them try to throw up after meals anyway, but it doesn’t sound like much fun to me.
I have no interest in ‘discovering myself’. I want to discover America. My father travelled there in 1960 and spent two adventurous years studying American fiction, dating American girls, driving American cars across American landscapes, eating hamburgers and going on civil rights marches. From him, from the cinema, from Huckleberry Finn and Moby Dick and Dallas, I am in love with America, too. I keep a giant folded map in my bedroom, and take it out to stare at the redolent, romantic names: Hawk Springs, Dead Man’s Gulch, Looking Glass Falls.
Over two tightly budgeted months, my friend Nicky and I take Greyhound buses all round the southern states, up via New York to Massachusetts and on across the country, all the way over to the west coast through Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and Colorado. We hop aboard a shaky twin-prop flight to Alaska, taking the first train of the season from Anchorage to Fairbanks. We rent a car and drive around the Painted Desert, New Mexico, Arizona and the Grand Canyon. All there is left that we really want to see is Wyoming, the Dakotas and Las Vegas.
Unfortunately, we start in Las Vegas. I write in my journal:
Sunday 2nd June
Nevada is amazing. Right over the state line, in the middle of nothing but dusty hills and sand, there are huge pink and yellow casinos, and nothing else at all. After driving through empty hot landscape for ages, you think you’re imagining them, that they’re a mirage. It’s like that old cartoon where the cars keep driving past the hotel and the man in the fez is standing outside saying, ‘I knew we shouldn’t have built it in the middle of the desert!’
Then Las Vegas is BREATHTAKING. Millions and millions and millions of neon signs and shiny hotels and pink plastic flamingos and adverts for famous people and sparkle and I ABSOLUTELY LOVE IT. We were going to stay at the Las Vegas Hilton where The Four Tops and The Temptations are appearing nightly, but the Desert Inn has Joan Rivers.
It’s AMAZING what hotels give you for the money here. The Desert Inn said they’d charge us $75 a night if we agreed to stay two nights, and for that we’ve got a STUNNING room with its own bathroom, seven free drinks each and millions of ‘Buy 5 get 5 free’ tokens for roulette and poker chips. It’s so weird and amazing after all the youth hostels. They valet parked the car!!
Couldn’t resist the casino and they couldn’t resist us either – business is so slow that they only asked for ID once and my fake student card held up fine. So I was able to lose $5 on fruit machines and $47 on roulette. I was doing all right at roulette, but decided in advance that it was OKAY to lose all my winnings for the fun of playing. Tonight I’m going to try poker.
We never make it to Wyoming and the Dakotas.
♠
You wouldn’t think there was anything especially character-building about eating cheese sandwiches and reading Milton under a tree. But my college is ambitious, heavily male-dominated, and our tutors approach English Literature with military discipline. They specialize in reducing new students to tears, stripping away our confidence, then gradually bestowing approval as we work longer and longer hours, until we hunch over the books all night with an obsessiveness born of Stockholm Syndrome.
I like it. Standing my ground with alpha males, not showing fear, trying to make them laugh, noticing their own vulnerabilities, aiming always to win respect – I’ve grown up with my father, and taken my chances with a rowdy Brixton club audience; this is fast becoming a comfort zone. Being shouted at by macho Yeats scholars (a construction which may sound oxymoronic to anyone who’s never met the men in question) is a pleasure. The only terrors of university life lie in the bars and parties, the competition for social and sexual success. It takes two years to find a proper best friend, a quirky theologian called Charlie, who introduces himself to me with a bizarre puppet show and an enormous row about whether or not Beyond The Fringe was funny. Our relationship really takes off when it turns out he is head of the five-strong university cribbage society. Cribbage is much easier with six.
Until Charlie stumbles into the picture, apart from one intense, doomed love affair with an angry medical student, I spend most weekends back in London, hanging around in comedy clubs and stopping in occasionally at the Archway game to lose money I can’t afford.
I miss the comic meritocracy. But getting older brings a self-consciousness which makes it quite impossible to go back on stage and shout ‘Good evening!’ at a bunch of sceptical strangers. I’m not scared of the idea, just embarrassed.
By the time I leave university, comedy has changed. It has developed an unexpected cool streak. Articles in newspapers are describing it as ‘the new rock and roll’. Comedians have become sex symbols. They have groupies. They have managers and TV deals. They don’t seem to be the community of outsiders that attracted me in the first place. They have become the in-crowd.
So, the natural path is to settle back behind a typewriter and try to craft my jokes from there. Broadsheet newspaper readers are far less demanding than stand-up comedy audiences. If you’re appearing after 2,000 words of earnest opinion about Bosnia, they’re happy if you can give them a single wry smile. And if they don’t smile, what the hell? You’re safely alone at home, not standing there like a lemon, being rubbed against the grater of public silence.
But there’s no risk in it. No clench in the stomach as you walk to the microphone, wondering what kind of an audience they’re going to be. No euphoric high when you hear the first laugh and know it’s going to be okay.
And how can there be any community, any belonging, when I’m alone at the typewriter? It’s a good life, but there is something missing.
♠
I am standing in the doorway next to 7-11 in Notting Hill, clutching a bottle of whisky. The door is opened by a delicate, laconic little fellow with an explosion of black hair that makes him look, somehow, as if he is a Victorian street urchin who’s spent the afternoon up a chimney.
He looks at the bottle of whisky, baffled. He seems as though he is about to say something sarcastic, but doesn’t. He takes the bottle from my hand, mutters a thank-you and puts it down on the stairs. I don’t see it again.
He leads me up into a small room that appears very crowded with people. I can’t quite tell how they all fit round the table; it’s a Mad Hatter’s tea party with dormice slotting into teapots. They’re eating sweets, talking, dealing, swearing. Hugo, the chimney sweep, murmurs a couple of half-introductions, then gets bored and gives up. There are a few journalists, an IT man, a sleepy second-hand book dealer, a few undefined extras. And there is a slender, elegant, quirkily dressed woman, the first woman I have ever seen playing poker: Kira. A mutual friend has sent me to this game, amazed by the coincidence of knowing two female poker enthusiasts. Such unlikely specimens had to be introduced.
But there is no smalltalk; this isn’t a dinner party. The hellos take about eight seconds before I am asked for money, given chips and dealt in. The entire conversation is about poker. There seems to be an intense group fascination for each hand, each deal, each variant, each card. If they’re not talking about the hand in play, they’re talking about a hand that just finished or a hand that was played last week. If it isn’t a hand they played themselves, it’s a hand that somebody played ‘in the Vic’.
The game itself seems easier than the ones I’ve played before. The stakes are smaller. And although the conversation is saturated with poker, the atmosphere is more light-hearted than I am used to. No alcohol, no machismo, lots of junk food and giggling and double entendres and throwing sweets at people who
