THOMAS LARSON

(The OC Weekly September 16, 1997)

In England, my companion Suzanna and I began traveling with the self-assurance that for the next several weeks our American voices would be the source of fascination, if not playful suspicion, by another group of people who—Hooray!—speak the same language we do. Coming from a country that venerates and distrusts, occasionally vilifies and deports, the “foreigner,” now we’d discover for ourselves the complexity of being “other.” We were ready to be enjoined: Cali-forn-i-yay? by hosts civil and curious: O.J., riots, Hollywood, quakes, affirmative action. Just ask; we’ll tell.

But our country did not become us. After one week, no one commented on our accents
or nosed us with the least bit of interest. We had no status whatsoever except to be pegged as Americans abroad with a bit of money. To that class, the British smile, say profound things like “Good Morning” and “Good Afternoon,” and are about us as curious as concrete.

Suffering anonymity in the morning was particularly tough. In line at the News Agent, I hoped that my simple query “Do you sell The New York Times?” would open the doors of reception. The friendly head said, “No,” then thought a moment and added, “Sir.” After a week of grey days buying that passable junior partner, The International Herald-Tribune, I believe every sales person had the same under-his/her-breath complaint: An’ ’e thinks ’es entitled to ’is ’ometown paper because ’es on ’oliday! Though I wanted to scream, “You’re right I am entitled,” I never did. I stewed and bought USA Today, proving just how bottom-line loyal to the stars and stripes I could be.

I wasn’t happy being ridiculed as a foreigner, even if no one said as much. Indeed, my American ego was undergoing radical re-education sensing that these people may have something against me. The experience is especially disconcerting if you’re accustomed to things moving—as I am—when you speak up: “If you can’t help, ma’am, then get me the supervisor.” I suspected that underneath the British demeanor many were sticking me, quick as clotted cream on a scone, as one of those impertinent sorts from Lubbock or Bakersfield, a go-getter, a wheeler-dealer, a Billy Bob. Fearing the typecast, I kept my trap mostly shut and said, as they do, ad nauseam, “Oh, thank you very much, indeed.” (Once, when a disgustingly efficient waiter served us Yorkshire pudding, I counted five thank you’s from him just for delivering warmed plates. Why would he thank us? Isn’t that the customer’s line?)

In any case, all my fulminating about our Americanness going unnoticed evaporated the morning I heard, at what I thought was our empty B&B, another American, my voice-sake, give himself away. Suzanna and I were lolling in a sun-drenched atrium alone (mid-October’s weather is quite clear and the environs blessedly untouristy), when I heard him call up to his wife from the foyer. “And babe, bring down the tan suitcase when you come.”

“Oh no,” I said to Suzanna, “it’s a Yankee. There goes our specialness. Let’s run for it.” Too late. In strolled a man and woman, very obviously ordinary not because they were outside the American norm but because as normal Americans they looked entirely out of place in England. “You’re an American,” the man nailed me at once, a statement so true it stung. I resisted the eighth-grade retort, I know you are but what am I?

“Put ’er there,” he said, gripping my hand like a shipwrecked sailor. His name was Mac, from Costa Mesa, the moneyed heart of Orange County, just up the road from San Diego, our hometown. Within nanoseconds, we heard that Mac, a pharmacist for Sav-On, along with Emma, his wife of twenty-eight years, had driven through Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and half of England, before zipping on today to their flight to LAX from Gatwick Airport, 100 miles east—their entire journey lasting two weeks!

A “visual trip” Erma called it. “I’m an artist and I came merely to get all those greens and oranges in my mind. And you?”

Us? Well, how do you pussyfoot your country persons, especially when you are nothing like them, in neither constitution nor guidebook loyalty. Not artists, not pharmacists, not crazy enough to tour the British Isles in two weeks as though it were Arizona. Yet we were polite and told the truth. When I said sabbatical, Mac said, “1 knew it. What did I tell you babe, a perfessor.” So, he must have been ear-spying on me, too.

Mac was a case, no matter which side of the pond he landed. Golly-Molly buck-teeth smile, hunch-shouldered, basketball-stomach, big thick glasses like TV monitors that bug-eye the eyeballs—this Mister Man off Main Street was not to be denied his opinions. Two bites into breakfast and he was promulgating an English-only movement for Great Britain. “Even in Ireland, for Christ’s sake, they talk in Gaelic which they think they’ve got some God-given right to speak, anything to make the British mad, geez, you leave America, California, eh? and what do you find? the same damn thing over here, agree?” he-said-without-breathing.

