"You got a ciggy?"

I opened my eyes and tried to blink away the rare English sun. I had been sleeping peacefully.

"What?" I asked.
"A ciggy? You got a ciggy?"

I sat up on the bench and saw a kid - eleven years old at best - hovering above me. He was missing a tooth from the upper row. His hair was closely-cropped on his head. He had on a light jacket that read "New York 89" in yellow letters on the upper left sleeve.

"Did you ask me for a cigarette?" I asked.
"Say, you an American?"
"Yes. How old are you, kid?"
"I'm sixteen."
"Right. How old are you?" I asked again.
"Why are you in England?"
"I'm traveling."
"Yeah, but why here? Why didn't you stay in London?"
"What's wrong with Liverpool?"
"Aw, Leever-pyool is a shithole."
"The Beatles . . ." I started.
"Who?"
"The Beatles. The musical group."
"Oh, yeah. I think my grandfather listens to them."

I tried to tick off other points of Liverpool civic pride, but the truth was, it was a rather grimy and unpleasant place - not all that different from my hometown's neighborhoods that the sweeping tide of gentrification had left behind - once-glorious brick and brownstone now decaying and playing host to pregnant unwed teenagers and grubby men in various states of public drunkenness.

I had stayed the last two nights at the local YMCA, which turned out to be really nothing more than a shelter for the indigent. When Debbie checked me in, she extolled the virtues of the gym and the full breakfast in the cafeteria. It had been awhile since I had a good workout, so I checked out the "gym" right off. Next to a torn bench was an assortment of dumbbells, each ranging from twelve to thirty pounds, none with its necessary mate. Various hooks and rings littered the walls, and if the soiled mats on the floor weren't enough to drive me from the place, the implements on the walls made the room resemble a torture chamber. I decided to skip the workout.

I went to my room and placed my bag on the bed. I looked around. Small, but fine. I locked my bag to the bedpost and went down the hall to check out the shower. I opened the plastic curtain and saw a puddle of bronzed urine. I decided to skip the shower.

Back in my room, I opened the nicotine-stained curtain and beheld my view. An abandoned factory, lined with a dozen dormer windows, all with cracked glass, smiled back at me. A pair of shoes rested on top of one of the sills. The sky was leaden and threatening to make the day gloomy. I was in Liverpool. Why was I in Liverpool?

Of course, there was the Beatles thing. And I had been a fan since my earliest years, when memories formed of sitting in a sun patch on the carpet of my parents' Washington, D.C. living room listening to The White Album and Abbey Road. But beyond that, there was something magical in the name Mersey - that lyrical-sounding river that bisects Liverpool. Something of Gerry & The Pacemakers' refrain of "Ferry across the Mersey . . . and there I'll stay," had been ringing through my head since Glasgow, heading south through the Lake District on my way to Wales. Because I was racing the expiration date on my Britrail pass and watching my money, I wanted to take advantage of the free passage on the ferry to Ireland before the pass ran out. But Liverpool was calling, and I decided, perhaps at the expense of days in Cardiff, to stop.

After a restless night at the Y, and a terrifying breakfast where I witnessed a woman in a bathing cap fling strips of undercooked bacon against the wall while hurling obscenities into the air, I was ready to do my requisite city exploration and move on.

I went to the Beatles Museum, walked around the central market, and choked down a kidney pie by chasing it with pints of Newcastle Brown. After lunch, I sat down on a bench to take advantage of a rare sun shower, and I promptly fell asleep. That was when I was awakened by the boy asking for a ciggy.

"I don't smoke," I said. "And neither should you."
"And what do you know of it, American?"
"I come from the land of tobacco."
"I don't inhale it anyway."
"Our last president said the same thing. Say, shouldn't you be in school?" I asked.
"We had half a day today."

I didn't believe him, but just then, two more young boys and three girls about the same age approached us.

"Tony, what are you doing?" one of the boys asked.
"I'm talking to this American."

Upon hearing what seemed to be a magic word, the kids came running. They began pawing at me, poking and touching as if I was a stuffed museum specimen - Touristus Americanus.

"You drive a limousine?"
"You know Michael Jordan?"
"You friends with Britney Spears?"

I answered yes to all of them. And though they obviously regarded the questions as legitimate when they asked, they looked suspicious when I confirmed them.

"What are you doing here?" Again, the question. Again, no good answer. Surely I couldn't explain the questionable Gerry & the Pacemakers connection.

"Football," was all I came up with. "I love football and Liverpool has a great club, yes?"
The kids scoffed. "We like Manchester United."

Yeah, I couldn't blame them. Everyone likes Manchester United. Even me - Yankee from the land of baseball. They began to climb all over me, to feel, to see if I was real. I pulled a dollar bill out of my pocket. "Here," I said and handed it to Tony. The other kids snatched at it, grabbing and pulling at the fragile bill while Tony fended them off.

