The American Call: OPENING SCENE – Introduces protagonist, explores themes of ambition and disillusionment, and foreshadows protagonist’s journey into the heart of the American Dream.

[JackDumonde]

Scene is the entirety of Chapter 1

 

Millions are marching. Millions have already marched. Millions are preparing to march.

An unstoppable movement proceeds apace. America beckons at the end of this movement. All roads lead to America. The world is marching towards a land of landless ideals as nations regather and realign to prostrate before the American ideal.

Samuel Rockwell was one of these millions, a twenty-four year old from London. Born into relative wealth, he seldom experienced material want, yet his soul was starving. A little under six foot, he cut a handsome figure. Girls found his puffy cheeks cute, especially two dibbled inlets they enjoyed teasing him about. Most of his early years were surrounded by a close-knit group of friends and when old enough for liquor peddlers to pretend these boys were overage, they partied on excessive quantities of cheap vodka. After finishing school, Sam attended university, competed in athletics and cleared tables as he revelled in that immense period when limitless opportunities park their stalls behind each thousandth door of a possible future. But there was only one salesman who stirred his soul and like millions across the world, a young man signed the dotted line.

Sam hugged his mother tight on the night he left for Los Angeles; poor woman had no idea if he would ever return. His brown fringe crawled over eyes dewy blue, ears wet, frills down the neck tip-toeing hairs electrified as he grabbed his backpack and shut the door to the first stage of life.

First station, second, fifth; the train rattling. Sam made his final preparations in the two weeks leading up to this departure. He was initially dragged back to his old university supervisor who hopelessly re-offered him the opportunity of a lifetime. Then he met friends, asking them to visit him in America. Max Matthias was the final friend he met six days prior on the last warm day of August. Max was a friend only because he was an old family friend. Boisterous and brash in his Australian gesticulations, Max’s body cut the opposite appearance. He wobbled like a slender pond reed bent in winds, his lanky body teetering to one side by a heavy black Irish fringe. Max donned spotless white trainers on the afternoon he last met Sam, with cut white jeans and a florid Hawaiian he won in a drinking game partying in America’s groin.

“Headache’s still palpitating” he said, groaning out an attempt at speech as he greeted Sam in Greenwich that afternoon. The town swarmed as they wormed into an overpacked pub. “Swallowed three paracetamols at four this morning and two at eight.”

“You’re not drinking for once?”

Max looked like a sunburnt lobster.

“I’m no prude and certainly not a teetotaller.” He spoke cynically in his self-satisfied Melburnian, prudently stooping beneath a low-beamed pub door too low for his narrow height. “I’ll have a few and still drink you under the table. Anyway, it’s almost twelve and I’ve been up since four, so in my mind its long past midday.”

It was a quarter past eleven as they meandered through the gloomy pub. It stunk of claustrophobia and bitter hops. Most of its stalls were pinned in damp felts with stained wood darkening this already dusty establishment into something more akin to a colonel’s antique lounge. Its ageing publicans were already drunk with glasses stacked as they scanned tabloids, occasionally glaring above their papers to scorn at two youngsters with all the mendaciousness of stale ale.

“I’ll get you a beer.” 

“I’m no water drinker” Max said, rebuffing Sam. “If they pump anything other than gravy, get a double vodka one ice. No lime. They don’t wash the limes.”

Max had yet to recover from his two-week bender in Miami fuelled by crack lines he and his banker friends sniffed ravenously. Gulping their first round of drinks, they discussed Max’s recent breakup with an American girlfriend.

“Disagreements about everything” Max said, sipping his vodka.

“Your breakup was last week?”

“Tuesday, but it feels years ago. I got her spaghetti at that Italian near Leadenhall. She tried throwing it over me and the dish just happened to slime down the suit of a senior boss I sort’a recognised. Went right past my head like a frisbee, hitting him instead.”

“From your bank?”

Max shook his sunburnt head, flapping his Irish fringe.

