by Jerramy Fine
As we drove peacefully through the steep switchbacks of the Rocky Mountains, something came over my mother. She suddenly felt that it was her maternal duty to confess everything that she’d been holding back from me before I went away to college. Believe me, I didn’t want to know. And believe me, I did my best not to listen. I really did try to spare myself. But stuck in the back of that station wagon, there was nowhere to run.
All my friends’ parents had nicely framed wedding photos on display somewhere in their houses. These photos inevitably contained a bride in a white dress and a groom wearing a pale blue tuxedo with ruffles. Nice, normal 1970s photos. Then, in utter bewilderment, I would look at my parents’ wedding album. These photos consisted of a picture of someone’s bloodshot eye, a close-up of my parents’ first dog, a close-up of what looked like the blue corner of a tablecloth, and another one showing nothing but a giant yin-yang of white flower petals. Based on this ridiculous group of snapshots, I couldn’t even figure out what my mother had worn (not that I would have approved).
“Our wedding ceremony was beautiful” or “Our wedding reception was very cool” is all my parents would ever say about their mysterious San Francisco nuptials, and it drove me bonkers. I used to ask them over and over where on earth the normal pictures were so I could see this very cool ceremony for myself—but they simply refused to tell me.
Until that excruciating car ride.
“You know, Jerramy,” said my mom as she looked at the expanse of mountain highway before her. “At our wedding, there was a dropper full of acid in the Japanese wine. Everyone was drinking it. So everyone was tripping. Even the photographer.”
Ah.
I acted like I wasn’t fazed by the news; like I wasn’t screaming at her inside my head.
“Can you tell me what you and Dad wore to your wedding?” I asked, ignoring the acid comment altogether.
“Well,” she answered dreamily, “I wore a hand-embroidered orange skirt and your dad wore pants that I sewed for him out of a tablecloth that we bought for fifteen cents at The Salvation Army.”
I stared straight ahead of me, trying to stay calm. I’d had a countdown on my calendar for the last three years, religiously crossing off the 1,095 days until I left for college and could escape the insanity once and for all. It was the 1,094th day. Only one more to go.
“Now, Jerramy,” my mom continued, “when you get to college, go ahead and experiment with drugs if you feel you need to. But please—please don’t start drinking.”
It wasn’t long before my dorm room cocktail parties were legendary.
A girl’s got to rebel somehow.
Four
“The accent of our native country dwells in the heart and mind as well as on the tongue.”
—FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Lots of kids get homesick when they go away to college. Not me.
In the sophisticated, east-coast atmosphere of Rochester academia, everything was as it should be; and everything was exactly what my past was not. It was like this magical, alternative universe that I’d always known existed but had finally been able to enter. College was one big blur of learning and laughter and until that point, I don’t remember ever being happier. After eighteen painful years of enduring the hippies and hickville, I was finally able to breathe freely, finally able to be myself.
Every night, as I climbed into the loft bed above my desk, exhausted from another late night of studying or partying, I said a silent prayer—thanking some greater power for taking me away from Colorado and granting me this new life. I’d never really believed in God, but I always felt it was important to speak to what ever force out there might be listening. I firmly believed that if I continued to define the life that I wanted, continued to focus on it with all of my intention, and was ready to claim it with all of my heart, eventually the universe would provide it for me.
I also firmly believed you had to constantly visualize your intentions if you truly wanted them to materialize. So I plastered my side of the dorm room with dozens of glossy posters: beautiful prints of the State Dining Room and the Grand Staircase at Buckingham Palace, turn-of-the-century black-and-white photographs of the bronze lions in Trafalgar Square, sparkling night skylines of the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben.
Late at night, when I became bored or delirious after reading too much of my comparative politics textbook or something really horrible like my neuroscience notes, my tired eyes would always wander away from my desk and settle on my wonderful English posters. In my sleep-deprived state, it sometimes seemed that if I stared at those posters hard enough, I could somehow transport myself into them. I could actually picture myself in that royal dining room; I could hear the buzz of the society chitchat, feel the heat of the golden candelabras, see the texture of my nineteenth-century ball gown and the brocade on the footman’s arm as he served me from a giant silver platter. When I wanted to procrastinate, my mind could wander for ages, swerving in and out of my imaginary English life, moving from scene to scene, epoch to epoch, and poster to poster.
Meanwhile, my Los Angeles roommate thought I was nuts; her side of the room was covered with black-light Led Zeppelin posters.
The first day Lindsay and I met, I was sitting on the floor of our room trying to set up the voice mail on our shared phone.
“The six-digit password is 774623—or PRINCE,” I told her cheerily.
“Prince as in Purple Rain?” she asked.
“No, Prince as in Prince Charming,” I answered.
At first glance, anyone would have guessed that as freshman roommates we must have despised each other. And I suppose this was an easy mistake to make because outwardly, we couldn’t be more different. Lindsay wore jeans and big baggy T-shirts every day; I hated jeans and only wore big, baggy T-shirts to bed when I couldn’t find my silk pajamas. Lindsay tried to teach me about heavy metal music while I tried to show her the joys of Broadway musicals and Disney soundtracks. For the campus-wide Halloween party, I dressed up as (big surprise) a princess, and she dressed up as the scary girl from The Addams Family.
