You Did Say Have Another Sausage

by John Meadows

  He shook his head wearily and sighed, “That’s our man, let’s go get him.”

  Robert revelled in the disruption he had caused as we gently escorted him outside. The chairs and benches were quickly replaced, and, thankfully, the show resumed.

  We sat Robert down on a bench and waited for him to calm down after his hilarious moment in the spotlight.

  “I bet they are regretting turning Minichello down after his audition,” joked Bob.

  “Mmm, somehow I think he will be given a part in next year’s show,” I mused.

  Bob agreed, and quipped, “Maybe we could follow up this year’s play on the War of Independence with one about the Civil War. We can call it ‘Gone with the Wind!’”

  During the course of a season, counsellors were given the opportunity to take part in a wide range of activities and I had my first experience of SCUBA diving, water skiing, and yachting. There were regular highly competitive matches between the counsellors at baseball, basketball, and soccer. Richard played well at soccer, and I managed a few catches at baseball out on the boundary, but I must say that it was hardly difficult with the huge mitt they gave me.

  “Man, you should be ridin’ the rodeo,” screamed Barry Hoffman as he got up and threw the football to the ground. I took it as a compliment, as I had just hit him with an upright ball ‘n’ all rugby tackle. It was my introduction to American football, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

  Richard and I had bought Greyhound Bus rover tickets in England prior to coming to America. These entitled us to unlimited travel for a month and, since we had become good friends over the summer, we were both happy to agree to travel together as it would be more fun and safer. We both received several invitations to stay at the homes of our counsellor colleagues, and Bob and Bruce were the obvious choices. We spent a week at their homes in the Ann Arbour district near Detroit, and we were both overwhelmed by the friendliness and hospitality offered by their families and friends; it included a bon voyage party for us, to which many of the counsellors came.

  Mark, whom I had ‘beaten’ in the round-the-lake challenge, glided silently up to the house in a sleek, shiny Cadillac. He called me over to introduce me to his chauffeur for the evening, his dad; who got out of the car and greeted me with a firm handshake and a beaming smile. He told me that he and his wife had roared with laughter when they heard the story, and then he leaned forward and put his arm around my shoulder.

  “It probably did him a world of good,” he whispered, nodding in Mark’s direction, “He was beginning to be a little full of himself.

  “Have a great road trip,” he shouted as he swept off down the road.

  The Spies Who Came in from the Rain

  During the week, Bob received a phone call from Mark asking if he, Bruce, Richard, and I would like to go to the ballgame that weekend. His dad had managed to get some tickets to see the Detroit Tigers at Tiger Stadium. Richard and I had packed our bags ready to leave the following morning, and Bob drove us to the game. I was incredibly impressed by the level of skill, despite my earlier disrespectful big mitts and rounders comments about the game. However half-way through, dark rain clouds started to gather ominously.

  “Looks like we could be in for a rain check,” said Bruce with a trace of disappointment. The heavens opened and the match was duly postponed. On the way out, all the spectators were given a rain check, that is, a ticket for the game when it is rescheduled. (This is a term which has found its way into general usage in the sense of something which can be done at a later date). We told Bob and Bruce to give ours to their friends, but they were disappointed for us. We assured them that we had enjoyed the event, and they were pleased when we were very complimentary about the sport. Bob looked at his watch and suggested that we could drive over to Windsor in Canada for a couple of drinks. We said goodbye to Mark and then set off over the Ambassador Bridge. The rain was really hammering the car as we joined the line of slow-moving traffic, and we were simply waved through by the uniformed guards. Bob assured us that it was a very relaxed border with regular two-way traffic, and many Detroit Tiger supporters actually lived in Windsor. Incidentally it is the only place where you travel from North to South going from the USA to Canada. We spent only about an hour in a small local bar, because Richard and I had an eight o’clock bus to catch the following morning. Bob wound the car window down as we approached the armed border guard and he told him that we had been to the ballgame and had come over to Windsor for a short visit due to the rain.

  “Okay, where were you born?” the officer asked matter-of-factly.

  “Dearborn.”

  The officer then pointed at Bruce in the front passenger seat and asked him the same question.

  “Ann Arbor.”

  He then pointed to me in the back seat.

  “Where were you born, sir?”

