3rd March ~ 15th June, 2005
Like Roddy says, "a song is a beautiful lie." Well, I don't think my story counts as beautiful but it is definitely a large-scale fabrication; the "I" isn't (really) supposed to be me, and the "you" isn't supposed to be based upon any one particular person. But I would like to apologise in advance to any "real" people who think they might have had parts of themselves fictionalized, amalgamated, ripped-off or otherwise story-fied here. I did it with the best of intentions, that is, to write a story and nothing else...
I worried and worried about how to tell you this. As I retraced my steps over all the journeys I’d made that afternoon, I tested how this line would run; I lost the bracelet you gave me. Listening to a mixtape you made me on my walkman as I went, the music twined round memories like those scraps of lyrics curled inside the tissue paper I first unwrapped. I wished I could wrap the bracelet up again and take better care this time. But I couldn’t because now it was lost somewhere.
It didn’t help that I’d been all over the place that day—office, library, the college radio station, numerous shops—leaving my name and number at each the second time around. With tears threatening to dribble out of the corners of my eyes, I scribbled descriptions on scraps of paper which I assumed would be discarded fairly soon after. Maybe if I was able to describe it better they would look harder. ‘Lost: One inch thick, gold and pearl/shell bracelet.’ I didn’t even really know what it was made of. I thought I saw crushed pieces on the asphalt in the parking lot but they were only shards of ice. It was cold. In the dark, discarded gold cigarette packets were also hopes raised then crumpled and abandoned.
“Gee it sounds super pretty, dear,” said the woman in the convenience store. She was the quintessence of small town friendliness, or maybe, said my uncharitable British cynicism, just a well-oiled, all American customer service machine.
“Someone’s probably taken it,” said her co-worker, who was neither of the above. Perhaps sensing my despair, the first lady reached for what I’d come to recognize as the Anglo-American conversational safety catch:
“I love your accent! Where are you from?”
“Leeds.”
I was monosyllabic but she, like all properly trained shop assistants, was tenacious:
“Is that where the bracelet is from?”
“My old boyfriend back home gave it me before I moved here.”
She’d wrung that much out of me but I couldn’t begin to describe everything. I couldn’t begin to explain the things that had pulled us together and the situations that would pull us apart. She let me go, no doubt sensing a dead end and also realizing that I probably wasn’t going to be making any purchases. I was relieved that she hadn’t asked me why I’d decided to move to Ohio. It was a question I’d been asked so many times in the last six months that I’d forgotten what the real answer was.
If the first thing people noticed was my accent, the second was quite often my bracelets. People would spot my ostentatious collection of gifts and thrift store gems and ask where I got the big antique-looking one from. I’d say that a friend had brought it back from his holiday. Sometimes you were a friend, sometimes a boyfriend, and sometimes you weren’t even you. It was just easier that way. As I left the convenience store, I pictured the bracelet sitting back in a shop in New Orleans and toyed, as I often had, with the coincidence of you finding it there. My image of New Orleans was the residue of a sixth form English class on Tennessee Williams—the significance of his visions of crumbling Southern gentility had been all but lost on me at that time but something has since become patched up around them. I wonder how the real thing would measure up now.
The way I see it, there are two kinds of places; the places we imagine and the places we end up. Forgettable places don’t exist; you might as well never have been. But once you’ve been somewhere, can you still imagine how you thought it’d be? Sometimes I try to recall the image of the University that I’d amalgamated from websites and informational leaflets prior to enrolling. It was some sort of educational edifice imposing itself over a corn field, I think. Once you’ve moved on to a new place, I’m not sure if you can ever remember how you didn’t know it was.
I still imagine that my bracelet belonged to Blanche DuBois, though, and that it probably fell off in one of her struggles at six thirty-two Elysian Fields. She only had slender wrists; a big chunky thing like that would have slipped off easily in all that dark sweaty decadence. Funny how things come together sometimes … like you matching the bracelet to the ones I already had, joining it to the other journeys, friendships and unknown stories that coincided and jangled on my wrist.