Lindsay felt that college had ripped her away from her closest friends; I felt that college might be my first opportunity to make them. She missed home desperately; I dreaded the thought of ever returning. But after getting over each other’s questionable tastes in music, fashion, and decor, Lindsay and I realized we had more in common than not. We were both extremely picky about boys, extremely serious about academics, and most importantly, extremely determined to attend college parties at least five nights a week. And believe me, it wasn’t long before we were as thick as thieves.
Probably out of curiosity, boys and girls were drawn to our unlikely friendship and within days, our schizophrenically decorated room was the social epicenter of our coed hallway. Lindsay tried to get me to stop drinking beer with a straw and I tried to show her the classic glamour of perfectly mixed martinis. Night after night, we’d drink ourselves silly till 3 A.M. and then roll into class the next morning with astonishingly clear minds. We were too young to experience debilitating hangovers (I actually used to enjoy getting the bed spins!), but it’s truly a wonder our brains didn’t dissolve away completely with the amount of units we regularly consumed on an almost nightly basis. Our pre-party cocktail parties alone should have killed us. (Not to mention I have no idea how over fifty people squeezed into our tiny dorm room every night.)
But college wasn’t all fun and games. Thanks to my parents’ brilliance, I also spent a great deal of my time trying to explain to various university administrators that despite my misleading first name, I wasn’t a boy—that I was actually a girl and extremely girly at that—and to please make sure that I was removed from the fraternity mailing list and to also make sure that no official records had my gender listed as male or my title as Mister. Lots of people tell me that I got off lucky. That I could’ve been named Rainbow or Peaches or Moonbeam. But at least those names are somewhat girly! At least with a name like Peaches, I would
n’t have been constantly invited to join a fraternity.
Like most moms, my mom sent me a college care package that first year. Along with giant bottles of vitamin C and echinacea, it contained a small, handmade wooden tray engraved with my initials. I had absolutely no idea what I was meant to do with it. Serve myself breakfast in bed? Lindsay took one look at it and burst out laughing.
“I can’t believe your mom sent you a rolling tray!” she cackled. “A personalized rolling tray!”
“What do you mean ‘rolling tray’?” I asked her. “What am I supposed to roll? Sushi or something?”
She was still laughing. “Joints, you silly blonde! It’s for rolling joints!”
For the love of God. Why couldn’t she send me cookies or muffins or something like everyone else’s mothers? After all these years, did she still not realize I was never, ever going to embrace her beloved sixties counterculture? When she called me later that week I decided to confront her about it.
“Mom,” I said carefully, “I appreciate the thought, but you know perfectly well that I don’t smoke pot and never will.”
“I know, honey,” she said warmly. “I figured maybe you could use it as a cheese tray if you wanted to. In any case, it’s good to support the hemp industry. Hemp crops are the solution to global warming, you know.”
I’m telling you, my switched-at-birth theory did not come out of nowhere. The evidence came rolling in every day.
No pun intended.
Now please keep in mind that past lives aside, at this point in time, I had never met a real-live English person. I had never heard a real-live English accent that wasn’t in a Hugh Grant movie, BBC costume drama, or an old rerun of Fawlty Towers. So when I overheard one in the beer-stained basement of a noisy fraternity house one night, I froze. The effect was positively hypnotic.
“I left my mobile at the bar…” the mystery voice was saying.
I felt like someone raised by wolves who had suddenly recognized the sound of my mother tongue even if I couldn’t speak it myself. In a flash of delight, I was overwhelmed by a flood of bizarre sensations. I felt like the kid in The Jungle Book when he first saw another human. The sound evoked my deepest memories and innermost desires, and in that beautiful, emotionally charged moment, I became some kind of accent-addicted mad-woman.
What ever vibration occurred in the upper-crust English accent became the single largest aphrodisiac I was ever to experience. And for the rest of my life, I was irrationally overcome with the desperate need to hear it again and again.
Lindsay could have her carefree California boys. I had no interest in them, nor the hundreds of preppy guys from New England boarding schools that filled every frat party. I had a new plan as far as boys were concerned. From that day forward, I was going to seek out and seduce the few Englishmen roaming the campus. So help me God.
Unfortunately, soon after making this drunken announcement to my friends, I pored though the university student directory and based on the home addresses listed, discovered that the campus contained only two Englishmen for me to seek out. But I wasn’t daunted. Quite intentionally, I went out and developed a crush on a chunky Englishman with a mole on his face, and another on a guy with dark beady eyes and a face like an eagle. It didn’t matter what the boys looked like; it didn’t matter what they talked to me about—all that mattered to me was the spell-binding sound of their beautiful English accents.
My obsession eventually seeped into my coursework. I convinced the registrar to let me take the History of Victorian England as an English credit (after all, I would be writing lots of papers in English) and always sat in the front row staring starry-eyed at the handsome, middle-aged professor. He was technically American but he’d lived and studied in England for so long that his accent had changed and when he said things like “Do you have any queries?” instead of “Do you have any questions?”—my heart would flutter.
