Houston

Hot roads. A car on fire. First prize is a gun.

It's summer when you set foot in America for the second time in your life. The first was on a stopover in Los Angeles, years before, where you passed the time smoking with a shoeless gentleman, and a waitress placed her hand gently on your shoulder as she topped up the gravy on your meatloaf. She was kind and other-worldly, more at home in Fargo or Twin Peaks, or the diner in Nirvana by Charles Bukowski which Tom Waits rumbles through, than the chain restaurant overlooking the LAX departure hall.

Although you've only been here once before, you're in a place you've known since you were a boy. Like every other child who grew up in 1980s Britain, you grew up in America too. Every Saturday you'd sweat through a day of games in which everyone chose their own imaginary gun, and the sole aim was to shout your come-ons and let's-get-outta-heres the loudest. Then you'd sit down to a series of half-hour action shows. The A-Team. Manimal. Battlestar Galactica. Gleaming white-toothed grins, fast cars, impossible leaps, and machine-gunned bullets that never met their targets. Every eagerly awaited film (how many were there back then...two a year? three?) promised the same but on steroids. It didn't matter where or when it was set - New York, the Middle Ages, space - you could be sure of the drawl, the grins, the sassy girls with bright eyes and tight sweaters. The music too. The songs you taped from the radio and the bands that obsessed you in your teens were almost all from that far land. Even the ones from home seemed curiously to be from the same place. America.

America was like the cousin who never settled down and always had some drama or other going on. While the culture and politics of home mumbled away to itself, dusty, slow, as dull as the 6 o'clock pips, America was away on adventures filled with love affairs, fights, and drunken break-ups, and you watched it all from your sofa, and read its letters home in comic books beneath your sheets.

Perhaps that waitress in the airport took pity on you because you were dirty and skinny from your travels. You were travelling at the time, happy and free, just like the kid in the Bukowski poem, only he was heading out and you were heading home. In a way you're going home this time too; to a new one in Houston, Texas.

It's hot. The cab driver who takes you and your family west along the interstate points out two cars on fire, exploded in the heat, like minor tourist attractions. These long Texan roads, like the skies, houses, malls and plates, are like crowbars that break open a vice you didn't know you'd been in. Everything is immense. It takes an hour to get anywhere, and you do so in a car with air-cooled seats and steering wheels, and the places you go to are indoors and air-conditioned too, so that life is pressed into a different vice, a 21st-century bubble protected from the huge reality outside.

The roads are mathematical, the 8-lane highways making right angles north or south when they need to, and occasionally swarming together in snake-like equations at huge junctions. In the suburbs of Katy, where you are to live, they collapse into a tight grid, each crossing decorated with a strip mall or gas station. Months later, waiting at the lights of one such crossing, a driver in a pickup beside you turns and gives you an appreciative smile, nodding along to the bass break in the Sonic Youth track currently thumping from your car. You like his dirty pickup and the dog beside him. A part of you wants to swap seats with him. You consider what it would take to trade in your Jeep for a pickup just like it. You wonder if he has a gun somewhere on board.

In the first few days you take the kids to a rice festival, which amounts to something between a village fête and a homemade theme park. The track that leads you from the gate to the main field is like some gold rush dust street of hawkers, freaks and snake oil merchants. A priest in a black hat and cloak waves a leather-bound bible in your face. A witchy-eyed woman dangles wooden trinkets before your dazzled daughter, and you buy raffle tickets from a stall run by the local fire station. First prize: a gun. This is funny. Outrageous. First prize is a gun when back home it would have been sherry. But you watch the man at the traffic lights, and his truck and his cap and his dog, and the hidden gun, and you wonder how long it would take for you to ease into that world, how long before artillery would stop being funny and become normal.

You're here for your wife's work, which makes you something called a 'trailing spouse'. It's like you're some Egor lumbering along by her Frankenstein, but it suits you. You've just written a book that will go on to do well, and the kids are very young and need your care. You spend the first few weeks in a condominium complex, where you pass the days trying to entertain them while your wife gets used to her new routine. You go to the pool where the residents spend their afternoons drinking (Texans like to party, you learn) and play hide and seek in the small apartment when it gets too hot. During one such game a girl downstairs knocks angrily on the door. You're being too noisy. She's trying to sleep. You apologise, and then again later again to her boyfriend at the pool. He's a big man with a cap and a goatee. 'Does she work nights?' you ask. 'No,' he growls. 'She's just fucking lazy. Ignore her next time.'

