The Anglophile (19 page)

“John was quite taken with one of Yoko Ono's pieces. He had to climb a ladder and look through a spyglass to see it—it was a little tiny word the artist Yoko had printed.
Yes
was all it said. John said later what piqued his interest is that Yoko had written something positive. He thought it would say something negative. What happens next is history.”

“Buggered if I care what anyone says about Yoko,” the salty older British woman says, the one who was hit by the paper cup. “She was his great love.”

Richard nods with vigor. “John was once asked what
attracted him. Now you may think John and Yoko went together like chalk and cheese. But John said, ‘She's me in drag.'”

As we walk toward Three Saville Row I try to nail exactly what attracts me to Kit. Besides the obvious British stuff. Do I know his internal side at all? A safari? That choice nugget of life history would have come out of me right away.

And what exactly is it about me that he likes? Has he dated a string of bubbly Jews? Does he think I'm funny? I'm sorry to report to myself that I honestly don't know what he thinks.

Another American tour member who hasn't spoken before sums up what he's feeling as we leave the site. “I find this story enfeebling and ennobling to hear.” He speaks so elegantly, like a youthful Walter Cronkite letting the private man out of the corporate anchorman as mankind landed on the moon. “We're dots in history, aren't we?”

 

The highlight of our next few stops is in front of Apple Records' old headquarters. Its rooftop is the sacred spot the Beatles played a surprise free concert for the people of London, their last-ever public appearance. After we're done soaking up the site's glory, we head for the tube and together take the short ride to St. John's Wood.

We emerge at St. John's Wood station and still a unit, turn a corner and walk in a steady pace. In the near distance, a slew of tourists is crossing backward and forward on a street I already know from countless photos.

I gasp a little. “Have you been here before?” I whisper to Kit.

“Can you believe it? I never have.”

“This little scene plays itself out every day,” Richard says after we stop right in front of Abbey Road Studios, on, as one would expect, Abbey Road.

By the look of the many grins on my tour, I'm not the only one vastly pleased.

Richard continues: “All day people cross and their friends photograph, to prove they were here. And then the tourists about-face and do it again, motorists be damned. Be careful when you cross, it gets a bit dicey now and then.”

Our group's attention falters when a middle-aged man drops his pants, his backside toward us. He's doing something naughty against the metal gates that holds back the tourists. Yellow liquid soon drips down onto the curb.

The hit-by-a-cup woman on our tour rages again. “Ya taking a whiz?” Kit and I exchange slightly worried and amused looks.

“I'm doing it for the Stones,” the public pisser says in a London accent as he finishes his pee.

“You're a disgrace to England.”

“Go fuck yourself, lady.”

“What am I today? A hooligan magnet?”

(Apparently.)

“Let it be known, you're a fuckin' wanker,” says a familiar northern English voice.

“No fucking way!” another American man who is not from our tour says. “Oh, Jesus, Lisa, it's actually Ringo!”

The urinater zips up and turns his head, his eyes wide as twenty-five pence pieces.

“How are you today, Guv'ner?” Ringo Starr says to the guilty party.

“Fine,” the urinater manages, before running in shame.

The Beatle Brain struggles hard for his own composure. “Oh, hello.”

Ringo offers his hand to Richard. “I read about you in the papers. I hear you do good work.”

Where did he come from? It's as if Ringo dropped in by jetpack. When my heart recovers, I note a limo a few feet down the road, and a BBC crew filming our awe.

“Dis is da craziest—” our group nut in the T-shirt is too freaked to finish his tearstained sentence, but the cup-on-head woman pops right out with: “Sign me Bristols, Ringo!”

She opens her coat, lifts off her brown blouse, and hands Ringo a ballpoint pen. He bravely leans toward a large exposed shriveled bosom stuffed into a bra. He honors her request as nonchalantly as a man who has spent a lifetime around fawning womenfolk, even fawning womenfolk missing three front teeth.

“What's your name, pretty woman?” Ringo asks.

“Pe-nellllll-o-pe,” our gal lets out in a long drawn-out rapturous mewl. “I want you to spell every letter, please. I won't clean me Bristols for a year.”

Ringo gives her a kiss on her wrinkled cheek, too.