Indeed: Leaving America is futile. U.S. conceits are roomier than a Missouri cave, more varied than Indian place names. Yet when Americans travel we discover that the world has shrunk to the size of a travel agent’s tour book, shuttling our ilk in and out of the seven thousand “Must See” sights and adjacent gift shops of the world.

Mac wasn’t through. “What do you think,” he wanted to know, “can we just swing by Stonehenge”—a few kilometers away—“for a quick look and still make the airport?” God, do I really sound like that to the English? The typical blowhard American, pompous, prejudicial, galling, stupidly “doing” Great Britain on a credit card and automotive positivism/ I wanted to remind him of what the rustic, swarthy chap in the far west of England told us: “You people will never see Cornwall by car.”

I thought about our poor hosts. To them, two American couples in their breakfast space must have seemed offensive. No wonder they didn’t emerge from their warm kitchen, after they had served us in cute little cook and waitress uniforms. Ma and Pa B&B got wind of Mac’s chatter and quite rightly shrunk from our gibberish the four. Language genes on alert, the literate English are careful not to be seen being heard with Americans. In a word, we’re corrupting. The luvly country air, the public footpath, the bicycle bell, the liters of milk on the porch: Preservation of sensibility is their donnée. Words must be preserved because words, I was learning, sound far more elegant in the Brit’s mouth, far more elephant in the Yank’s.

Yet, by now, I felt obliged to reach out to my nation’s brother and sister in a strange land. I had to admit that only an American would understand my stopping in the middle of a roundabout to look at the map while the local drivers swerved and honked. But that tale had to wait: Costa Mesa Mac wanted to talk baseball. “Since you came over after we left,” he said, “you must know how the Dodgers did in the playoffs.” As a matter of fact, fresh in my TV-mind was that dramatic final series of the year which my hometown Padres swept from the L.A. Blue and thus won the Western Division. I came to life recollecting those games’ majesty.

At gut-check time, the Dodgers checked out, I said, and Mac replied, “You got that right.” Yes! There was one of those perfectly ripe American expressions, which I’d been starved for. My phraseological heart fluttered. Suddenly I was nostalgic for that swagger and accent of the confidence man, the American’s pushy voice, with its hardwood tones, those two- and three-beat slam-bam retort rhythms of our speech. Which if no one else on this bloody island would revere, I would.

In no time, Mac won me over. We had only a few minutes to talk but I could tell he wanted to speak with me as avidly as I did with him. With, not to. So we let loose, dissing English customs until we were drunk on playing the dozens, boorishly American.

“Hey-hey, ho-ho, these kidney pies have got to go—”

“O, ye olde curiosity shop, what is so curious, brimming as ye are with touristy trash, is why ye can make a living at tall—”

“Now, let me get this straight: The man, Andrew Robert Buxton Cavendish, who lives on this estate, Chatsworth, in Derbyshire, is the Duke of Devonshire, who married the daughter of the second Lord Redesdale, whose son, Peregrine, the Marquess of Hartington, will inherit Chatsworth and, God willing, pass it to his son William, Earl of Burlington? Did I get that right?”

“Treacle tart sounds like a sluggish hooker.”

“All this king and queen stuff from five centuries ago is fine but might we hear a bit more about Charles’s and Diana’s affairs?”

—until our companions cried, “ENOUGH!” Oh, how sweet it was to sound like us!

How happy I to entrust my deprecating humor to Mac, the other—the ugly, loud, listen up!—American. A partner in guffaw, I wished we had more time. “Didya get a load of those prices for Windsor Castle? I mean, c’mon,” he whispered when I walked him to the door. Then I realized that having given us so much of their time Mac and Emma would have to forgo Stonehenge and gun it to Gatwick.

My surprise in England was hearing the American voice: That hip-hop, hippity-hop of our vernacular, which I thought was nondenominational and uncommitted to father and flag but is, in fact, seared into my brain like luncheon meat is Oscar Meyered. Our Americanness is no hot-air balloon on which we ride in from Oz. National character begins with the larynx, the fact of mouth, of open mouth, out comes home. We need not inhabit foreign realms with our maws zipped tight, censoring our doltish rudeness, our jazzy sass, our voluminous excitement, our occasional vulgarity. We might as well say what we think. In England, it doesn’t really matter if we do.