American on Purpose Read Free

their lives and if they thought they could get away with it they would do the whole blitzkrieg thing all over again in a heartbeat. Maybe my parents are right. To this day if I am talking to a German man, I cannot help, at least momentarily, picturing him in an SS uniform, and I wasn’t born until nearly twenty years after the war ended. The only time I have ever seen an SS uniform is in the movies. My parents never saw an SS uniform up close, either. They saw U.S. army uniforms instead.
    When the American GIs turned up in Glasgow, en route to Europe, they must have seemed like gods for their white teeth and lack of rickets alone.
    They also brought items that had been forgotten since the war began. Nylons, fruit, laughter, and hope. With America in the war, my parents’ generation began to realize that it would eventually end and that life would go on. Maybe it would get even better, because the GIs brought something else. Something that had to exist before I could. Swing dancing.
    Scottish people love to dance. Only certain types of dancing, though. The kind that comes with a set of rules and instructions. We are, after all, the great engineers. Organized stamping and clapping or structured reels and skips are what Scots want—God forbid anything involving sexiness or free expression, no fluid or sensual movements, please. No squeezy buttocks pushing against groins to a salsa beat, that’s just the kind of thing that leads to people talking about their feelings. The GIs changed all that. Long after that little Austrian fucker was burned up in his bunker and the liberators had returned to their fabled land of cowboys and Coca-Cola, swing dancing and big band music remained. It became known simplyand collectively as “the dancing,” or, in the broad Glasgow dialect, radancin .
    Even now, every Friday and Saturday night Glasgow pubs and bars are packed with young people who pound down as much Dutch courage as they can before they head out for radancin to try and find prospective sexual partners or future spouses. Like thousands of Glaswegians, that’s how my parents met.
    My father, Bob, was rake thin when he was young, but he was tall and good-looking, and at six-one a giant for a Scotsman of his generation. Diamond-blue eyes, white-blond hair that was silver by his thirties, a strong nose, and fabulous teeth, though the teeth were something of a cheat since they were dentures. Bob told me he’d lost his own teeth when he was thrown from his Enfield motorcycle at Anderston Cross going eighty miles an hour but it seems improbable because:
    (A) No one can get eighty miles per hour out of a 1945 Enfield dispatch motorcycle.
    And:
    (B) The injuries my father would sustain from such a high-speed accident would surely be more serious than just dental.
    Perhaps he was traveling so fast that his poor old gnashers, weakened from no flossing and a lack of fluoride, were sucked out of his mouth by the relative velocity.
    Nonetheless, the Great Teeth Incident has now become family legend and that’s good enough for me, but the more likely story is that my father lost his teeth at a young age due to the awful diet of his truly Dickensian childhood. He didn’t own shoes until he was eleven years old, and for a few years during the war, in an effort to escape the bombing, he was evacuated from the inner city to one of the notorious childhood labor workhouses—sweatshops in the countryside that kept children safe from bombs, but not from horrifying abuse and mistreatment at the hands of wartime opportunists. My father refused to talk about the details of his wartimeexperience until the day he died, saying only that it wasn’t fun. I believed him.
    I also believed that he rode a motorcycle, and he rode it fast. After all, he was a telegram delivery boy in Glasgow in the early fifties, round about the time Marlon Brando starred in The Wild One as a troubled and brooding motorcycle gang member.
    “Hey, Johnny, what are you rebelling