She sobs, and kisses the floor.

“What brings you back here?” the Brain says on our astounded group's behalf.

“A project for the BBC. A tribute song for George.”

Ringo is a real trooper and offers to take a photo with everyone on the street who has paid a fee to Richard.

The other tourists gathered at the Abbey Road shrine moan, but Ringo repeats his rules, “I'm helping out a working man.”

“You're as nice as they say you are then,” Richard says with grace.

Ringo grins, and asks Richard to nod if we're with the tour.

When it's my turn, I say weakly, “It's nice to meet you.”

“Where are you from in America?” Ringo Fucking Starr says to me.

“Queens, USA,” I manage.

“Played a concert there once.”

I'm still too starstruck to laugh at the Shea Stadium joke. “Un-huh,” I manage. But I regain enough composure that Kit and I take turns taking a picture with Ringo.

Ringo glances at the gates daubed with international sentiments, smiles at a particularly obscene bit of graffiti and waves goodbye. The last time I saw and heard spontaneous public clapping was in October of 2001, when several firemen with sooty faces took a lift uptown on my New York bus after a hard day's night toiling at Ground Zero.

Ringo walks up the stairs, and past two large topiary spheres in terracotta pots outside of the fabled Abbey Road doors. The door opens and closes. There is a brief silence as we process the awesome surprise of the afternoon, and then there is a collective giggle from our group and more groans from the unfortunate without a London Walks ticket.

“Amazing,” I say to Kit. “We just lucked out, matey.”

“That was superb,” he says.

“Brilliant.”

“Yes, brilliant.” Kit nods his head toward white enamel lettering on the section of black gate. “Did you see this?”

“The Japanese graffiti?” I ask.

This time Kit points precisely where he wants me to look, and I read a rather famous English language sentence out loud: “The Love You Take is Equal to the Love You Make.”

“I didn't even see that when I took it,” Kit beams. “I'm sure I got it in frame with Ringo.”

“A keeper,” I say. “I'm going to make everyone I know a coffee mug with that photo on it.”

Kit nudges me and directs my eyes toward Richard smiling contently as he leans against a rail; his euphoric customers have left him alone.

We walk over to get the world's biggest Beatles expert's opinion on this almost, but not quite, impossible day.

My eyes are moist with emotion as I think of my spot in a centerless universe. Is it the drugs? I feel like I'm PMSing times ten. Talk about an emotional seesaw. First there was the horror of last night's dream, and now the memory of a lifetime.

I sit on the curb and cry as Kit rolls a cigarette, and addresses Richard. “That must have been a life highlight for you, no?”

The Brain and Kit grin as my quiet tears become less quiet.

Could someone please tell me what distinguishes me from the insane guy on our tour? Why I am such a
bloody wreck when I should be in a constant state of bliss?

“Quite odd, that. But quite nice, yes. Never met Ringo before. I'm rapt.”

You'd think the Brain would call it a day, but he
is
a hardworking man: after a few more minutes he blows into his mic and announces, “Well, folks, I still have some words to tell you. Originally
Abbey Road
was going to be called
Everest
after the cigarettes smoked by the Beatles' favorite recording engineer. It was suggested that they take their photo at Mount Everest, but here was nearer. And that's that. This was an extraordinary day for me really, and I'm very glad to have shared it with you. As John said at the end of the
Let It Be
album, ‘I hope I passed the audition.'”

The Bronx fan is not taking in any of Richard's final words. He walks back and forth across Abbey Road, having somehow cajoled the shorter of the two Japanese women into snapping his picture as a trio of impatient cars wait it out.

Kit rolls and lights a cigarette, and seeks out my eyes. “So now that you're standing, I guess you want to take a photo crossing, too?”

I'm severely embarrassed at my previous emotional display. “Isn't that too embarrassing for you?”

“How's that?”

“A bum photo of a road? And what's the point after the gold we got a minute ago?”

Richard overhears us. “Do it. I get e-mails from people who wish they listened to me, and were too cool about it.”

“Okay,” I say. “Can you help us match the photo up to the album cover as much as we can? Might as well get it right.”

Kit snuffs out the cigarette, gets my camera ready, and says, “Take as long as you want. I want the woman I love to be sated.”

