Harry Harrison! Harry Harrison!

by Harry Harrison

  At seven in the morning the pilot came aboard; a number of pencil-pushing types were close behind him. There were some bottles of scotch open on a table in the officer’s mess and we were soon busy with the paperwork there. There were some sealed full bottles as well, which soon vanished, helping to lubricate our paperwork. Customs came and went with unbelievable speed. There was a tall pile of passports for the crew. These were opened, stamped, and returned. Since the Harrison family would be leaving the ship here it got a little more complicated. A few questions were asked, the passports riffled through and stamped with unbelievable dispatch. The same applied to the VW for which I had produced all the relevant documents. Ancient vehicle, personal use only, a few thuds from the official stamps and welcome back to the United States.

  I think that the crew turned out en masse to see us off. It had been a fun crossing for all of us. After many a cheerful good-bye we disembarked, our bags were brought ashore for us—and we watched as our bus was lifted from the hold. A veritable antique in the sea of gleaming sports cars all around her. We loaded her up, more waving and good-byes, and then we were threading our way out of the endless dockland.

  We finally found the exit and showed our passports one last time, and we were home, if you can call the roaring trucks and cars passing us on the New Jersey Turnpike home. Nor was it any better when we had crossed the river and joined the solid phalanx of traffic on the Cross Bronx Expressway. White-knuckled, I squeezed the steering wheel and felt very much the country rube in my native land. I relaxed only when we crossed the bridge into Long Beach and put the brake on in front of my in-laws’ house. Joan’s mother was waiting. No father there, for this was a working weekday. The arrival of his daughter and grandchildren was not reason enough to miss a day at the shop. His first heart attack was soon after this.

  As quickly as I could, I slipped away and back into the VW, where I cracked one of the five-dollar bottles of scotch that the captain was happy to sell to me from the ship’s store. A short time later Joan joined me.

  “Whisky,” she said.

  “You never drink whisky.” I gaped.

  “Cut it with water. She’s already correcting the way the kids speak.”

  “Did you expect anything different?”

  “No. I had just forgotten.”

  “California, here we come.”

  “Roll on the day!”

  She laughed and everything was all right.

  * * *

  Except that it wasn’t. Days became weeks and we fled Grandma’s house and rented a furnished apartment in Long Beach: California wasn’t that easy to reach. The children went to the local school and hated it. Moira’s teacher stood her up before the class and, with her newly acquired English accent, she was told to speak so the other children would listen and learn how to talk properly. One can easily imagine how popular that made her with her classmates.

  We had to get out and find someplace to really settle down, for all our sakes. All the globe-trotting had been fun, but it was time to call a halt. I finished all my assignments, signed contracts, and promised delivery soonest for all the rest. I had the VW tuned up and ready for our heroic drive from ocean to ocean. However I had one slight trouble with the gearbox that would cost a fortune to repair and so would have to be endured. There was no reverse gear.

  “You can’t drive to California without a reverse,” my father-in-law said.

  “I’m only going one way and not coming back,” was my feeble response. The silence that followed was deadly.

  Came the day we were all packed and ready, time to go. I scraped the ice off the windshield, then we boarded and said all our good-byes. Not for the first time did our parents think that we were mad—and were quick to tell us so. We waved good-bye, I put the VW into gear, and we were off. In more ways than one if you were to believe our in-laws.

  14

  Autumn had arrived and we had the first frost on the day we left Long Beach.

  We headed south, not west as yet, in order to find the southern sun. We rolled through Pennsylvania and gaped like rubes at the difference that time had worked on the American highways. Some ten years had passed since our earlier trip south to Mexico, and America was now one interconnected freeway. Gone, but not missed, was the two-lane blacktop. Gone also were the Bates-style motels. As European yokels we gaped ever wider at the high-rise chain motels. By late afternoon we had enough of the driving and left the freeway for one of those palaces of delight, only to discover that we were going to have some parking problems. All the cars of the clientele were parked in a row, up against the curb in front of the motel. Nose in. This was fine if you had reverse gear and you used that to back up and out in the morning. What to do?

