In several interviews, former NBA player John Amaechi who recently came out as gay has said that teammates sometimes found him a bit light in the Reeboks, but that they usually laughed it off as a factor of his Britishness.
Well, friends, I return from England with this perhaps obvious bit of news – in fact, the English men that I saw on the street, and interacted with in the public arena, from newspaper hawkers to businessmen, were, as a whole, more fashionably dressed, more polite, more delicate, and more expressive than their American counterparts. They also wore very stylish, often pointy shoes. This all says a lot about why the U.K.’s hooligans feel the need to be especially violent, to belie their national rep as, well, poofters. Say no more, say no more, nod’s as good as a wink, know what I mean?
***
I had one manly, odd, aggressive interaction in London in an “American bar” I happened into one night. The owner/bartender is a former lawyer from New York, so we chatted a bit about the States and the City. The bar was done up to feel kind of New York-y and divey with a touch of kitsch. The crowd was young, kids with a bit too much money to spend on overpriced drinks, couples on first dates, etc.; some were Brits, but the place had a definite international/euro/borderline-touristy. After a while, the proprietor left me to serve a customer and a fellow who must’ve overheard us appeared at my side. Uncle Timmy, me new mate, whom I’d spied earlier at the end of the bar, was clearly one of the few regulars; an actual Londoner, he added a pathetic legitimacy to the joint. He wore a three piece suit that looked to be of high quality but a tad past its prime (everyone else at the bar was wearing some version of urban casual wear). He was about 55, bald, pot-bellied and very, very drunk. Apparently Uncle Timmy had money to spend and seemed to like using it to buy himself a set of young friends: when explaining that Uncle Timmy (and yes, that’s really the name he went by) couldn’t have any more champagne, the bartender mentioned that he had already bought all eight bottles she had on hand that night (At a bar where my Jameson’s rocks cost $15, I can only imagine what all that champagne ran.)
So, here was my new uncle, Timmy, vigorously shaking my hand and telling me about his grand old university days at UPenn and then Wharton. I made the mistake of telling him I’d gone to Columbia, which made us immediate Ivy League compadres of the first order. He continued for a bit about college and then, out of nowhere, and apparently for shock value, asserted that Joe Kennedy had schemed to help Hitler to win World War II – I believe Uncle T was going on the assumption that all Americans love all things Kennedy; he was clearly disappointed when I wasn’t aghast. From there, again out of the blue, he grabbed my hand and my shoulder for about the fifth time in his surprisingly firm grip (he was very physical, Uncle Timmy), and asked, loudly, “Are you a Jew?”
Too taken aback to respond “Yeah, are you an asshole?” I simply replied, “Yes, uncle Timmy,” at which he gripped my hand and shoulder tighter still, refusing to let go, and started in on a new topic, all the while clutching me. It didn’t make much sense, something about “visiting” Israel during “the war” that suggest he’d been a spy for MI-5 or something. All the while, he would neither let go of me nor stop prattling, his grip and passion unflagging as his inebriation. Somehow I remained calm, spectator rather than victim, but my impatience and discomfort were rising. I felt this odd combination of someone wanting to let me know that he had some affection for me as the member of an affinity group (I’ve always been repulsed by such affection, be it for my being a Jew, left-handed, Ivy Leaguer, Stereolab fan, New Yorker, Dude who likes to check out chicks . . . ), but underneath it I felt a hatred coming from him that I’ve never experienced before. It was as if he was actually telling me that he was really a horrible anti-Semite, for which he felt the need to simultaneously apologize and to strangle me for feeling that he needed to apologize; what had he ever done to me or my dirty little money-grubbing tribe to apologize for in the first place? I’m not sure this is what Uncle Timmy was thinking, but that’s how it felt. We were standing near the door – I had been about to leave when he accosted me – and, finally, I yanked his right hand from mine and his left Vulcan-death-grip from my shoulder, shoved him away and cut him off with a hearty, “G’night, Uncle Timmy!” and got my ass out the door. As I walked away, I looked in through the front window as Uncle Timmy, unphased and probably all but having forgotten our entire conversation, wove happily over to his next victim.