“Another one, but it’s an incestuous industry.”

“Sounds like a movie breakup.”

“Wasn’t it just? I abjured the world like a Buddhist as the banker chided me for causing her to chuck pasta at the back of his greasy hair.”

“As if you flung it over him?”

“Rest assured. Both performed their roles. Kate made a scene because the movies tell us to make a scene and the greasy fart played to a tee defending the damsel and reproaching me as a deadbeat.”

Sam tried to hide his grin under a white T-shirt neck cuff.

“Cut looking at me like that” Max said, frowning.

“Like what?”

Sam’s cheeks dimpled as he smirked.

“Screw you and Jonny. You’re as bad as each other.”

“What did Jonny do?”

“Doesn’t matter” Max said, gulping his vodka. “He’s in the dog-house.”

“I’ll never understand you, Max. I should put a stethoscope to your soul. Only last month, you wafted on like Wordsworth about Kate and I felt queasy.”

Max thumped his vodka glass onto the table. 

“Look,” he said, “I was lying to myself. Don’t we exaggerate to delude? Demand affirmations when it’s hitting the tank?”

Sam shrugged.

“She was everything for a while. Even when there wasn’t a droplet left in the watering can, I tried my hardest to sucker up its last dusts. I kept telling Kate I loved her and she wanted to hear it, but I didn’t do anything to back it up.”

“And what exactly did she do wrong?”

“Oh, everything imaginable” Max said, rolling his eyes.

“That’s a little vague.”

“It’s all the titbits collecting like gunk at the bottom of a drain that you need to pour cleaner down to gut.”

“I almost bought a calendar to count the days till your engagement.”

Max held his glass close to the stained table.

“That was never on the cards.”

“Didn’t you call her perfect?”

“I blabbered on about her a bit too much. There was a time when I really couldn’t think of nobody else. I always wanted to date an American and Kate was as good as I could get. When I met her family in New York, a feeling of…” he pondered into his vodka like Chinese tea leaves, “I don’t remember the precise words. I think you said something?”

“I said it?”

“There was a word you used.”

Sam pleaded ignorance.

“Whatever” Max swigged his glass. “It’s hard to pin down, but it was the same feeling whenever anyone spoke with an accent like hers and the same feeling beating me like a crazy bull on the day I arrived into America. You’ll know what I mean in a week.”

“I’m not going to Manhattan.”

“Doesn’t matter. It’ll be the same in Los Angeles. Perhaps worse because it’s Hollywood. Just find an American girl and you’ll know what I’m talking about.” He pointed at Sam with his neat glass. “Or gal as they call them and Californian gals are the whackiest after Floridians.”

“I don’t think you’re making sense. Kate was level-headed.”

“Only because she’s Virginian, but they’re still whack. The whole country’s whack. The whackiest people over there are the foreigners who aren’t whack.”

“Well, Kate’s more down-to-earth than Maria and Isabel put together. They’re Spanish, so you’re schmoozing a load of bullshit. It’s the vodka talking.”

“Izzy?” Max yelled defiantly, not giving a damn about any of the publicans staring at his sunburnt face. “Now you’re the mad one.”

“I’m just trying to make the case for Kate’s normality.”

“Listen. And I mean really pay attention as if your life depends on it because it will do soon enough. Are you listening?”

“You’ve long taken my ears hostage.”

“Now read my lips.” 

Sam leaned over the stained table.

“Kate was normal in the only way an American can be.” Max spoke as if revealing a great secret. “Of course, she still had a textbook accent with those cliché mannerisms from the talk shows that makes everyone feel like a million bucks. And let me straight talk. When I was with her, it really did feel as if anything was possible. We had a high-rise apartment near Times Square. Each day, we worked above the world. I was called Mr. Wallstreet Guy by a bum flogging drugs on my daily grind and we’d sniff his white lines to get us even higher. Then at night we climbed the tallest skyscrapers for overpriced drinks and more magic powder.”

