Ch2 (which should be ch1?) draft 1 - Feeling the Divide

There will obviously never be such a thing, but there should be a pamphlet handed out to cultural-transplantees. I knew it would seem strange and foreign, but I had no idea about the shock I would feel – and I don’t even know what such a pamphlet would have had to say to prepare me correctly for it. It would have to speak about a loneliness that consumes you, so that not only do you feel far away from anyone you know, but you feel certain that not a single one of them has ever cared about you and that there’s no reason anyone where you are now ever will either. Why did I have such irrational thoughts? Was the weather affecting me? - because although I had arrived in June, I couldn’t go out of doors without a jacket. It could have been any of a million things, including but not limited to the reverse flow of traffic, the strange electrical sockets, or coming to terms with the fact that it would be some time before I saw hot and cold water coming out of the same spigot again.

I didn’t start to feel these things right away. The first day I woke up there, I still felt excited and electrified by the new foreign experience laid out before me. If I’d known little about my travel to and time in Stirling, I knew even less about the people I’d be spending the time with. There was Todd, who was probably 6’4”. I found the double d at the end of his name appropriate to the double chin he had at the end of his face. He had lost a lot of weight, he said, and made no effort to hide the fact that he was a momma’s boy to the core. I knew Owen got high, so I was ready for him to become my friend right away. He was the shortest one of us, and already balding, but had large kind eyes and a soft voice and a subtle sense of humor that I got along with right away. Tim was our token metrosexual; I felt certain he was a homosexual but he denied it forcefully. He had class, wardrobe, physique and accessories, and an attitude that belonged on a runway in heels. His duality and ambiguity annoyed me to no end and I avoided him at all costs. I learned this much about them only because we went out for drinks to expose ourselves to the locals and the locals to ourselves.

There was a pub/restaurant/disco just down the road from the front entrance to the university, so we had a couple of drinks on campus and headed that way. It was early evening but as bright as afternoon as we walked across the campus, taking it in hungrily. Its landscape weaved and sloped and was beautiful the whole way across. We laughed loudly, as people eager to appear comfortable will do, and joked as though we were already friends. The pub turned out to be a fabulous old house that had been converted, with beautiful results, and we seated ourselves a table not far away from two huge Scottish fellows who ended up inviting us to move over and chat with them. Everyone was getting along famously, sharing drink recipes and making orders for each other, telling tales and having an all around fantastic time, when suddenly it was 1AM and we were being suggested to admire the other side of the door – and if we wished, the disco out back. The whole crowd was up for it, but at £10 per person to get through the door, I winced. I heard the price quoted to Owen, behind whom I was standing in line, and as I turned to complain to the others, he whipped out £60, we were in, and that was that. Of course, that required we all buy rounds so he wouldn’t have to, and as we all sat around in the disco, things really got interesting. One of the two Scottish brutes had been paying me some extra attention, which was fun even though I had no intention of doing a single thing about it. As we struggled to talk over the music, he decided to make sure the conversation got where he wanted it to right away, and I cannot remember how, but suddenly we were discussing the clitoris. “OH, AYE!” he shouted, “The clitoris! Wee coll them FAISH FLAPS!” Nono, dear, I explained to him, you’re thinking about the labia. It’s time for an anatomy lesson – the clitoris is up at the top, just outside, the little pearl. His eyes lit up with recognition – “OH, AYE!” he shouted again, “Tha WEE MAHN IN THA BOAT!” I relayed this to the rest of the group, and as they collapsed on the tables laughing, this same drunk loon turned to me and said, deadpan, “What do you Americans think about the arse?” I didn’t know what to say, so I just stuttered out, “How’s that?” He said, “It’s very FASHIONABLE here to do it in the arse!” I shook my head and said, “Well there you go!” He didn’t stop. “Do you know what it means, when I say, I really fancy you?” “Yes,” I said, “I know what that means.” He told me he thought I was hot, I told him that was nice, and then he shouted, “I WANT TO FOCK YOUR CLITORIS!”

Laughter glorious laughter can really save you sometimes, and with no idea how to even begin to explain the physical challenges that made his statement impossible, I fell into waves of it, and let the alcohol go to my head. I’d been fighting it, trying to drink far less than everyone else, buying rounds of these crazy purple concoctions called Diesels of half lager, half cider, and just enough black currant syrup to make them a loud shade of disco pinkish-purple. I laughed him and his statement off as the lights came back on, and then doors were opening and people were moving toward them. I’m not sure how we shrugged those boys off but soon we were back on campus and I collapsed on a beautiful, comfortable-looking hillside to stare at the still-bright sky. I let the earth spin beneath me and stared up in wonder at this sky that refused to darken this far north and the leaves that framed my view of it. The sound of the lake at the bottom of the hill and the ducks and geese in it drifted up to us as we all seemed to repeat “We’re in fucking Scotland!” in a drunken stunned way – and as simple as it sounds, it felt like so much heavy truth.

The shade of angry fuscia that came back out of my stomach and into the sink so many times that night and that morning reminded me how poorly malted beverages got along with my internal workings. I slept ridiculously late the next day and only left the dorm to get free food from the Management Center across campus. That day was when the feelings began. I didn’t see any of the other boys that day, and as I wondered what they were up to, I realized I didn’t know anything about any of them. If the only people I knew weren’t my friends, it hit me, then I certainly was completely alone. I ate quietly, in a corner of the staff room there, and mumbled short responses to a few questions that were posed to me. I tried to smile, but I didn’t have it in me, and just explained that I’d been out all the previous night. Scottish people can definitely understand that, and I was mercifully left alone.

