It was the summer of 1985.

This was a remarkable achievement within itself, ME, Richard Windsor, coming to America!! Without going nutso on my background, the chances of me ever coming to America were with either of two hopes…. Bob Hope and no hope.

Many thoughts went through my mind today about what I should write about, and believe it or not this wasn’t one of them until about ten minutes ago. As I turn 46 years old today I had considered writing about the last 12 months of my life, but having lost my Brother recently, and having had the most hateful thing said to me 9 months ago in all of my 45 years to date, I decided that there would be too much negativity in that reflection. The truth of the matter is, I am happier now than I have ever been in my life, and I thought that I would share a positive tale, albeit a primarily vanilla one.

It was twenty four years ago, mid June 1985, when this twenty two year old quit his job, packed some clothes into a back pack, and decided to come to America to work for the summer. So I’m stood there at that bus stop waiting for my bus to take me on my journey. The old man had woken me up before he left for work that day at like 6am or whatever time it was, and I’m all set to leave at around 8am.

Now I had always worked the summers, mostly where my Father had worked, so I was more than familiar with his delivery route for the bakery he worked for. I had worked with him probably a hundred or more times on that very route. The closest store to where I was waiting was the last stop on his route, which was generally 9am. So imagine my surprise when at 8am this lorry (truck) is bombing down the street. I can only imagine what he was thinking as he tried to get there, changing his whole delivery route, perhaps even realizing that he was going to be an hour or two late back to the depot after his round was over.

His reason for doing this? Just so that he could come and wish me luck on my travels, a strange occurrence for a man who never outwardly showed any love. To give you an idea, Feb 6^th 1998, I flew to England to surprise my father on his 70^th birthday, even though I arrived a day late. After meeting my Mum to get the house keys I walked in to surprise him and shook his hand for the very first time in my life. That was the closest affection that had ever been displayed between the two of us. Exactly one week later, Feb 13^th 1998, he approached me as I was getting ready to leave. He extended his hand and said “Have a safe trip, don’t leave it so long before you come home again”, then he left. As I left the house fifteen minutes later I saw his car at the end of the street, he had waited there until I got into my Brother’s van for the journey to the airport. That was the last time I ever saw him, he died the following year.

So anyway, his frantic attempt to come and meet me at the bus stop was successful. He wished me luck and handed me a ten pound note so that I could have a good breakfast that day, and to wish me luck. It was only ten quid, but that was probably a significant portion of his own money for that week. With that ten pound note he also gave back to me a little piece of my heart. It is probably the most important memory I will have of my Father until the day I die. I have his cigarette case that his Father had given to him on his 21^st birthday back in 1949, and the memories I just shared that will give me positive thoughts of him.

America, here I come!!

I am 22 years old, by the standards of most 22 year olds I have had a wealth of life experience, or so I thought!! What I had actually had was a wealth of survival skills taught to me, lessons that I will always be able to carry with me and use. As for life experience though, nah, I was still much greener than the grass outside your own front door. My life experience revolved around the Old Town Teds, I knew very little about life outside of going to shows, getting drunk and hanging around with a bunch of likely lads.

This might be a shock to most who know me, but when I first came to America I was shit scared of the place, as much as I wanted to come here. My exposure had been shows like Starsky and Hutch, Columbo, Barreta etc, plus whatever movies I had seen displaying the bad side of America. The early days of rap were no help either, watching videos of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five didn’t exactly pump confidence into me that life in America was good.

I am at the airport with a backpack and a ten pound note, and a dream!! Nervous would be an understatement, other than a few weekend trips to Le Havre in France for some Rockabilly shows I have never left England, nor have I ever been on a plane before and the thought of it scares me stupid.

Once we are on the plane it becomes clear pretty quickly that I am ‘Billy No Mates’, a lot of the folks already seem to know each other, how I have no damn idea, did they all apply together? This is a primarily Bunacamp flight so there are 100 or more young Brits coming to the States, some are quiet, some are overly loud, most are showing a good deal of excitement. Me, I spend most of the flight smiling should someone look at me or just simply looking out the window at the clouds below us. It’s strange I know, but I had no idea that planes flew above the clouds and I was fascinated by it.

