The story thus far: For new readers unfamiliar with this experiment, which I put on pause this last spring, this is a series of third person memoirs about recent events. To explain the idea behind it, this letter sets up the thinking, and the London letters are here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12.
American Letters begins here.
On a recent drive back from New York to Vermont, he and Dustin stop in at a cafe in Northampton, Massachusetts located in the same place as a cafe he once loved when he lived near there 17 years ago. As they pull up to the sidewalk, it seems more or less the same, just rebranded, the same rooms, the same bar, the same ceilings, same bathroom. But with everything covered in flowers. Most importantly the coffee is still excellent.
In the bathroom, he sees himself in the mirror he hasn’t looked into in years. His beard looks nearly white now to him. His barber in New York had just teased him about it. “More salt than pepper,” he just said to the barber, who chuckled as he swept the floor. The barber bib had glowed with the aftermath. That beard was something he’d grown around the time he got the job that brought him there. He’d shaved it off and then grew it back.
Before this, it had framed his face. As it grew lighter in color, it seemed to have a different effect, one he is still measuring. There used to be two white stripes, one on each side of his chin. Now they are spreading towards each other, and for a moment they catch the sunlight, flaring.
He sees a raisin scone and against his better judgement he buys it, nostalgic for the Sainsbury scones he misses back in London, a four pack cheaper than this single one, which is of course, like most American scones, really an overstuffed dry biscuit. He grew up thinking he hated scones but really he just didn’t like the American ones, which seemed to repudiate even good butter and jam. How many Brits had come to this country, he wondered idly, and ordered a scone, only to be presented with some enormous scaly biscuit, the raisins dried even more by the oven? Or was it like the way bagels seemed to need the water in New York? Did something simply not travel, no matter what? The fatal moment in any colonial fantasy was that you could make the place you’d taken over into the home you’d left behind. Almost as if you’d never left the one place for the other.
New England indeed.
He eats the “scone” all the same, washing it down with the good coffee, as the road whizzes by again under their wheels and they make their way back to Vermont.
*
He’d left London last December, just before Christmas, and everything he dreaded about returning home to America seems to have come true, more true than he could have expected. The return was in many ways prophetic.
Their late December flight back from London to Boston had been unobjectionable, on time, free of conflict and direct. In other words, by contemporary standards, paradise. He and Dustin had sat side by side across the aisle, their preference. He scrolled the choices on the inflight movies as people put their bags away and took their seats. No, no, no, no, he thought, as he scanned the film selections. All of the films seemed like children’s films, even the so-called adult ones. And then there were the action movies where a dad has to save his family and has no choice but to engage in heavy weapons fire and the torture of possible enemies. Even though all he really had to do to save his family in most of the country was to find one of those jobs that offered health insurance with no lifetime cap. Not very exciting, maybe harder than fighting off a gang with heavy weapons and running with dirt on your face down a hallway and another hallway as the walls exploded. But of course, if anyone wanted to see a man fighting to save his family, pushed to the limit against all odds, all you had to do was go on social media and see videos of families in Gaza, pushing all of their belongings across rubble-strewn streets as they tried to outrun missiles guided by AI. The whole family was at their limit or beyond it.
He had gotten the best American health insurance his employers provided, the most expensive of the employee choice plans because it lacked that precious “no lifetime cap.” A lifetime cap was a leash on your whole life. You can spend this much of your health insurance and then that’s it. It was just one of the reasons he didn’t want to live in America anymore. And while a majority of the American public had supported a change away from this system for over a decade now, as it was a system that regularly bankrupted people or sent them to their deaths. The only majority supporting the system nationally was in Congress, where their healthcare was better than if they’d never been elected to office.