The next day I woke up at 10:30 and decided it was time to figure out where I was and what the heck I was doing there. I had been to this same city once long before, for a few days during a family vacation when I was fourteen or fifteen, and was astonished by the faint familiarity that certain things I saw outside of certain windows brought up within me. I could remember that my family had gone to both of the two major historic landmarks in the town, the Wallace Monument and Stirling Castle, so I decided to visit them both again by myself before I began work and see what I remembered.

And sure enough, after trekking across campus and down some country road for a good distance, I found myself staring at a parking lot and sign that looked exactly as they had when I saw them all those years ago – only with the addition of an atrocious statue of Mel Gibson decked out in a kilt and braids screaming, presumably, at the injustice of a such a ridiculous statue at the foot of the Wallace Monument’s mountain. I was so disappointed that I forgot my killer plan of asking for the family discount as a Wallace when I paid for my admission - £4.50 with an international student identity card I bought just before flying out, and I intended to get my money’s worth. I was feeling pretty good about walking all that distance to the mountain and decided to get up the hill without taking a break. Motivation is a great thing, especially when it pays off, which mine sadly did not. But during the break I took I spent some time thinking about my situation. I decided I would become determined to take it and shape it into my own experience. I thought about the situation I had just escaped from, how nothing could be worse, and how therefore something like this could only be better. Standing up I felt confident and hiked the rest of the way up.

You come around a curve in the trail and suddenly all the trees tightly surrounding you just completely open up and you’re on top of a mountain, you can see the whole city of Stirling and all of the surrounding countryside, you can follow the River Firth twisting across its way and inspect people’s farms, houses, livestock, lives. It’s breathtaking, it’s windy, it’s shocking and it’s beautiful. The Wallace Monument stands pointing up at the sky, with its strange face open and bellowing. I stepped inside and spent a full four hours climbing the two hundred and forty-six stairs, stopping and reading the histories and displays on Wallace, the monument itself, and other prominent Scots. Once I’d made it to the lookout at the top I truly felt I had conquered something and stayed as long as I could brave the wind, gazing across the at my next conquest, the faraway Stirling Castle.

I knew I was in Europe, the land of public transportation, but I didn’t know how to get anywhere on it yet. I climbed back down the monument and back down the mountain and headed in the direction of town, hoping to find a bus stop where a bus might still stop on a Sunday. I made my way to the edge of town and found one that took me just into the town itself, where I began climbing again, this time the mountain Stirling had been built around with the castle at the top. I spent only an hour in there as they were closing, but it too brought back feelings of memories, and on the way back down I passed the hotel I was to be working in. Naturally, I let myself in. I wandered through it until I came upon the restaurant and waltzed in to the kitchen, where I met Paul and Alex.

Paul and Alex deserve introductions. Paul was just shorter than me and had a scalp covered in a fuzzy stubble. He was thin and had big eyes, a fantastic accent, and the goofiest sense of humor I’d encountered in a while. Paul was in love with some girl even younger than he was, and from the pictures he showed us it was understandable. Alex was in love too, it turned out, but he was older and it seemed to be a more mature love. She was Italian and they went on holiday there once during my stay to visit her family. Alex was taller than most, including me, with dark hair and eyes and a genuine piercing smile. He was from Northern Scotland, a place made fun of like our own South in the United States, so I immediately bonded with that. These two boys were fabulous, and I told them I looked forward to working with them.

I wandered around the town, bought a book second hand, had some hot vegetable lasagna, and caught a bus back out to the campus based on a map Paul had scrawled out for me. I had taken some gorgeous pictures that day, especially some in a graveyard older than my home country where boys played between gravestones while I reflected on the fact that I was alive and alive and living. I tried to concentrate on that, that I was living and surrounded by beauty and life, and buried the loneliness for a night. But these feelings manifested themselves in my dreams in crazy ways for a full week after my arrival. I had nightmares every night, all night long, something different every time – dreams about drowning, werewolves, Armageddon… The one about Armageddon had a twist, because in the middle of all the fire and chaos, I could look up at the sky above me and shout, “Up! Up! Up!” Two of my friends from home, a Tweedledee and Tweedledum pair of boys, had a hideaway up there and would open a trap door and lower a rope for me to climb and escape the mess for a bit. I could never stay long, though, or else someone back down in the real world would know I was gone, and then the shit would really get deep. The werewolf dream was strange as well, because a friend from my past and I were slowly turning into werewolves, but we had figured out how to slow the process down. If we pushed a sliver of wood into our hearts, we’d go back to being people for a while longer – it hurt, but it worked. What did they mean, all those terrible dreams where I would work out some trick to slow down the inevitable? I could never reach the ‘end’ of these inevitabilities in my dreams before waking and was always left the following day feeling I was still trying to escape them. I finally had enough and told myself that buying a new pillow would solve all my problems, and when I did buy one after a week, it worked somehow. This would have to be one of those bits of info in the pamphlet, a little traveler’s tip in the margin, “Remember! If the nightmares get to be unbearable, a new pillow may just do the trick!” And it did, and as the nightmares faded and I was introduced to my new job, I began to find a sort of sanity within which I could function in this new and foreign place, and hope to learn a few things.