Had this not been my first flight I would have panicked as the land of North America came into view. Our first port of call was to land in Gander, Newfoundland in Canada. Ignorance is total bliss, should I be on a flight nowadays that makes an unscheduled landing in a country that we weren’t supposed to be landing in; you wouldn’t be getting my fat ass back on that plane for love nor money!! To this day I have no idea why we landed, why they drove stairs up to meet us getting off the plane, why we sat in Canada for 2 hours at an airport bar being served by Inuit’s while 30 or so people milled around the plane that was being refueled. All I know is that I have probably made the transatlantic trip about 20 times in the last 22 years and this was the only time that we stopped at Gander, Newfoundland.

America is in sight!!

Remember, this is 24 years ago so there are only certain things that I remember. I remember the landing that’s for sure, I don’t think that the pilot landed, he more so threw the plane onto the runway  When we disembarked it is the time that I am the most nervous. Immigration is coming up and the little puppy has some secrets that were never declared on the visa application. As far as I am aware, any arrests prior to the age of nineteen are considered ‘Time spent’, that means that any petty arrest or custodial sentence are sealed and your record is ‘clean’. I didn’t feel that it was any more important to declare anything AFTER I turned nineteen either, as far as I knew, everything was ‘Time spent’.

It was remarkably easy to get through and there was a happy chappy at the other end holding a Bunacamp sign so we are on the right track. I still haven’t come across anyone going to the same camp as me, in fact, it seems that I am the only one going to Ohio, everyone else seems to be located in NY, NJ or PA. In my possession I have a ticket from Port Authority bus terminal to Toledo, Ohio.

We are bussed to the YMCA, our digs for the night. That’s the one on 34^th St between 9^th and 10^th. We have an orientation and though I don’t remember the exact instructions, I of course now know which directions we were told that we could and which we couldn’t go that night. East and North are a no no, West and South are fine. You have to remember that this is 1985 as well, 42^nd and 8^th are whore/crack city; to the East is Hell’s Kitchen. So Billy No Mates here ventures out by himself, walks around a few blocks, then goes back to the Y not having gone further than a few hundred yards.

The following morning they have breakfast for us, a bagel and a cup of coffee, each individual had already received a card telling them what time they were expected to be in the lobby. The organizational part was actually pretty good considering that they had over a 100 people to direct. At the first table I am sent to the table at the end of the room, an ominous sign I thought. At that table I am provided with all the directions and support I need, how to get to Port Authority and most importantly, the DO’S and DON’TS while there!! It’s only eight blocks away, you go straight there, you don’t answer anyone and head to gate xx, they had all the info for us, it was great. Of course, they could have been a little less melodramatic as I was already shitting myself. The final part though to this orientation was that they told me to wait as there is one other person going to the same camp as I, a girl called Anna.

It may come as a surprise, but I actually remember the time that the bus was leaving Port Authority. Our bus was to leave at 8.30am to start us on our journey. The journey for Anna and I though started at 7.45am, that was the time that we both stepped out of the Y and that we were on our own. This was it, there was no more molly coddling, we were now in a foreign country and we were on our own with a backpack apiece and a set of instructions on how to get to the bus station. It probably doesn’t sound like much, but to be a 22 year old in a foreign country with a pretty 19 year old companion was pretty daunting, especially as we knew that we were walking towards one of the worst pits that America had to offer at that time. Think about it, you are given a ticket and then you are on your own in a culture that is foreign to you, it was a nerve wracking experience that’s for sure. We did make it to the bus though, in one piece I might add, and we sat there waiting for it to depart and send us on our travels. The only initial communication that I remember was that we decided that we would split the window seat every 3 hours or so. The one thing that had yet to set in was that the journey from NY to Toledo was going to be a massive 17 and one ½ hours!! We were going to arrive in Toledo at roughly 2am in the morning where the director of our camp was going to meet us. Anna and I of course were expecting crackhead Joe and his 50 mates to be waiting for us in Toledo at 2am.

