‘I sure am,’ I replied, smiling.
‘So how do we know you’re not a terrorist here to blow this whole stadium up? Hey?’
The question floored me. I felt myself tensing inside.
‘So, go on, if you’re a Bruce fan what’s your favourite Bruce song, huh?’
I was back on firm ground. ‘Not sure to be honest,’ I said slowly. ‘I like ‘‘Backstreets’’ and ‘‘Incident on 57th Street’’ . . . I know it’s a bit obscure but ‘‘Two for the Road’’ is also really great and ‘‘The Promise’’ has got to be up there . . .’
The red-faced man looked startled. ‘Dude, you’re a fan, no doubt about it,’ he said, taking a gulp of beer.
When The Rising tour reached Wembley Arena in the winter of 2002, Amolak and I were at the very front. When work prevented my friend from going I went alone; I thought nothing of flying to the United States to see him play two charity concerts in Asbury Park. The week before I flew to the United States to see the opening night of the Rising tour a friend invited me to a Bollywood themed party in central London. Most of those attending the party were young, hip Asians and a scattering of whites. I walked through the room watching the trendy Asians with their impeccably styled beards and hyper-gelled haircuts and the girls with their immaculately applied make-up and plucked eyebrows. I share a skin tone with these people, I remember thinking, but that is all. This is not my world, these are not my people, this is not how I like to have my fun. I left early.
One week later I was standing outside the Meadowlands Arena. The only people lining up were local New Jersey folk: lawyers and waitresses, nurses and military men. I was the only non-white person, the only non-American and one of the youngest in line. When they first saw me join the queue I could tell that some were slightly puzzled. I stood out. But it only took two sentences of conversation, me explaining I had come from England and revealing how much of a fan I was, for the faces to break out into smiles and for me to be invited into conversations. I might not look like these people, I might speak in a different accent and follow another religion but in my heart I felt more connected to the fans I found waiting for Springsteen in the New Jersey night than I did with the Asians at the Bollywood party a week earlier.
The last time Amolak and I went to a Bruce Springsteen concert together was the second week of November 2006. We walked out of Wembley Central underground station and made our way towards Wembley Arena. Eighteen years earlier we had seen him at Wembley Stadium; that building had been torn down and the new stadium was still under construction. The arena, where we had seen Springsteen fourteen years earlier, had also been renovated. Our tickets allowed us into the pit right by the front of the stage and it was from there that my friend and I watched Springsteen and the Seeger Sessions band. It was, of course, an awesome concert and the most moving moment came when Springsteen struck up the opening chords of ‘Bobby Jean’. The song, from Born in the USA, is about the enduring power of friendship, and when we had been at college Amolak and I had considered it our song. Neither of us ever referred to it in such terms but some things do not need to be said. When Springsteen sang, ‘Down we went walking in the rain, talking about the pain that from the world we hid, and there ain’t nobody nowhere no how who’s ever gonna understand me the way you did,’ Amolak had his arms round my shoulder and he was singing those words to me.
After the concert was over the pair of us repaired to an Indian restaurant that was only minutes from the arena where we ordered samosas and keema naans.
‘Fuck me, that was good,’ cried Amolak as we sat down to catch our breath and have a drink.
I reached for my wallet to pay. ‘Hey, this is gonna be on me,’ he said, ‘American Express black card – time for some black power tonight.’
It had been many months since I had seen my friend; he had been working in the United States and my career had kept me busy. And yet the curse and blessing of such close friendships is that they are never truly lost or forgotten. We had not fallen out, but we needed Bruce Springsteen to remind us why we had been friends in the first place. That evening after the concert we talked and I could feel the years fall away; we talked about the early days at sixth-form college and our messianic passion for Springsteen, about the years spent trying to live up to the values we heard in his music. We were no longer boys, we were now men and the conversation inevitably turned to how much life had changed for both of us during the years.
As we talked I remembered how ever since college Amolak and I had been outsiders; we were not like the other Asians because we had ‘white’ tastes and we were not like the whites because of our families and traditions. When we had nothing to hold on to except our dreams of escaping, we had Bruce and we had our friendship. Now all those years later, with our different lives, the music of Springsteen and our friendship still endured. Amolak and Sarfraz. Roops and Saf. The Luton boys. Blood brothers.
The Promised Land
Mister I ain’t a boy, no I’m a man and I believe in a promised land
‘The Promised Land’, Bruce Springsteen
In the summer of 1981 I was ten years old, wearing pyjamas under my trousers to make my legs seem less skinny and still being bathed by my mother who insisted I wear my Y-fronts in the bathtub to protect my modesty. The summer holidays always began with grand plans; I would resolve to build my own telescope, learn how to write backwards like Da Vinci or teach myself Morse code. These aspirations usually evaporated in the summer heat and the summer of ‘81 was spent looking forward to the Royal Wedding, watching the Ashes and playing cricket with my friends. Each school holiday my father made his customary promise to take us to London Zoo but each holiday those hopes were dashed. Once or twice during the summer holidays my father would ask his old friend Sufi – he of the snowy beard, furry hat and unreliable Datsun – to drive us to St Albans to see their friend Adalat. Uzma and my mother both suffered from car sickness; before setting off my sister would take a tablet to prevent her being sick. The pill would be crushed and sprinkled on to half a boiled egg which she would eat with her mug of tea. The tablets didn’t seem to work for my mother and the journey would invariably be punctuated with Sufi pulling the car on to the hard shoulder to allow my mother to vomit heartily before wiping her face with a tissue and wordlessly motioning to Sufi to start the car again. Travelling with my mother meant always having a plastic carrier bag to hand.
