"I could be your cute American..."

Archive (30th September 2010)

I have received a proposal of marriage.  Her name is Linda and she’s a singer.  She’s American and older than me.  She listens to 104.5FM and likes Bill Cosby.  That is pretty much everything I know about her.  I have never met her although we have spoken briefly over the phone (with thousands of people listening in) and she has sung for me.  She knows very little about me.  She just likes the sound of my voice.

The publicity trail for my book has followed an unusual path to get me to the point where strange unknown women are asking me to marry them.  It starts over lunch with StrayCat.  Those of you who have actually read the book (and I’m very grateful to you both) will recognise StrayCat as the pink puffball skirted, pop sock-clad skating coach of Central Coast Roller Derby team, the roller skaters of Roller Skaters and Wine Makers.  Having hung out almost exclusively with wine makers since my return to California, I think it’s time I restored the balance.

Over the back table of a downtown sandwich bar, I read StrayCat the chapter of the book in which she features.  I am very nervous.  One of the things about writing a book about real people, especially one in which you try to be funny about them, is how they might react when they hear about it.  “What’s with the Burt Reynolds thing, Nick?  I don’t look nothin’ like Burt Reynolds,” Keith Kelsey has said to me a dozen times and there are a couple of Anglophiles that have now found at least one English person they’re not so keen on.  I’m just waiting for the moment when those two San Luis Obispo gun sellers discover that I call them Goldilocks and Cinderella and I come home to discover the Airstream peppered with .22 calibre bullet holes.  I am hoping that StrayCat will see the funny side of my depiction of her favourite game.

Thankfully she is as good a sport as I’d hoped she was and laughs all the way through, interrupting to fill me in on little embellishments about her team mates, until I wish I’d had her sitting in the trailer with me when I first wrote the thing.  She is determined to help me publicise it.  Who better than a skating coach to help get things rolling?  By that night, the book is all over roller derby blogs and Facebook groups and has received more tweets than a costumed Jonathan Ross knocking on doors at Halloween. 

A text from StrayCat the following day sends me back to the Paso Robles Event Centre, where the Central Coast Roller Derby announcers, Chica Libre and Senorita Cheeba are expecting me.  As I arrive, the bout is kicking off, in the ‘sleeves-rolled-up-mayhem-ensuing’ way that you’d describe events on a Newcastle City Centre street at closing time.  Even the referees are sporting the black and white Zebra stripes of the Newcastle United strip.

Many of last year’s heroes are at the centre of the fray.  ‘10 Cent’ is good value as pivot while ‘Golden Delicious’ streaks through the pack in a flurry of elbows, doing nothing to keep the doctor away.  Shockingly violent in pink, ‘Zona Hussy’ is sent back to the sin bin by another Zebra referee.  I can’t spot Resident Vixen but somehow that makes me feel safer. 

A host of new challengers have arrived to jam with the Central Coast girls and as usual the names tell most of the story.  Gwen Tsunami, Elle Bow Again and Geni Cydal loop the track vigorously while outside Marilyn Gun Hoe and Retro Bution are psyched up by their coach. 

Chica Libre shamelessly promotes the book over the tannoy with every pause in play, “We’ve got this great book, Roller Skaters and Wine Makers, by our friend Neck Lennurd.  Say hey to Neck everyone.  I don’t know about you, Cheeba, but I reckon this would make a great Christmas gift for ALL my family.”  By the end of the first bout, the people of Paso Robles are probably heartily sick of this book and this Neck guy but I reckon that if Chica Libre has a big family I am still well ahead of the game.

I have a copy of the book which I get everyone who features in it to sign.  Well, nearly everyone.  We’ve discussed the gun selling contingent and, even more deadly, Chuck Liddell is unlikely ever to sit down with me for a cosy reading and signing.  The closest we came was when I approached him at the Thursday Farmer’s Market and he cut me off with a nod sharper than a shiv.  He’s a lot taller in the flesh than you’d think.  I’d put somewhere between nine and fifteen feet tall.

Of course Chuck’s not the only sporting hero in San Luis Obispo with an autograph.  I already have Stray Cat’s paw print in my book, not to mention Cheeba’s and Chica Libre’s.  And after the first bout, Cheeba takes me off to meet the team, brandishing a list of every player mentioned in the book.  Totally star-struck, I am led from Cindafnrella to Golden Delicious to the stunning 10 Cent.  April Fools signs with a snarl and StrayCat later tells me that she will have been furious that I managed to photograph her.  I am even brought to Resident Vixen, sitting out the bout as she is expecting a baby.  ‘Are you having a Derby Girl or a Zebra,’ I want to ask but something about her, even sedate on a rug, cows me and I proffer the book through an awkward silence.