"How much is it worth?" one of the boys asked.
"That's like twenty pounds," one of the girls said.
"That's right," I confirmed.
"You want to have dinner at me house?" Tony asked.
"I don't think your parents would like you bringing home some strange American. But thank you."
"Me father won't be home until late. Me sister makes dinner."
"No, thank you. I don't think your sister would like it very much."
"She was just in America."
"Really?"
"She's a student."
"She's very smart," one of the boys added.
"How old is she?"
"Nineteen."

I decided I would dine there that night. "Come on," Tony said, and we were a right parade, all seven of us, walking to Tony's house.

I tried to imagine young John walking the same streets. I saw him meeting up with young Paul, being introduced to young George, going to see the older, but still young Ringo play the drums in his band. But I couldn't really. My visions of the Beatles were limited to hilltop pow-wows with the Maharishi, startled welcomes at New York's Kennedy Airport, screaming and head-shaking at Shea Stadium, and belting out rockers on rooftops; Liverpool seemed fake, a set recreated as the place the mythical Beatles prowled before they were the real Beatles.

But it also seemed very real - too real, actually. It was depressed, and depressing. No one we passed seemed particularly happy. Only my kids smiled, the new friends who had landed the prized catch to show off - here was an American who was in Liverpool. He was here and not in London. Here was someone who had been to New York and Los Angeles. Here was someone who was rich, someone just out of college who didn't have to work but instead could traipse around Europe for half a year. A person who would leave Liverpool on his way to Ireland and then to the continent, who would leave behind this grimy corner of England and dine in Paris, hike in Switzerland, waltz in Vienna. But for now, I was theirs. And they could rightfully show me off.

Old women sweeping stoops looked at us as we passed. "American," the kids would say, each one with a hand clipped to some part of my body.

We got to Tony's house. It was a nice stone house that looked exactly like every other house on the block. He knocked on the door.

"No key?" I asked.
"Keep losing it."

The door opened. A beautiful young woman was standing there, looking a bit older than nineteen. Her brown hair was tied into a loose bun on her head and long strands fell over her face and shoulders.

"Who are you?" she asked.

That's the simplest question in the world of course, but I had no answer. It wasn't an existential conundrum. It was a problem of figuring out who I was to her. The answer was that I was some guy thousands of miles from home, in a town that beckoned to him for no clear reason, and who had sort of befriended her brother. That would sound weird.

"He's an American," Tony said.

The sister's eyebrows raised slightly. I imagined sending young Tony and his friends off while I got acquainted with his lovely sister. I considered moving to Liverpool, where Tony's sister and I would make our plans to escape to London, or Paris, or Buenos Aires. I would rescue her, take her back to America with me. Surely something had gone wrong with the school program and she was forced to come back to Liverpool. Or the money had run out and now she was back home, working as someone's domestic help in the posh district of town - if there was a posh district of town.

"Yeah? You're American, huh?" she asked.
"Yes, ma'am."
"What are you doing here?"
"In Liverpool?"
"What are you doing here at my house?"
"Oh. Uh, I'm not sure. Tony here invited me. Didn't you, Tony?"

The sister was looking at Tony, a look that made it clear that Tony was in some trouble.

"Actually, I sort of followed him," I hastily added.
"That makes you sound like a lost dog," she said.
The kids laughed, Tony included.
"I suppose so," I said. "So, Tony tells me you were in America."
"That's right. For a year."
"So, what happened?"
"I came back home. I hated it."
"Really?"

"This one," she said, nodding her head at her brother, "Wants to move there. Thinks everyone's rich and drives around in limousines. He gets ideas like that from the television. Even though I tell him it's different. Even though I tell him it's a horrid country filled with superficial, rude people." She smiled.

Trashing one's own country is a time-honored tradition. The Argentineans do it incessantly. On my one trip there, I heard it as a constant refrain: "Ar-henteena es boo-shit," yet the one time I said it, I got punched in the neck. Like the Argentinean who hit me, I could say all the smack I wanted about my own asinine government and the imbeciles who ran it, but it's a different thing completely to hear a foreigner say it.

Except that I was the foreigner. And now my lustre was gone, too.

Tony followed the sweep of his sister's outstretched hand into the house. "Goodbye," she said and she closed the door.

I turned around, to face my adoring crowd, but they began to disperse, making plans for meeting the next day before school. They didn't even say goodbye to me. And my brief foray into celebrity was gone.

Oh, well. Liverpool never quite seemed the right place for it anyway.

Questions?
If you want more information about this area you can email the author or check out our Europe Insiders page.