Greetings from Bury Park

by Sarfraz Manzoor

  ‘I dunno, it just sounds like it could be really cool.’

  ‘Have you asked your dad?’

  ‘Not yet. I thought I’d apply, get the whole thing sorted and then see what he says. But I think if you go too he’s less likely to go mental. Don’t you think it would be so fucking cool if we both went!’

  We carried on talking, me on the payphone at the end of the corridor on the second floor of Grosvenor House student accommodation in Manchester and Amolak in the hallway of his Luton home. I knew it was a crazy idea that would not go down well with my father but having moved away from home I was less worried about his reaction. Amolak was still living with his family and America seemed more distant to him. ‘Look, mate, if I go and send you a postcard from Asbury Park how fucked off are you going to be?’ I asked Amolak. ‘Go on, think about it, there I’ll be, standing on the boardwalk in Asbury Park on my tod cos you couldn’t be arsed to come with me. You telling me you won’t be royally pissed off?’

  ‘Listen, I gave you Bruce Springsteen,’ Amolak reminded me yet again. ‘You were listening to pop rubbish and chatting shit so don’t be thinking you’re going anywhere near New Jersey without me!’

  ‘It’s up to you, my friend. Like I said, I’m gonna go, you coming or what?’

  ‘All right,’ said Amolak finally. ‘Stick my name down and see what happens.’

  I rang the telephone number on the advertisement and was told to turn up the following week to speak to Andy, a company representative. With his spiky blond hair, square jaw and dimpled chin Andy looked like he had narrowly failed an audition for Baywatch. His voice had a relentless cheeriness which seemed out of place on a rainy Manchester evening. Andy told me the name of the company he worked for was Southwestern and that they had been selling books door-to-door for decades; apparently generations of Americans had worked for them and many had gone on to become champions of industry. The way he described it, working for Southwestern wasn’t so much a job selling books as a holy rite of passage. ‘So where exactly will I be working?’ I asked him.

  ’I couldn’t tell ya,’ Andy replied, his eyes twinkling. ‘It could be anywhere – we got students right now in Florida, in California and in Maine. You’ll go where we send you. That’s the deal.’

  The alternative was to work in a factory in Dunstable that produced paint stripper; it wasn’t frankly much of a choice. Andy wanted to know if I had what it took to sell books to strangers. I had never sold door-to-door but I told Andy that I had experience of telephone selling; while I was at sixth-form college I had had an evening job selling kitchens on the telephone. I told Andy I was not afraid of hard work and I told him about my father who had come to Britain because he wanted a better life. I wanted to go to America for the same reason.

  ‘Competition is fierce for these jobs,’ Andy said at the end of our conversation, ‘but you know what? I’m gonna give you a shot, because if you can work half as hard as your father must have done then you and I will get along just fine.’

  We shook hands and I told Andy I had a friend who was equally hard-working. Amolak travelled up to Manchester and was also interviewed and accepted. The first hurdle had been cleared, now we had to find the money for the flights. And tell our parents.

  Each time I visited Luton I would tell myself this was the time to break the news and each time I would step back at the last minute. I tried to soften my father up by talking about how the modern employment market favoured candidates with proven work experience. Other times I would casually start discussing the brain drain and how the best minds and the best salaries were now to be found in the United States. When neither of these strategies seemed to be making much progress I decided to take the plunge. ‘A lot of my friends are going to be spending the summer getting placements to help with their CV,’ I told my father one morning as I had my cornflakes with hot milk.

  ‘So long as you get money what does it matter what it is called: placement, work experience, job, who cares?’ my father said.

  ‘Well, I have been accepted on to a work placement,’ I said slowly, trying not to sound nervous. ‘It was very hard to get and it will be very useful. Amolak is going too.’

  My father looked up from his newspaper. ‘Going where?’

  ‘America. The job is in America.’

  ‘America? Why do you need to get a job in America? Have you heard this?’ my father said to my mother.

  I told him about the job and it was then that he exploded.

  ‘Selling books door-to-door! Never. If it was something professional then maybe, but this? Never! Tell that Sikh boy you are not going.’