  “St Helens.”

  “Wow, you are a long way from home. Have you come all the way from Mount St Helens in Washington for tonight’s game?” he added jokingly.

  “No, St Helens in England.”

  “England? Let me see your passport.”

  “I’m sorry; I haven’t got it with me.”

  His jovial manner changed in an instant as he pointed at Richard and asked for his place of birth.

  “Middleborough, England,” he answered sheepishly before adding, “and I haven’t got my passport with me either.”

  “Sir, pull over to the parking space,” the officer instructed Bob sternly. “Are you trying to get these guys arrested?”

  The four of us were taken into the customs office and told to sit down.

  “So where are your passports?” he demanded of us.

  “At their houses in Ann Arbor,” Richard and I answered together.

  We explained exactly what had happened and although the officer appeared sympathetic he insisted that we would not be allowed to re-enter the United States without our passports.

  “You could be Russian agents who landed in remote Northern Canada and waited for a rain-check game as an opportunity to enter the United States.”

  “And is that what you think we are?”

  “Not for one second, but I still can’t let you go.”

  “But we are catching a Greyhound bus to Chicago tomorrow morning,” I pleaded, but to no avail. We told Bob and Bruce exactly where our passports were to be found in our rucksacks and they set off on the one-hour drive back home.

  Far from being arrested, the guard proceeded to treat us like guests. He provided us with sandwiches and soft drinks and we chatted convivially for a couple of hours. He wanted to know all about our time working at Maplehurst, and he asked lots of questions about England.

  “Even though this town is called Windsor, we don’t get too many Englishmen in these parts,” he said.

  After about two and a half hours I started to get a little concerned, and then a beam of car’s headlights swept through the office through the venetian blinds. Bob and Bruce came in holding the passports triumphantly aloft.

  “Okay you guys can go,” the officer said to us with a wave of his hand.

  “The least you can do is look at them,” said Bob with a trace of mock exasperation. The officer actually came out to the car with us shook our hands and wished us the best of luck on our trip around America.

  “I wish I was coming with you,” he said.

  “Er, I think we’ll take a rain check on that,” I answered with a wry smile.

  During the drive home Bob and Bruce apologized profusely for leading us into such a compromising situation.

  “Don’t worry,” I answered reassuringly. “After all, it was hardly a traumatic experience. We weren’t exactly ‘banged up abroad’, and he even fed and watered us.”

  “Yeah, all we’ve missed is a couple of hours sleep. I am sure we will catch up on
the bus,” added Richard.

  “I suppose we shouldn’t have been quite so honest when he asked us where we were born. I could have put on a fake American accent and plucked a name of a town off the top of my head,” I said, half-joking.

  “Such as...?”

  “Shitbritches Creek, California, without the proverbial paddle,”

  Chapter Five

  Time-Travelling by Greyhound

  Keep Movin’, Movin’, Movin’...

  We managed barely a couple of hours sleep but we made it to the Detroit Greyhound bus station on time. Richard and I had ambivalent feelings that morning. We were very sad to say goodbye to Bob and Bruce, who had become good friends over a fantastic summer, but we were very excited to be setting off, in the words of Simon and Garfunkel, ‘to look for America’. It is the home of popular music and the dominant art-form of the 20th Century, the movie. So these will be the underlying themes of our adventure.

  Before I left England, Bill, Jeff and the rest of our group had all requested postcards from ‘Wild West’ towns, like Tombstone, Dodge, Wichita or Cheyenne. Names of places we had grown up with when Westerns were never off the telly. They wanted nostalgic reminders of those endless summer days when ‘Cowboys and Indians’ was the only game to play. We used to make our own bamboo bows-and-arrows and we fired lethal pebbles at each other with home-made elastic guns. We even made rifles powered by long lengths of elastic cut from inner-tubes of bike tyres. A typical battle would end with quite a few bruises and cut heads. Happy days! Hostilities would only cease temporarily when we were called in for dinner (never called lunch) or to avoid a menacing gang of ‘Teddy Boys’ coming down the street.

