America Circa 1997

By Trixie Pearce

This is not a guide to future travellers nor a discourse on the customs, culture or landscapes of the United States of America; there are shelves full to bursting with works of that nature in any bookshop. This is a story on my terms and in my words: sometimes colloquial, sometimes rich with imagery and evocative language and sometimes plain prosaic; but that's me and this is my inner journey.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trixie Pearce
• Release date: Oct 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301564873

Trixie Pearce

I've been writing since I could read. I write a mixture of genres from erotica right through to travel (from personal experience). Sometimes I can go quite a long time without writing anything but it's still always there in my head, plotting away. I'm currently working on a novel set in my favourite era - the 1920s. Whenever I'm not writing it, I imagine the characters sat around looking bored and drumming their fingers on the table waiting for me to come back so they can do something else!

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AMERICA CIRCA 1997

By

Trixie Pearce

SMASHWORDS EDITION

*****

PUBLISHED BY:

Kreative Katherine Limited

America circa 1997

Copyright © 2013 Kreative Katherine Limited

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This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

AMERICA: CIRCA 1997

*****

In the summer of 1997, I endeavoured to sample life across the pond and embarked on a three-month working holiday to America, land of freedom and opportunity. I needed a break after university and to escape from England. I had been suffering from itchy feet for some time and could not stomach the thought of a summer of drudgery in a factory, trying to pay off my overdraft and worrying about what I was going to do with my life. As I was not ready to cope with living at home again either, instead of York, I headed for New York.

Until the family goodbyes the day before, I had likened my parents' thoughts on this trip, to the numerous occasions they had waved goodbye at the departure gates of Gütersloh airport on our return to boarding school. I was unfazed by the journey. At the age of fourteen, when Dad was based in Germany with the Army, I underwent endless lone trips across London on the tube and countless journeys on the Gatwick Express; that was six years ago. Needless to say, in my parents' eyes, I was journeying to the land of drive-by shootings and religious cults; to a country over three thousand miles wide which boasted single States bigger than the entire United Kingdom. However, all that occupied the realms of my own imagination was log cabins in Aspen and rollerblading in Central Park, but I now understand the significance of the tears in my Mum’s eyes and Dad's overzealous bear hug.

Mum and Dad had shown disapproval when I casually dropped into a conversation earlier that year that I was going to the States on my own. This reaction was parental love and concern, of course, but I misinterpreted it badly, in the same way that I had misinterpreted the limited talk of America in the days leading up to my departure. Mum and Dad were letting their child fly all the way to the States unescorted, with no job or accommodation waiting at the other end. It was not as if they could come and pick me up if I was stuck and wanted to come home; believe me there were many occasions when I wished that they could.

*****

JUNE

Tuesday 24 June

As I boarded the 6:00 a.m. train to Manchester airport, I was actually more anxious than I had dared admit. Although I was armed with my passport, my visa, a four-month work permit, a credit card and $800 dollars, I could not relax until I had actually arrived in New York. The process of getting myself to the airport on time, checking-in and through the gates of the departure lounge, was like second nature to me: the simple part. The hard part was finding like-minded people heading for the same destination: Ocean City, Maryland.

After a mix-up with the passenger list when I had been told that I was on stand-by, I was finally able to go through to the departure lounge where I poured through my travel guide. Although I had some romantic notion of debarking in New York and having any destination in the whole of America at my fingertips, I now knew that I wanted somebody to share it with.

I was now beginning to regret the number of pre-arranged jobs that I had turned down. My best friend Emily and I had planned to conquer America together, but she had pulled out a few weeks beforehand because of different career objectives. Therefore, before I could relax and start to enjoy myself, I set about the task of finding like-minded students to share my dream with. After teaming up with a couple of other girls in the departure lounge, I was dismayed to learn that a mere handful of us were participating in the working holiday programme and the rest were Camp Counsellors.

Once seated on the plane I watched as all the other BUNAC students found their seats (you could spot them a mile off), and the aisle seat next to me remained empty. Then, at the last minute, a man in his thirties started to come towards the back of the plane and I knew that he would be sitting next to me; whispering please don’t sit in that seat to myself didn’t seem to do the trick. My only other hope of finding somebody who was headed for Ocean City, Maryland would be when we got to our overnight accommodation at Colombia University in New York, where we would be joined by those on flights from Gatwick, Heathrow and Glasgow.

The aeroplane took off and soon we were soaring over the idyllic arable fields of rural England, with their chessboard hedges and varying shades of green. Soon we were over the Atlantic Ocean where we would remain for a good five hours, before passing over the rocky coastline of Eastern Canada. The featureless stretch of water and fluffy white clouds created a false sense of security, as if should the engines fail, the plane would be safely suspended in a cradle of sticky candyfloss. Reality took over when we hit a particularly nasty bout of turbulence.

By mid-morning US time, we were passing over huge expanses of uninhabited greenness and far more lakes and stretches of water than I could fathom. It was then that the first stark contrast between the US and the UK hit home: this was the American definition of a ‘cosy’ field - a different world from the countryside we had left behind only a matter of hours ago.