  ‘Why not? It isn’t going to cost you anything. I will pay for it myself and I will come back with money.’

  ‘Have you not heard what I have said? Never. You are not going to America.’

  The arguments continued for weeks. Amolak was having similar problems with his family. The company which had offered us jobs was pressing us to confirm that we were going and I was stalling them while hoping that my father would have a change of heart. Whenever I went home it was not long before the question of my summer plans arose. ‘What I don’t understand,’ my father explained one afternoon as he was driving the family into town for shopping, ‘is why do you need to go to America to earn money? If you go to America you have to pay for flights and accommodation but if you stay in Luton for the summer and work in a factory you have no costs and you can work overtime!’

  I was tempted to remind my father that if I stayed at home I would not be seeing a penny of anything I earned but it was hard to explain to him that it was possible to aspire to more than working in a Luton factory over the summer. When he was in a more belligerent mood my father would interpret my desire to visit America as tantamount to a declaration of war. ‘My son, it is very simple. They say this is a free country and it is. You have a choice. You can choose America or you can choose your family. But you cannot choose both.’

  I tried to tell him that it was only for three months but he did not want to listen, for him the United States was everything he hated about Britain multiplied a hundredfold. ‘Why do you want to go to America anyway? Americans are unclean, immoral, look at how little their girls wear.’ I did not want to confess that was one of the reasons why I was so desperate to visit.

  While my father remained hostile I tried to persuade the rest of my family. My mother’s greatest concern was not cultural pollution but whether I would be safe. ‘Look what happened when your brother went to America,’ she said. ‘Him and Zahid were like you and your Sikh friend and look what happened.’

  My brother was also uneasy about me going. ‘The roads are very dangerous,’ he warned me. ‘Even if you’re not driving, someone else can just cut you up on those big highways. It’s not worth the risk.’

  The situation looked desperate and yet I could not bring myself to cast the plan aside. Seize the day, I told myself. Even if this tears me apart from my family I am going to do this. I could go for three months and even if my father did not talk to me for another six, he would eventually get over it; if I did not follow my dream I would never forgive myself. I told Amolak that come what may I was going to be in America that summer, with or without him, with or without my father’s blessing.

  Then, one day, as I was walking with my father along Old Bedford Road on our way into the town centre, he asked again about the proposed trip. ‘So how long is it?’

  ‘Three months.’

  ‘And where will you be?’

  ‘New York, Nashville and then a few months in California,’ I answered.

  I think he must have realised that I was going whether he approved or not. I never said as much but he must have noticed that I did not flinch or concede when he had warned me that I risked sacrificing my family for three months in the United States. We continued walking, my father taking short but purposeful strides while I shuffled along at his side. ‘And you don’t think you’re better off trying to find work in Luton?’
r />   ‘No, Dad, I don’t.’

  ‘How much is the flight to New York?’

  ’I’m not sure but I think it’s about three hundred pounds.’

  He stopped walking and, looking me in the eye, said, ‘Let me pay.’

  In the third week of June 1990, ten days after turning nineteen, I took the Intercity train from Manchester and arrived in Luton weighed down by a rucksack packed with clothes and a stuffed holdall. After saying goodbye to my family where only my mother reached out to hug me, my father drove me to Luton train station. I said goodbye to my father, made an attempt at hugging him, promised I would call as soon as I had arrived in the United States and bundled out of the Ford Cortina.

  Amolak was waiting for me. He had already settled on the look he would sport for our American adventure: his head was covered by a Stars and Stripes bandanna, around his neck swung his dog tag and he was sporting a trimmed goatee. Under his faded denim jacket was a black T-shirt with an image from the cover of the live box set. I was also wearing a Springsteen T-shirt over which was a denim shirt with wing tips, a bootlace tie I had bought from a clothing store in Dunstable and a black waistcoat that was the best approximation Mr Byrite had for the one that Bruce wore during the ‘Tougher than the Rest’ video.

  ‘So this is it, buddy,’ said my friend. ‘We are on our way to the Yoo Nited States!’

