Dispatches From a Dilettante Read Free Page B

a stack of bibles that what I write next is exactly what happened. Suffice it to say that I scored a second half hat trick and we won 3-2. Two of them were tap-ins after Edward, who had worked tirelessly, set them up. The third was a thumping volley from twenty yards the effect of which was only somewhat mitigated by the fact that I was a good ten yards offside. A photo was taken of female staff holding the leg that scored the winning goal, which luckily was still connected to the rest of me. Kenneth won his five hundred dollars, gave all the players a half day off and I decided life could not get any better at Lake Minnewaska. I quit the next morning, hitched a lift into town with the resort limo driver and headed for Atlantic City.
    America that summer was in political turmoil. The Vietnam war was not going well and when campus kids began to be drafted the middle classes produced an articulate opposition to the war in double quick time. From the anonymity of a Greyhound bus on the freeway to Atlantic City I read the stickers on car bumpers as they hissed by my window in the rain. ‘America - Love it or Leave it’ said one on the back of a huge Cadillac. Cars were still mostly American manufactured in the US then and large gas guzzlers with it. The first non American vehicle I spotted minutes later was a battered Volvo with the perfect response defiantly posted for all to read… ‘America - Change it or Lose it.’ A Chevy truck swung by with a frightening piece of polemic on the back window ‘Get behind our troops or get in front of them.’ Just as I was beginning to feel depressed by it all as I felt an aspiring hippy should, a middle aged mom overtook the coach gripping the steering wheel of her Ford with a dogged determination. However on the back her humanity was revealed by the sticker… ‘Gimme the chocolate and no one gets hurt.’ I really hoped that it was her car.
    The woman sitting next to me was reading an underground student magazine. Under the title ‘We’ve cracked the code’ there was an article showing how students could use a credit card code to phone anywhere (illegally) in the world free. I was to try it out in a few days with disastrous results. A propos of nothing she glanced up and asked enigmatically “Are you into plants?” The look of disappointment on her face suggested she knew the answer and we rolled into Atlantic City in silence.
    The first impressions were of a town in decline as I was met at the bus station by James Lincoln. We had grown up in the same street in Leeds, had both got pathetic GCE results and scraped into different colleges. We’d travelled together to the States that summer even though our friendship was in inevitable decline. I had begun to realise that we had little in common apart from being a long way from home. However needs must and he took me to a former brothel which served as the staff quarters of the hotel where he was a bus boy. During my first evening spent drinking with some of the American summer staff who were, like me students, I was assured that if I went down to the staff canteen next morning and said that I was ‘working with Joe in maintenance’ it would be ‘no problem’ and free meals would follow.
    ‘No problem’ was a phrase that thankfully had not yet entered the English lexicon and so seemed to carry an authenticity that would allow me to eat gratis. ‘Hell….no one will even notice’ I was assured. Unfortunately it was a big problem as next morning in the canteen I clearly failed to speak with the required conviction when I mentioned where I was working. Or maybe it was because Joe had quit the night before, possibly having been accused of harbouring freeloading workshy students.
    I walked out onto the famous, if somewhat dilapidated, boardwalk to contemplate my options. It was three weeks and two days into a three months working vacation and I was hungry, hung over, broke and jobless. So of course I did what any self respecting