My last newsletter was about me trying to tell my mother a story about a ghost, and how she kept interrupting with anecdotes about her mad friend, Norah, and her spider baby. What you’re about to read is the story I was trying to tell; she’s not a terribly good listener, my mother, so I hoped that if I wrote it all out, my life might start to make a little more sense to her, and she wouldn’t even need to listen to me, or even mention her mad friend, Norah, or her bloody spider baby. The trouble is, this story gets a bit involved. I’ve broken it up into smaller portions, and what follows is the first installment. I hope you don’t mind; it’s just that an awful lot of strange things seemed to have happened to me, and sometimes those strange things are connected to other strange things, and so on.
Also, I think it would be unfair if you judged me for the shenanigans I am about to describe. I was young, and two decades have passed and ... well, I like to think I’m nicer, at least. But back then? I was a little bit more difficult.
Actually, when I was twenty-four I was a complete larrikin, which if you didn’t know means “a mischievous young person, an uncultivated, rowdy but good-hearted person”, or “a person who acts with apparent disregard for social or political conventions.” Thank you, Wikipedia.
Larrikins are woven into Australia’s social fabric; simply put — their existence does not shock. And also, why was I a larrikin? Interesting story, actually. My grandfather Jack, you see, was — but no, this tangent takes us well outside the scope of this story, and I’m determined to tell it to you properly. And all I’m trying to say, anyway, is that if Zoya’s parents had been Australian, they would have recognized me, and received me differently. But as it was, they were good Christian folk living in Indiana — Baptists, I seem to think — and so I made no sense to them whatever.
Now, don’t take this amiss, but the men in my family haven’t attended a church since the 1920s on account of my great grandfather (Jack’s father, in other words) getting into an argument with his local priest. The priest had damned his children and descendants (my grandfather, Jack, my mum, and myself) because he’d married a protestant. (The tale is more thoroughly explained in a previous story, Call Me Nebuchadnezzar, which is about me trying to teach my daughters about religion). So, understandably, my great grandfather sent that priest packing, and my people have eschewed organized religion ever since. I suppose you could say that avoiding church is simply our way of honoring the past.
But my friend Zoya’s mother? She was devout. She attended her local Baptist church every Sunday and even had a favorite theologian named Rush Limbaugh. She worshipped this one specific type of Jesus who had blue eyes and golden hair, and loosely resembled Ewan McGregor back when he played Obi Wan in the Star Wars prequels. Zoya’s mother also, quite dutifully, hated gays and Democrats and foreigners like myself — ‘forners’, as she called us. She prayed for Jesus to smite America’s enemies — that is, most of the world, including California — with The Rod, The Locust, and The Botch of Egypt. And you know, I don’t know what those things actually mean, and I expect it is all explained in great detail somewhere in the Bible but I’m not allowed to read that, owing to some fairly solid reasons that I have already explained. In short, try never to annoy Irish people.
Anyway, my friend Zoya was nothing like her mother. She was a cute, blue-eyed American exchange student of approximately five feet and two inches in height. She was cosmopolitan and intelligent and good natured; so understandably, her mother had become concerned that Zoya might have been indoctrinated by communists.
Now, the exact details are hazy in my recollection, but I gather both mother and daughter had a falling out some time before I arrived in Germany. It had something to do with Zoya getting a tattoo. A month or two later, Zoya was struck down by glandular fever (or, mono, as Americans seem to call it), and when her mother turned up at the hospital and saw that tattoo, she flew into a massive tantrum. This event, I somehow think, is the real preface to what was about to transpire.
Enter me. I’d been Zoya’s penfriend for a few years and — well, never mind that now, the point is, I was in Germany, telling stories and jokes and being my own, affable self. I also befriended another American exchange student called Byron. I used to throw potatoes at him from Zoya’s window, and I suppose that made Byron curious about me. There was an energy about me, I suppose; there always has been, I think, because I am always getting up to something or other. Anyway, we would all hang out in Zoya’s apartment, throwing parties, and I told all sorts of outlandish-but-true stories, as you’d expect.
And then, of course, Zoya, Byron, and I went on a train journey together, and the stupidest things began to happen. I got arrested in Poland for no reason whatsoever. And then, a ghost! And then, another!
Finally, Zoya’s year in Germany ended, and so she invited me to stay at her parents’ home in Indiana. Which — from a certain perspective — only serves to illustrate just how differently women quarrel with each other, as compared to men.
No, I had to hand it to her — bringing me home to meet the parents? It’s almost diabolical. I mean, have you been reading these newsletters? Have you worked out how I am, yet? At age twenty-four, I was almost entirely composed of pure mischief. And Zoya, taking me to Indiana, was ratcheting up the conflict with her mother by several million notches.
But let me be fair to everyone involved; today, I have a ten-year-old daughter named Hattie, and if, one day — like, in eleven years from now — Hattie brings home a young man who is anything like me at age twenty-four, then what would I do? Take him drinking, probably, on a boat. And maybe take that boat roughly ten miles off shore, tie an anchor around his neck and throw it overboard. Then I’ll come back into port, gibbering about sea monsters or something. I don’t know! I’ll work it out then, if Fate should ever be so mean-spirited.
But back then? Well, I had my own problems.
When a foreigner arrives in the United States for the first time, it’s the accent that hits us first. The only time we will ever hear that accent is in sitcoms or movies, and that means that non-Americans are trained, from the earliest age, to believe that Americans are not at all a serious people. Honestly, to us, they just seem implausible and silly.
Also, they seem to have these peculiar neighbors who keep walking in through the rear kitchen door and then help themselves to food in the refrigerator. They have names like Skippy or Chuck. This is how we learn to associate the American accent with utter silliness.
