That Time I Got Deported

PART ONE

2: AM, Heathrow Airport, London, 1980.

I disembarked the United Airlines flight from New York. After a disastrous visit home to my family in New York, I’d traveled over 24 hours to get back to my London flat. I waited in line, and handed over my passport to the official. She was in a crisp skirted uniform, fresh despite the late hour. The terminal was brightly lit. It hurt my eyes. I was on one side of a turnstile, the immigration official on the other. There weren’t many other people at this hour, it shouldn’t take long. (Security was much looser in those days.)

“You’re not allowed into the country. You’ve been ordered out.”

“Come on, it’s two in the morning, I want to go home.”

“You’re not officially in England yet.” She pointed to my side of the turnstile. “We could send you back to New York right now. ”

My passport was stamped with the official order that I was being thrown out of England. I had appealed. During the appeal, I’d been told I could come and go as I pleased. So, I went home for Christmas for the first time in several years. Which had been a catastrophic mistake in many ways.

“I’ve appealed the order, I have the papers.” I produced the letter from the Home Office. “Please, can I go back to my flat? I’ve been traveling for hours.”

“No.”

I waited under the harsh airport lights. When the officer came back, she told me I was to report back to Heathrow the following day at 10 AM. And took my passport.

Exhausted, my head spinning, I returned to my flat. And discovered my flatmate, Dennis, in my bed. With a woman.

There was no way I was getting into his disgusting bed. He probably hadn’t changed the sheets since he moved in. So I fell out on the couch.

Dammit, caught! My father was expecting me to return to America for good, but I had decided to disappear again.

You see, my father was a college president. I grew up on the campus. He and my mother fully expected me to attend that college. I didn’t see independence as moving across the street. In fact, I didn’t want to go to college at all. Thank God, the head of the college drama department remarked, “have you considered going to drama school in London?”

Yes! Not just leaving home, but leaving the country! I was an Anglophile. I worshiped British comedy. Monty Python, Peter Cook and Spike Milligan were my comic idols. In fact tall, handsome Peter Cook was the only man I would consider to father of my child.

But as it turned out, at 16 I was too young to audition for all of the big schools. A tiny school, the Deleon School of the Drama, accepted me. It was a terrible school, run by two crazy old ladies. I dropped out after one term. Now what? I didn’t want to go back to America and my parents, but I only had a student visa.

So, I disappeared. First, I moved out of my current bed-sitter in fancy Kew Gardens to another in a different part of town. Then again to the then crime-ridden, dangerous neighborhood of Islington. I found a two-story flat at the top of a building that was about to collapse. The stair railing fell out of the wall within weeks of my moving in. I reported my landlady for fraud and overcharging rent on a dilapidated apartment.

I lived there until I got caught several years later. During that time my flatmate, Dennis, moved in. He was a pothead with sallow skin that had never seen the sun, buck teeth and a frizzy yellow Afro. He sold pot and hash to the American expat community. Dennis was a member of the “wake and bake” school, gently blowing pot smoke into his friends’ faces to get them up. He was also friends with a Danish couple who sold the most potent hashish I have ever smoked. Once after smoking, I stood in one place for six hours and had no idea I’d done so.

Once he found out I was still a virgin, he waged a campaign to be my first. It was simply wrong in the eyes of the universe that I still hadn’t fucked anyone. But his insistence on washing his sore-covered dick in the sink while I took a bath made it easy to say “no”. As part of my “liberation”, he took photos of me on the toilet, in bed, in the bath. Being an unattractive 250-lb woman I hadn’t had many offers, but somehow I was able to turn him down. I had no idea why he had sores all over his dick. In hindsight, he probably gave genital herpes to most of the female American expats in London.

To be continued…