Dallas

I’d never been more than a hundred miles away from home. I was a Michigan kid who grew up in Plymouth, near Detroit. Very prim and proper place, upper middle class. My dad was a company man who worked himself up to manage a small factory in the area. Mom left when I was ten and he remarried twice. You can imagine I spent my rebellious teens hating on the guy. In hindsight, he was doing his best. He deserved a chance at happiness for himself, but back then I took it as a betrayal.

By college time I was ready to go to California or England or anywhere as far from him as I could. That’s the first and only time he put his foot down. Looked me in the eye like never before — this was a very quiet, reserved man, mind you — and said: “As long as I’m paying, you’re going to U-M.”

I liked to play tough, sure, but I wasn’t ready to go out on my own. I also wasn’t above being petty, so when he said I could “study the undiscovered tribes of the Amazon” for all he cared, I took him up on it. 

So Ann Arbor it was, some twenty miles from home, getting a degree in anthropology and planning my escape.

I was good at it too. Academia fit me like a glove. I buried myself in the books and by the time I was twenty-six, I got a small doctoral grant from the university to go to Romania and find out what makes the ex-communists click. There was a lot of corporate interest around Eastern Europe back then, so the money didn’t come with too many strings attached. What I did know, was that I had to go deep. “Don’t bother with the big cities, we got those already,” my coordinator told me.

So in the summer of ’97, my brain boiling in my skull and my nostrils full of the smell of engine grease, I got off the train in a backwater city close to the former Soviet border. 

I remember standing on the platform and just looking at things, the way you only do when you feel you’re in a moment that happens once in your life. I must have been in Wayne County Airport a hundred times and I have no clue what’s on the floor, but the image of the cracked, yellowish tiles on that train platform is burned in my memory. Above me, a sign in big white letters over a blue enamel plate said: BRAILA. 

That was the name of the city. I landed there through connections at the University of Bucharest. I’d asked for out-of-the-way, and they had provided it. My “handler” was one Mrs. Bigu, director at the House of Youth, a legacy communist institution that dealt with cultural activities deemed less than serious. I wasn’t bothered. I thought I’d find my own stories.

Someone should have been waiting at the station to take me there. I looked around for a sign, a piece of paper with my name on it, somebody waving, but everyone seemed to ignore me and go about their business.

So I shouldered my bag and waded through the crowd going in and out of the station building, a high-ceilinged concrete hall painted in an eye-watering shade of pink. Every nook of this offensively cheerful place was filled with some sort of business. A ticket office, a newsstand, a small shop that looked like it stocked anything and everything, a man in a corner who sold large pretzels from a tray that he had propped up on a couple of old beer crates. The people around me were going in and out with colorful plastic bags, taking places to queue for the various offerings.

I came out the other end of the hall to a wide plaza centered by a Soviet-style concrete fountain that looked like it hadn’t worked for decades. Going into the sun was a quick reminder of how damn hot it was. Humid, sticky heat, the kind that keeps the smell trapped within it, like an invisible cloud of stink that follows you around. The five hours I’d spent in the un-airconditioned train made my own body contribute to the problem.

I wasn’t going to wait. I knew the name of the place and a few Romanian words, which should be enough to get a taxi. There were plenty waiting out in the street so I approached one of the drivers.

“Buna ziua,” I said, which was good day in Romanian. “Casa Tineret?” I asked. House of Youth.

The man was leaning on his car, smoking. He assessed me from top to bottom as he pushed two thick columns of smoke out through his nostrils.

“Strain?” he asked.

I did not know the word.

“Foren?” he asked again.

“Foren?… Foreign! Yes! I mean, da!” I blurted.

The man looked unimpressed.

“OK. Foren, red car,” he said, pointing at the front of the line of cars, where a red taxi was parked.

“Red car? Why?” I asked. He just stared at me and pointed again towards the red taxi. It didn’t seem like he was open to say more.

Was this a trick they played on tourists? Or a hierarchical structure where they took turns taking the foreign, more lucrative clients? I thought maybe that was something I could explore here. I was, in the end, an anthropologist. One that at the moment, didn’t have a choice. So I approached the first taxi and repeated my rehearsed “Hello, House of Youth” piece, this time through the car’s open window. The driver, a bulky guy in a sweaty AC/DC t-shirt gave me a wide smile. 

“Yes,” he said. “Come in!”

His English was better than the last guy’s, though not by much. I’d barely managed to throw myself and my duffel in the back when he started the car and drove off in a rush. The inside had the same smell of hot plastic and engine grease as the train but all the windows were down and the wind coming in felt good on my sweaty face.

“England?” the driver asked suddenly.

“No,” I said. “America.”

“America? Ohoo. Dallas!”

“Dallas? No… umm… Michigan. Detroit.”

“No, no!” he waved me off. “Dallas! Television.”

It took me a moment to get it.

“Ah yes!” I said. “Dallas!”

“Yes,” the driver smiled at me in the mirror. “J.R. best!”

That was their image of America, an 80s soap about oil tycoons in cowboy hats. No wonder people didn’t pay me any mind; I looked nothing like J.R. Ewing.