Then you actually arrive in that country and, instead of silliness, there’s a terribly serious immigration officer glaring at you. It’s disconcerting. He does not so much as even wink at you. But again, Americans are people you know from television. We are both amused and bemused. We are greeted with an excess of wariness, bordering on hostility. When I arrived in Chicago, the agent wanted to know why I’d been away from Australia for four months. He explained that it was, to his mind, suspicious for anybody to be away from their mother country for that length of time, then stamped my passport and looked away with an expression of disgust at my evident lack of patriotic feeling for Australia.
So, that was odd.
Zoya met me outside — bright blue eyes and a blue dress. All smiles, and none of that strange hostility I’d just encountered inside the airport. She led me over to a huge SUV and, within moments, we were on a highway. I quickly learned that Zoya, a diminutive woman with a china doll look about her, swears ferociously at other cars while driving.
And in fairness, there was more traffic here than I had seen anywhere in my life. Eight lane highways. It was alarming. There were also strip malls just about everywhere. The outskirts of Chicago seem to have been arranged without the consultation of a town planner. Everything is haphazard, everything is inorganic and weird and brash.
The culture shock was, for me, absolutely mind-bending. People have milder experiences on Ayahuasca than I experienced in my first few days in the American heartland. I haven’t been everywhere on this Earth, but I am nonetheless convinced that the MidWest of the United States has to be the strangest place on this planet.
We passed through Gary, Indiana, which I already knew was the birthplace of Michael Jackson. I also knew it to be, at that time, one of America’s most dangerous cities. I thought to myself, if we break down here, we might conceivably die. I’d never had that sort of thought before. I’d been to other countries, but I’d never been anywhere quite so dangerous.
Soon, Zoya pulled over and we had lunch in a restaurant called Olive Garden. Naturally, I tried to make friends with the waiter; and it seemed to confuse him. He brought me a sizeable bucket of carbonated sugar water and promised me unlimited refills; and that deeply confused me.
We resumed driving. Cornfields, highways, more strip malls. Oh, and those funny-looking water towers you see in the movies. Also, old brick buildings with fire escapes on the outside, and even a yellow school bus. It was like experiencing a movie from the inside.
The drive to Indiana took four hours, and I gathered this was no great distance to anyone who lives in the MidWest. We pulled up on a driveway and parked below a basketball hoop. Like most of the houses on the street, there was a flag hanging out the front.
I met Zoya’s parents; they greeted me cordially, because you never know when Jesus is watching. Zoya’s sister nodded at me, and seemed displeased. But Zoya’s nineteen-year-old brother, on the other hand, was delighted to meet me.
His eyes, I noticed, were bloodshot. Later, I’d realize they were always bloodshot because he was high all of the time. The day I met him, he’d been doing something called, ‘munching pharmies, dude’. I needed this explained to me, and evidently he had wiled away his morning swallowing all the pills and medication he could get his hands on.
“No medicine cabinet is safe, Dude,” he told me, looking pleased with himself.
So, I said, “You oughta try Zoya’s birth control. You know, in the spirit of scientific enquiry.”
He blinked slowly and, said, three seconds later, “What, dude?”
The house had a beige sort of interior. I remember the floor of the bathroom was thickly carpeted, for some reason. I was stowed away into the guest bedroom. In the evening, her parents took us all out for breakfast, which obviously confused me. At first, I thought they were being sensitive to my jet lag. I soon learned that Zoya’s family went out for breakfast a couple of nights per week.
I ordered something from the menu, and was dumbfounded when it arrived — a slice of fried ham, with a piece of pineapple on the top. I looked at what everyone else was eating and it was all terribly, terribly weird. I think Zoya was eating something like an overly large bread roll, sans butter or jam or anything.
Now, later, in various cities across the United States, I did find Americans eating food that might be considered a recognizable breakfast; you know, eggs and toast and bacon, and that sort of thing. No, I’ve since come to the realization that Zoya’s town was just incredibly weird, and that the people living there had a terrible understanding of what constitutes actual food. And sincerely, I lived for roughly two decades in the United States, and that particular meal, in that diner in Indiana, was absolutely the stupidest meal I was ever served in a restaurant.
Dining with us was one of Zoya’s brother’s friends. His name, evidently, was Toast, and yes, Toast was just as high as Zoya’s brother. Toast was also wearing his hat indoors, and I did what is, admittedly, a peculiar thing: I removed his hat and put it on the table. Wearing a hat inside a restaurant was, where I grew up, such a serious breach of etiquette that womenfolk might come over and yell at you. I assumed Toast might be too high to realize what he was doing; which might also have been the case.
It’s actually quite strange for English speakers to visit different English-speaking countries. The commonality helps you overlook the subtle cultural differences. But over time, those differences begin to pile up, and one day, they come toppling down upon you.
I remember one time, I was in their family kitchen making a sandwich and the dog leaped up and grabbed the sandwich from off the counter. I stared at the dog in utter bewilderment; I suppose I’d never seen such a poorly trained animal. Zoya’s father, who had observed the dog take my sandwich, reached down and patted him affectionately.
“He’s got a behavioral disorder,” he explained.
I think he started talking about the dog needing a canine therapist, but I didn’t quite listen; I just nodded softly and said nothing. In my mind, I could only marvel. My first impressions of the United States were wrong. It was not, in fact, a terribly serious country at all. No, actually, living here was going to be like living inside a sitcom, after all.
This story continues in:
With chaste affection,
Kris St. Gabriel
What a tease...don't make us wait too long, k?!