  The golden age of the T.V. western was the late 50s and early 60s, and we wanted to visit places to evoke distant flickering black and white memories of James Garner as ‘Bret Maverick’, Ty Hardin as ‘Bronco Laine’ and Clint Walker as ‘Cheyenne Bodie’. The Greyhound bus took us down memory lane as Richard and I reminisced about Ward Bond leading the ‘Wagon Train’, and the voice of the Western, Frankie Laine, singing ‘Rawhide’, which starred a young Clint Eastwood as Rowdy Yates. Ranches had names like ‘The Ponderosa’, ‘The High Chaparral’ and ‘Shiloh’. In addition to the fictitious world of the TV Western our road trip will bring us into contact with real-life legendary Western figures such as Buffalo Bill, Wild Bill Hickok, Wyatt Earp, Davy Crockett, Billy the Kid, Jessie James, Kit Carson, Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, Geronimo, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. Their names have been kept alive due to the Western movie genre in the cinema, but, as we shall see, fact and fiction have become a little confused.

  As the silver Greyhound bus glided on to the highway towards Chicago, I found myself humming ‘Everybody’s Talkin’, the Harry Nilsson theme song from the movie ‘Midnight Cowboy’. Richard and I were no longer the ‘Symbolics’, we were now John Voight as Joe Buck and Dustin Hoffman as Rico ‘Ratso’ Rizzo. I’m not quite sure who was who.

  America must be the only country in the world where song titles resonate everywhere. As we looked at our map of the USA it seemed to sing to us as famous songs jumped out everywhere. We had no sooner left the Motown city than we were passing through Kalamazoo, where Glenn Miller ‘Had a gal’, and from ‘My kinda town Chicago’ we passed Lonnie Donegan’s ‘Rock Island line’. As we pointed at places, we were never more than the width of a fingernail away from a classic. We even started to sing along. Our repertoire included ‘The Man from Laramie’ before ‘leaving our hearts in San Francisco’ and asking if anyone ‘knows the way to San Jose’.’ By the time we got to Phoenix’ we had ‘set the stakes up higher in Viva Las Vegas’ and wondered why ‘Jojo had left his home in Tucson Arizona’. We were ‘down in El Paso’ asking ‘the way to Amarillo’ before checking that ‘Oklahoma City is oh so pretty’ and we took ‘the last train to Clarkesville’. With ‘Georgia on my mind’ we eventually arrived back in ‘New York, New York’. If we can make it there, we can make it anywhere.

  All the songs evoked memories of golden eras of music as we passed through the home of Rock and Roll, Soul, Motown, Gospel, Blues, Jazz and Big Band Swing. We learnt a lot. Take Country music for example: before I went to America I thought ‘Box-Car Willy’ was an antisocial infection picked-up by hobos riding the freight trains. Our pastime of picking songs from the map of America somehow doesn’t quite work with a map of Britain. Fiddler’s Dram sang about having a ‘lovely time the day they went to Bangor’. And was it Marty Wilde who ‘took a trip to Abagavenny’? They don’t seem to have quite the same ring to them. What about Wigan’s favourite son, George Formby? He sang about his euphemistic ‘little stick of Blackpool rock’. Was this the first rock record? But credit where it’s due, we do have ‘Mull of Kintyre’, ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Waterloo Sunset’. Ralph McTell’s song ‘Streets of London’ must be the greatest ever written about a closed-down market, a bag lady with dirt in her hair and clothes in rags, and a mission for discharged seamen, so to speak.

  Our map of the USA also explains why Americans always qualify the name of a place anywhere in the world by also naming the country: Paris France, Rome Italy, Sydney Australia, and so on. The rest of the world assumes that we know where major cities like, say, Venice, Athens or Paris are. Are Americans so unaware of world geography? Actually no, it’s just that all of the above places, and many more besides, are also the names of American towns, and often duplicated several times. They have all of the above, plus Glasgow, Aberdeen, Florence, St Petersburg, Melbourne, Oxford, Cambridge, Birmingham, Manchester and Bristol, to name just a handful.

  Even mundane essential services in America seem to conjure up romantic images. Glen Campbell sings about being a ‘lineman for the county’, a great song which is basically about a bloke up a telegraph pole. Just to see the name Wells Fargo brings back memories of stage coaches being chased through Monument Valley in a John Ford western, while the ‘Pony Express’ was the title of a Motown-style hit by Johnny Johnson and the Bandwagon. At least we have got Postman Pat and his black and white cat. On the other hand, there is the all-time classic song by the Moody Blues about North Wales, ‘Nights in Prestatyn’.