During one of my frequent trips to the toilets, more to alleviate the boredom of a seven-hour flight than anything, I struck up a conversation with a girl in the queue. She was in exactly the same predicament as myself and had not come across any other Work America participants. She introduced herself as Gill and subsequently to the two girls she was sat with. I tried to mask the flicker of jealousy across my face as they sat giggling and getting drunk on the complimentary wine. Meanwhile, I was sat in the middle section of the plane next to a businessman with no other BUNAC student in sight, cursing the girl at the orientation in London who had given the impression that the flight was designated for BUNAC students only and was a seven-hour long booze-up. I, nevertheless, only have my overactive mind to blame for that. Building things up to be something that they were not, only to be disappointed in reality was something that got the better of me a lot during my stay. It was not until I stumbled across the work of travel-writer Bill Bryson in his book The Lost Continent, that this really struck a chord. All grievances aside, at least I had met Gill, who seemed fun-loving and adventurous as me and I would make damn sure we headed in the same direction.

Soon we started to fly up the Hudson River towards New York, but the first thing I noticed was the thick layer of putrid smog hanging over the city like an unwelcome parasol and I did not like what I saw. Subsequently, it was very difficult to appreciate where I was, a feeling aggravated by thirty-two hours without sleep and a completely uprooted body clock. Once we landed, however, I decided that I was not going to let a pollution problem ruin my outlook. Once we made it through the scary experience of US immigration and listened to tales of participants so unable to cope that they got straight back on the plane to England, I allowed myself a tiny pat on the back for having made it this far.

With my work permit tucked safely in my neck-wallet, I took a deep breath and stepped out of JFK airport into the sweltering heat of New York City. As the bus made its way to the council offices two blocks from the Bronx, it occurred to me that the saying so good they named it twice should be so huge they named it twice.

Surrealism became the key word in my vocabulary over the coming weeks. Unable to come to terms with the very real presence of Yellow cabs and hotdog vendors, I felt at a remove from everything that I was witnessing in the throes of heady, undisguised awe. All that I saw became the manifestation of some American film I had seen back home. We aimlessly wandered the streets of New York, swearing blind that every group of black men chatting in a shop doorway or playing basketball on a Harlem street corner, had walked straight from the set of Coming to America or Boyz ‘n’ the Hood. Little wonder then, that the hordes of middle-aged Americans let loose on the cobbled streets of York every year cannot muster anything more vocally challenging than isn’t that quaint?, when the biggest influences on their perception of England are such cinematic exports as Four Weddings and a Funeral and Sense and Sensibility.

Together with four other students, I explored what I could of the city in the little time that we had, managing to fit in a trip to the top of the Empire State Building and Macy’s department store. After carrying around a brown paper ‘grocery’ bag in each arm, I was convinced I had been taken over the body of an extra on a film set. Banality aside, almost all of the images of America witnessed by my generation are through this medium, whether it be films or glitzy soaps like Beverley Hills 90210 and Melrose Place.

Somehow, in all the excitement of this new and foreign experience, I had lost Gill and did not find her again until that evening, finally catching up with her after her own escapade in downtown New York and we arranged to meet up at breakfast and discuss our plans.

We had arrived at the BUNAC/Council offices at three o’clock in the afternoon US time, but according to our body clocks it was 8 p.m., UK time and we still had those five hours and more to relive. I felt like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day and by 8 p.m. local time we were dropping like flies, it now being one in the morning. I could not get any sleep until I had repacked my Bergen (the contents of which were sprawled all over the floor of my dorm room). As I lay awake listening to tooting cab horns and the beat from the night-clubs all around, I felt strangely soothed by the city that never sleeps and fell asleep knowing that I had made the right decision.

Wednesday 25 June

Breakfast was like nothing we had ever experienced before. Pancakes, muffins, pastries, multi-coloured breakfast cereals, bacon, hash browns, scrambled egg, sausages. We had never seen as much food before in our whole lives. Among the array of mouth-watering offerings sat the inevitable bagels and coffee, the former which was to become our staple diet over the coming weeks.

After everybody had clamped his or her jaws back together, Gill and I discussed our destination. She had already planned to travel down to Wildwood, New Jersey and had a pre-arranged job in a pancake restaurant, while I was still intent on heading south to Ocean City, Maryland. As they seemed reasonably close to each other, I decided to catch the same bus, stay in New Jersey for a couple of days and then carry on to Ocean City at the end of the week. However, there is no such thing as ‘nearby’ in America. Some States, such as Delaware, are extremely small in comparison with others and the major towns appear quite close to each other on the map, but it is perfectly normal for the nearest town to be thirty or forty miles away.

We sat with increasingly itchy feet through the two-hour obligatory orientation on taxes, accommodation and pay, among other things. It was conducted by a really loud American student who tried to convince us that we would all be saying awesome by the end of the trip. Never, I vowed. It would be like trying to convince an American teenager that he or she would return home saying sorted all of the time. He made the talk amusing enough, but we were all dying to get away. Besides, after queuing up for social security applications it would be 1 p.m. before we got away and we still had a four-hour journey ahead of us. This was part of the reason I decided to board the bus to Wildwood. If I had set out for Ocean City on my own it would have been 10 p.m. at the earliest. I did not fancy wandering the