I Used to Say My Mother Was Shirley Bassey (22 page)

‘And we have a brand-new Hoover right here!' I shouted down the line. I switched on the power and waved the hose at the receiver. ‘Hear that? We want to go to New York!'

‘Yes, sir. You and about thirty thousand other people. And if you think holding the end of a Hoover up to the receiver and shouting at me is going to make me go any quicker then think again. I've already been here for fourteen hours today trying to satisfy our valued customers. Believe you me, sir, I'm doing my best, and I don't even know if I'll have my job at the end of the week. Maybe you'd rather I put you back on hold.' Her voice was teetering between icy-cold hatred and the soft squidgy tremble of a nervous breakdown.

Dustin hit the end of the Hoover away from the receiver and glared at me. ‘I'm really sorry about my friend. He's just very excited about the prospect of leaving the country. He's been kept indoors most of his life due to being a hyperactive idiot. Please believe me when I say we really want this trip to New York.'

‘OK. What's the point in hanging up? There's only another thousand of you lot waiting to talk to me. Well, give me the serial number on the Hoover box. And there are a few conditions. Firstly, you have to pay for all your own flight taxes. That's £200 for the pair. You'll be covering your own expenses and we fly you in and out of Philadelphia International. It's an hour and half out of New York. Don't complain because that's the best we can do. You've heard of flying coach? Well, because of costing issues you guys can only have one piece of hand luggage allowed. Checked bags are extra. What's your date of birth?'

‘Sixth of September,' Dustin shouted down the phone.

‘OK. The dates of your travel can be the sixth of March, the twenty-fourth of December, or the fifteenth of January.'

‘That's not very convenient because I have work on the—'

‘Take it or leave it!'

I could see Dustin trying to think quickly, then his face went pale. ‘I can't go, Stephen. Not on those dates! You'd have to be homeless or a student to make those sorts of dates.' He looked desperate.

I grabbed the phone off him. Damn. The only people I could think of whose dates of birth I knew off by heart were members of my family. By now Mum had had one more child, Elizabeth, and then finally stopped having kids and so the Amos brood had stabilized. I started counting them off on my fingers. Stella wouldn't be able to make it as she had a well-paid job in a laboratory. Albert was just getting married – he'd never come. Cordelia, Andrea and Elizabeth were still at school and Hoover wouldn't issue tickets to minors. Chris was the only option. Chris the too-cool-for-school teenager had just turned eighteen. He'd be doing his A levels in March, so that was out. December? That was Christmas. But January was a possibility.

‘I can make it for the fifteenth of January no problem. Print the tickets.' Chris wasn't even twenty-one so how would we go drinking?! Whatever. I'd bought the Hoover and I was going to capitalize. The Amos brothers were going to hit the States. I gave his name and date of birth and sure enough the tickets arrived within a week to my flat. I later discovered that Hoover had lost £25 million as a result of this promotion and they had to sell the whole company to Whirlpool.

I hoped that Chris would be able to come with me in January. He might be at university or could even be working, but knowing him it was quite possible that he'd be doing neither. There's a six-year age gap between me, Stella and Albert and the younger kids and something odd had happened to my parents in that time. The pressure put onto the younger kids by Mum and Dad was nothing compared to what we'd lived through. Those babies could get away with stuff that would have been unthinkable for us. The chances of Chris being forbidden from going on holiday to America aged eighteen was probably less than Mum and Dad giving me a hard time for taking the trip at twenty-four.

I might have to sack off the first week of work in the New Year but that shouldn't be a problem. I figured I could just say that a distant relative had suddenly died. One of the good things about having a huge family is that there is a long cast of characters who can have an accident befall them. This time it was going to have to be my sick great uncle who had suddenly died with a funeral to arrange and attend – I couldn't use my grandmother again. By this time she had suffered so many calamities forcing me to take time off that in the employment agency I was affectionately known as Little Red Riding Hood.