  What I had to do was make a U-turn in front of the curb. Then it was all hands—except the driver—to push the VW so it rolled back down against the curb ready to drive straight out in the morning. This produced some raised eyebrows among our fellow motelers, gaping at Joan and the kids pushing and getting the VW rolling. But it worked and they got some needed exercise!

  The kids wanted to head for the pool and, after persuading Joan that the unpacking could wait, we headed for the poolside bar where we could keep an eye on them. We ate at the hotel, hamburgers and fries all around. The kind of junk food we rarely ate at home. If we treated the drive as a rule-breaking holiday it might make the trip that much easier. It was going to be a long way to California: I had a vision of a row of hamburgers smoking away into the sunset. I insert here a small word of advice to those who are thinking of undertaking a transcontinental drive. Don’t. If you still feel that you have to do it, then get some kind of vehicle that can wind up to a decent speed. Don’t do it in a decrepit van with a top speed of fifty miles an hour. That is a top speed downhill with a tailwind. You will eventually get there and you surely won’t get any speeding tickets: that is about all that can be said for it.

  Once we were on the road, Brian Aldiss had the dubious pleasure of receiving a daily postcard report, so that he could share in the heady joys of our trip. While we were refueling each evening the kids went through the local postcards in the gas station, finding a classy one for Brian.

  “Is this one bad enough for Brian?”

  “You can do worse. Keep looking.”

  When a blurry pic of the local hash house, or a gem of a local sight—a plaster dinosaur, or the world’s largest doughnut—was found, we would buy the card and list that day’s roadkill:

  2 sparrows

  1 furry blob

  1 something bird

  These were the feeble reports from the populous states like Pennsylvania. Things improved the farther west and south we drove, where the wildlife roamed suicidal and free. Like:

  3 rabbits

  1 hedgehog

  1 rattlesnake

  1 skunk

  The latter detectable by smell, well before—and well after—we had passed the flattened corpse. It took us three days to cross Texas alone; the panhandle seemed to stretch, unchanging, forever. That’s because it did. We lost track of the cardboard-thick jackrabbits, though we did pass the flattened remains of a big dog, which we hopefully listed as a coyote.

  Mexico was close to our road and a trip across the border for memories’ sake could not be resisted. We parked and walked across the international bridge and into the third world. The food stalls smelled impossibly good but were easily resisted, with memories of gut infections still strong. A clean restaurant tempted us, Mi Casita, and this we did not resist. When done, if it is done well, Mexican food can be the best in the world. Moira dived in and tried everything, from the guacamole to the turkey molé—Todd wolfed down only the handmade tortillas. How children can be so different…? Filling was the word, and we walked it off, only stopping at a booze shop to buy a tax-free bottle of Cuervo Tequila Añejo. Next to the cash register on the counter were some Mexican cigarettes, including one pile that was tastily labeled HORSESHIT CIGARETTES. You don’t often get a chance to buy
this particular brand. On the front of the pack was a drawing of a horse producing the labeled contents. On the back there were health warnings. Not fart in carload and Real horseshit no donkey shit. Delightful.

  I peeked at the package and saw that the printing was on a wrapper covering a normal package of Mexican cigarettes. I bought them, knowing who would appreciate them. That night I put the Bible from the nightstand to good use for once. With my buck knife I hollowed out an opening in it that just fit the pack of barnyard cigarettes. When it was done I wrapped the Bible with wrapping paper so the ends of the innocent book showed. In the morning I mailed it, book rate, to Brian in England with the return address of A. Einstein at Princeton. In case the Brit customs found the doubly illicit contents.

