Double Double (11 page)

I had planned to attend the University of Iowa in the fall, but now I had some hazy notion that I would start the following spring. The week before I left for England, I got a telephone call from the admissions office, telling me they were looking forward to seeing me in the fall, wanted to sign me up for orientation, and needed to talk to me about student housing.

“Actually, I'm going out of the country this week, so I won't be there this fall. I'm planning on coming for the spring semester,” I said to the man on the phone.

There was a pause on the other end. “Ken, when were you planning on telling us? School starts in eight weeks.” I could tell this guy couldn't believe what he was hearing, and frankly, neither could I. It hadn't occurred to me to call and let the college know I wouldn't be showing up.

“Look, kid, we'll keep a spot open for you in the spring. Let us know in a few months if you still want to enroll.” He hung up.

I was tempted to bring some weed with me to London because I knew it was not as plentiful there as in the U.S., but I decided that being on the wrong side of the law once in the past two months was enough. When I got off the plane at Heathrow and went through customs with nothing to declare, a customs guard looked at my passport and said, “Mr. Grimes, this way, please.”

Always polite, the customs guards gave a running commentary as they searched my bag, went through every item I had, opened up my vitamins and counted them, checked my wallet, patted down my clothes, and had a guard dog sniff me and my belongings, all while asking my business, my age, where I was from, what I planned to do in the UK, and whom I knew there.

They escorted me to a holding cell with several shifty-looking undesirables. The customs guards were unimpressed that the only phone number and contact I had was Charlie's father, so they let me sweat it out while they went to call him and see if he knew me. I wondered if my being arrested the month before had put me on some kind of Interpol list, or if they just didn't like bleary-eyed American teenagers without parents or a school group to vouch for their intentions.

After letting me cool off for several hours, the customs guards came back, apologized for the delay, gave me my belongings, and pointed to the exit door.

Cockney East Side men had run organized crime in London for decades. Charlie had ties to these men. He convinced his boss, Peter, to hire me as a stock boy/forklift operator in a frozen food factory he owned up near Scotland. Peter was the real article, or at least he appeared to be. An organized-crime figure who had gone legit, Peter claimed to be related to one of the gang that pulled off the Great Train Robbery of 1963. Peter liked to curse, drink, and show off his money.

Charlie felt a connection to me that stemmed from his own knockabout youth. He wanted me to be his sidekick in northern England, where I was even more out of place than he was. He also wanted me to spy on the other employees to see who was stealing the frozen cakes and apple pies. Considering what they were paid, Charlie should have been happy they didn't steal the milk, eggs, and flour as well.

I loved England. I had lived there for six months when I was ten years old and had gone to school in Hampstead. I spent multiple summers there with my mother from the time I was eight until I was twelve. We visited countless stately homes, manor houses, castles, and museums, and drove through the countryside as it changed from calm to mysterious to forbidding. Those early, happy experiences in England had deeply affected me.

At the age of seventeen, all I wanted to do was drink pints and pints of Guinness and smoke pack after pack of John Player Special Black cigarettes. On a trip to Ireland several years later, I vaguely remember going to Trinity College to see the
Book of Kells
again—my mother had taken me there as a child—but what I really remember was how fresh the Guinness was in Dublin. I loved Guinness more than anything. The strike of the wooden match to light my cigarette. The hush in the darkened pub, the murmuring voices, and the light reflected from the mahogany walls. The dark, rich, bitter beer that slid down my throat like ice cream. Guinness was a spiritual experience.

 • • • 

Charlie arranged for me to move in with an ex-con nicknamed “Tiny” for his diminutive size. Tiny was about 140 pounds, with a lined, baggy face, and lived in a very tidy, small two-bedroom
council row house with a TV and no backyard. He lived in a small town in northern England not too far from Newcastle. Tiny's fourteen-year-old glue-sniffing son, who lived with his teenage girlfriend in a nearby housing council flat and aspired to be on the dole, was a frequent visitor.