And now he was returning to election year America, his least favorite version of it, and it was like he could feel them as he sat on his seat, feel them pulsing their absolute bullshit through the air into the sky the plane was flying through: the American companies anxious for the lax oversight a Trump administration provided last time. Hoping for that sneering fool to return to office and do away with more regulations, more oversight, more laws. They were planning for it. A neat trick he had observed in the last year: companies would raise prices claiming it was because of inflation, and the public would blame the president. It was so relentless, this absolute waste of human potential. The price of living in the richest country in the world was to live as a beggar at a feast that was always just out of reach. Most of his life had been spent trying to protect himself, his family, his friends, his students, his colleagues, trying to tell people this or that or the other, and there were victories, but it was exhausting. He was still burned out from the push to protect Obamacare, such as it was. He could still remember the struggle for that one vote from John McCain. Disabled activists in wheel chairs being carried away from the offices of different senators. The horrible relief when it finally went the “right” way.
And then in the years that followed, the realization that for some reason it was always down to one or two votes. Not always the same ones but often. McCain died and was replaced by Sinema, not immediately but gradually. Manchin was still there.
He isn’t watching the DNC because it would be too painful. These old presidents are in many ways kinds of opponents, no matter their party. People who had to be forced into competencies of various kinds related to his life. People he’d had to fight for his life. He still had to, has to. He doesn’t want to get old in America, he can’t afford it. He has no plans to become a millionaire. He still remembers the days when LGBTQI folks had the backing of no particular party, which is to say neither party would advocate for their lives during the AIDS epidemic’s first decade. Last summer the urgency of those days had come clear again to him when he’d entered his husband’s hospital room after an infection had sent him there and there was no issue, of any kind, to his being there. He was the spouse. The state and thus the hospital allowed this visit. A right that was so new it still shocked him.
Being in London had made the anxiety he always felt in America go away, just by virtue of him being in London. It was like a cool envelope of air set between him and the heat of America. He did know from the constant strikes there in just about every part of the city across many kinds of jobs that almost everyone there was underpaid as well. He’d inhabited the city but in another, second artificial bubble, created by his job and his role as director of the foreign studies program. But now that was over. Those bubbles had left.
They’d disembarked from their airport bus into the rain in Hanover, NH. The taxi that met them was driven by a man who on the phone had seemed strangely reluctant to accommodate them by meeting them at the earlier stop in Lebanon, as if he was doing them a favor. Dustin was not feeling well—something was making him nauseous. Once they saw the cab driver in person as he climbed out of his beige sedan, his indifference to pleasing them made sense. He was a white man with the sort of bushy beard that made you flinch to think about what might be inside of it. The driver, the car, the beard, all about the same color, popped opened his trunk for them to put in their suitcases and sat down again in the front seat.
He was about to put the first suitcase in and then paused when he saw a gun covered in nylon with a familiar long shape. An AR-15. “Can you come and move your gun, to make room for the bags? I’m not going to touch this gun,” he said to the driver, who stood with great effort, aggravated. “It’s an AR-15,” he said, as he came back to the trunk, as if they didn’t know. As if that meant it was something you could just cover with your suitcase.
The taxi took them to their car, which was parked in a friend’s garage at his building while he was away. He paid the driver and watched the car leave.
He and Dustin now told the story of the taxi driver to friends. Everyone who heard it said “Welcome to America” at the end, which was more or less what they’d felt. He thought of the former student from China who told him about wealthy families there hiring former soldiers to teach them how to handle themselves during an active shooter situation. The sense of returning home, by now his apparently inevitable and much repeated mistake, surrounded him. But for now, at least, this was home, if they could survive it. And now it was time to elect a president again.
Thank you. I just came back to the Los Angeles two days ago to meet my baby niece from London. It was strange being in London while riots were happening and yet I still gelt safer there - watching videos of a man pulling a chainsaw out of his car and running at a Muslim couple with it in a gas station - than I feel here. There is such a sweet sadness to being here, a home that doesn't feel like home, in an election that doesn't see us, not really.
this was great to read. I've lived in the US for a year and I realized recently that each new friendship, each lover, the connections that usually make me secure about my future in a place, feel bittersweet because I can't imagine growing old in this country. Too many guns, not enough social safety nets. And while I love each day here, it feels scary to add them up into years.