COMING TO AMERICA

     I first came to America over forty years ago. I came with my youngest brother on the newly-founded Freddie Laker airlines, which for the first time had made America a realistic vacation destination for Brits. For my 18-year-old brother, it was simply that, a vacation. For me, however, it was something more.

Photo by Gary Lopater on Unsplash

       I was in my late twenties and had never in my life lived anywhere but London. To be honest, there had never seemed a great deal of reason to. I was a writer on a glossy magazine there and was being talked of as one to watch; I had good friends, some of the world’s best theater on my doorstep, and shared a rented flat with interesting people in a vibrant part of town: quite soon, I supposed, as my career solidified, I would save up some money and buy a flat of my own. My life’s pattern was set, and a very pleasant pattern it was.  Except … that I had never lived anywhere but London, and as my thirties approached, it was starting to occur to me that there was a whole wide world out there, of which I really should see at least a little before I settled down permanently. 

       The British pound, in those dear departed days, was strong against the dollar, and a couple of my journalist friends were taking six months or a year out of their careers to work as freelancers in New York, where they were having, by their accounts, a high old time. It sounded attractive, but not, something inside me said, precisely for me. New York, from what I had heard, was not so very different from London; and if I were to go somewhere new for an adventure, I would go somewhere really new.  

       I had recently met a couple of young Los Angeles women who were passing through London, who had talked of beaches, and film studios, and driving to Mexico for the day … Los Angeles, I thought, sounded definitely intriguing. That first trip with my brother was still only a vacation; but, for me, it was nevertheless a vacation with something more in mind.

       We touched down first in New York because you kind of have to, and did all the requisite New York things: we felt the buzz in the air; we climbed the Empire State Building and marveled at the view; we saw Woody Allen walking down Sixth Avenue with a leggy Diane Keaton lookalike whom he was making snort with laughter, and followed them shamelessly all the way to the Gotham Book Mart; we had brunch with my friends at Joe Allen’s and wolfed transcendentally delicious knishes from a street cart on the Lower East Side; we got – in my case, certainly not for the last time – hopelessly lost in Central Park.

        It was fun: New York always is. But the Greatest City in the World was never where I planned to hang my humble hat for an extended period: it was LA that was already calling me.

       The plane we took to Los Angeles was delayed and the flight was turbulent: by the time we landed at LAX it was well into the night and we were tired and airsick. We hadn’t made hotel reservations in advance, because, extraordinary as it may now sound, in Europe then you didn’t have to, you just jumped off the train and walked into town; for Los Angeles, someone in New York had recommended the YMCA, then mostly known as a cheap but respectable hostel chain, as a reliable place to stay, so, once we had collected our luggage, we made our exhausted way to the phone booth to look up its address in the local telephone directory.

       Only to be confronted with, not one telephone directory but a whole shelf of them, each one representing a different portion of all of the very many different communities that made up the 502 square miles of Greater Los Angeles.

       Newcomers to this city without a conventional center, not even sure of which part of town we were currently standing in, we could only stare at the names, befuddled. Was it Santa Monica or Santa Ana that was out in the desert? San Gabriel and I shared a name, maybe that was a lucky sign? The grandly styled Marina del Rey was clearly too posh for the likes of us, and wasn’t Chatsworth a stately home back in England? In the end, we decided on Hollywood because at least we’d heard of it, located the telephone number of the YMCA just off Hollywood Boulevard, and reserved a room for two.

       “You want to go where?” said the cab driver in disbelief.

       Hearts sinking, but seeing at this point little alternative, we repeated the address.

       He mulled the information for a while, then shrugged.

       “It’s not the worst time to go,” he commented philosophically. “This time of night, most of the druggies are out cold anyway.”

       It was a long drive to the district the driver reassuringly described as Hollyweird. Neon signs flashed past in the darkness, the driver shook his head in foreboding, and inside the cab Donnelly tempers, never the most mellow at the best of times and now rubbed raw by six hours of lurching plane travel and an uncertain destination at the end of the drive, were doing what Donnelly tempers will do. By the time we were at last disgorged into the Y, had settled the discussion about who would take which bed, and one of us (that would be the one with the stubbly chin and the cowlick) had concluded his complaints about the smell of the miniature of whisky that the other (no cowlick, but a burgeoning stress headache along with a diminishing appreciation for the joys of sibling relationships) had snapped that she had damned well earned by organizing this damned trip for the both of them and was damned well going to enjoy so damned well get used to it, we were both wondering why we had come there at all.

       The next morning, we woke to wonderland. Blue skies smiled benignly on tourist and drug dealer alike; palm trees swayed gracefully above Spanish-style buildings; and … was that really the Hollywood sign on the hills above the town?

       I telephoned one of the young women I had met briefly in London. She arrived at the Y an hour later, greeted me, California-style, like a long-lost sister who had newly recovered from a near-terminal illness while being held hostage by terrorists and along the way winning the Nobel Prize for literature, bundled all three of us into her car, and drove us down long sunny streets lined with more palm trees, past the billboards of Sunset Strip, around the mansions of Beverly Hills, past the UCLA campus in Westwood, and through the ramshackle bohemian enclave that was then Venice, until we ended up in that oh so intimidating Marina del Rey, which, it turned out, was not posh at all but a bustling, cheerful yachting community, where we sat in a restaurant eating the sort of Mexican food most of us used to eat back then – long on the sour cream and shredded cheese, short on the complexity of the spices – and looking out over the water.

       I was in heaven. The restaurant’s food tasted glorious to my still-gringa palate; the sky was high, the water was clear, and all around me were sun-kissed people who smiled when they caught my eye. Already there was something in the California air that spoke to me; that promised optimism and good American can-do; that whispered to my very soul, “Come on down. Try it out and see what it’s like.”

      I did not know, that sunny lunchtime in the Marina, that my entire life was about to be thrown most happily onto its head. I did not know that my six months’ time out from my London life would turn into two years, that the two years would turn into a lifetime. I did not know that it would be in Los Angeles that I would dream my best dreams, and make friendships that would last through tempests, that it would be where I would marry an American, buy a house just down the street from that same sunny, friendly Marina del Rey, and four decades later be buying my books at the Barnes & Noble and my wine at the Trader Joe’s there.

       I did not know that I would one day trade in my foreign journalist’s working visa for a green card, which I would then trade in for American citizenship; I did not know that when I would cast my first electoral vote, in 2004, I would feel my heart nearly burst with joy to be, no longer a guest of this extraordinary, complicated, one-of-a-kind nation, but a full American at last.

       Nor could I ever have guessed that this week, like so many other Americans, I would be watching the news reports with grim dread, all of us praying, with all of our hearts, to whatever gods we follow, that our nation will survive whatever will come on Tuesday.

       God protect our democracy. God preserve the America in which I have chosen to live.