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Alien nation
On Independence Day, an Englishman reflects on life in America
BY CHRIS WRIGHT

A few weeks AFTER I arrived in America, back in the early ’80s, I found myself sitting in stop-start traffic on Huntington Avenue, stewing in my own juices. It was one of those torrid July days we don’t really get in England, the kind that make steam shoot out of your ears, that make your eyeballs swell. On the car radio, and for some reason I remember this very well, they were playing "Fire and Ice" by Pat Benatar. I remember thinking, "This song is rubbish."

But a lot was rubbish back then. I was 18. I was at that age.

I think the reason I remember so many specifics about that moment is because of what happened a moment later: a young man darted into the stalled traffic, skidded his backside across the hood of the car in front of ours, and disappeared into the Northeastern University campus. A few seconds after that, a sweat-drenched police officer, his gun drawn, came tearing through the traffic in pursuit. Wow! I thought. Or maybe blimey! In any case, I was dazzled: this was the America I had always imagined. The America of Starsky & Hutch and The Dukes of Hazzard. The America of guns and cars.

Even though I was never to see anything quite like it again, the incident remains one of this country’s defining moments for me. "Leave ’em cryin’ for more," wailed Benatar as cop and culprit performed their little action sequence before us. "I’ve seen you burn ’em before."

I also remember, at around the same time, seeing a Buick parked in Central Square. I was mesmerized by it. The way its hood stretched out for what seemed like an acre. The way it muscled its way into one’s line of vision. The car was cherry red, and it shone in the afternoon sun like a promise. I remember, too, standing in Baskin-Robbins in Harvard Square a few days later, gazing at the 31 flavors of ice cream on offer: blueberry, boisenberry, bubblegum ...

Everything at the time — even such banalities as Twinkies and the 7-Elevens they came from — seemed fraught with archetypal significance to me. The skyscrapers. The cut-off Levis. The Stars and Stripes. The guns and cars. The girls. The money. The baseball. The cities: Chicago, Seattle, Detroit, Miami, Las Vegas, LA, New York.

The first time I visited New York City, I literally went weak in the knees. Seeing the Empire State Building, that quintessential icon of Americana, was like spotting someone famous — Clint Eastwood or Jane Fonda. In fact, New York in general felt very cinematic to me. The hordes of yellow cabs. The steam rising from the manhole covers. The constantly shifting Cubism of the skyline. The sky-blotting, self-obliterating scale of the whole thing. I stood at the foot of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, the wind whipping around the plaza, looked up, and got what seemed to be a glimpse of infinity.

Not that Boston didn’t have plenty to offer. I worked for a furniture-moving company at the time, and I’d meet all sorts of colorful, or off-color, characters. There was the gangly alcoholic who managed to work twice as hard as everyone else despite being drunk by nine o’clock in the morning. There was the athletic Californian who confessed to me, after three days of working together, that I was his best friend in Boston, and who never once cracked a smile. There was the Vietnam vet who would tell us tales of bullets whizzing by his ears as he crept off to the local bordello, the chain-smoking egotist who cried when his finger got smooshed by a refrigerator, the diabetic muscleman who was famous for making songs up on the spot. And then there were the customers, many of whom were crazier than my co-workers.

And yet, as thrilled as I was with all this, I wasn’t completely at ease.

Even though I’d grown up in London — a large, bustling, smoke-clogged city — everything here seemed so much bigger, so much faster, so much wilder. I felt swallowed up by it all. I felt lost and left out. The very things that had made me feel at home in England made me feel alienated here. My accent. My attitude. My fashion sense. On my green card it said I was an "alien." For all the fitting in I did over those first few months, I may as well have been one.

There were times, though, when I got into the spirit of my desolation.

One sunny day, wandering around Boston listening to some gothic dirge on my ever-present Walkman, I stopped off at the Public Gardens, plunked myself down on a bench, and gazed wistfully into the waters of Swan Pond. There’s a sense of existential weightiness, I think, that we lose when we leave our teenage years. At the time, there in that park, the entire city of Boston served only as a backdrop to my profound melancholy. The music blaring in my headphones provided a perfect soundtrack for this solemn scene: "Sad and lonely, leave me alone, I’m sleeping less every night/As the days become heavier and weightier and weightier in the cold light."

As I sat there contemplating this thing I called my life, I attracted the attention of a squirrel. Cute little fella he was, too, bushy-tailed and perky. "You’re my only friend," I said to the squirrel, who tilted his head in a sympathetic way. Determined to milk the moment for all it was worth, I ran across the street to a convenience store, grabbed a bag of sunflower seeds, and returned to the bench, where my squirrel, or one very much like him, waited in anticipation. I threw him a seed. He ate it. I threw him another. He ate that, too.

Soon, my squirrel was joined by three or four others. Every now and then, he would make a chicka-chicka sound and unleash a brief but shockingly violent attack on one of the interlopers. Foolishly, perhaps, I kept throwing the sunflower seeds, and before long there were about 20 squirrels competing for them. The chicka-chicka noises gained in frequency and intensity. Before long, the animals were fighting furiously among themselves. For those who haven’t seen it, a squirrel with the leg of another squirrel in its mouth loses a lot of its charm. I began to fear for my own safety.

By now, the ruckus had attracted the attention of other people in the park, some of whom stopped to watch the spectacle unfold. Mortified by the attention and unnerved by the sight of blood, I flung the entire bag of seeds into the midst of the roiling mass of froth and fur — an act that sparked what can only be described as a squirrel war. As I walked away from the carnage, I heard sounds that one would expect to hear in the ninth circle of hell: shrieks and howls and sickly gurglings.

No, this America business wasn’t working out at all.

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Issue Date: June 27 - July 4, 2002
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