  Days of Future Past

  Talking of the Moody Blues, I have just had an idea. (Yes, I know, it’s about time). They released an album called ‘Days of Future Past’ and this has inspired me to use it as the sub-text of our Greyhound bus trip. I will be leaving Richard periodically as I take a couple of detours along the way. Don’t worry, I will not be abandoning him, because, like Marty McFly, I will be going ‘back to the future’. My occasional excursions will be thirty years into the future when I returned to America as a teacher in charge of a couple of school trips. I will be back before he knows it. Now, did I remember to pack my flux capacitor?

  From Chicago we passed through Iowa City and Des Moines. Since we were on a tight budget, Richard and I decided to sleep on the bus as often as possible to save on hotel bills. If a place was of particular interest, we would take an overnight bus to literally anywhere, provided it was about four hours away. We would then take the next bus back, which was often the same bus. We just had to get off while the cleaners came aboard. I became quite adept at sleeping in an upright sitting position, with my rolled-up sleeping bag acting as a pillow against the window. On the rare occasion when we treated ourselves to a night at a hotel, neither of us could sleep horizontally and we would end up sleeping upright against the wall.

  En route we experienced a Mc Donald’s restaurant for the first time, since they had not yet began their colonization of Britain (McDonald’s opened its first UK restaurant in south London in October 1974). The waitress had a candy floss of yellow hair. She must have over-dosed on peroxide. Her lips were full and ruby red, and her eyes were framed in purple mascara. She was no oil painting, more an Andy Warhol screen print. I was tempted to order Campbell’s soup and a bottle of Coca Cola, but we settled for a ‘Big Mac’ and a milkshake
, which became our staple diet for the next month, cheap and filling.

  ‘The road is long, with many a winding turn...’

  In Omaha, Nebraska I saw a statue of a boy carrying a smaller boy on his shoulders, and the thing which caught my attention was the inscription on the plinth: ‘He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother’. I recognised this as the title of one of my all-time favourite records, written by Neil Diamond, and a huge world-wide hit for the Hollies. I found out about the story which inspired the sculpture. Two boys were making their way to an orphanage, and when the local priest commented to the older boy that he was carrying a heavy load, his poignant reply was, ‘He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother’. The story of the orphanage was portrayed in the 1939 Hollywood movie ‘Boys’ Town’, starring Spencer Tracy. As a post-script to this particular story, let me rub my magic flux capacitor and instantly travel a couple of decades into the future. I am still on a bus, but this time in Paris (and, for the benefit of any American readers, I mean the one in France, not Texas). I am a High School teacher in charge of a school trip, and sitting next to me is my headmaster, Mr Williams. ‘He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother’ (the song that is, not the headmaster), came on the radio and he told me how much he loved that song. I told him the story and, being a headmaster, he immediately saw the potential for a school assembly. A couple of weeks later he gave a memorable assembly which began with the Hollies singing (on record that is, school capitation doesn’t quite stretch to booking the real thing) and closed with a picture of St Christopher carrying the Christ Child. I hadn’t seen that connection; which is perhaps why he was a headmaster and I wasn’t. It’s time for me to get back to Richard on the Greyhound bus before he misses me.

  We had a brief stop-over in North Platte, Nebraska; which, I must confess, I had never heard of. However, it gave us our first taste in our search of the mythical West. In 1883, a certain William F. Cody noticed that nothing had been arranged in the town to celebrate Independence Day. He put up posters inviting cowboys to show off their riding and roping skills. To his surprise, hundreds turned up and the show was an outstanding success. Cody is better known to us today as Buffalo Bill, and that is how his world famous ‘Wild West Show’ began. Up to that point he had already had an eventful career; He was a Pony Express rider at the age of fourteen, an army scout, an Indian fighter and buffalo hunter, and he went on to become one of the greatest showmen and self-publicists of all time. He was inspired by that other great American showman and promotional genius P.T. Barnum, who in 1871had started his ‘Greatest Show on Earth’ circus. When it came to the art of self-promotion those two made the boxer Muhammad Ali seems modest, shy, and retiring.