The New York City skyline is one of those memories that never leave you when you see it for the first time; we crossed onto the NJ turnpike with our mouths in awe at its beauty. The journey was still exciting until we hit some place in Pennsylvania for the first pick up stop, that’s when all of those videos we had watched seemed to come to reality. It was only a pick up, but the first proper look at a ghetto was very scary. We didn’t say much, we just stared out at the desperation.

So it went on. Can you possibly imagine being stuck on a greyhound bus for 18 hours when the furthest you have ever done in a car was about 3 hours? Even to this day I have never had such a boring day in my whole life. Miles of open road and a girl I have only recently met. Thankfully something happened that killed some of those hours, Anna fell asleep. No big shakes I know, but she fell asleep on me. I was soon perched with my back against the window with Anna’s head resting on my chest. It was only for a couple of hours but I was one very content man.

The rest of the journey is something that I don’t remember, it was boredom to the highest degree broken up by the closeness of a pretty girl who had given up the personal space requirement within two hours, as we arrived in Cleveland it was like her and I had been friends since we were kids.

The last memory of the journey itself was at the bus station in Cleveland. I don’t know exactly what time it was, but it was late at night and we had to wait a period of time to change buses. The thing I remember is what I guess would substitute for some type of homeless lounge, a bunch of seats surrounded by filth and some poor scrubs trying to find a place to sleep for the night. What was memorable though was that the seats had miniature TV’s on the back of them. They were black and white and were perhaps a 5″ screen and you could put a quarter in to get 15 minutes of grainy television streamed to you. The computer age is a fuck of a long way from those days, but I had never seen anything like it in my life.

The balmy night had set in as we boarded the bus for our final journey. Anna went to the rest room to change and returned wearing loose grey sweatpants, now call me a weird freak all you want but they turned me on like no tomorrow. So my last memory of the journey is staring at her butt as she cuddled up to me and thinking of a way to relieve the erection that was threatening to do some clothing damage.

We arrived in Toledo as expected and the camp director was there to greet us with a chirpiness that both of us could have done without at 2am. There was still 20 more miles or so to go to his place but we had made it, we had been in America a little more than 24 hours and I already had a mountain of memories to carry with me the rest of my life. Those memories are nothing compared to the awakening of one Richard Windsor though as I plied my life skills in a foreign land for the very first time.

There wasn’t much of a rest as the next day we were at the camp, though I don’t think we actually did any work, it was more of a meet and greet. This is Camp Courageous in Whitehouse, Ohio, a summer camp for children and adults with learning difficulties, and more importantly, a female to male ratio of like two to one 🙂 I shared a cabin with 5 other staff, the 3 of us guys in the front of the cabin, all of the campers were in the middle, and 3 girls roomed at the back of the cabin. I’m guessing it was designed as another male room but there just wasn’t enough males working at the camp. Being that we all saw each other from 7am until midnight every day we all became very good friends, which as you can imagine was a pretty fun ride. Pretty much every morning during the raising of the flag they were lowering the flagpole and handing back the panties to the girls who had the misfortune of having had hers put up there the night before by one of us 3 jocks.

It was also during this time that I first became aware of the subject, birthday spankings, and of course managed to give my first ever one at the camp that year. I can’t even remember when it happened or who it was, but I do recall some girl standing on a chair while the camp director used a witch’s style broom to brush away at the girl’s bottom. I remember clearly that it was totally symbolic though, but it was enough to satisfy my curiosity and I asked one of the guys that I shared a cabin with what it meant. At that point I was scared stiff of bringing such a subject up to a girl. The girl I hooked up with that year was the girl who got the birthday spanking, done from a standing position as she leant forward in front of a few friends. It was nothing to write home about, but when you look at the amount of bottoms that I have spanked over the years, at least she can say that she was the first in America.

Three months later and we were sitting around a campfire as one of the counselors sat with a guitar and sang the camp farewell song. So much happened during those three months, so much for the good. Being an eccentric character in England is a pretty tough thing for a young man, when I came to America I could be as crazy as I liked and was seen as a novelty rather than a freak. Two years later I moved to America permanently, and as I turn 46 years old today I reflect that I have now spent almost half of my life on these shores, and as my awakening happened in 1985, pretty much all of my adult life has been spent in America.