I live in London. London is not my home. Home is 6000 miles west of here along the coast of California. For someone who grew up with surfing, skateboarding and sunburns, the ice-water beaches, leaden grey skies and endless rows of concrete parking structures of Mother England are, if not hell, a reasonable approximation.
In the summer of 2000 I abandoned friends, family, Mexican food, sandy beaches, warm summers, mild winters, decent book stores, 24 hour anything, objective journalism, non-smoking offices, outdoor activities, tans, shorts, cheap petrol, rock radio stations, baseball and my cat in order to move with my girlfriend, to London. She had been accepted to graduate school at Oxford and I managed to wrangle a transfer within my company.
We arrived in the midst of what I was later to find out was an unprecedented heat wave; my California surfer-dude shorts and t-shirts seemed comfortably appropriate. We found a ridiculously over-priced flat overlooking the rail road tacks in what I was told was a pretty swish neighbourhood, bought a bunch of semi-disposable Scandinavian furniture, fucked a few times and talked about what colour cat we wanted. Life was good. I was happy, in love and thinking, “This will work, this is good, I could really get to like it here.” What an idiot.
A month later my girlfriend dumped me; leaving me with a six-month lease on an apartment that I couldn’t afford and a dawning realization that not only did I not know a soul in the entire country but also that the only social activities available involved getting monstrously drunk and throwing up a lot. Fleeing was not an option. All my stuff was somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, impossible to divert for at least a month and the terms of my work contract stipulated that I had to stick it out for a year or else pay the company back for dragging my sorry ass to England.
I was fucked and I knew it. By November, when the freezing rain set in, I was wearing four layers of t-shirts under an old biker jacket because I was too poverty stricken to buy any proper clothes. I had no friends, no telephone, no TV or radio and ended up spending 16 hours a day at work just so I would have people to talk to. The only memory I have of my 35th birthday is sitting on my floor and crying.
My parents came to visit me for Thanksgiving that year. They smuggled a turkey over in their luggage because I was unsure whether we could buy one in the local store. My oven refused to light and we were forced to grill the wretched bird under the broiler: it came out looking like a lump of charcoal with legs.
Increasingly desperate and pathetic attempts to reunite with my ex-girlfriend failed predictably. I was replaced by someone younger, smarter and better-looking 24 hours after she set foot on campus. But hey, it’s been 13 years now and I’ve moved on. I’ve accepted her decision and I’m sure that if I saw her today lying on the ground engulfed by flames that I could find it in my heart to piss on her- if I didn’t have to cross the street first.
Those first few months pretty much set the stage for everything that has followed. So if anything I write sounds a bit jaded, you can at least see that my bitterness has a solid grounding in betrayal, isolation and despair.