American Odyssey

By Spencer Hawkridge

'American Odyssey is essentially a road trip story about two friends who work and travel their way around the United States and discover much about the landscape and the culture of America as well as things about themselves. It's a story of friendship and it's also a story of the seductive power of America and a belief that two young Brits had that America was still a land of opportunity if you were prepared to get out there and work hard. They both returned to the United States after their experiences that summer, but only one of them remained...'

• Language: English
• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Release date: Apr 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9782322103539

Spencer Hawkridge

My name is Spencer Hawkridge and I like eating, especially in restaurants, especially when work pays. During the day, I am a teacher of English at an Engineering School in France and I write prose and poetry without knowing I am doing it, which is a good thing because it certainly precludes any possibility that any of my poems will ever rhyme. I write prose and fiction, which is largely based on my own scattered and varied and wandering life experience and it all tends to lead back to me. There is much more I could say about myself and which I am sure you would like to know, but not now. You will just have to read my stories and poems.

Book preview

American Odyssey

American Odyssey

Friendship

Gainful employment – kettles, chickens and demolition!

The University of Wales and ‘Work America’

Stateside

The Phillips Hotel and Wendy’s ‘world of customers’!

The Riptide

Cousin Ray

English or un-English behaviour

Shoes at K-Mart

A painting job

Steve and frisbee golf

The Chevy Van

Buffalo and Niagara

Heading for the West Coast

Mount Rushmore

Cheyenne

Salt Lake City

Destination San Francisco!

Big nature

L.A.

Hollywood

Mexico

Las Vegas

The Grand Canyon

The van’s moving, the van’s upset

Worrying about money

New Orleans

Graceland

Hyattsville

Epilogue

Copyright

American Odyssey

Written by Spencer Hawkridge and illustrated by Gabrielle Evain

Odysseys

Odysseys, adventures, happenings, events in our lives are made as much of others as they are of us. How we end up doing what we do is in large part due to people we jostle, bump into, hug along life’s path and what we choose to make of those collisions of time and fate. Does the pointy-elbowed jostler meet with our liking, do we trust the open-armed hugger or trust them not, does the bungling bumper make us laugh or cringe with embarrassment and does intelligence’s cool breeze turn our heads or meet with diffident disinterest?

Indeed, the inspiration to write this story comes not from myself, but from another who I didn’t even know and who wasn’t even there and forms one of my own life’s unscheduled encounters. And such encounters, such meetings, such people are all part of the tossing and turning and swaying of human destiny, which itself is but the sum of all the fairness, kindness, justice, spite, contrariness and malignance of Chance, of Luck, of Fate. And no amount of money or poverty, no amount of intelligence or ignorance will remove you from their path – for they are all life’s paths.

But anyway, you didn’t come here for a lecture in philosophy or to read John Stuart Mill, so suffice to say that you know when you meet someone who you connect with, who feels right, who seems to have a kindred spirit, and it is these encounters that generally nourish and enrich us and make us feel less alone in the world. This story comes out of one such meeting and a friendship that developed from it and so it is both a story and a journey of friendship. But it is also a story about people, about places and about ‘events’ that shape us, that make us a bit more or a bit less human and which most importantly, make us want to laugh.

This is a story about America - as the more observant will have already surmised - and more precisely, it is about a road trip around America! We live in a world of Americana nowadays, 24/7 it is all around us; we hear it, we see it, we listen to it, we read it, we eat it and walk right by it!. Love it or hate it, you certainly can’t ignore it!

Growing up in drizzle-grey Seventies England, empire lost and semi-comatose, I wasn’t conscious of the fact that ‘Pax Britannica’ was but a decaying corpse and America was imperceptibly seeping into the lifeblood of an England in urgent need of transfusion!

But if I had had the intellectual capacity aged 10 to stand back and analyse all the cultural cues and references that filled my everyday life and wild, war-inspired adventures I would have seen ‘AMERICA’ writ large everywhere. Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Jimmy Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Steve McQueen, The Great Escape, Star Wars, Jaws, Muhammed Ali, Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye and Tamla Motown, hamburgers, hot-dogs, coke, Woolworths, the Ford Motor Company, King Kong, the statue of liberty, John Glenn and Neil Armstrong. These were the cultural references that rang out in my ears and filled my gaze with exciting images of an English world that was like my own, but so completely different from my own. America was faster, brighter, more modern, it had cars that were bigger and shinier, buildings that were higher than they needed to be and everything spoke of smiling comfort. This was a world where the sun always shone, fridges could be stepped inside, air-conditioning was standard and most important of all, the goodies always won!

It’s little wonder that as I grew up I continued to look across the Atlantic where everything was accelerated and futuristic and imagine that adventure laid there if only I could somehow get myself out there.

Friendship

Like many paths we take in life and adventures we have along the way, my American adventure was born of a friendship which started at the celebrated Hastings College of Art and Technology. Aaron and myself were studying for our A’levels and we were both pulled towards the same anti-matter of the absurd, the ridiculous, the hilarious and the wonderfully eccentric which for many simply passed as the ‘ordinary’ and ‘everyday’. We both instinctively tuned into the humour and comedy of it all and it was in the company of one such glorious eccentric that we found the same common narrative and reveled in the almost surreal, but ultimately loveable and human face of Mr Mitackis, Teacher of Law.

Pr---------eeee--------ma Faaaac----------ciieeee! The Police present their case to the Crown Prosecution Service who then decide if there is sufficient ‘prima facie’ evidence to bring about a successful prosecution. We all rejoiced when Mr Mitackis over-annunciated these wonderful Latin phrases with such relish and if he imported nothing else to us in his Law classes, he did at least make us realize that English Law is remarkably human and idiosyncratic and like humans, sometimes mysterious. We had great fun with ‘Mens Rea’, ‘Ratio Decidendi’ (which I think was Mitackis’ personal favourite as there were a lot of heavy syllables for him to leap around on!) and ‘Compos Mentis’ (which he certainly wasn’t!) in our coffee break as we sought to caricature what was already a caricature with highly affected Shakespearean flourishes!

It was probably a mutual recognition of Mr Mitackis’ comic potential and the fact that we found ourselves laughing at the same moments that first formed a close connection between myself and Aaron Persaud. We both revelled in Mr Mitackis’ reconstructions of crimes, whereby a street mugging would be graphically reenacted by Mr Mitackis (who always wanted to play the criminal!) who would coldly select ‘victims’ from amongst the class to be ‘goshed’ over the head with his invisible ‘gosh’ and he would then grab their wallet (which was in fact his own wallet!) and pretend to run away! Of course