Grey's Journal:
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``I was in a dreadful state from the food poisoning. I was so weak that I found myself reduced to crawling to the loo. I had to call my bloke. He was a bit cross about it, having advised me against the curry in the first place, but he popped right over.'' I was sitting in a pub eavesdropping on the British girl at the table next to me. Though she described a moment in her life when she lay in her own filth in the hallway of her flat, I was in love. I forgot the joy of listening to British women speak. They make even the most horrible, embarrassing, and disgusting moments of life sound so polite and enchanting. I was glad to be back in London. * * *
On Friday night my friends from London Metropolitan held an end-of-the-semester party at a bar that I was supposed to attend. I was hesitant about going. I knew I would have all sorts of uncomfortable questions to answer about my future direction in life. When I left graduate school two months ago my European friends were concerned. ``What are you going to do?'' they asked. ``Oh, you know,'' I said a bit too casually, ``I'm going to take December off and then I'll figure out what to do over the Christmas break with my parents.'' This was a great response because it delayed giving any real answer. I essentially said `I'll tell you in a month'. I went home, relaxed and visited some friends. The majority of the people I graduated with seemed to be wildly floundering with their own futures as well. This made me feel better. I didn't want to be the only one without a plan. I was supposed to return to London three weeks ago, but I kept delaying the return trip a week at a time. I was staying with my parents on Long Island and enjoying myself. With my parents I was a bit of a kid again and lived without responsibility. But, staying in the States longer than a month seemed too much like avoidance to me, so I decided to return to London. Besides, my parents lived in a rural area and I had grown quite accustomed to city life. I missed the sensation of living somewhere. Living in a place where important people do important things. I was neither an important person nor did I do important things, but living around them makes me feel important by proximity. Back in London and dreading the oncoming party, I imagined eager voices asking me the same questions as before: ``So, what are you going to do? We are all going to graduate in four months with marketable business degrees. You however, won't have anything.'' Zornitsa, my friend from my first day at London Metropolitan, for some reason has supreme confidence in me despite my current inability to form a plan or get the desire to look for a job. She seems to patiently wait for me to be successful and famous so she can then say: `See. I knew'. For this reason I wanted to enter the party with the fierce, protective Bulgarian on my arm. But alas, she would not be at the party from its start as she had to help her boyfriend in the library. ``Go without me. I will come later.'' she insisted. But I refused. Social phobia gripped me and I simply wasn't going unless she came with me from the beginning. She thought this was ridiculous. She is so self confident that I'm not sure she is capable of understanding other people's insecurities. But despite her inability to understand why I refused to go ahead of her, she eventually conceded to call me when she left the library. Two hours later Zornitsa called and said she would leave in fifteen minutes and that I should go to the party without her and she would meet me there. The library was on my way and I passed outside in hopes of catching her exiting. I hate walking into a place alone and trying to find a group of people. That one moment of standing silhouetted in the doorway, looking lost and alone is horrible - all eyes fall on me and silently ask `Have you any friends in this place? If not, be gone from here.' There is also the embarrassing series of false positives that happen when trying to identify someone in a dim and smoky room. I sit down at a table only to realize that this isn't my group of friends, only a set of people who look vaguely like them. Then what? ``Oh, hello... I... yes... I just wanted to see what the room looked like from this table.'' Pause. ``Well, nice meeting you. I'll just be going now.'' What makes this worse is the sure knowledge that my real friends have seen me from the beginning and are wondering what I'm doing. After seeing me at six wrong tables, they must think I'm a very popular person, but, when they see me standing in the center of the room looking lost, then they realize what is really going on. ``Grey, over here!'' I look around the room and can never locate the voice's source. It's like when the computer tech support guy tells you to click on the `advanced' tab on the control panel. You know it's right in front of your face but you just can't find it for an absurdly long time. Zornitsa didn't exit the library as I walked passed, so I paced the street, ready at any moment to feign surprise at the implausible timing of bumping into each other. It was raining and I noticed a security camera on the library following me as I paced. I must have looked quite the psychotic, pacing back and forth in the rainy gloom just outside the library's entrance. I looked into the camera and was sure that someone was watching me on the other side, perhaps with a hand resting on the telephone debating whether to call the police. I wanted to signal that I was not a stalker, waiting to rape and murder the next woman to exit the library. But, how would I send such a signal? A big sign that says `I'm not crazy'? Is there anyway to signal one's sanity that doesn't raise more questions than it attempts to answer? I think not. `The hell with this,' I thought, and called Zornitsa from my cell and informed her that I was not going to the party without her and I'd wait in the lobby. She came down a few moments later still confused as to why I hadn't gone ahead on my own and escorted me to the bar. I was very, very pleased. I sat with my friends at a long wooden table. The music was too loud for comfortable conversation so everyone kept pairing off to talk. It looked like we took turns kissing our neighbors' ears. I enjoyed talking to everyone, but still felt uncomfortable at the moments when I was left without a partner and I think some of the others felt the same. Due to the music volume, three way conversation was impossible, so you had to wait for someone else to suddenly find themselves without a partner before you could talk to them. The only one who seemed unconcerned was Zornitsa. She either talked when she cared to or, without a conversation partner, she sat in the middle of the crowd, beautifully and confidently independent, listening to the music. Late in the night she broke her statuesque image to frown at the group of girls next to us. ``They are drunk,'' she said, then added disapprovingly ``On beer. It is ugly when girls are drunk on beer.'' She turned to face me, very serious now, ``You must not drink beer, Grey. It will ruin your image.'' I cannot figure out what Zornitsa thinks my image is. I see myself as an overly academic, bookish, dorky kind of guy, but she seems to try and groom me for something better. For example, she corrects me when I walk on her right side, saying that gentlemen walk on the left. But I really can't figure it out. This week's TimeOut London issue is on how to make money fast. It's filled with lots of odd ways to make a few quick pounds. When I showed her with a big smile that I could get £40 for a sperm donation I did it partly because I thought she would have an amusing reprimand about ruining my image. But to my surprise she just nodded and said, ``Good. I would do that if I were a man.'' Despite my worries for the evening, I had a good time at the bar and for once I was glad about the impossibly loud music. It made questions like `So, if you dropped out of school and you don't have a job, what do you do all day?' that much easier to avoid. At one point in the night my French friend, Marine, turned to a friend of her's and pointed at me. ``That's Grey,'' said Marine. ``He's the American.'' She never refers to me this way and I was surprised. But as soon as Marine's friend opened her mouth and revealed her nasal, obnoxious accent, I knew why. A fellow American! A New Jersey girl to be precise. We were instant friends. Now it may seem odd that I was so happy to see an American after spending four weeks in America, but she was the first American my age I'd met in London. She was just as happy to meet me for the same reason. We had both been envious when people from other nations met their compatriots and instantly bonded. While we didn't have our own language in which to conduct a private conversation, we naturally spoke so loudly, quickly, and with such nasal inflections that I'm sure most people tried not to listen. We had many things to discuss. We talked for a long time about the vague sense of inferiority of being Americans in Europe and about the dangerous linguistic skills of the British. ``With their voices and accents they can talk you into anything,'' she warned. ``I know.'' Finally, someone who understood. |
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Copyright © 2004 Wellington Grey  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. |
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