Sam was mesmerised at the idea of America.

“And that’s what most of us don’t comprehend over here” Max went on, lowering his voice as he unbridled his scornful ruminations. “Real skyscrapers only exist in America. Every skyscraper outside America is a replica like,” he pondered for a moment before narrowing his sunburnt eyes in contempt, “an Egyptian pyramid in Vegas or Tower Bridge in that godforsaken Chinese town.”

“I wouldn’t call London a replica of Vegas.”

“You don’t get it. I’ve been to Vegas.”

“And lost twelve thousand?”

“Seventeen to be precise, but I blew a lot more on crypto.”

Sam gulped his pint.

“Vegas doesn’t gamble on gaudy because it admits what it wants to be, but London’s gone the full mile. Even worse are European cities. Just look at those detestable towns in France and Belgium with the clocktowers and castles.” Max appeared genuinely ill at the thought of such sobriety. “Then they have a skyscraper shunted far from their medieval clutter and every polyglot bleeding veal eater pretends to abhor this American middle-finger as they secretly ogle it with all their provincial pride.”

“I spoke to Raffa about this last week.”

“Raffa eats his veal alive.”

“Thinks we’re delirious for wanting to live in America. Yet he watches American television, blares hip-hop on his broken speakers, gobbles McNuggets and only has opinions on American news as if any of it matters to dingy Slough’s rundown charity shops.”

“I’ll off myself if he prattles about dirty water in Flint one more time” Max said, resting an arm on the squalid table. “At least I’ve got sense to know I’m a recovering addict, but the world refuses to admit it’s also addicted. Climb to the observatory and look across the river. We’re trying to build Manhattan. It’ll never be the same and I’d know.” 

“Here we go again.”

“It’s my testimony, Sam. And it’ll be yours too.”

“Getting drunk for two years?”

“America is a drunkards’ paradise whether or not you drink any alcohol.”

“But you did drink a lot.”

“I’m no teetotaller.”

“That’s been clear for years.”

“And I’ll happily drink every drop all in one go if it means I get to relive those years. I partied in penthouses overlooking New York. I saw the Empire State Building flashing in the night. I hailed yellow cabs in snowstorms. I saw the trees withering their final leaves in Central Park. I lost my soul in choruses of jazz. Wretched men on saxophones and tubas with hideous eyes smiling because of the tears crushing them cold. Their audiences roared and those really were roaring years. Years when I danced on the lights, flew to the stars, tiptoed like a pampered cat along the skyline of a city and sung the song of its electricity. Oh yes indeed, being a damn fuming mad drinker,” Max barbed his own chest, “chucking thousands into tills of roof-top bars selling preposterously overpriced cocktails. I’m talking two hundred dollars for a drink not like this shit, pardon my French.” 

He inspected his vodka morosely. 

Sam sipped his warm ale.

“But when Kate dragged me back here after my work placement ended, I realised my love for her was only built on the love of an idea. That idea is now dead for me.”

Sam asked if he wanted another round.

“On me” Max insisted, downing his remaining vodka. “You’ll need cash for America.”

The warmth of the pub and its throngs were worlds away from the coldness of the carriage. The train rattled towards the airport as London blurred into the obscurity of incandescent streetlights, leaving the fulcrum of a screaming capital for the Indian and Pakistani suburbs of the west. Planes soared and vanished over the horizon. Along the metal tracks, the train’s wheels pulverised in indomitable speed, shaking the carriages like hurricanes assaulting a boat lost on ocean waters. An older man snoozing by pyramids of luggage juddered out of his accidental sleep. His mouth groped in agony and his veiny hands gripped the seat for dear life after his dreams were hacked to smithereens by the rattling train. Sam watched him wildly shake. Then he shut his own eyes and drifted back to the memory before.

“Six days till you’re off” Max said, sitting down in the pub with two whiskeys as nearby eyes sniggered at his flowery shirt. “Third of September?”