I had had a fairly unusual conversation with my Dad earlier in the day that I lost the bracelet. He wanted me to buy him some copper nails from a man in Charlotte, Michigan. Dad makes Shaker-style oval boxes for a hobby. First he has to soften planes of wood in hot water and then bend them gently round a mould without splitting them. The traditional method doesn’t require any glue, just some special copper tacks that hold the whole box together. Reluctantly stationed on an army base in Germany, miles from anywhere, Dad was churning out these boxes like they were coming into fashion. And it turned out this Charlotte man was in possession of the world’s last remaining machine for manufacturing this one truly authentic type of nail. Dad found him on the internet.
Now this is strange. The manufacturer, going by the name of John Wilson, has a website but no email address. He also has the worldwide monopoly on his product but no facilities for accepting credit card transactions. Dad told me that there was a photo on the site showing a man with a beard and no moustache. Somehow the first two anomalies seemed to make sense then. Dad and I chuckled over this,
“Although,” I said, “having spent time in rural Michigan, it doesn’t surprise me.”
Well, not so much surprise me, I thought later, as make me feel comfortable and strangely at home in my funny flat-space-outside-of-time called Ohio.
When the internet seems to let you proceed to checkout with anything and everything—books, flat-pack houses, friendships, wives—loaded into a big Amazon-ian shopping cart, and when airplanes make people at once very close together and very far apart, this convoluted payment scenario speaks to me from different directions; the man with a beard and no moustache in his shed in the Great Lake State; the amateur craftsman in his garage in Germany; his daughter somehow a short drive from the Ohio-Michigan state line, writing checks for nails from a US bank account. I marveled at these three points of a triangle and wondered how many copper nails laid end to end it would take to chart the direct lines between them. My pen drew loops on a scratch pad, like Venn diagrams mapping accessibility and illusion, or connection and coincidence. And Dad and I chatted and laughed in that way people do over coincidences. One of us—I forget who—became the x-millionth person to have said “small world” and I felt close to him as I sat in my office with the phone wedged between my shoulder and cheek, shifting the gold colored pin that clasped the bracelet together in and out of its slot.
I wore the bracelet everyday—part routine, part ritual. Twice daily— every morning and every night—I would maneuver the whole thing over the fattest part of my right hand, quite often grazing the side of my thumb on a sharp edge where the hinge was. But countless times between the edges of the days I would also attend to the little golden pin. This was a habit of mine— this sliding, this not leaving it be. The catch used to be firm but had gradually loosened, sometimes slipping half way out. “I’ll have to watch that,” I thought, while still sliding and still not leaving it be. Once it had broken open entirely but was rescued by my big woolly sleeve. Another time I heard it clatter on the sidewalk behind me and then turned and picked it up with a tight tummy and a shutter-flash vision of the soft edges of your face. Five hours after I’d phoned Dad, I took my coat off at home. The bracelet was gone.
~ * ~
As I carried on retracing my steps, gradually realizing that I would find nothing, I thought about the ways in which, every day of our lives, we brush up against people and things. There are sharp edges and rounded curves, shatterings and coherences, reflections, refractions and angles of incidence. We can plan out routes, plot the basics, but for the magic we do rely upon coincidence. And so, as I finished my fruitless search, I thought about all the other journeys we make and how times and places and concrete things come together and move apart. People are constantly battered and changed until we decide to stop for a moment and pick over our past like a beachcomber stumbling along a shoreline, throwing some things away and pocketing others. At the beach, I like to pick up those pieces of glass that have had their angles worn and rounded by the sea. I appreciate their softness and think of them as pieces of trash treasure, loved then lost.
~ * ~
The bracelet showed up a week later in a mailbox—my friend Eva’s, to be exact.
Eva and I didn’t live together but we co-owned a car. Americans were baffled by this arrangement. The man at the license bureau looked like something was about to short-circuit in his head; divorced lesbians?! A friend from the university said
“Wow, that’s so European!”
It wasn’t, really, but my friendship with Eva made me feel European for the first time in my life. She, a paragon of urban-chic from Berlin, never really seemed to get over the shell-shocked feeling of finding herself marooned in a small Midwestern town where Tractor Pulls draw crowds and state law prohibits beauticians from administering eyelash tints. The 1994 Chrysler mini-van, which had almost as many miles behind it as we did, was our $500 ticket to elsewhere. It had been previously owned by three Austrian graduate students who boasted that they had driven at 80mph between Seattle, San Francisco and Florida. As a souvenir, the car often squeaked, shuddered, and gave off disconcerting gassy odors as it took us places. But it did take us places, and for that we loved it. Just like I loved that whole vision of America.