St Albans was as far as our family managed during the summer holidays. It wasn’t just money – although we didn’t have much of that – it was just that my father didn’t see the point of holidays: why spend money going somewhere when you could stay where you were and save it? There was nothing unusual about his attitude – he was typical of an entire generation of Asian fathers. I grudgingly accepted this but returning to school from summer holidays was always rather embarrassing since we were expected to write essays on what we had been up to. Trying to fill a few pages of an exercise book with an uneventful trip to St Albans proved beyond my literary talents; meanwhile Scott would be busy detailing his family holiday to Tenerife and Richard would be describing how his mother had taken him to the Canaries. But it was Mary, a pretty blue-eyed blonde, who trumped us all the day she brought her holiday slides into junior school. Mary had been across the Atlantic: she was the first person I had ever known who had actually been to the United States of America.
I had been fascinated with the United States for as long as I could remember; for me it was a magical crucible from which spewed fantastic films and marvellous music. It was where The Streets of San Francisco was based and where Kojak worked; it was certainly not somewhere I expected anyone I knew to be able to visit. Yet here was a slide of Mary in her sunflower-yellow dress with her parents, smiling and squinting as they stood at the top of the Grand Canyon. That Mary should have gone there for a holiday was particularly galling as I fancied myself as something of an expert on ancient geology having watched David Attenborough trek down the Grand Canyon on Life on E
arth. It was hard to know which I found more astonishing: the awesome wonder of the Grand Canyon or the fact that Mary had actually been there.
Although I had always fancied America, after Mary’s slide show I fell headlong in love with the country. On Saturdays when Navela would take me to Luton Central Library I would take out travel guides to New York and California and construct imaginary itineraries that traversed the length and breadth of the nation. I followed the American elections almost as avidly as the British ones and even compiled my own cuttings file on the 1984 Presidential campaign. When family friends came to visit my father would call me downstairs and ask me to tell the guests who the American President was. ‘Ronald Reagan,’ I would confirm before racing back upstairs to read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
To say I didn’t excel at sports would be somewhat of an understatement. When we played football in PE I saw so little of the action that I would return to the changing rooms with my tracksuit as pristinely unmuddied as if it had been freshly laundered. In time I perfected a secret ritual of falling into the mud during PE so as to appear as if I had been in the heart of the sporting action. My lack of sporting prowess rarely concerned me most of the time. The only time I can remember wishing I was more gifted at football was when the Lea Manor football team, managed by Mr Moreton and named Moreton’s Marauders in his honour, went to the United States to play against some American schools. They came back three weeks later feted as international sports stars and teenage ambassadors. It was a source of deep pain that, as with Mary and the Grand Canyon, I was reduced to reading books about America while Moreton’s Marauders got to visit the real thing.
A year later I chose to study the assassination of John F. Kennedy for my high-school history project and wrote to the John F. Kennedy library in Boston. They sent me a large parcel packed with information, booklets, photographs and photocopied articles about the life and death of the assassinated President. Even just receiving a package from the United States felt thrilling. I had an American penpal but after two letters my father started complaining about the strange letters with foreign stamps and told me to sever the correspondence.
The cinema had always been forbidden for our family; my parents were nervous about the consequences of allowing me to watch films alone in case it opened some moral floodgates they would be unable to block. It was Scott who suggested that we skip school one afternoon and go to the cinema. The plan was simple: we would go to school as usual in the morning but rather than returning for double English after lunch we would take the number 27 bus into town and go to the ABC. Eager to learn what it was that made my parents so nervous, I readily agreed.
I was fourteen years old the first time I bought a cinema ticket. It was 1985 and the film which popped my cinematic cherry was Back to the Future. Even now I remember the feeling of wonder and awe that surged through me as I sat in the darkened theatre. The knowledge my parents were unaware of what I was up to made the experience even more special; it was so liberating not to have to worry what my father might say should there be any kissing or nudity.
After Back to the Future I went back to the cinema and saw Rocky IV. Even though I went to an afternoon screening the cinema was completely packed. Rocky IV was even more thrilling than Back to the Future because during the fight scenes the entire cinema was cheering Rocky as if the fight was actually taking place in the cinema. For someone who had only ever watched films in silence at home this was an entirely novel experience. Over the next year Scott and I sneaked in to see Rambo: First Blood part 2, Heartbreak Ridge, Over the Top and Crocodile Dundee.