Tiny and his friends schooled me in how to drink like a man. I drank Guinness, bitter, ales, anything but lager (what we drink in the U.S.), which was considered a woman's drink, and no half-pints; those were for women as well. I quickly learned how to drink without throwing up or falling down.

Tiny was a very kind and gentle chap. Like most of the local men, he was unemployed and very much at peace with living on the dole. All of the manufacturing jobs that employed Tiny and his mates—the coal, auto, shipbuilding, and heavy-manufacturing jobs—had disappeared in the 1970s. Labour Party stalwarts and Margaret Thatcher haters, these men drank, argued, and fought among themselves constantly, particularly at the pub. The ones who were married cheated on their wives, or claimed they did. Masculinity was measured by how much you could drink and if you could fight. At my favorite pub on the tiny Main Street in the village there was a standard joke—“That's not sawdust on the floor, that's last night's furniture.”

All through high school, I had worked very hard at drinking without throwing up. Alcohol was more difficult to purchase than marijuana for a teen in suburban America, but with the kegs and six-packs we successfully bought, I tried to figure out how to pace myself so I could drink a six-pack or more without puking in the woods or in somebody's parents' house.

To be in some remote village in the UK with very little to do but drink with some of the local teenagers didn't appeal to me.
Drinking with men five, ten, fifteen years older than I was fun. They accepted me, spoke to me as an equal. I had never drunk this way before. It was obvious my usual limit of six to eight beers would have to be raised. By the time I left England at the age of eighteen, I was a stone-cold alcoholic able to drink ten pints of beer in one stretch.

On any given day, everyone met at the first pub, prepared for a serious bout of two to three hours' drinking, minimum. For a Friday or Saturday night, the pubs closed at eleven
P.M.
, so we gathered early after dinner, drank until the pubs closed, then went to someone's house to continue drinking. The drinks were bought in rounds: In a group of six, each man would go to the bar and order six full pints and return to the table with the tall, thick glasses that widened as they went up and filled to the very rim with a light dusting of foam. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, a pint was between eighty pence to one pound twenty pence, so the unemployed could still afford to get drunk. If women were present, it got more complicated—and expensive—since they weren't expected to pay.

British beer is not warm or even room temperature. It is cold. Not cold, in that fake Budweiser American-commercial way, but cool and delicious. After the beers were placed on the table, someone took out a pack of cigarettes and offered them around. Drinking the cool draft of strong ale with its careful mix of aged hops and barley, while smoking throat-crackingly strong cigarettes, was something I could do for hours and hours.

One night at the more upscale pub down the street from my usual haunt, a couple of friends from work joined me for a night of carousing. As the night progressed, I noticed one of our legendary fisticuff experts, “the Hulk,” staring at us. An aging, unemployed bruiser with a head the size of a keg of ale, he kept glaring at us from
across the bar. I knew he wasn't mad at me, but for some reason, he didn't like the look of my friends. He had grandly forced his beautiful young daughter to go on a date with me the first week I was in town, an embarrassment for both of us, since she had an unemployed boyfriend who kept her occupied when she wasn't working at the factory. I wisely kept my hands to myself, and although Hulk was disappointed that I couldn't dislodge his daughter's suitor, he appreciated me for being a gentleman about it.

As I saw the Hulk approaching us, fear shot down my spine. I was terrified he was going to headbutt them, known locally as a “Geordie hello.” He asked my friends where they were from, and before they could reply, the Hulk grabbed one by the back of the head and slammed his own forehead into the guy's nose.

The blood exploded across both men, and everyone in the bar rushed up and kicked us outside. I stood in the doorway and looked at my mates and shrugged. They nodded and shuffled off. It was not an uncommon night.

What did I do the next night? Go out to drink, of course. The banter and the laughter of drinking companions in pubs made the hours roll by in countless amusing ways. My favorite was the man who would sidle up to me occasionally and ask what I was drinking and make me a challenge. “Aye, son, if you buy me onna them pints, I'll eat this glass right in front of yeah.”

As a well-traveled, sophisticated partyer I doubted him the first time but ordered a pint of his favorite ale. He stood chatting with me and glancing over occasionally to a couple of the barflies, who were smiling, already on to the game.