I willingly bought into the clichéd romance of driving across the States. For a while, even a short drive to the supermarket on the edge of town had the aura of an epic road trip. I bought into this on behalf of all those people at home who bought into it too and were doing it now, vicariously, through me. I spun tales over email in which the unremarkable landscapes of Indiana or Illinois became glorious through the windows of a moving car. I’m suspicious of email now, especially the emerging tradition of the travel narrative groupmail. You can travel the world but a computer with internet access will always let you know where you have left your heart. Home is where you write to? But, when it feels like every experience is something to write home about, when do you stop writing? Or more worryingly, when do you start? Begin too soon and you can find yourself living things in retrospect even as they happen. But I suppose cars are designed that way too; when you look out of the front windscreen you can also see the rear view mirror.
I said to a new friend, as we embarked upon a two hour journey to go and see a band in Columbus,
“The thing I like best about this town is leaving it.”
He laughed, and agreed. But that was only a half truth. I liked coming back too. I just liked moving.
One of the first classes I took at the University was called “Maps of Englishness.” One week, we were assigned an essay from our British Cultural Studies textbook which argued that American teenagers traditionally come of age on their country’s highways, whereas the youth of Britain stages its rituals in the throbbing spaces of their home town’s nightclub. These assertions at first seemed bizarre—inaccuracies both academic and clichéd—but then so were the threads of class discussions most weeks. As I listened to the inevitable generalizations about the country I’d just left behind and tried to duck under the spokes-Brit hat, I also started to see how these impossible imaginings might take place. Maybe I understood why some Americans hold their cars so dear; without them, vast spaces of their country can mean nothing. While confirming my suspicions that America registers far more in the lives of Britons than vice versa, the mutual incomprehensibilities of drive-through liquor stores, Chinese take aways, patriotic bumper stickers, Princess Diana, Apple Butter Festivals and Goodness Gracious Me eventually began to blend in oddly friendly new ways. Perhaps I would fit in here after all? But at the same time, I did miss those nightclubs …
~ * ~
I would often play your mixtapes on the mini-van’s muffled stereo. My favourite one—the same one I had threaded between my ears as I searched for the bracelet that day—featured snatches of weekend club hits recorded from BBC Radio One’s “Essential Selection.” I used to listen to it on my headphones while walking around Leeds too, overdubbing the everyday sounds of the city as I re-lived the last night out and anticipated the next.
This was the city I remembered now—the streets through which you and I walked home one morning, our legs leaden with lactic acid, dark smudges under our eyes and our cheeks stiff from smiling. We took a short cut through the park as the sun was coming up. This was a foolhardy route to choose but with you I always felt indestructible, even at the same time knowing that you could mash me like a re-cyclable coke can at any moment. You were carrying my shoes as we picked our way through upturned polystyrene trays of chow mein, and worse. I always loved treading the empty streets in daylight after not having slept. It’s the oddly beautiful time when the cleanest part of the day collides with the dirtiest fag-end of the night out.
We reached the sundial-shaped intersection of the paths at the center of the park, about the highest point for miles around. I didn’t know then how I would come to relish every slight incline once I’d moved to a place of one hundred and eighty degree horizons—the place from which letters and contracts had started arriving. Elsewhere was gradually invading my letterbox but all I knew then, as we lingered instinctively over the morning view, was that soon the world I’d painstakingly built around me would be gone. I remember feeling, “I am in love with things as they are.”
In the near distance were the church spires and stadium floodlights of Headingley, and the Yorkshire Dales stretching out behind. Across the patch of waste ground to the north east was Woodhouse. People who lived there claimed that nobody ever visited them. I seldom did. Woodhouse wasn’t on the way to any of my somewheres and so I rarely passed through its terraced mazes and tunnels. Because straight ahead was Hyde Park; the heart of it all; a dirty little enigma which countless students had called home for a few years, renting six-bedroomed houses and paying unscrupulous landlords £5 per week extra to squeeze an Ikea queen bed into a box room. There, the 56 bus ran until 3am, down the steep hill past the Royal Park pub, the Picture House, the so-called “Inconvenient Store” which shut at illogical hours, and the post office which was just shut. Nobody, it seemed, wrote letters anymore. Maybe you would write to me one day…
Was I picturing things differently now from my street in the North American heartland—a place where people mow the lawn, keep the music low and put the trash out on time? No, if I focused hard I could still see Hyde Park’s litter, ragged bill posters, discarded club fliers, pushed-over wheelie bins and pot holes in the road—hardly anyone paid Council Tax so they never seemed to get filled in—all of which suggested that the residents didn’t care too much about aesthetics. Lobby groups pointed out that demand for joint-tenancy houses for multiple occupants drove rent prices up and families out, creating transient “scenes” rather than communities in the traditional sense. Certain locals complained about the rowdy hordes of students and their lack of civic pride.
