There were three random moments that led me to England. They’re quite dumb and I suppose that’s what makes them random.
I was a wee lad at the Lone Star Library campus in Barker Cypress playing fútbol by myself on the pitch. A December gray with gusts of winds and chilly by Texas standards. As my mother and sister were book browsing, I was out with my Nike 90 gray and orange football and $15 Academy football cleats in baggy pants and a large, black sweatshirt, the mid-2000s Joga Bonito football fashion. What I most appreciated at the time was that even if Americans didn’t really play football, they had, literally, amazing goals: a beautiful, clean white net with World Cup-standard posts and crossbars.
A damn dream for the tercemundista (third world) football addict.
You ever seen a dream come true?
In Mexico, I was satisfied with two paint buckets or backpacks as the goals or the two scrawny posts at the park with the imaginary net flowing behind it. I think that’s a reason why American men as a team don’t quite perform at the world stage; fútbol is a street sport and years of living in the States I’ve only seen street soccer being played in a hidden concrete pitch in Scalzi Park in Stamford, Connecticut, not ironically by overweight Hispanic men who transform into Maradonas and Pelés on Sundays.
But here, in this Houston suburb, I was Wayne Fookin’ Rooney with an Old Trafford-like goal and the monotone gray skies as my witness. It was the cover of FIFA 2006 with Big Day by Tahiti 80 playing above. I’d pretend — no, I was — Ronaldinho curving the ball into the goal or missing by more than a few meters - with such a childlike wonder that there was just no way I wouldn’t play in the Premier League one day. If only angels were agents taking a look from those immobile, heavy, lugubrious clouds. Or maybe I could be a referee, a unit like Howard Webb. (Funny how even referees gain notoriety in football - is that a thing in other sports?)
But that was the first time I remember, as I picked up the football from behind the goal line, wanting and dreaming that by bloody hell there would be one day when I’d play football in a similar pitch in England under perhaps a grayer sky and never ending rain.
Shot on a severely deficient iPhone 8.
The second relies on my love for witty gangster films and the better Guy Richie movies. I have to thank my older cousin Arturo for showing me “Snatch” at waaaay too young an age.
“Layer Cake”, however, stands out and in particular that scene with Sienna Miller where a pre-James Bond Daniel Craig and Ben Whishaw are at the club. It’s always those two notes on electric repeat, repeat, repeat before Candi Staton’s coy “sometimes I feel like putting my hands up in the air” hits. I can’t quite remember when I first saw this movie but there was a peculiar wish about hearing an English person telling me to “stick around and have a drink” that I’m subconsciously waiting for to happen in real, non-covid life.
Where “baddies” are “fit” and “loaded” is “minted.”
That was it - I was sold. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t take much. It wasn’t Tolkien, King Arthur and definitely not the cuisine that enticed me to come to this island where people drive on the left side and use the metric and non-metric system interchangeably.
Maybe the banter — yes, that because like us Mexicans, and frankly most Latinos, the English have a way with words that is hard to explain to non-foreign Americans. A way in which words and phrases are twisted into understandable absurdity like in Peep Show’s “that wasn’t a dry heave, that was a wetty” and “tell you what, that crack is really moreish” where adjectives are altered and tweaked similar to how us Mexicans make everything “-ito” or “-zote” (chiquito and the famous jabonzote as examples). This parlance reminds me of Mexican humor in ways that I still cannot put into words. And on Peep Show, the finale was anything but final; it was the first time I’ve seen a show with absolutely no character development and it was… fantastic? No grandiose “everyone gets together” moment and happiness will reign eternally sentiment like the typical American sitcom but rather a realistic bleakness that is, if not to be embraced, accepted.
Thirdly, it was that damn Coldplay “Charlie Brown” music video.
I know, I feel the judgment but to me the idea of London came from this video. The gritty, underground scenes where stupid teenagers run amok, the booze flows and somehow someone starts a fire just captivated me. It fucking enthralled me as someone who grew up in suburbia where nice little green lawns are a distinguishing point of pride and reading about planned communities is akin to the middle-age version of seeing erotica for the first time. Soviet-y apartment blocks, insipid wallpapers, the dozen shades of gray that one eventually learns to differentiate and appreciate. A recklessness and defiance of authority I wasn’t born with but had to learn outside of cookie-cutter suburban Houston. Smoke screens, mindless dancing, laser lights. In the words of Gatsby, my life has got to be like this. I yearned for that shit. Just one night like that.
On a drive to the one of four high school homecoming dances I actually went to, I put on this damn song to everyone’s obvious disappointment. Amid the confused looks I just dreamt of that one day where I’d be in a desolate, green pitch, the colorless skies and mist coming down from the mountain’s like the breaths of a hidden god — just that one day.
