Isolation

I've heard it said that when you go somewhere you should be sure you're running to something and not from something. After all these years and all these trips, I still can't tell the difference.

Did I just go from New York to Europe because I was running from the city's bad feelings? Or did I run to a big empty house on the North Yorkshire cliffs because a friend had offered it to me and I needed a place to write?

For those who would argue that I'm an escape artist and am afraid to settle down, this could be one of their best cases. The house was only free for a few weeks before it was due for a renovation. Then I'd be back to homelessness in New York or wherever the next city was. Half of me thought I should move to Europe, hence the one-way ticket.

I got to the seaside Irish town outside of Dublin to pick up the key and visit my friend for the weekend. I spent most of the weekend sleeping. When I took the compost out back, it was my first time outside in two days. The wind was blowing a bit. It was bleak and grey. I could tell I was somewhere else, the sea smell vaguely, the greyness, the dampness, the quiet, the suggestion of green everywhere if there weren’t these walled-off yards and little stuck-together houses, a gull’s cry. There was something haunting about these islands, the bleakness, the moors that suck you in, the sea that could dispose of you easily.

I blinked and was in northern England. Bus from Durham Tees Airport to Darlington, train from Darlington to Saltburn. It was hard to believe these nattering gerbils were the colonizers of the world. There were young men carbuncular with skateboards going from Darlington to Redcar because they’d heard there was a skatepark there. They asked me where it was. There was a blond micro-Sting with logorrhea unloading on the poor woman beside him. There were the dough-faced, the snaggle-toothed, the misshapen faces of Britain, bulbous-nosed, and here along the cliffs was their history, from the Roman watchtower that prior to crumblingto the sea looked out for invasions from Scotland or the low country , to the 10-meter fan mill made to blow smoke out of the iron stone mines, to the skeleton of the wheel that's left there today, emblazoned with a graffito by “Nigga Thomas.”

The house was big and cold. No central heating. Only one gas heater worked reliably, in the downstairs sitting room. The heater in the upstairs master bedroom wouldn't light for me the first week, so I slept under five blankets in all my clothes but shoes.

After a few days in which I didn't utter a word, I went into a pub to look at human beings. This was a seaside town, after all, and people lived there, and others came to look at the sprawling views of the sea and the cliffs to the south, said to be the highest cliffs in England. I had the following conversation with a young drunkard:


"Oh my god, I’ve never met someone from the States before," said the drunkard. "I’ve met Americans, people from Florida, Kansas, Wisconsin, but never anyone from the States. The Big Apple. Washington, D.C. Do you know Britney Spears?"

"No."

"Have you met any famous people?"

I was sure I had, but given that this was my first conversation in days, I was having a hard time thinking. The only one that came to mind was Sugar Ray Leonard, and that was when I was nine.

"Ray Leonard, sure," he said.

I told him I needed a phone booth, and he left the bar to take me to one, with his female friend pulling his arm and commanding him not to leave her alone. "We call them cabins," he said. "What do you call socks?"

“Socks?”

“Yeah.”

“You mean, those things?” I touched my sock.

“Yeah.”

"S-o-c-k-s."

"I’ve seen some places they do it s-o-x."

I spent another few days alone, devoid of human interaction. I read Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence and was stunned both by his brilliance and that I'd neglected him for so long. I wrote poems too mawkish to ever see the light of day. I watched English reality television and enjoyed it. One was "Make Me a Muslim," another "Arrange My Marriage," neither of which would fly Stateside. I watched the 100 funniest moments in television, as voted for by the English, and laughed inside for much of them. But the moment I'd been waiting for, the funniest moment in the history of television, was a stand-up comic with an accent so inscrutable that I missed every joke.

After another three days without speaking, I headed for another pub. I watched some boys play snooker and told a girl that she looked like Cameron Diaz. She and her less-attractive friend invited me to another pub. The road was glazed with ice, and it took 15 minutes to walk 100 meters down the steep hill in their pumps. We had just gotten our first round when the girl's boyfriend showed up and made her cry. "This happens all the time," said one of the other two women who had met us there. "It's just one of those relationships."

So it was me and four women and an arguing couple. I refused to take off my tweed cap, because I was ashamed of my greasy hair. I hadn't showered in a week, because the water heater wasn't working. The four women took Cameron Diaz to the bathroom for a pep talk, leaving me alone with the surly boyfriend. I had no idea what my role was. Was I supposed to be stealing Diaz away from him? Was I supposed to eject him from the bar? I took one of the women aside and asked her this. "Am I supposed to throw him out of here?"

"No," she said, "don't get involved. He's nasty. He'd just as soon punch you as look at you." I couldn't help laughing inside at the poor guy. He was about 5'4" and had this 80's hockey-rocker mullet do. I was sort of in the mood for a fight, but after all this was his town and his life and his girlfriend, and who the hell was I to interfere.

I went back and sat across from him. He looked past me. I looked over his head at a TV screen. Our faces were both tense, as if we were a second away from jumping on each other. Two bouncers stared from the door. Two of the women came back. Diaz could be seen crying at the bar, with her friend comforting her. One of them said, "No one wants you here. What are you doing here if no one wants you here?"

"Fuck off," he said. "Do I even know you?"

I was surprised two people here didn't know each other.

Suddenly Diaz was sitting next to the hockey player and they had made up. What the fuck. The two anti-hockey women left, and the one who stayed made peace with hockey. I did to, asking him about Middlesborough's shocking victory the other day over Liverpool.

People got drunk. The women started reaching for my cap, trying to yank it off my head as if we were on the junior-high bus. "It's rude!" they said. "It's rude to keep your hat on inside! Take it off!" There were two transexual twins. I was about to advise them to come up with more feminine gestures and stances when someone told me that they are in fact native women. "There's no way," I said. They had Leno jaws and huge mouths and moved like linebackers, though they were thin. One was blond, the other brunette. The blond swiped the cap off my head. "Let's see what you got under there," she said. I managed to quickly snag the cap back and cover the damage, then got the hell out of there and headed back up the hill to my seclusion.