I swallow air. This is the first time that Kit has used the word love. Three hours ago I would have bristled even more than I did after Kevin abused that emotive, but after an incredible day, I kiss his neck, and hear myself utter, “I love you, too, mister.”

I am delighted with myself how that fell out of my mouth so easily, but I am concurrently so, so ashamed of my previous thoughts about my sweetie. Thank heavens I did not think out loud. A serial killer? That was the lowest low of many stupid thoughts.

Richard maneuvers our bodies into the correct angle to shoot and be shot. “If you look at this photo you will see the top of the road here, and there's the wall of Abbey Road through the lens of Iain Macmillan when he took the famous photo in 1969. So you see you are now exactly in the right place.”

W
ith my internal pendulum swung back to happy romantic, I'm eager to get on with my grand tour of the British Isles. Even despite the dream I had last night, which for a few minutes left me more than a little shaken when I awoke this morning. Kit brought me to an old gem he knew about in London, a glassblower's shop chockful of hourglasses and gorgeous goblets. There was no shopkeeper present, and when I stepped inside he locked the door and tried to strangle me.

Unaware that he's stalking me at night, Kit's still firmly discouraging a swing through Stonehenge. “Give me a half hour. Read. Watch some telly. Let me call some friends and cook up an alternative. They might have some recommendations for day trips I haven't thought of.”

“Go for it.” I've been secretly dying to watch British TV and commercials.

While Kit makes a few phone calls from his bedroom, I happily watch
Breakfast Time
on the BBC.

“What's a zebra crossing?” I say when his door opens.

“A pedestrian crossing. Abbey Road is one.”

“A kid in Surrey got killed on another one. That's the headline. And a new mutation of strep that warrants a flu shot if you haven't gotten one already.”

“I did, back in December. Awful about the kid.”

He joins me on the antique cushions, and presents a handwritten itinerary for me to approve.

“Hackney,” I read. “What's there?”

“Not much,” Kit admits. “Outermost East London, none too pretty, but there's a Burberry's outlet to spend some of your brother's money. You can buy him a scarf or mackintosh if you like.”

“Great idea,” I say. Continuing down the list, I read: “Lunch in Canterbury. Simple Simon's—”

“A fourteenth-century pub. Not too touristy, I hear from a friend.”

“No McDonald's?” I say good-humoredly, watching Kit grin. “Would we visit the cathedral in Canterbury?”

“That's what I was thinking. I've never actually been, but it must be good, Julius Caesar was a tourist there.”

“Whitstable,” I read. “Never heard of that either.”

“Probably not a place you Yanks have heard of yet. An oyster town once, still is, but it's in danger of getting trendy. I've always bypassed Canterbury and gone right there to the best battered cod I've ever eaten.”

I say in my awful British accent (surprisingly not much better than Gary's): “I do believe I've never eaten battered cod.”

“Then Whitstable is a must. The skate at the Oyster Bar is great, too.”

“Skate? Is that a fish?”

“You've never had it?”

“No.”

“Very tasty. And oh, it's not on the itinerary, but I've tentatively booked us lodging at the town we're getting the chips, on your approval of course. There's terrible traffic near Canterbury Castle.”

“Approved.”

“Scarfs and castles, fish and chips. How does that bloody sound?”

“Perfect.”

 

You don't expect too many fashion Meccas after driving past kilometers of sprawling housing projects. But there, like a mirage, is a bona fide Burberry's.

And there on a silver rack of last year's items is the bona fide white leather trench coat I spotted only a month ago in New York while pretend-shopping with Cathy in the intimidating Burberry's SoHo branch. Here is the beautiful coat at only seventy-five pounds! By my trusty pastel pink Hello Kitty calculator's calculation, that's only one hundred and thirty dollars, seventy-five percent off what I saw on the New York rack at five hundred and twenty dollars! I hesitate for a moment too long and a young black fashionplate type wearing a silver sweatshirt with the word “Cutie” picked out in silver glitter scoops the prize up.
Shit.
She's wavering between purchases, and drapes the prize over a rack of clothes. Is she done?
Should I yank it from the rack? She picks it up again.
But that's my size, lady, not yours!