For me, I was going to America and nothing was going to stop me! My next stop was visiting Grosvenor Square to sort out a visa. This was in the days before it was easy to go to the US by filling out the visa waiver form online. I had to queue for hours at the embassy to get my paperwork in order and they asked me a lot of odd questions. Like, was I a Nazi? That seemed like an off question since my Aryan credentials are somewhat lacking. It's not easy to get through an interview like that when you're a natural joker and I had to bite my tongue more than once.

I wonder at American intelligence agencies. I mean, why just come out and ask a question like that? Couldn't they have tried to be a bit more sneaky? Like: What is your opinion of toothbrush moustaches? Or a how about a multiple-choice word association game to trip you up. Maybe: If I say the word ‘tikka' do you think of a) Chicken, b) Lamb or c) Swas? Or how about: If I say the word
‘anschluss'
do you reach for a) A Kleenex tissue, b) U2's acclaimed seventh album or c) Austria? I think things have tightened up since 9/11 but count yourself lucky that you don't have to go to the embassy in Grosvenor Square any more. It was pretty imposing back then, but it's a lot more imposing now they've installed vats of boiling oil on the roof ready to be chucked down at any invading foreigners.

I did manage to get the visa and on the fateful day of travel I arrived at Heathrow Airport with Chris in tow. Though Chris was a well-rounded young lad he was still six years my junior and I had a sense of responsibility because I was in charge of a minor. Plus my mum had said that she would kill me if I allowed anything to happen to him. There's nothing like the threat of death from someone who'd lived through the Biafran war to focus the mind. I looked over at Chris, with his shoes untied and chewing gum, and resolved that we were going to have an amazing time. He may have been my second choice of travelling companion, but he didn't have to know that.

‘N
EW
Y
ORK
! N
EW
Y
ORK
! It's a helluva town!' So the song goes. And it really is a non-stop madcap place of pure mayhem. When Chris and I arrived at the immigration desk, after all the rigmarole in the UK of queuing up at the embassy to get visas from a surly official, the guy at the desk was surprisingly friendly and welcomed us with a big smile. We got our bags and headed for the taxi queue, where immediately as we came out of the terminal I saw my first American arrest. A Latin American taxi driver (maybe he was driving without insurance?) was stopped by the cops and face planted to the ground. I looked at Chris and if we had ever doubted that New York was basically a film set blown up to city size, we were now under absolutely no illusion.

When we got our cab the driver was a black guy who had his hair intricately braided into a dollar sign. He turned to me and Chris and said, ‘Where you going? The 212? The island?' We looked at him like he was totally mad. ‘Are you guys going to Manhattan or what?' We nodded and he pulled off at speed. We immediately hit unbelievable traffic and, just as we were getting used to the idea of sitting through a long and expensive hold-up, the driver just powered over to the hard shoulder and drove down it at about eighty miles an hour. As four lanes of stationary traffic honked and shouted abuse at us, in the back of my mind, I started thinking of Nigeria.

I am no fearful driver myself, but was totally terrified and clung to my seat for dear life as we careened around on the half-muddied dirt track next to the motorway. The driver tuned the radio to full blast hip-hop and Chris shouted out, ‘Oh my God! Is this Hot 97?'

‘Sure is. You heard of it?'

‘Of course! It's in all the best hip-hop tracks. “Hot 97 so I guess I'm flexible. Twee! Twee!”'

‘KRS 1?'

‘Stop that Chris!' the older brother in me snapped. I had no idea what they were talking about but apparently Chris and our cabbie had just launched into a rendition of a famous song by some rapper. That's New York for you. Even the radio stations are world famous.

In Manhattan itself, from bridges to streets to museums to squares, you literally see one incredibly well-known sight after another. The cabbie dropped us off at our hotel off Broadway and immediately gave Chris his beeper number. ‘Beep me 911 when you want to go out and I'll show you the clubs.' We had arrived in the Big Apple and it was a friendly place.

I'd done my research before heading over there so that I could fit in. But I found out that I couldn't possibly fit in because Americans have no idea of what to think of a black British person. They haven't got a frame of reference. They're used to the Harlem style and a certain attitude. They were confused by me. I went into a local coffee shop and simply said, ‘My good man, I'll have a cappuccino please.'