  This story had a happy ending. In the fullness of time the package arrived in Oxford. It seems that Brian was then the literary editor of the Oxford Mail. He dissected the Bible when it crossed his desk and greatly admired the cigarettes inside, then he took them to the office and passed them around, so his coworkers could enjoy an exotic foreign puff or two, showing them the packet only after they had inhaled deeply—and coughed out mightily.

  * * *

  We were still crossing the endless miles of the USA. The road rolled slowly but steadily by. We took warning at the promised hundred miles to the next gas station and filled the tank. We trundled on across the desert and back to what passed for civilization in this part of the world. We drove past the last of Arizona and crossed the border into California, land of our dreams. We had made it. There were cheers all around and we cracked the still-cool California Cabernet Sauvignon we had purchased that morning and had a glass. The kids preferred Coke.

  We were heading for San Diego. A friend of ours from Cuautla, Adam Glass, had moved there after leaving Mexico and we had stayed in touch. He said that we would like the city. We probably would if only we could have found it. Somehow I missed finding San Diego, ending up miles south of it, which is hard to do when you consider the fact that it is America’s eighth-largest city. We ended up almost at the Mexican border. Heading back to civilization we came down a very steep hill and into the community of Imperial Beach. Once again destiny took a hand. Our comments as we drove down Palm Avenue are imprinted forever in my memory.

  “What a lovely house,” Joan said as we whistled by it.

  “Did you see the For Sale sign?” I answered.

  It was getting late and there was a grotty motel nearby. We checked in, then went exploring. The street we had come down was Palm Avenue; when it crossed the railroad tracks and under the freeway, it became the four-lane road to Coronado with shops, gas stations—and restaurants. Since we were only about five miles from Mexico there had to be a Mexican restaurant—and it turned out to be a pretty fair one. We tucked in—and promised Todd a takeaway burger and fries on the way back to the motel. It had been a long day and a tiring one. We fell asleep watching television, ending our first day in California.

  I was dragged awake in the morning by the sun streaking through a rift in the ancient curtains. I lay there, possessed by a feeling of darkness, that life was repeating itself in a most unpleasant way. Here I was at the end of the road, in a broken-down motel. Just like Mexico these many years ago. No road ahead here, for it ended in the Pacific Ocean. Or go south a few miles and you end up in Mexico. Maybe we should continue on into Mexico, back to Cuautla? We certainly knew how to live there. The kids would pick up Spanish in a few months. There was a pop as I punctured this particular daydream. We were in America, 100 percent. We would stay here and the kids would go to American schools and we would all swim in our native culture and then? Then I would turn the coffeemaker on and face the new day.

  It had been a long trip and no one argued when I decided to take a day off. After breakfast I went to the drug store for tomato juice and gin—America would take some getting used to—and picked up limes in the utility store. The kids splashed into the pool and we had Bloody Marys—in plastic glasses—at a table poolside. “Well, where do we go from here?” I asked in what I hoped was an enthusiastic voice, meaning the big picture, the many problems.

  “We find a better place to stay than this fleapit,” Joan said, eminently practical.

  “Right,” I said, and went to get the yellow pages; still used in those precomputer days.

  Funny, with the ragged end of Southern California all around us, we never considered changing our locale—taking a look at Hollywood, for instance. Fate had landed us here and we wanted to check it out and we both wanted to see that for-sale house on the hill nearby.

  Coronado, right down the road, was one gigantic naval base, which meant sailors and their families and rental units galore. We found one nearby, checked it out, and moved in that same day. Then we called the phone number on the house on the hill and went to see it that same afternoon. The owner, Willy, was there ahead of us. With a liter bottle of Booth’s gin and a bag of ice cubes.

  “Let’s try this gin, then we can look around at the house.”

  “None for me,” Joan said.

  “Maybe a small one,” I said, surprising no one. “With a squeeze of lime.”

  “You look around,” Willy said to Joan. “I’m sure the children would prefer a run in the garden.”