“I land in the morning.”

“You’re a loon for not doing it properly. They’ll kick you out with a ban for life if they catch you without a visa or staying longer than you’re allowed.”

“I’ve got an outward ticket to Colombia that’ll throw off the scent” Sam said, clarifying his scheme to bypass border security questions over his return flight. “They’ll think I’m another tourist. Nobody will suspect a thing.”

“How much was the ticket to Colombia?”

“Less than a hundred.”

Max tutted, checking a text message.

“Can you get a refund?”

“Think of it as a business cost. It’s peanuts in the grand scheme.”

“You’ve got work, though?” Max asked sceptically, looking up from his phone. 

“In northern California. I’m chopping trees for a woodsman in the wilderness. I was given his contact by Will who helped him after being picked up by the old man two summers back, hitchhiking along California’s coast.”

“Ah, Will Jaspers” Max raised his eyebrows as he did whenever recollecting an elapsed memory. “Haven’t spoken with him in years. He still bumming around India?”

“He’s in Central Asia at the moment, living in a yurt.”

“Central Asia?” 

Max was always bemused by Will’s antics.

“Mongolia. Riding horses over the steppes.”

“Christ almighty. Civilisation really does die with Will.”

Max started nervously tapping the tabletop.

“Not meaning to pry” he insisted, looking into Sam’s eyes, “but you get paid in your new job? I only ask because Will’s not too fused about money.”

Max could only think in money.

“It’s not much, but I get room and board. I figured it wouldn’t be possible to experience the wilderness without doing it the way I’m planning.”

“How long are you there for?”

“Till the new year.”

“And after that?”

“No idea” Sam said, cleaning his whiskey. “But I’ll be settled in America by then, knowing a few people and places to go.”

A whooshing sound swept the train as it entered a tunnel. Although Sam had never visited America, its ideas were burrowed into his soul from birth by bombardments of serial television, popular music and happy burgers twitching every nerve end of an earth on hallowed names of Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood celebrities and Rockefeller Plaza. Those refusing America’s enticements are either annihilated by the most formidable military machine in human history or go insane by their own volition. Rogue bandits, rouge nations and rogue minds. 

Sam arrived at the airport. The lady at airport check-in scanned Sam’s papers pithily and the call to boarding soon began.

“Gate Thirty,” an attendant spoke over loudspeakers, “last call to Los Angeles.”

Hundreds of Americans clambered around the waiting room.

“Dilan, get off ya friggen phone, dere’s plent’a time to natta” muttered an oversized Yank wrapped in a poncho. “We’re boarding. What’a ya waitin’ for?”

“I’ve texted mom” another teenager moaned, shafting a purple beanie over her nuclear green hair. “I told her to buy peanut jelly-o.”

Accents just like the movies.

“Oh, Roger, remember that ever so sweet Gugarian waiter?” a tenderly grandmother asked her stern husband, softly and refined in Tennessee gentility. “He smiled so dearly. N’ what’a fine chap, givin’ us complimentary refills n’ telling us about opening times for...”

“He was a Bugarian” her husband snapped irritably, annoyed at queuing.

Her husband was a grey-haired veteran who felt uncontrollably flustered at queuing as he mispronounced Bulgaria, even though he firmly believed his pronunciation was absolutely correct because he imagined himself right about everything. 

“Argh, n’ mah legs hurt” he continued moaning like everyone else itching to sit in their claustrophobic plane seat. “Can’t these bloomin’ peoples get’a move on?”

Then the crowds vanished.

Darkness slumbered as the plane rolled back. A hum undergirded the machine as accents subsided, lights dimmed, wind guards turned and engines roared. This was the last connection Sam would have to England for a long time; forever he imaged as the plane ascended into darkness. Below slept an old country creaking under constraints new contradictions forced upon it. In front lay a future in its never-ending conquest of that past. One movement in one direction, from the individual to the peoples on this plane as whole nations and civilisations answered the same call.