I stalk her, hoping she won't notice. She tries the coat on once more, preens in a mirrored panel, and then goes instead with a dress cut from beige barkcloth fabric blocked with a pussy willow print. When she's about to rehang
my
trench coat on the wrong rack, I lunge—only to have a fingertip pressed hard against my shoulder by a rival shopper, a woman tall, pinch-nosed, sharp-toothed, and angry. “Now, now, hand it over. We know who got to it first, don't we?” I'm guessing by the Princess Di accent and the smart black ensemble, Lady Bitch is slumming it here in East London, a bit of diversion here from her life all silver and gold.

“First of all, ma'am, get your hand off me. And this is not yours. I was three feet away.”

“Don't ma'am me.” She won't let go, and I've no backup troops: Kit's in the men's section, unaware of my combat.

A worried manager finally comes over, his heavily pockmarked face lightened by warm brown eyes. Using Burberry Judicial Power, he has a security minion rewind the security camera.

Before the winner is determined, Kit is back by my side with a stuffed shopping bag. “Did you find anything?”

I show him the coat.

“How much dosh?”

“Seventy-five pounds.”

“Quite a good steal, I'd say.”

“If she gets it, it certainly is,” my still-livid competition says.

We stare each other down until the manager emerges from a back room with his verdict: “We're giving it to the American.”

Triumph.

“I'm from the British wool marketing board,” the Defeated One says with considerable wobbliness. “I'm certainly going to report a horrible shopping experience to the people that matter.” She opens her cell phone.

The manager nervously pantomimes for her to close the phone as he holds up a similar coat that he has at the ready slung on his arm. “We haven't even tagged it yet,” he confides loudly when she closes the phone. I continue “shopping” nearby just to get the full scoop on the developing story. She picks it up with her well-manicured fingertips to take a look. In a peripheral glance I assess that this second choice might even be a bit nicer than mine—is that actual horsehair trim on the white collar? She is smiling as she models it to a mirror, but I'm not going to acknowledge anything short of triumph, and as I leave the shopping area to pay for my item, I am the recipient of the iciest stare of the twenty-first century.

Our cars are parked several spots from each other. I offer a simpering smile through my left-side front passenger seat window. The woman is so angry she almost backs into a parked minicab directly behind her.

As Kit revs the engine, he laughs about the discount department store as the new battleground. But he soon loses the grin. The traffic jam by Canterbury Castle is alarming, and we sit and sit and sit.

I take my shoes off and try a little Chaucer toe the
ater, one big toe the knight in the
Canterbury Tales,
the other the maiden.

Kit says nothing.

“Where did the London broil get its name? Was there a celebrated butcher in your country's history?”

No response, not even a grunt.

And even less of one when I demand to know the difference between a hill and a dale. Gene's influence? Kit has too much road rage to play.

 

Kit offers an apologetic kiss when we finally get to the town my guidebook calls “the Pearl of Kent,” an apparent play on the many oyster towns around the county. Canterbury, as any literature major knows, is the home of the cathedral where one fateful night in December 1170, four knights burst through the doors and killed the archbishop, Thomas à Becket on St. Augustine's chair. Without that event, Chaucer would never have had even one tale to write about, for there would be no travelers paying homage to write about. I've also checked off the medieval Eastbridge Hospital, a twelfth-century hostel for those fatigued tourists, apparently now a private retirement home, but I read out to Kit, “You can still see the undercroft, refectory and two chapels.”

We're both famished, so instead of going directly to undercroft and refectory touristing, we detour to that fourteenth-century pub.

When Kit proudly declares that his friend who recommended the establishment promised that tourists have not found out about the place because it's off the
beaten path, I keep to myself that the pub has a prominent paragraph about it in my guidebook.

I can see why it's so beloved by Fodor's on our arrival. The architects from Disney would probably love to photograph Simple Simon's medieval workmanship. According to my book, those windows, brick-work and timbers on the outside are authentic. Equally perfect on the inside is a sloping beamed ceiling, and a working fireplace that warmed drinkers of centuries past.

Kit heads to the bar to order us two pork pies in Kentish cider, and two “real ales.” When he returns to our table he says, “So how much do you know about ale?”