When my friend Natalie told me her physics professor was English, I signed up for the class right away, knowing full well that I’d probably fail it. I didn’t understand those scorpionlike equations for the life of me, and as expected, by the end of the semester most of the students had As and I had a D. But at least I got another dreaded science credit out the way, and my God, that English professor’s accent made it all worth it.
Meanwhile, back in the world of student frat parties, I would strategically place myself near my two not-so-handsome English targets and hang on their every English-accented word. The fat one with the mole quickly dismissed me as yet another crazy American (honestly, how could he?), but the Eagle and I got on rather well when we were drunk. And one night during my sophomore year I found myself sitting on his lap in a crowded car on the way to someone’s house party. One thing led to another and somehow he ended up in my dorm room and I ended up letting him kiss me.
Mind you, because of the rather impossible criteria I insisted upon before letting a guy kiss me (i.e., kisser must be English or speak with an English accent), letting a guy kiss me didn’t happen often. So, needless to say, I was quite excited that such a rare occasion had presented itself.
After a while, the Eagle came up for air and began to look around. It was the first time I had brought a boy back to my room, so until that moment, it hadn’t really occurred to me how boys might react to my England-inspired decorating scheme. I mean, I have to admit, if Anglophilia were a crime, that dorm room contained more than enough evidence to arrest me and imprison me for life.
In my silly, cocktail-induced condition, I watched the Eagle’s beady eyes move from my Union Jack flag to Tony Blair’s smiling face (seriously, can you name a sexier world leader?) to my posters of London’s dazzling skyline. My shelves full of vintage royal memorabilia, including an elaborate shrine to Diana, were behind him, which, in retrospect, was probably for the best.
“Fucking hell. You’re obsessed,” said the Eagle with a tone not as kind as it should have been.
“I like England.” I shrugged with a giggle. I tried to pull his lips back to mine, but he pulled away, still looking at my posters.
“Jerramy,” he said slowly, “you do realize it’s just a country.”
You see, that’s where he was wrong.
“It’s so much more than that!” I laughed when I said it. But I was serious.
The Eagle looked at me with visible fear, like he had just found out I was some kind of dangerous mental patient or something. Granted my lipstick was probably smudged like in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, but that was hardly a reason for him to look as frightened as he did.
As the door closed quickly behind him, I was left standing fully clothed with a bottle of beer still clenched in my hand, and staring bewilderedly at the Life magazine picture of Charles and Diana’s famous wedding kiss that I had taped to the back of my door.
Never mind. It’s not like the Eagle and I had a future together. He wasn’t even royal.
During the first semester of my junior year, I was sitting in the campus coffee house when my radar ears picked something up from a nearby table.
“You think the exam was easy?” the mystery voice was asking his coffee companions. “Bollocks! It was a disast-a!”
Wait a minute. I’d already been through all the English guys on campus. Who was this?
I sneaked a glance. Our school was small and everyone lived on campus, so I definitely recognized him. In fact, I’d probably seen him hundreds of times in the last two years. But our social circles didn’t cross very often and I’d never taken much notice to be honest.
But after hearing his very English accent, everything changed. Suddenly this stranger, whom I hadn’t given a second glance to in the past, was extremely good-looking. (And to be fair, compared to Mr. Mole and the Eagle, he was practically a supermodel.) And just like that, my new English love interest was born.
Because of his trendy red sneakers, my nickname-loving friends quickly took to calling my newfound crush “Red Shoes.” And if any of them spotted Red
Shoes in the library, they would call me right away so I could study in his section. This semistalking behavior went on for weeks. I even invited him anonymously to my sorority crush party—but he didn’t show up.
Then came the traditional day7 when the entire university gets up at dawn and drinks all day in the autumn sunshine. I’d swallowed two full thermoses of white wine by the time I got up the courage to walk across the Frat Quad and tell Red Shoes it was I who’d invited him to the crush party.
He looked at me through his trendy sunglasses and in his beautiful, glorious, sexy English accent, he said, “If I had known it was you, I would have come.”
God, I love English guys. They can take the simplest sentences and make them sound like the most sophisticated, eloquent, and heartfelt combination of words you’ve ever heard in your entire life. Too bad the white wine erased all memory of everything we said to each other after that.
I suppose it’s just as well our paths never crossed again after that short but ever so sweet drunken rendezvous—because my semester abroad had finally arrived and soon I’d be departing for the motherland! Gone were the days of chasing any hint of an English accent, because soon I’d be drowning in English accents!
But before I caught that first precious flight to London, before I was able to begin the rest of my life once and for all, I had to go back to Colorado for Christmas break.
Five
“Home is not where you live, but where they understand you.”
—CHRISTIAN MORGENSTERN
As usual, the blissful normality of college life slipped away as soon as I arrived in the Rocky Mountains. And, as usual, I was forced to endure the traditional Christmas Day family outing to the nearby clothing-optional hot springs. My parents loved that place. They walked around naked all the time at home, and I seriously think if they had their way, the whole world would be one giant nude commune.