Dispatches From a Dilettante (2 page)

At this point I should remind readers under fifty that although this was the summer of Woodstock, which I was later fleetingly to attend, most American males actually had very short if not crew cut hair. I had an enormous Afro hair ‘style’ which I had grown after seeing a poster of rock star Julie Driscoll (ask your parents). Even dampened somewhat with perspiration it looked, with recently added headband, quite arresting as I struggled to take in the scene in the hotel foyer. I spotted male and females of immense size, with girths the circumference of roundabouts. I prayed that they were not my relatives. As I did this I now realize my relatives were looking at a lanky teenage longhair who they were praying was not me.

We eventually connected and drove in near silence to their modest home in Westchester County. Bill was taciturn and his daughter, who was going through the early teenage monosyllabic period, failed to crank out a sentence during the entire ninety minute journey. On arrival I learned that I was to share a bed with their son Bill Jr. who was eighteen and clearly had, what we would now call, special needs. This proved not to be a problem in that I was so drunk after the welcoming barbeque that, on touching the mattress, I instantly fell into a deep and noisy sleep that not even the increasingly violent kicks from Bill Jr. could disturb. In the unfamiliar heat of the first afternoon out of the city I had taken no precautions against the sun. Then, as now, this planet only appeared fleetingly in northern English summers. As exotic beer followed gigantic burger and incoherent and increasingly slurred drivel spewed from my mouth I was unknowingly roasting to a painful medium rare.

On the two other evenings of my stay Bill Sr. downed beer followed by whisky chasers as I, in recovery and glowing red with a luminescence that would have lit up a substantial art of New York State, stuck to soft drinks and still fought to understand his increasingly eccentric views on life. During the day he had gallantly lent me his car to pick his daughter from school. Given that my entire driving experience to date in the UK had been three trips to town in my mother’s Morris Minor this was a significant leap of faith on his part. Although as a cultural coming together this had been an underwhelming experience for them and a painful one for me, the rest of the stay passed off without incident.

On reflection over the years I realised that this had been an occasion where my emotional immaturity resulted in an opportunity missed. My father had died when I was fifteen and I knew very little about his family. His sister Celia Rossiter, who by 1969 was in her early seventies, arrived as an immigrant to the US in the nineteen twenties. She had always lived in the same apartment in the Bronx and had slaved away at the same menial job since her arrival. For almost half a century she had been a room cleaner at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York City. Her son Bill in Westchester County, who had hosted me, was looking forward to catching up on family news and reconnecting. He had even suggested a phone hook up, which was just about possible back then. Having dragged himself to a middle management position in a New York bank Bill had started to think about family origins and had long anticipated my visit. What he got in me probably increased his propensity for melancholia and introspection.

After that I never did see Bill or his family again. Bizarrely twenty three years later when I was the UK Director for BUNAC who sent English students to work in American summer camps, I found myself driving in Yorktown Heights which is where they had lived. Without thinking I had dredged up the address from the depths of my memory, driven into a cul-de-sac I remembered as their road, turned the radio off and parked the car. The house looked smaller than I recalled, empty and uncared for. A teenager shooting some hoops next door observed me sulkily. I noticed the name ‘Rossiter’ was still on the post box and I could hear the yelping of a small dog inside. Drops of rain started to splatter on the driveway and I felt a strange nervous foreboding. I reversed slowly, turned around and drove away.

Lake Minnewaska Mountain Houses stood in beautiful and substantial grounds in the Catskill Mountains some sixty miles north of New York City. The land and resort area was owned by Kenneth B. Phillips Junior. The clientele were mainly, but not exclusively, Jewish citizens of New York who paid their hard earned cash to come on vacation for a week or two to escape the heat and pollution of the city. There were two slightly down at heel hotels at either end of a picturesque lake and my job was to work with the laundry truck driver shuttling between the two. What could be easier? After a perfunctory greeting from the owner I was shown my room and told to report to ‘Howie’ the next morning. I lasted three weeks and emerged much wiser about the world of work and drug abuse.