They were right in a way. A sense of semi-permanence did express itself in the fact that some people who lived there seemed to do so in inverted commas. Or perhaps parentheses, denoting a fashionably grubby detour on the road to semi-detached houses in cul-de-sacs within commuting distance from London. Or “ranch-style” bungalows in Ohio. The people I knew there—especially the ones who sidestepped the post-graduation exodus—seemed to have a love-hate relationship with the modes, lifestyles, and attitudes that marked out Leeds as perhaps more renowned for its trendies than any other university city in the UK.
There was a different kind of pride though, only not the US-style college sweater and pom-pom kind. Instead the area’s postcode enjoyed a kind of self-deprecating use as an adjective. It was all very LS6, or so the T-shirts said. LS6 was also rated 10/10 on Ensleigh Student Insurance’s premium scale. Obviously this didn’t count as full marks; it entailed expense. But again, there was strange pride in the fact that we went to parties on Chestnut Avenue—reportedly “the most burgled street in Britain.” Once there was even a drive-by shooting three or four streets away but this seemed to come from another world. Hearsay shrugged it off—“it was some drugs thing”—as if students had no business stake in that particular economy.
Of course, I see now that there had to be many other versions of this few square miles I called my home turf. Perhaps shamefully, it took discussions about “Multi-ethnic Britain” in Ohio of all places for me to really consider the ways in which different versions of Hyde Park were geographically superimposed over my white, middle class student one—a complex ecosystem of lives both intrinsically connected and, in other ways, acres apart. There was bhangra music playing in the taxis that whisked us from Headingley pubs to downtown clubs as midnight approached. Then there were the cafes in Hyde Park to which you could later return to smoke sheeshas and eat couscous at 4am. What did the women wearing salwar kameez who extended their family’s laundry across the back terraces think of us, bellowing in the streets in the small hours of weekday mornings?
But from our vantage point in the park that morning, I couldn’t see the rubbish or the inconsistencies. I certainly wasn’t in the mood for sociological analysis. All I could see were the roofs—parallel lines of brown red terraces laid out back to back. Not in grids like those letter and number systems I would later negotiate, but weaving in and out like secret doodles down the margins of my lecture notes. I’d spent three years cutting through back streets, trying to establish by trial and error the quickest routes to my friends’ houses and, as a result, this place wasn’t merely the back of my hand. It was inside my brain with pins stuck in it to mark spots where I’d carved out routine heartbreaks at bus stops, got talking for ten minutes to that Welsh homeless guy or perhaps just shared a joke with you on a park bench, old folks-style.
In that one morning’s early sun, the roofs were bright, bright red—all except for the shining green of the newly renovated Mosque. Light beamed off its dome. I reached into my bag for my disposable camera but you held my arm to stop me.
“Don’t,” you said. “It won’t come out the way you’re seeing it now anyway. Just concentrate instead.”
So I did. And I cried sludges of makeup down my face. You held me the way you usually did when we’d just broken up. You held me so tight that I had to tense back, catching us in that suction moment of tugging to open a sealed refrigerator door. I thought something might be about to implode. And I thank you for that because that picture of the roofs in my mind became things-as-they-were—a still from a film about the only place I’d ever really felt at home.
Luckily this freeze-frame has a portable soundtrack—not the walkman-precluded sounds of road-sweepers or burglar alarms—but beats that carry with them the pounding allure of Leeds’ famous nightclubs, places where I’d found my feet and succumbed to dancing as if they were nothing more than bedrooms with banging professional sound systems. Hang on— maybe I was a textbook case after all?
