Where to...?

- “But why? Why would we move anywhere?”- Gus, my partner, asked me incredulous. “Is there anything missing for you here?”; “Do you want to be treated like a second rate citizen?”; “Do you want to feel and live what black people do here in Ole Country? Do you want to be part of this experience? Do we have enough money to live abroad like we live here?”. “Well, in that case-why not?”

We stared at the world map and got confused. So many options, for somebody who has no perspective at all. Anything is good, anything is just fine. I felt like the US would be wonderful for us, while Gus was more into the Old Continent. I had been to London so many times before(for work reasons) and had this impression that Londoners were sad. I don’t know why. Maybe read too much Dickens.

Maybe it was my actual experience in Brighton where I passed summer school in my teen years. I couldn’t tell what was summer, I couldn’t tell what was beach-from where I was coming. The landlady lived in a converted stable : she had 03 boys-one older and quiet(defeated?) who worked at a Rolls Royce factory; the middle was a hot 19 year old kid who knocked at old people’s houses asking whether they had anything they wanted to throw away. He would then check his antiques catalogue and resell them to antiques shop or go into auction with them. The smallest was a 12 year old kid who digged the Beach Boys. Ah,yes-there was also the 15 years old girl who(to be honest)just looked like a slut. And there was me and my other colleague from summer school.

So, all in all we were 06 people living in a 03 bedroom apartment, being that my colleague and I had each a separate room for ourselves. How was the equation solved, don’t ask me. I know that Mrs. Bird got a bit angry at me because I wanted to shower every day. She told me it was not needed in England. But we shared something, “me and Mrs. Jones”: we were both Shirley Bassey’s aficionados. So, for a while, we were friends, sharing the kind of stuff that only a forty something woman and a fourteen year old boy had in common back in the early eighties: plenty of drama.

Tell you later.