As I strolled across from the staff quarters at 7.30am on a crisp Catskill morning the azure skies were cloudless and a summer of unknown possibilities lay ahead. Howie was leaning on the door of the truck rolling his first joint of the day. The conversation went as follows:

“ Hi, I’m Paul pleased… to meet you”

“Yup”

“Looking forward to working with you”

“Ah ha…(long pause)……I’m probably the third greatest guitar player in the United States today”

There were, of course so many things that I wanted to say at that stage and having mulled it over for forty two years the best retort would still have been ‘Tosser’. I did consider briefly who the top two might have been and with Jimi Hendrix clearly number one there was obviously fierce competition for the number two slot. Sickeningly I was later to find out that, although Howie certainly was an odious human being, he was also an excellent guitar player. Even worse this allowed him to seduce members of the female staff and at least one guest, while I spent my brief sojourn at Lake Minnewaska quietly seething with jealousy and resentment.

On the third morning Howie was so stoned that he allowed me to drive. We were loaded with laundry and had been asked to take three freshly baked apple pies from the kitchen in one hotel on our journey round the lakes to be delivered at the other. These were placed carefully on the front bench seat between us. The journey was less than a mile but involved a couple of steep hills. I was quietly and somewhat smugly congratulating myself on getting the hand of this truck driving lark when three hundred metres in, on my driving debut, we approached the first downward slope. A skunk shot across the road in front of us and I instinctively hit the brakes hard. Howie, who had been barely conscious, shot forward and hit his head on the windscreen. He remained barely conscious. This was of no consequence when compared to the fate of the apple pies which had slid off the seat and now resembled a Jackson Pollack portrait on the floor of the cab. I was moved off laundry truck duties and downgraded to dishwashing in the kitchen.

This move proved to extremely beneficial from a linguistic point of view. Never before, as a callow youth from England, had I heard the words ‘motherfucker’ or ‘cocksucker’. Later on my first day in the kitchen I was to hear them both in one sentence and directed at me.

The menial duties in my new workspace were exclusively done by black staff. The waiters were all white as were the chefs. In my innocent life to date I had never seen a divide writ so large. It was an accepted division by both parties and all the more repugnant because of that. Minimum wage was better than no wage and even this seasonal casual work was a foot on the job ladder. I quickly became the novelty act in a heaving, hellishly hot, noisy and always overstretched kitchen. Rapidly I came to understand what hard and grindingly repetitive work was like. Huge scorching hot and greasy metal trays were dumped in the sink that I had been assigned to and I washed and scrubbed them…minute after minute and hour after hour. Catering on a mass scale obviously means washing up of a similar volume.

After three hours solid I went outside for a breather, which was a big mistake. The conveyor belt system had been interrupted and when I got back a mountain of unwashed utensils had spilled on to the floor. At that moment Kenneth B. Phillips Junior came into the kitchen on a rare visit, possibly to see how his English employee was doing after the apple pie truck disaster. As he entered the washing up area so did the chef who, seeing the carnage caused by my unauthorised break turned to him and said, “Kenny… get that motherfucking, cocksucking limey outta my kitchen.” Even Kenneth looked slightly askance at the brutality of this but ‘chefs rule’ and as Kenneth walked off he said in a rather brusque way, “Paul we gotta talk in the morning.” The summer of sixty nine wasn’t turning out the way I had dreamed it and having been relieved of two jobs in four days the next day’s ‘talk’ did not seem to be a meeting that I could look forward to with confidence.

Feeling vulnerable and a long way from home I arrived next morning for the appointed ‘talk’ and miraculously left it with a new challenge. I say challenge because what transpired as my next assignment could in no way be called a job. Kenneth’s opening question was to enquire whether I played soccer. I confirmed with him that I did, which was the truth. Kenneth went on to explain that in settlement of a bar room argument with the Greek American owner of a similar resort in the Catskills called Lake Mohonk, a soccer match was to be played in three days time between the staff of the two resorts. There was $500 riding on the result and the Greek American had nominated a man, who he assured Kenneth was a qualified referee on vacation in the area, to control proceedings. He turned out to be a Scottish rugby union player who had seen Partick Thistle play once.

It has to be remembered that in 1969, way before global TV broadcasts, soccer had zero presence in the States even as a college sport. However my remit was to get a pitch marked out, get goalposts erected and select a team. A team that, I was reminded by Kenneth, was to win him $500 bucks. Getting the pitch sorted turned out to be quite easy and by midday there were posters all round the staff quarters, golf course and swimming areas advertising the ‘Soccer Challenge’ with those interested in playing to ‘come to a meeting with Paul at 7pm in the staff canteen.’

