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

and wonderful. It was Disneyland, Oz, and fucking Jupiter. It was noise and smell and lights and people looking like they were in a movie. Fat cabdrivers chewing wet cigars and talking about the exotic sport of baseball, unbelievably sexy women in outfits that Scottish girls would not have dared to wear even on a carnival float. Individuals wearing colors I had only ever seen on soccer uniforms or sectarian parades. The people themselves were different colors. Black people, brown people. (My dad once told me about a black guy who lived in Glasgow but I had never seen him.) We took the elevator to the eighty-sixth floor of the Empire State Building and looked across Manhattan. North to Harlem, east to theriver and all the airplanes landing and taking off in Queens, west to the Hudson, and south to the colossal new World Trade Center towers.
    We took a ferry to Liberty Island and climbed to the head of the statue. It was wicked hot inside the metal goddess—110 degrees the raspy, sweating Fiersteinesque tour guide told us gleefully as we trudged slowly up the iron stairs. We stood in Liberty’s crown and looked out over the harbor as the guide droned on through the heat about the poor and unwashed masses yearning to be free.
    I made a promise to myself and told my dad.
    “One day I’m gonnae live in New York, Da.”
    He nodded and did that half-smile thing of his, but he believed me.
     
    As the holiday progressed I bonded with my American teenage cousins over clandestine nicotine. I had been surreptitiously smoking the occasional cigarette since I was ten years old, thinking myself quite the dangerous bastard, and though certainly there seemed to be other kids in Scotland who shared my love for life on the edge, it was in America that I was introduced to something a little wilder.
    My cousins took me to my first-ever rock concert. Blue Oyster Cult at the Nassau Coliseum. We were driven there in the station wagon by James and Susan and my father, who were cool enough to drop us off in the parking lot and go to dinner on their own, arranging to pick us up after the show.
    The noise of the huge crowd was audible as we walked across the parking lot. As soon as the adults were out of sight I produced the gold packet of Benson & Hedges (“Benny Hedgehogs”) cigarettes, a British brand that I snuck over in my luggage. We all lit up and walked into the arena, where the air seemed to be blue, the lights from the support band’s meager display shining through a smoky haze. The smell was sweet and exotic and kind of frightening, like the incense joss sticks my brother sometimes burned in our room at home when our parents were out and he was listening to Pink Floyd and trying to be all mysterious and arty.
    We met up with some other kids from Karen and Leslie’s school, all of us yelling the traditional abuse at the support band. As the main act arrived onstage—and I confess I had never heard of Blue Oyster Cult before that day—the crowd went wild. Then one of Karen’s friends handed me a joint. I had watched some other kids smoking it, that odd sustained inhale and the holding of the breath. I was a teen and I wanted to fit in so I did exactly what I’d seen them doing. I sucked on that doobie until someone crossly snatched it from me and snapped something about Humphrey Bogart. I knew it was marijuana but I was unaware of any sensation of drugginess. I expected it to have horrifying side effects like all the antidrug horror propaganda said it would, that things would change shape and I would hallucinate angry demons and such. Perhaps I would even drop dead on the spot, but if I wanted to fit in this was a risk I had to take. Of course nothing really happened, but I did start to feel pretty good. And the band sounded great. And everybody was funny. Hilarious in fact. And I was starting to get a little hungry, then really hungry. Karen got us hot dogs and they were the best hot dogs I had ever tasted and this band was fucking