After draining the glass, he slowly and calmly begin to eat it one bite at a time, carefully chewing and swallowing the pieces. My jaw dropped in astonishment, and he laughed.

“The hardest part is when the pieces get stuck in yah teeth in da back,” he said proudly. “But this is nothing. You canna believe me when I chew a bottle of Newcastle Brown.” Newcastle Brown ale was the good locally brewed beer, and the bottles were made of thick, brown opaque glass.

Alcoholism is measured not only in quantity of alcohol consumed or number of pint glasses eaten but also decisions made. For example, trying to date the most attractive woman at the factory where I was working. A frozen food factory is not high on the list of places to fall in love when you're seventeen, but how could I resist Julie? Though there were some very attractive women at the factory, Julie was the prettiest of them all, and she liked to come out back and flirt with the stock boys while catching a quick smoke. I soon found out that she was married to—but separated from—a much older man who had recently been let out of prison for stabbing someone in a fight.

Somehow that only made her more interesting.

The factory was a moldering behemoth in an industrial park on the outskirts of town, a relic of the complete collapse of the manufacturing era. The nearest city of any size was Newcastle, which was still suffering from the strikes and mass layoffs of the 1960s and 1970s.

I've noticed that the only people—writers, academics, Republicans—who extol Henry Ford's invention of the assembly line are people who've never worked on one. I suppose automated production of everything from cars to cakes changed the world for the better, but stand on your feet for eight hours with a thirty-minute break and two fifteen-minute cigarette breaks, doing the same monotonous task over and over, every day, every week, and you'll wonder about progress.

The women on the various product lines made the best of it, calling out to one another in their singsong Geordie accents while listening to a radio perched high overhead, tuned in to the local hit parade. I have every English pop hit from the fall of 1982 memorized, particularly the Human League's “Don't You Want Me,” which seemed to play every fifteen minutes.

As a stock boy in the frozen cake section, I got to wear a spiffy blue jumpsuit and white boots, like a reject from David Bowie's “Major Tom” video. I was charged with operating a forklift, moving huge metal canisters of milk into the cold room, and stocking fifty-pound bags of white flour. The factory made frozen apple pies for one high-end supermarket chain and a gâteau for a moderate-priced market chain. Their use of the French word for cake always amused me, because there was nothing French about those cakes.

When you're seventeen, it's a rush learning how to move five-hundred-pound pallets on a giant forklift. And nothing could be cooler than operating the machine and scouring the workplace to find the most attractive woman in the company. Why? Because only the unreachable, the unattainable, would move my levers. I knew it was dangerous at the time, in that half-understood way of teenagers, but I didn't care, because once Julie started flirting with me, I would have picked up a five-hundred-pound pallet with my hands. As the only American there, I had instant celebrity. I think everyone at the forsaken place lived within a ten-mile radius of the factory, and very few had even been to London, which was three hundred miles away.

Julie was a froster, the glamour job at the factory. She wore her cute white hat cocked at a jaunty angle while working a big white bag of frosting, twisting it rapidly in her hands to create the various designs on top of the gâteaux.

The interior of the factory was not well lit, and there was a constant hum and crash of motors wheeling the foods around the line. Charlie, the lord of the realm, stayed behind large plate-glass windows near the main entrance and liked to stare at the workers. Pretty girls he fancied or male workers he took a liking to were invited to drink Smirnoff vodka in the back room. I was one of those favored. I never liked vodka as a teenager. It was my mother's drink, my uncle's drink, served in a big glass pitcher with ice and refrigerated until the pitcher was whisked out and drinks were poured into crystal glasses. Vodka smelled bad and tasted worse. But ah, the effect. Vodka worked faster than beer, made me warm inside, and promised instant friendship with those I drank with.

Charlie was the master of the drunken joke and regaled us with anecdotes about the peculiar inhabitants of the town and of his former haunts in the East End of London. As is true of many Cockneys, Charlie was a natural storyteller and loved to hold court with his captive employees, who would listen to anything for a chance to take a break from work, sit down, and have a free drink.