At this point I hadn’t thought to ask about kit, boots or balls. I was informed by Kenneth that we would be having a ‘time out’ in each half. It made it sound like a cigarette break which it turned out, by and large, to be. Thirty two made the meeting more out or curiosity than a serious bid for a place on the ‘roster’ as Kenneth insisted on calling it. We had our one and only practice the next day.

Somewhere out in America there exists a silent super eight film of that practice and whoever now has possession of it is sitting on a comedic goldmine. I didn’t even attempt to explain the offside rule but tried to use the three players who had played before, one of whom was a fit and intelligent American student of Puerto Rican background (Edward), to coach the others. This being the days before substitutes I then picked a final eleven who were to carry honour or more likely the burden of representing Lake Minnewaska. Quite intentionally I omitted to inform them of $500 side bet on the basis that if I was sick with worry thinking about it they would feel the same.

There was a loudspeaker system in the trees all round the resort, a la Butlins, which at times made it seem like a prison camp when announcements were made. However the ‘Soccer Challenge’ was given top billing next morning and guests invited to attend. The result was that at half past two when I went down to the pitch there must have been five hundred people there, which was bigger than any crowd I’d played in front of.

Lake Mohonk arrived by coach and twenty four ‘players’ got off, clearly under the impression that we were playing an American Football squad rotation system. They also had matching kit and worse still four footballs, which they kicked around during the warm up in a way that suggested they knew what they were doing. I lined the team up in four, three, three formation for kick off which was the only time they stayed in that shape throughout the game. The Scottish barman in the back four had instructions to hoof it to Edward and I up front at any opportunity. The only other ‘tactics’ were to get our other American guys, who included some tough nuts from the ground staff, to be as rough as possible and chase for everything.

We played in purple sashes, most wore trainers and two wore climbing boots. We kicked off. The crown cheered, and generously cheered again as Lake Mohonk opened the scoring after eight seconds. Strangely that galvanised us as we soon realised that, although they could play a little, they were not fit and crucially lacked spirit. As the game wore on they continually bickered about who was going on or off the field, as we had not contested their squad size or their intent to use all of them. The crowd were on our side even if they did cheer for things like goal kicks. Anything that achieved distance was rewarded with an even bigger cheer. At the first time out I found myself talking to a group who hardly knew each others’ names, were not sure what they were playing, but wanted badly to win.

Disaster struck just before the interval with a freak own goal and at half time we were 2-0 down. I am not of any religious persuasion, but I’d swear on a stack of bibles that what I write next is exactly what happened. Suffice it to say that I scored a second half hat trick and we won 3-2. Two of them were tap-ins after Edward, who had worked tirelessly, set them up. The third was a thumping volley from twenty yards the effect of which was only somewhat mitigated by the fact that I was a good ten yards offside. A photo was taken of female staff holding the leg that scored the winning goal, which luckily was still connected to the rest of me. Kenneth won his five hundred dollars, gave all the players a half day off and I decided life could not get any better at Lake Minnewaska. I quit the next morning, hitched a lift into town with the resort limo driver and headed for Atlantic City.

America that summer was in political turmoil. The Vietnam war was not going well and when campus kids began to be drafted the middle classes produced an articulate opposition to the war in double quick time. From the anonymity of a Greyhound bus on the freeway to Atlantic City I read the stickers on car bumpers as they hissed by my window in the rain. ‘America - Love it or Leave it’ said one on the back of a huge Cadillac. Cars were still mostly American manufactured in the US then and large gas guzzlers with it. The first non American vehicle I spotted minutes later was a battered Volvo with the perfect response defiantly posted for all to read… ‘America - Change it or Lose it.’ A Chevy truck swung by with a frightening piece of polemic on the back window ‘Get behind our troops or get in front of them.’ Just as I was beginning to feel depressed by it all as I felt an aspiring hippy should, a middle aged mom overtook the coach gripping the steering wheel of her Ford with a dogged determination. However on the back her humanity was revealed by the sticker… ‘Gimme the chocolate and no one gets hurt.’ I really hoped that it was her car.