little League coach.
This glad-handing persona got me into lots of trouble. There was obvious anti-Americanism, of course. A deranged Irish guy, who always sat alone in the coffee shop I frequented, had it in for me. “Hey, Yank!” he’d yell. “Do you know who me hero is? Karl Marx! Karl! Marx!” As if I were supposed to shout back, “Them’s fightin’ words!” But for everyone who took me for a running dog of McCarthyism, two received me with open arms as the ambassador of Woodstock Nation. Hitchhiking, I met an accountant — an accountant!who told me, “Man, the spirit needs to be set free in order to grow.” A street musician I knew asked me, apropos of nothing, “So! How’s the heroin in the States?”
One weekend I arrived in Stranraer, Scotland, two hours early for a ferry. I had 30p in my pocket. I figured that if I went into a pub, there was a 1-in- 4 chance I could win enough from a slot machine to buy myself a half-pint of beer.
There were four people there: the barman, two violent-looking guys my age standing over beers, and a 50-ish fellow slumped on the bar.
“Hey,” I said. “How you guys doin’?”
Slump straightened up and said, “Och! A Yank! Have a whiskey with me, Yank!”
I didn’t want to take advantage. I looked at the two guys my age, and they both gave a single downward nod, which meant, go ahead.
“I am the richest man in this town, Yank,” Slump said as I sat down. “I am the only one who has been to America!” Slump loved America. But he turned out to be not that great a guy. He described how he’d been to New York, to Las Vegas, how he liked our American women (“. . . if ye ken wha’ I mean, lad”), the bars he’d wrecked, and the various people he’d either ripped off or punched out. He offered me a second drink, and as I took it, he said, “. . . and I will visit you, lad! I promise!” He whipped out a pen and asked for my address. It was clear to me that he meant it. So I wrote:
Wojciech Przedpelniecki
72890 Mulligan Crossways
Hootenanny, New Jersey
This seemed to infuriate him. “Wodge — . . . Woadge — ”
The two younger fellows came over and looked at “my” name, quizzically. I had thought it would amuse them, but they didn’t seem to like it much either.
Now Slump felt he was being had. “What kind of name is that!” he bellowed.
What could I do? I pulled my bottom lip over my top one into a Bill Clinton frown, feigned deep emotional hurt, and said, “It’s . . . it’s . . . an American name, sir!”
After that, I must have grown a little less vigilant. A few days after I got back to the States, I was driving through Lynn, Mass., the city I was born in, when I got a fiat tire. It was right in front of a gas station. I pulled in. I walked into the attached grocery store while they changed the tire, and bought a pack of Kool-Aid and a bottle of spring water from the cashier. But when I asked for a cup, the teenage girl at the counter told me I’d have to pay for it.
“Golly,” I said. “Holy cow! Five cents for a little cup!”
“There’s no such thing as a free lunch, sir . . .” she said. I smiled as I pushed the door to leave, but she wasn’t quite through.
“. . . here in America,” she finished cheerily.
CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