I meet Big Joe, the head of ‘Sk8curity’, and his partner Iva, the Ivanator.  They are now Facebook friends and came along to a ‘Signing and Wining’ Event I held in an art studio in Paso Robles, bringing with them a girl who introduced herself as ‘Melon Brawler’. 

However, the most exciting was Zona Hussy, described in the book as ‘my personal favourite’ for so many reasons.  In the flesh, there’s nothing of her fearsome track persona about her.  She seems much calmer and sweeter and I am instantly smitten.  StrayCat tells me Zona Hussy is getting married soon and I wish her well (and consider going off and joining some foreign legion somewhere.  To forget).

The momentum continues.  The following Monday, Cheeba is still wondering how else I can promote the book.  ‘Did you know I work in local radio?’ she asks me over email.  Fifteen minutes later, I have turned up at the offices of American Radio and she has introduced me to Adam Montiel, host of the Up and Adam in the Morning Breakfast show on 104.5, who books me to appear on his show that Friday.

Adam takes me out for drinks on Wednesday, to get to know me.  I am enormously impressed by his work ethic.  I bet Michael Parkinson doesn’t drink shots with Clive James before a show.  If Jeremy Paxman had bought Michael Howard a beer or two, he might not have had to ask him the same question fourteen times.  Is this an American thing?  Do Jay Leno and Larry King and Oprah Winfrey meet their interviewees in the bar beforehand?  Is that what went so wrong for David Letterman with Crispin Glover?

Adam’s technique works.  By the time I arrive at his studio at 7am on the Friday morning, we have got to know each other.  I’ve met his dog Ally and heard his Chuck Liddell stories and his views on Californian girls.  He’s read some of my book, seen my trailer, asked me my views on California and its girls.  The interview is no longer making me nervous despite a late night at the previous evening’s Full Moon Ride.  In fact, it is just like sitting down at the bar of the Black Sheep with Adam, except we are not drinking and there are two large microphones between us and a red sign that says ‘ON AIR’.  Despite his extensive research, Adam leaves nothing to chance and a board behind my head reminds him who I am, what my book is called and that it’s about the Central Coast.  Adam introduces me and over the course of the next two hours, between songs, we chat like two old friends, which of course we now are.

He asks me about the book, about writing it and publishing it. He persuades me to read his favourite bit (suspiciously near the beginning) and laughs heartily.  He makes me tell his listeners what brought me to San Luis Obispo and how they can get a copy of the book.  He involves me in a rather disastrous telephone wind-up when his listener is so confused by my accent pretending to be an English butler that she hangs up within twenty seconds.  He overlooks my shameless plugs for my friends’ bookshops and wineries and gets me to gush about Derby girls. 

Adam makes me relax and that’s when I am foolish enough to make the kind of joke on the air that, if I ever do meet and fall in love with and marry and move in with an American girl, will have the immigration people breathing over my shoulder and asking me awkward questions about toothpaste brands and bathroom habits for the rest of my life.  Bear this in mind, any American girls who may have entertained such thoughts.  It won’t be easy with me.  Sure, I’ll love you and honour you and all that but there will also be a certain amount of sitting in small windowless rooms showing complete strangers all our holiday snaps.  If you can put up with this, we’ve got a chance.

Adam asks me if I’d like to stay in California and I tell him that I’d love to although I’ll need to find a cute American to marry for my green card.  It’s a fairly crap joke but shortly after the phone rings and the caller introduces herself as Linda and offers to be ‘that cute American’, adding that if she wins the Bill Cosby tickets in the on air competition she’d love to take me with her.  Adam and I exchange horrified glances over the table.  It is the first moment of hesitation I’ve seen in him.  ‘Er, how do we know you guys would be suited, Linda?’ he asks.  ‘How old are you?  What are you into?’  Linda admits that she is a ‘fair bit older’ than me but she reveals that she’s into singing and gamely lets herself be talked into belting out a tune for us.  She doesn’t win the Bill Cosby tickets and I feel a slight sense of relief.

In the back bar of the Black Sheep, during one of several follow-up sessions so essential to his work ethic, Adam post mortems the interview with me round a table with half a dozen of his American Radio colleagues. 

While the rest of them squabble over the next round, Jojo from 106.1 WiLD FM and I talk about California girls and relationships.  Now Linda is in my life, I feel like I have something to say on the subject. 

To be entirely honest with you though, I’m not sure I will marry her.  Not without meeting her anyway.  But it’s always nice to be asked.