“Just a little.”

“If you need a refresher course, ale is darker in appearance and heavier than lager. What we're about to drink is what locals call an English bitter.”

“Okay—”

“This one is called Hopdaemon's, it's brewed right in town. Ale should be brewed as close to where you're drinking it as possible.”

What's that expression?
It's not what you drink, but where you drink it.
The Shakespearean word
thereupon
pops into my head.
Thereupon, I drink the ale.
After my first-ever bitter sip of the stuff I hide my displeasure with a palm—and briefly recall Kevin's much more amusing beer lesson that he gave one of those few days I thought we could actually even make it over the long run. “There's dark ales. Strong-flavored European beers. Can't stand them. Beer is like ketchup, Shari—it should have one flavor. If you add anything to beer it is only
going to fuck it up. The only exception is Corona which is okay to throw a lime into.”

“The pies come with a side of runner beans,” Kit says after a long sip of his own.

“What are those?'

He looks confused. “Long? Green?”

I'm guessing string beans. I notice the words Simple Simon printed on my cocktail napkin. “This pub's name must come from the nursery rhyme.”

The young hipster bartender hovering over us has skulls tattooed on his skinny arms. He sets down our place settings and jumps right in with,
“Simple Simon met a pieman going to the fair. Said Simple Simon to the pieman, let me taste your ware!”

“I haven't heard that in years,” Kit says.

“I hear it six times a day,” the bartender admits. “The owners were right in changing the name. Tourists like it better than the old name.”

“I thought there were no tourists here,” I say with a wink in my voice.

“Where did you hear that?” the bartender scoffs.

“I heard there was a regular clientele, too,” Kit says hopefully.

“Well, that there is. For a few centuries it was called St. Radigund's Hall. Our resident customers don't care what we call the joint, as long as we serve good brew.”

I have to agree with him. Maybe they get many tourists, but other than myself, I don't see anyone here that fits that bill. For a pub over five hundred years old, this clientele does looks lively and hip. Leaning against the bar, two groovy musicians are loudly discussing the history of
Moog synthesizers over their own pints of Hopdaemon's. I kind of hear another conversation nearby, but not quite.

“Stop listening,” Kit says softly.

“I can't help myself, I'm a linguist.”

“Seriously, it's a bad habit. I understand the appeal, but others might find it very rude, especially in England.”

“Oh really? How did you know I wasn't with Gary in Chicago?”

“I eavesdropped.”

At my self-satisfied grin he says, with a serious quality to his voice, “But I was alone. We're here together. Let's listen to each other.”

The smell of heavy smoking and recently chopped onions permeates the air, and I'm tearing slightly from both. I would probably tear anyway at the poignant conversation going on at the next table between two drinkers, a college-age kid and the man I quickly determine to be his father.

Kit is listening to the ever-loudening conversation too—so much for his just-touted manners.

“You had a poor show in school, and you need to apply yourself. But my son couldn't stick the job.”

From my angle and lightning-quick glance to their table, it looks like the son is cleaning a bit of dirt out from under his left thumbnail with his right one. “You don't know what you're talking—”

“When you pop yer clogs, you want to be known as a lazy fuck? You're too fond of the dole. Fun when you're twenty but when you wake up from the stupid years no longer a kid the dole doesn't pay too many bills.”

“You wanted to relax with a pint. Was this the plan?”

“I'm your concerned father.”

The son picks up the bill and slams down some pounds. “A concerned father who beats the shite out of his mother—”

“
Sup
ya drink and stop your
scryking,
” the father says. “You're not going anywhere.”

Kit looks ashen, as if witnessing this father-son altercation has released a “something else” sullying his memory.

“What you gawking at?” the father says, as he catches Kit's stare.

“I'm sorry you have to hear this pig talk,” Kit says loudly to me, the harshest comment I've ever heard this exceedingly well-mannered man make. Even when he was trying to get rid of Owen at the airport, he was technically polite to him.

The son laughs appreciatively at Kit's acerbic commentary and rises for the door. His dissed father sneers at us, and pounds the table with a hairy fist. He refocuses on his son. “How are you going to get anywhere?” the father bellows to the entranceway.