  We boarded the train from Luton, our rucksacks on our backs, and alighted at King’s Cross before taking the Piccadilly line to Heathrow. The other students, the ones who were also spending the summer working in America, were already at the airline check-in desk. ‘Do you realise that by the time we go to bed we are going to be in New York?’ I said to Amolak as the girl at the check-in studied my passport.

  The first time I saw America was through the window of the plane as it descended through the clouds towards the landing strip of the airport. It was past nine in the evening. I had spent the flight listening to music on my headphones while Amolak had been chatting up the two girls seated behind us. Outside the night sky had been as dark as ink when suddenly a collective hush of excitement spread throughout the cabin. I looked out of the window and saw the Manhattan skyline; at night the city seemed constructed from light. I had never seen anything like it and yet the view was completely familiar. I felt a long way from home.

  The plane landed at JFK and a shuttle bus dropped us outside the Sloane House YMCA in midtown New York City. Amolak and I were given the keys to the room we would be sharing. The room had two bunk beds, a small wardrobe and tiny wash basin; the noise of traffic filled the room with honking horns and police sirens. We could not have imagined a more beautiful sound. I had brought a small pocket radio with me; I wanted to hear what New York radio sounded like. While Amolak stood at the basin splashing cold water on his face and spraying half a can of deodorant into his armpits I fiddled with the radio trying to locate any radio station. As I turned the dial I heard a familiar sound and a male voice singing: ‘I got a wife and kids and Baltimore Jack, I went out for a ride and I never went back . . .’

  ‘Hey, Amolak! Can you hear this?’ I said, pointing the radio in his direction.

  ‘Everybody’s got a hungry heart, everybody’s got a hungry heart . . .’

  ‘You’re fucking having me on!’ my friend said, his face dripping with water. ‘This is too much, mate: we’re in New York and The Boss is playing on the fucking radio. It’s just too fucking much!’

  New York City in the summer of 1990 was a frightening place. A serial killer the newspapers had dubbed the Zodiac Killer was on the loose, murdering women according to their star sign. Every morning we would walk past the homeless pissing on the street and have breakfast at the Cheyenne Diner before spending the day exploring the city. Amolak bought a cheap stetson and I borrowed his bandanna; the two of us wandered through the city in the sweltering June sun, laughing in disbelief at our outrageous luck.

  We bought postcards of the New York skyline but never found the time to mail them; when I rang home it was like being slapped hard by reality; the truth was all I wanted to know was that everyone was alive. I was having too much fun to miss my family and I didn’t want to be brought back to earth with stories of what was going on back home. Amolak, however, seemed to feel differently and would ring home every day.

  On our third day in the United States we walked to Penn Station and paid $11.95 for a round trip bus ride that took us to Asbury Park. The bus deposited us in an unpromising neighbourhood populated entirely by unsavoury-looking young men; as soon as we got there I wanted to return to the relative safety of the big city. ‘Just chill out, mate,’ Amolak said. ‘You’ve been watching too many cop shows.’

  Still nervous, we followed the signs that led to the ocean. And then we saw it: the Asbury Park boardwalk. ‘Holy fuck, can you believe we’re here? Can you fucking believe it?’ Amolak was yelling as we ran the length of the boardwalk past the dusty arcades with the Atlantic Ocean lapping a deserted beach.

  ‘It’s Madam Marie!’ I shrieked when we passed a wooden booth upon which was painted a huge blue eye. Madam Marie had featured in a Bruce song.

  Amolak kept running on the boardwalk but I began walking slowly and deliberately, staring hard at the wooden planks of the boardwalk, all the time whispering to myself, ‘I am here, I am in Asbury Park, New Jersey.’

  That afternoon we must have walked up and down the boardwalk a dozen times. We visited the Stone Pony, peered inside the Convention Center and saw the ruins of an amusement park. We tried to imagine what it must have been like when Springsteen himself visited those same haunts. It was high summer: the sky was cloudless and the sun was warm but the beach was empty, and we saw no one except two young French girls, sisters, who had also come to Asbury Park on a Springsteen pilgrimage. We knew they were hard-core fans as they wore home-made Steel Mill T-shirts. Meeting two French sisters, both Springsteen fans, in Asbury Park: it was perfect.

