A benefit night in an east-side warehouse, where the cover charge goes to picketing nurses and nobody will let a stranger stand alone
Dancing for the Strike Fund: A Londoner on an American Night Out
It is one in the afternoon and I am eating toast in bed with the curtains shut. Last night I danced for five hours in a warehouse in the industrial east side, in aid of a strike fund, and at some point I told my entire life story to a woman in the queue for the toilets whose name I never learned. I have things to say about all of it, particularly the second part.
The Cause
There is a dispute on at one of the hospitals. I will not go into the details, since they will have moved by the time this is read, but people I know from the tenants’ union are on the picket line, and a strike is expensive. When you are out, you are not paid. So the rest of us raise money to cover rent and groceries for those who are.
In Tottenham this would be a bucket and a raffle in the upstairs room of a pub. Meat tray. Bottle of whisky. Somebody’s dad on the microphone. Here it is a dance night. A collective of DJs gave their time, somebody knew somebody with a warehouse, and every dollar on the door went into the fund. Fifteen dollars, or whatever you could manage, or nothing if you were skint, which is a phrase they use here: nobody turned away for lack of funds.
I gave twenty and felt like a philanthropist.
The Room
A concrete box near the railway yards, with a loading door, a sound system on scaffolding and a bar made of pallets selling cans of a fizzy water with a hint of grapefruit, because half the room does not drink. Fairy lights. A banner the length of one wall, hand-painted, with the name of the union on it. A table by the door where you could sign up for picket shifts between dances.
About three hundred people at the peak. Nurses in their scrubs straight off the line, still wearing the placards round their necks like enormous necklaces. Students. Old trade unionists in denim jackets covered in badges. A great many people in dungarees. I have been to clubs in London where you could not get in if your trainers were wrong. Here a man of seventy in a fleece was dancing next to a girl with a shaved head and a tutu, and nobody looked twice.
The music was good. House, mostly, the warm kind. At midnight they stopped it, and a nurse of about fifty got up on a crate with a microphone and said, in two minutes, what it is like to look after nine patients alone on a night shift. Then she said thank you, and the bass came back in, and three hundred people roared. I have studied solidarity for six years. That was the first time I had felt it in my sternum.
The Americans Will Not Leave You Alone
Now the cultural report. I arrived by myself, since my flatmate had a cold. In London that is a perfectly normal thing to do in a club. You stand at the edge. You dance a bit. Nobody speaks to you and you speak to nobody, and at the end you go home having had a lovely time among nine hundred strangers. It is one of the great freedoms of a big city.
I had been in that warehouse for under four minutes when a woman I had never seen came up to me, beaming, and said: hi! I love your jacket! Where are you from?
I looked behind me. She meant me. I said London. She said, oh my gosh, and called her friends over, and I was introduced to six people, each of whom told me their name, their job and how they knew the others. One of them hugged me. I had known him for ninety seconds.
This happened all night. In the bar queue. On the dance floor, between records. A man asked how I was finding Portland and then waited for the answer. A woman complimented my accent as though I had made it myself. Everybody wanted to know what had brought me here and listened to the reply. By two o’clock I had given my email address to a nurse, a welder and a person who makes kombucha.
The Toilet Queue
And then the toilets. There were two, for three hundred people, so the queue was twenty minutes. The woman in front of me turned round and said, I am so sorry, this line is wild, how is your night going? And I do not know what happened. Perhaps it was the grapefruit water. I told her. I told her about my thesis and that I miss my mum and that I am not sure I am clever enough for the doctorate and that I had a row with my supervisor in the spring. In a queue. To a stranger.
She held both my hands. She said, you are doing amazing. She said it with total sincerity, looking me in the eyes. Then it was her turn and she went in, and I never saw her again.
If you did that in a queue in Wood Green, the person would assume you were about to ask for money. I stood there feeling as though I had been lightly mugged by kindness.
What I Make of It
I have thought about it all morning. My first instinct, as a Londoner, was suspicion. Nobody is that nice. It must be shallow. And sometimes, in shops, it is: the have-a-great-day that is in the script.
But this was not that. These people came out on a wet Saturday to give their money to strangers on a picket line. The friendliness and the solidarity are the same muscle. They talk to you in the queue for the same reason they show up at the hospital gate at six in the morning with coffee. They simply assume other people are their business.
Where I come from, we show we care by leaving each other alone and then turning up without a word when it counts. My nan never once told a neighbour she was doing amazing. She did leave a shepherd’s pie on the step of every house in the street that had a death. It is a different dialect of the same thing. I think I may need both.
Naturally, a Piece
I dictated it into my phone on the night bus, which here is a tram, and which was full of dungarees. A British woman, the report says, has been admitted to hospital in Oregon suffering from acute exposure to friendliness after being asked how her night was going. Doctors describe her condition as awkward but stable. She is understood to have said sorry eleven times. Striking nurses broke their picket to treat her and then asked where she was from.
My editor at The London Prat likes it but wants it clear that the nurses are the heroes of the thing and the Englishwoman is the fool. That is the house rule, set out in what satirical commentary is, and what it is not: the joke falls on the narrator before it falls on anybody on a picket line. I have added a line in which she tries to tip them.
It will run on the British satirical news page, and a longer one from the American side is going to Bohiney. I also explained to my editor what I had been called by a fellow at the bar when I said I was knackered. He thought it was the most wonderful word he had ever heard. I sent him the paper’s guide to Cockney rhyming slang and I fear I have created a monster. He texted this morning to say he was cream crackered and to ask if he had used it right. He had.
Afterward
They announced the total at the end, from the crate. A little over six thousand dollars. That is rent for several families for a month. The room went up like a goal had been scored.
I have a picket shift on Tuesday at six. I am bringing a flask and I am going to try, as an experiment, asking a stranger how their morning is going. I may need a lie down after. The diary is on this site, and my work is here.
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