  Well done, Willy—who proved to be no dummy. He was a school superintendent—good job, as well as pouring a good drink. Joan returned after a bit and wanted to show me the joys of the en suite bathroom. Once there she closed the door and whispered, “I love this house. Can we buy it?”

  “I hope so,” I said as cheerily as I could. “Let me talk to Willy.”

  It really was exactly what we wanted. A spacious, modern California house with three bedrooms and a giant living room, opening out on a patio and garden, with a large lawn. The lawn ended in a row of trees and beyond this was a typical California half-desert landscape, almost three acres in all. I had another gin and asked the vital question.

  How much?

  I swilled down some more gin and tried to remain calm when I listened to the answer. I kept my cool. I had only limited funds in the bank so I must now hit the bank for a mortgage. With what collateral? I crossed my fingers and snuffed in the gin. This was not going to be easy. It wasn’t. Joan’s parents came through with a loan. And …

  And who cares about the boring details of buying a house? I shudder as I write this. Basically—we started from nowhere and ended up with this jolly, happy home. More important is—what was happening to the people living in it?

  Having bought the house on the hill we now had to turn the house into a home. Getting our furniture out of storage helped. Along with the prints, amphora, bits of sculpture, the odds and sods that make a house a home. We picked from friends as well, but this was a more difficult process. Joan was lucky in that she met Dixie Preese soon after we moved in. Dixie proved to be a loyal friend—keeping contact by correspondence long after we moved away. Dixie was married to Verne, a very unlucky guy. He only had one leg; the other was blown off by air force pilots who bombed the safe bunker with Verne and some generals instead of the target.

  An interesting fact: it wasn’t until some time later that we found out that the locals called this stretch of Palm Avenue Snob Hill. Imperial Beach itself was covered with acres of low-cost working-class and military housing. Out on the fringes of this was the Chicano housing. There were just a few large houses here on Snob Hill, each with plenty of grounds—including one with a barn and some horses. Our house sat at the bottom of a steep hill christened Suicide Hill by the locals. Kids used to ride their bikes down it at speed, start to wobble, and crash at the bottom in front of our house. Cars would also fly down too fast and deposit their hubcaps in our front garden, much to the delight of the children, who amassed a fine collection over time. The local ambulance crews were on speed dial to respond when kids came off their bikes and broke their arms.

  We were settling in, the VW was snorting and groaning and not really worth repairing so I shopp
ed around and discovered that Toyota was trying to crack the American market. They did so with a very nifty little Toyota Corona. I bought the first one—but not till after they accepted the VW as a trade. Poor thing! They could never unload it on the secondhand car dealers and I watched it sink slowly into the dirt of the back lot. The tires went first and it settled onto its rims at a jazzy angle. For all I know it’s still there—a tribute to German arbeit.

  Joan zipped around in the Toyota, chatting up the other moms in the school run. Todd was too grown-up to be seen with his mother, but she did manage to see his principal and his home class teacher. Their first shock turned to interest since most of the other moms were navy wives or Spanish-speaking Chicanos who carefully avoided him. Todd seemed to be fitting in okay, mostly ignored by both groups. Moira enjoyed school and settled right in. In fact she wrote about it:

  The school I first went to was Sunnyslope Elementary. It was very different from England, much less formal and much bigger. It was so sunny as well, not grey like England! I loved the lady who helped serve the lunches and I joined the Brownies like a proper American child. I loved my teacher Mrs. Morrow and all the lovely books that we were given. They were so incredibly new and shiny. Being a true writer’s daughter, I used to stand them up on my desk just to look at them and smell them!

  Living in California was an experience. I was hammering away on the typewriter and my ancient Rheinmetal portable seemed to have reached the end of its days since it had suffered a twisted carriage, crunched in transport. I felt that a new machine was in order—I had never had a new one before—relying instead on secondhand machines of dubious origin, meaning possibly stolen. So I took a deep breath and bought a new IBM Selectric, just released on the market, which had a rotating silver ball with the letters on it, which we soon called a flying matzo ball.