Meanwhile, after years of hiring video players, my father finally relented and bought a silver Panasonic VHS recorder which was mostly used to watch Bollywood films but when my parents were out and I had the house to myself I would watch other films. One of the boys in my school had a father who ran a pirate video store out of the front room of his council flat. Each film cost fifty pence to rent out; it was from that dingy backstreet video store that I first watched the films which defined my early teenage years: kung fu film classics like Jackie Chan’s Drunken Master and Bruce Lee’s Way of the Dragon.
If anyone wanted anything stronger they had to go to my friend Craig, the local supplier of video nasties. Thanks to some mysterious contacts, the precise nature of which he never divulged, Craig had a large selection of films which included the legendary Driller Killer and I Spit on Your Grave. These films were never as gory as their titles implied and the picture quality was as poor as the acting. When I complained to Craig he had already pocketed the money and was busy buying games for his Commodore 64.
Craig accidentally influenced me more than he intended on the evening he came to my house with a video cassette, breathlessly urging me that ‘You have to see this film, mate, you’re gonna love it.’ He did not live far but it was rare for Craig to come to my house so this film had to be something extra special. ‘It’s called The Breakfast Club,’ he told me.
The Breakfast Club was unlike any other film I had seen; it was also the film which convinced me that nothing could be better than to be an American high-school student. After watching The Breakfast Club I began to borrow other John Hughes films. I saw Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Pretty in Pink and Maybe Baby; at the time I thought John Hughes was John Huston and could not believe that a man old enough to have directed The African Queen could have such a grasp of the preoccupations of the teenage mind.
After seeing The Breakfast Club I would fantasise that I was an American high-school student. I visualised having my own metal locker, imagined the pressure of prom night and speculated on what it might be like to date a cheerleader. In my daydreams, the possibility that my high-school experience might differ on account of not being white did not arise. I became so obsessed with the idea that on my weekend visits to Luton Library I began reading about exchange programmes that would let me spend a term at an American high school. It seems an absurd teenage fantasy but at the time I was deadly serious and truly believed that were it not for my obstructive parents I really could be an American high-school student.
I never actually raised the question of the US school exchange with my parents as I already knew what their response would be. I persuaded myself that if my parents were like those of my friend Terry, my life would be so much better. Terry was not like the rest of the Lea Manor rabble; not only was he the cleverest boy in our year but he walked as if encased in a perpetual Ready Brek glow, bounding along the corridors quoting lines from Monty Python the rest of us didn’t understand. His white shirts were never less than dazzling and he had the hairstyle of a young Conservative. Terry and I became friends the day I saw him reading the latest issue of Time magazine and when I expressed interest he came to school the next day with a plastic bag full of old issues for me to read. His home was only yards from our school and I loved visiting his house because Terry’s father Dave was obsessed with all things American.
Running and music were Dave’s hobbies; his home housed the biggest collection of records I had seen. The living room had been converted into a music library where thousands of vinyl records were arranged alphabetically in wooden shelves that stretched from the floor to the ceiling. The room was a shrine to Americana; on the walls were vintage election posters of Franklin Roosevelt, an old Coca Cola sign hung above the door to the kitchen and a miniature black Cadillac rested on the bureau. Most impressive of all, Terry’s father owned a jukebox. It was an original Wurlitzer from the fifties which he had restored and it took pride of place in the lounge. It was my first exposure to the music that existed beyond the current top forty; the music of Lou Reed, Neil Young and Tom Waits – Bruce Springsteen was still in my future. Visiting his home was as close as I had yet come to being in the USA.
The more bored I was with my life in Luton the more America appealed. All my hopes were encapsulated in the life I imagined was possible in the United States. Why had my father not landed at Ellis Island? We could have been living in Manhattan, n
ot Marsh Farm. It wasn’t that I was unaware the United States had its own race problems but even those seemed glamorous. I read about the black civil rights struggle, the bus strikes and Freedom Riders, I watched the television series Eyes on the Prize and saw white policemen firing water cannons at innocent blacks, and I read the collected speeches of Martin Luther King. I knew more about American black history than I did about the fight for civil rights in Britain. In the absence of British Pakistani role models I borrowed Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. For all my interest in the black struggle I was not black, I had not read of any discrimination against Pakistanis in America and so the United States remained a place for second chances. Why would they care that I was Pakistani?
My first realistic opportunity to visit the United States came in my first term at university. It was autumn 1989, I had just seen Field of Dreams and Dead Poets Society at the cinema and I was scanning the notice board of the Student Union on Oxford Road in Manchester. One of the notices mentioned summer employment in America. It was selling encyclopedias door-to-door for six weeks and although the pay was commission only, the advertisement suggested the books practically sold themselves. Successful candidates would receive one week’s training in Nashville before being stationed somewhere in America. I rang Amolak who was still studying in Luton, having failed his A levels. ‘I think we should go for this,’ I said.
‘You sure about this, mate? You’ve never been on holiday and you want to piss off for three months? You think you’ll manage?’
Greetings from Bury Park Page 11