TURN FOREIGN

Self-Savagery no. 4566: Move to somewhere where you are a stranger. Become foreign. Abandon comforts. Find new ones. Write yourself a love-letter everyday by moving to a new country, with a false biography. Clear your name later. Develop some personal mythologies you can shed like skin. 'I got married at 17, 18 or at 26. I came here for adventure, to evade capture, for private health reasons. I am a love exile. My hair stays this high with spit, molasses and a prayer. The estate of Howard Hughes pays for my 'promising and energetic' demos. I have been to ten schoools. I have lived in nine counties. I have played the Wizard of Oz. I have charmed Latin housewives of ill temperment with tired showtunes. I have dazzled West Indian patriarchs with my Greek jaw. I have killed the power of a town with electrical signals to Mercury, lulled empty rooms into silence with my performances, sifted through braggart obituaries for glittering epithets that might be recycled for my wide shoulders. I have peddled hoax religions through a university campus. I have lived in an alter-ego, the combustible and brave Luminous Shadow. I have recorded albums and albums of gloopy sentiment in an hour and destroyed them all in a second. I have slept on trains. I have spent the night at Guildford station with dormitory ghosts. I have stayed in. I am Sav, Savo, Superman, Elvis. I have lost at tennis to a descendent of Lord Kitchener, and won at crazy golf against a relative of the KLF. I was sired at the birthplace of Shakespeare, and born at the birthplace of Charles Dickens. My Grandfather arm-wrestled with Lee Marvin, and drank with Bodie and Doyle. Cary Grant was my Great-Uncle, Groucho Marx was just great. I have recorded an album of fairy-tale songs in the woods. I have unexpired potential. Savage is a stagename, I won it in a raffle.'

Breaking Radio silence: I am in America, writing a story about Brighton Pier, mathematics, and childhood. Portland, Oregon is the new home for my wife and myself. If, as Bono would have it, being famous is like being a beautiful woman, causing all heads to turn as you walk down a street, then being foreign (in the correct and harmless circumstances of course) is like being a smartarse child. Your borrowed jokes are buried under laughter, your opinions suddenly swagger sweetly, your behaviour is indulged. Your twitchy mannerisms are as almost as cute as your parochial words. Preserve your assets. Exaggerate your difference. Say 'bum' alot.

Our UK bank accounts stagger and wheeze under their accumulated strains, but our US ones smile with helpful cleanliness. We're running away to home, two kids who watched some films. America is a trashy genius, a petulant teen, shirking perspective and splintering judgments hourly. No summary of its lands can be true. Growing up, America was a work of collected imagination, a fictional paradise, a modern Oz. A huckleberry wilderness, full of runaways calling home for more money, lost in a spider-web roadway of lost hopes. Sad rental cars purring on ever on dark roads. All-hour breakfasts. Free coffee refills. Such a large country was always fuelled on escape myths, and Americans were always idealists. That is their curse. Whatever anyone's feelings about America, it's romance bleeds into most childhoods (Everyone there spoke like film stars. Wake them up quickly, and they'd speak in English accents, right?). In mine, Captain Kirk was an LA detective with a catchphrase (the zen-like 'It works for me') who jumped across bonnets of cars. We'd watch from under a purple blanket, Dad in the middle, my sister and I on either side.

We used to do a small, smudged version of a road trip ourselves. Every month, my Mum would drive us on a Friday from our house in Nuneaton to a service station near Oxford to meet my Dad, who would pick us up and take us down to his home (and our first home) in Portchester for the weekend. Once a month, that quiet handing over ceremony in a car park. And then the rest of the journey; different cars: Dad's car was colder, more orange, and the radio more stubborn.

The Saturday nights. The purple blanket, TJ Hooker, lights turned off.


We'd make the return trip on Sunday evening. Three hours each way, unless we'd get stuck in traffic in Newbury. None of the mythic journeys of America, the roads and motels of Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek, Dean Moriarty and Humbert Humbert, Sam Cooke and Pee-Wee Herman; westward wagons, glowing motels, Tijuana weekends. We had our radio, crackling in and out of local receptions en route; we had miles of hedgerows along motorways, Sing Something Simple, the M27.


Living in a new country affects your dreams and memories. Walking in the Oregon hills I remember corners of scruffy Paulsgrove I'd not thought of for years. Grim kids from the darkest corners of my school yearbook come to my dreams, causing my mornings to be a disorientating mix of confused nostalgia and the hopeful feelings of living in a new place. New things always bring to mind older things. Oregon is Goonies country. In one dream, a girl who used to visit Foyles in London where I worked (and spend an hour talking about poor songbooks in a keen and serious way) played the part of the betrayed wife of my childish boss. She took me for a drink to ask about her husband's public embraces with his secretary. I didn't realise that I remembered her existence; in my dream, I tactfully told her what I suspected about her husband using suggestive whistles ('I think I might have seen him her in the office').

Working at Powell's Books has resurrected forgotten muscle memories too. I reach for the scanner with my right hand, where it was when I worked at Foyles in London; but it is to my left, and I scratch the air like an amputated limb.


Perhaps it is just all new places. Perhaps the fact that I am new in this place. But the breath of possibility carries on the wind; the narrative here is recent and incomplete, ready for the fingers of fresh authorship. There is a feeling in the West of America that land is still up for grabs, claims, hanging in the wind, are still to be settled. People of course are the same everywhere, and different everywhere. Like a nature documentary cameraman, it is impossible to remove your own presence from the equation (are people friendler here because I'm so obviously not from here? Or is it because they are friendler?). But Portland is, at first glance, more righteous, more militant, more politcally correct, more green, more laidback, less drunk, more of a community, happier. It's the Cloud City in Empire Strikes Back, a wet nirvana in the sky. Americans love England; but Portlanders understand why we moved here. It speaks for itself.

Compose running monologues in your skull, introducing the city to visitors. Speak to family in your head. Walk across the Burnside Bridge when the sun is out and it is spitting with rain, and with this internal commentary, a simultaneous detachment and attachment is possible. You're plugged into the architecture, yet observing yourself. Seeing for the first time, yet reporting on yourself seeing.


[Aside: Misconceptions, no.1: Americans believe the United Kingdom to be part of Europe.

They are of course mistaken. To the English, Europe is a holiday destination. Europe was defeated by Hitler. Europe wants to take something away from us, although we don't quite know what.


Misconceptions, no.2: TheEnglish are more charming, more intelligent and somehow more cultured than Americans.

We of course, know different. The 21st Century English are hilarious paupers. I promise I won't let on.]