American on Purpose by Craig Ferguson Read Free Book Online Page A

early on he could never do better, and he’s right.
    They bundled us into their car and drove us to the family home in Smithtown, Long Island. My first ride in a station wagon. Wood-effect panels, leather seats, automatic transmission—an upholstered land-boat a child could drive. I loved the term itself: station wagon. It sounded so American, like the Wild West, as if it had something to do with the railroads and avoiding hostile Indians. Thankfully we made the voyage across the borough of Queens unmolested by the local tribesmen.
    James and Susan’s family was almost exactly like my own. Of their four kids, Stephen and Lesley were about the same age as my older brother and sister, Karen was a few months older thanme, and young James (Jamie) was born a year before my wee sister, Lynn. We looked alike, too, except the Americans had braces on their teeth and were frecklier from seeing sunshine more than a few weeks a year. Everyone was so friendly and such fun. They all lived in a big white clapboard house on the edge of the estate where James worked as a groundskeeper/handyman. It was an idyllic scene, as if I had traveled to an alternate universe and met the new improved Technicolor version of my own family. The MacWaltons.
     
    For three weeks I got to experience life as a suburban teenager in the U.S., and it seemed a lot more attractive to me than home. Karen and Leslie took me to their junior high school for a day, where one of their teachers put on a peculiar version of show-and-tell in my honor. To my crimson-faced, buttocks-clenching embarrassment, I was the show-and-tell. I will forever remember the teacher as a merry buffoon named Glenn. It almost certainly was not his name, although in all other aspects he was most assuredly a Glenn, jocky and stupid. He brought me out to the front of the class and told all the kids that I was from “Scotchland,” where golf had been invented. He asked me to say something typically Scottish, so I mumbled, “It’s a brawbricht moonlicht nicht thenicht.”
    The other kids looked confused and Glenn asked me what it meant and I translated for him.
    “It’s a beautiful moonlit night tonight.”
    I don’t know why I said this, it’s just a stock phrase that Scottish people use sometimes. Men, I suppose, in the company of tiddly, amorous foreign women. It even worked for me, the fleshy out-of-towner. I was immediately popular with the ladies. American women seem to be attracted to the Scottish accent for reasons I have never understood but remain grateful for.
    At recess I found myself surrounded by giggling teenage girls. I told them lies about Scotland which they seemed to enjoy. I toldthem lies about how I had bested Ronnie Souter in a fight and became, officially, best fighter in my class, how I was thinking of being an astronaut or Egyptologist. Even the boys were friendly. They asked me to play touch football with them and though I didn’t really understand a game called football where everybody ran around throwing and catching the ball with their hands instead of kicking it with their feet, I did my best. I fit right in.
    And nobody wanted a fight. Not once.
    I would think about that often in the years that followed back at Cumbernauld High.
    My cousins took me with them wherever they went. I went bowling for the first time, feeling like a local in my rented two-tone shoes and sucking on my giant fizzy soda. I ate hamburgers and hot dogs and french fries. I went to a McDonald’s for the first time, this was of course before Micky D’s march to global domination. It was certainly before there was one in Glasgow.
    My dad took me to New York City.
    Now that…that was love at first sight. I loved it then and I love it still. Even now, overloaded with sanitized bullshit Trump glass towers and condo-yuppie pseudoculture, it is still a complete mindfuck. As a Scottish schoolboy that first time, New York City was the Big Rock Candy Mountain. It was smoggy, bright-hot, filthy,