It was amusing now. As I would drive my green van along the flat, straight roads of Northwest Ohio, or walk—unusually for locals—along streets where sidewalks had been deemed unnecessary, the music on my tape didn’t match the new landscape at all. Emails from others at home raving about havin’ it at Technique or Back2Basics sounded faintly ridiculous even as their off-the-cuff references and UK slang snagged on my sense of missing out on things. The songs would still take me places, though.
There was one whose name I never found out that had made me long to go to Ibiza—that is, the Ibiza where I suppose you dance in the sea as the sun comes up, not the one where people push paracetamol in clubs filled with Manchester United fans. There was another song called “Lola’s Theme” which had been the fanfare for the summer of 2004:
I’m a different person! / Turned my world around!
You always thought the vocals were cheesy but, in my car, the memories almost made my chest explode. And next the tape plays “Somebody to Love,” remixed ham-fistedly by the Boogie Pimps into god awful sixties nostalgia for the ecstasy generations. But I won’t pretend I didn’t love it and that, if I let it, it doesn’t still take me places …
… “I love the bracelet. Thank you. But don’t ever—ever—let me think we can be together if we can’t.”
“Don’t think this is … It just makes it easier to say what’s already there. No one’s ever,” you sweep that fringe, “affected me the way you did. It really scares me. But Happy Birthday. I’ll feel bad if this kills you and I gave it to you.”
I laugh and tell you that “I don’t care” because nothing matters except what it looks like to me now which is that you are pulling every string in your body with the effort of not touching me and it’s hot and then you are touching me and you’re lifting me up and spinning and spinning and spinning and, and, and … then the DJ drops a tantalizing hint of bloody Rui Di Silva! We can only understand what we are shown / How was I supposed to know our love would grow? More, more—God!—more; I understand the flashing lights and the fruity machine smoke. You talk of feeling your soul trying to escape from your body. You really think it might. Such dark, sexy music—impelling us to move—all the while holding the formula for the ache and the breath that sinks down when it should escape with the sucking pull of a concertina box. Breathing in figures of eight. The body language of your mind in a clinch with your vital organs. Sometimes you are the music. Sometimes I can distil the essence of those whole uncapturable experiences into the rush I feel remembering them. The way the music and the memories speak together, shifting particles inside me so that my whole body becomes an irregular, inverting egg timer, bracelets jangling as hands twirl with the constancy of clock hands generating and losing time ...
~ * ~
My special bracelet was lost and found either side of Spring Break. That week, I’d left Ohio behind and taken a long, icy drive into Canada. It wasn’t the Spring Break I’d derided in American teen movies—formulaic boy-meets-girl scenarios on Florida beaches—it seemed arctic. Lake Ontario was a solid white but still moved in eerie waves of pearly sheen when the wind got up.
When I got home, there was a phone call from Eva. She told me about the bracelet in her mailbox. She was almost as happy as me but couldn’t have felt the waves of nostalgia, adrenaline and relief—you would never have to know. Or, I would never have to know if you still cared enough to be angry, sad, or reproachful.
So now I’m back where I’d forgotten I’d been. I’m back in the parking lot outside 246 Second Street in Bowling Green, Ohio. As I was retracing my steps on that day, I hadn’t remembered that I’d also stopped by Eva’s apartment complex to drop something off in her mailbox. Eva had already left for a week in Miami with her boyfriend so I’d been there all of a minute. The bracelet must have unhinged itself then. Upon finding my treasure on the floor, one of those community spirited somebodies must have decided not to keep it and, by some blessed logic, also decided to put it in Eva’s mailbox rather than any of the six others. Maybe they’d seen me there, or seen glamorous Eva on the stairs and thought it would suit her. Since I’ll never know who they were, I like to imagine that you made the walk from Hyde Park to Leeds city centre, past the shuttered satellite branches with the For Sale signs to the main Post Office, and mailed my bracelet back.
A few days later, several hundred copper nails arrived in my mailbox with an invoice from John Wilson in Charlotte, Michigan. There was a note on the invoice saying
“Dear Steve, glad to hear you still find box making an enjoyable hobby.”
I hadn’t realized that this wasn’t the first batch that Dad had bought. Seven years ago, apparently, money had changed hands through an American citizen living in Cumbria, Northwest England. This time around it was me who sent John Wilson the twenty seven dollars, and spent almost as much again shipping the package out to Dad in Northwest Germany. Before sending it, though, I kept a few of the nails. That way, if the bracelet ever goes missing again, I’ll have something to remember it by.