  We spent five days in New York before travelling to Nashville on a Greyhound bus for sales training. We then took another Greyhound to California. Each time the bus made a stop I would step out and buy a postcard as a souvenir. It was the summer of Wilson Phillips’s ‘Hold On’ and Roxette’s ‘It Must Have Been Love’, two songs that seemed to be blasting out from every radio. I had my cassette player and Amolak and I would share headphones and listen to Springsteen. We crossed the Mississippi at midnight listening to ‘Racing in the Street’.

  The small Californian town of Yuba City was going to be our home for the summer, and the place where we would sell the encyclopedias. Amolak and I got off the bus and were met by Andy who shook us firmly by the hand before driving us to the apartment block where we would be living. The air was warm, the sky was blue and we were in California.

  Kenny and Al, two American students who were also working for Southwestern and who we would be living with, were already settled into our new apartment. Kenny was from a small town called Floyd in Virginia, he had hair like Jackson Browne and drawled his words as if perpetually stoned. He was the first person I had met who used the word ‘dude’ without irony. Me and Amolak thought he was the coolest person we had ever met because nothing seemed to faze him. He was the most unlikely door-to-door salesman you could hope to encounter, the sort of person whose ‘get up and go’ had got up and gone. Al, on the other hand, was an archetypal nerd. He was from Wisconsin and wore thick-rimmed glasses, had a square-shaped head and a sensible hair cut. He looked like a cartoon drawing of a clean-cut young man.

  When I had been told that Amolak and I were going to be living with Kenny and Al, I had been rather apprehensive about meeting them as they would be the first real-life Americans I was going to be spending time with. The teachers at the sales conference in Nashville had been American but most of the people I had actually spent time with had been other British students in the US for the summer. For all my love of everything American I knew I did not look how Americans imagined Brits looked and I was worried that somethi
ng in my daily behaviour would expose me as not being quite British enough.

  I should not have worried so much. Both Kenny and Al loved music; Al told me he had a subscription to Rolling Stone and that his father had been collecting issues since the sixties. Both Americans were stunned that someone like myself, someone from England, could know quite so much about John Mellencamp, Tom Petty and, of course, Bruce Springsteen. They thought it hilarious how music they thought of as quintessentially American had somehow made such an impact on both me and Amolak.

  It was this shared love of music that quickly helped me see Kenny and Al as friends first and Americans second. We were all, after all, employees of Southwestern and tasked with trying to persuade the good people of Yuba City to hand over their hard-earned money in exchange for a set of encyclopedias. On our first night in Yuba City Andy took Kenny, Al, Amolak and me to a local restaurant called Shoneys where he outlined our daily schedule. We would awake at six in the morning and have what he referred to as ‘a shit, a shower and a shave’. We were expected to be out of the house by seven in the morning with our satchel of sample books and a map. The map would have the neighbourhood we were targeting circled on it.

  Our week at the sales conference had taught us the pitch we were to use. I was to ring the bell and then stand back (so as not to frighten the homeowner or cause them to load their gun) and when someone answered I was to say brightly: ‘Good morning/afternoon! I guess you’ve seen me around the neighbourhood and been wondering who I am? Well, let me introduce myself: my name is Steve . . .’

  One of the strangest aspects to our week at the sales conference had been when Amolak and I were advised not to use our own names when selling books since our rather unusual names might puzzle possible book buyers. I was told to refer to myself as Steve while Amolak was to call himself Rupert, on account of his nickname Roops.

  Once I had introduced myself as Steve I was to rattle off the rest of my pitch, pausing only to say: ‘Gee, it’s really hot out here. Is there any chance I could get a glass of water?’ at which point, hopefully, the owner of the house would invite me in and when they came back with my drink I would have my satchel open and begin dazzling them with the sheer variety and splendour of books contained inside.