They were like ‘Say what?!' Gesturing in disbelief to the other waitresses in the shop to run over to us. ‘Alopecia! Get over! Anaconda! Get over! Now say it again!'

I said, ‘My good sir. A cappuccino, please.'

‘Whoo-ee! It's Geoffrey from the
Fresh Prince
.'

New York is different to London in many ways and one of them is the attitude. People are overall a lot more friendly than they are in England. For example, in London, if you see someone dressed in a Lycra catsuit roller-skating along with a boom box belting out Kate Bush in Hyde Park, you shuffle quietly away. In New York there'll be like ‘Yo! Way to go. More power to you!'

In the UK, people tell you that you can't do stuff but in the States they say, ‘Yes! You can!' And it was in New York that I met someone who would completely change my life for ever. They managed that by simply telling me that I could do something that up until that point I'd never even considered.

My one contact in New York was Michael. I had met Michael back in London and we'd developed a good friendship that had sadly been cut short when he went to live in America. Michael lived for the theatre and, more specifically, he lived for musicals. Since seeing
Cats
with Fola when I was fourteen years old, I hadn't gone back to the West End to do anything other than visit a pub. But when I met Michael and he said, ‘Stephen! We're stepping out!' you couldn't say no.

We had gone to see
Five Guys Named Moe
in the West End, which had been a real toe-tapping sing-along (of course Michael's friend had been in the show). On another occasion, I didn't consider it a date but Michael might have had other ideas, we went to see the amazing Chita Rivera, star of
The Kiss of the Spider Woman
. This time we were in the front row and I could actually have reached out and touched the leading lady.

Michael's love of the theatre, the stars, the razzmatazz (is that even still a word now?), meant that he had a burning desire to go and live in New York, where he is to this day. How he got to live there and get a job as an assistant at an actors' agency remained a mystery. You could visit America quite easily back then but to secure the elusive green card to work there was virtually impossible. I never asked but he was irrepressible and so he told me how he'd done it. He'd married an American girl that he'd never even met! His boyfriend, though, was lovely.

Chris and I spent the first few nights with Michael and we saw the sights of the city. Two shows a night was normal for him and in the middle we'd go to the local steakhouse where ribs were the size of your head. Luckily for me, visiting Michael in New York at the same time as us was his best friend from London. It was a lady named Delphine Manley.

Chris and I met her one morning at Michael's apartment. The apartment was everything I expected from a central Manhattan tenement block. It came complete with those wrought-iron metal fire escapes at the back, which are straight out of
Cagney and Lacey
. Of course my first suggestion was to re-enact an episode by running up and down those stairs playing cops and robbers and shouting ‘Hold it,' in a Bronx-style accent.

At nine o'clock in the morning, this was not warmly received by Delphine, who was staying there too. She was a well-spoken, slight girl who was pretty, talkative and full of positive energy. I hit it off with her immediately and shortly she suggested that we all go out to a local bar that was serving a New York brunch. This was otherwise known as an all-you-can-drink margarita brunch. (Proper New York margaritas.) Brunch. It was the first time I'd ever heard the word and it stuck. Forget the Irish, the Scottish, the Ozzies and even the English – the biggest drinkers in the world live on the East Coast of America. I made Michael's place my first stop of the morning, where I'd use the word ‘brunch' euphemistically, frequently and mostly inappropriately.

‘Who's for brunch?' I'd say at 10 a.m, while pouring tequila shots.

‘You're really funny, Stephen. You should do stand-up.' Delphine dropped the bomb.

‘What? Don't be silly. I've never even seen a stand-up show,' I replied.

‘I think she's right,' quipped Michael.

I was taken aback. People said that I was funny, but I was still foreign to the world of performance and I had no idea what a stand-up show would entail. Not only had I never been to see any live comedy, the stand-up that I had seen on television was definitely not aimed at me. In fact I couldn't relate to most of it. Mainly portly, middle-aged men from the North in dinner suits – all telling black jokes, Paki jokes, gay jokes and mother-in-law jokes. The audiences may have been guffawing, but I didn't belong to that arena. The only time we ever watched comedy at home was if Lenny Henry was on and I said so.