You soon move to a proper house. You have Venezuelan neighbours on one side and New Yorkers on the other. Opposite are Iranians, and further up a high caste Indian family, Norwegians further down. Texans inhabit the rest of the houses, one of whom jumps out of his garden in front of you during a walk with your three-year-old son on the tracks behind. He's having a tantrum (your son, not the neighbour) so you're walking ahead of him to let him cool off when suddenly the sky darkens and a towering, skinny man in his 60s appears before you. He has a voice box from throat cancer. 'You can't do that,' he buzzes from the machine pressed tight to his larynx. It's like hornets. He nods at the creek beside the path, and you follow his eyes past your still remonstrating son, to the murky reed-lined water beneath. 'There are alligators in there.' A childhood in Britain has given you no protocol for this kind of interchange, but by this time you have learned that Texans don't appreciate the British instinct for joke or apology in an awkward encounter. Instead, you thank him for his advice, and he grunts 'mm-hmm' before letting you pass, your son now quiet and close behind.

The wildlife is a challenge. Texans engage in a year-round war with it. Cockroaches, spiders, and poisonous caterpillars perish nightly on the moat of pesticide encircling every property. Snakes slither up from the creek at night and become stuck to the adhesive beneath garage doors. Skunks roam the gardens; the smell of their road kill can permeate a vehicle's closed air-conditioning so that you always know when you pass one. Fat dune bugs hover in your face when you're outside in the evening, and paper wasps turn their heads sharply in your direction when you approach. There are fire ants too, a nest of which is disturbed by a friend of your daughter's one day when they play across the road. Neighbours hear her screams all the way down the street, and it takes an hour to convince your hysterical daughter that she hasn't been bitten too.

And those alligators, lurking deep in what's left of the swamp Houston is built on, waiting to pick off your offspring. You see one, actually, out for a run one day. You follow a creek and see one on the other side. It's huge, eyes lazily following you with terrible apathy.

One night you smell something bad coming through the air conditioning vents. It persists, so you call in a pest controller who tells you an opossum has crawled in through a duct and died in the attic. Its corpse is inaccessible so you just have to let it rot away. It does so, slowly, over the following few weeks. The smell is immense, and when it finally eases the entire upper floor of the house is filled with black flies, which you spend an afternoon vacuuming from the air like a lunatic.

Texans are at war with the weather as much as the wildlife. The roads have escape routes that open when there is a hurricane, and every house has a small inner room with no outside walls and where you retreat in an emergency. You witness rainfall so colossal that it floods the roads in 30 seconds. Lightning strikes the road in front of you one day on the way back from your daughter's school, where you do volunteer work in the library, and again in the garden during a midnight storm. This time an emergency alert crackles onto your TV telling you to seek shelter. You wake the kids and take them to the special room, where you sit by the box of equipment and rations you were urged to make upon arrival. This you did with great enthusiasm, filling a sealed plastic chest with everything you could find in Home Depot. The checkout lady eyed you as she scanned ropes, gloves, lights, and waterproofs. 'Emergency supplies?' she asked idly.

You nod. 'Too much?'

She shakes her head grimly. 'I was here for Katrina. No, sir.'

The Texan manner is contagious. From your daughter's sparkling kindergarten teacher to the strangers in bars who strike up easy conversation like you've been there forever. You were worried about being othered when you came here, that you'd be considered an intruder. You've felt like this most of your life, in truth, never having really come from anywhere. But you don't feel it here.

The owner of the local auto repair shop fixes your tyre for free, and what's more, encourages you to come in and watch while he does it. There's nobody else there that afternoon, no customers, no mechanics, just you and him in the quiet workshop, and you talk for over an hour. It's proper talk too, not small, not useless, and when he speaks it's with a slow and gentle rhythm, carefully plucking out the words like the tools from his well-organised bench. When you speak he watches and nods with a deep, cool interest, and you know he's not just thinking of the next thing to say like so many do. He's listening, understanding, connecting. He says to come back whenever you need help with the car, but sadly nothing ever goes wrong with it again.

In Summer there are fairs, in October there are pumpkin festivals and pop-up Halloween shops. So much candy. On the day itself every street, still warm and hazy from the day, fills with tiny ghosts and witches yelping at the animatronics installed in the front gardens of every house. So much sugar. So much fun. And in July, near the time you have to go home, it's Independence Day. The family at the top of the street put on fireworks and a BBQ, and you all gather in their garden eating burgers and drinking beers and sodas. Kids play, kids from all over the world, and some of the older ones practice shooting BB guns against the street sign. It feels normal. The host, a proud Texan, leads a mid-evening seminar on how to set up fireworks correctly. Safety first. You have to make sure each one is secure, and everyone should keep their distance, and only one person lights it and they never go back. He's halfway through the demonstration when the father of the Iranian family turns up late, hollering and dancing, carrying three fireworks in each hand, already lit. Everyone screams. Everyone laughs. The fireworks are put out with sand. You've never felt so normal, so at home, so American.

A few weeks later you have to go home to the UK, the small island you grew up on and that still reverberates with American culture. You felt uneasy when you came here only a year before, and although you now feel uneasy leaving it, the truth is America is about to enter a period you'll be somewhat glad to miss out on. The world will watch its restless adventure play out, and the world will judge it, and be envious of it, as it has done for over a century. But if there's one thing you take from your time there, it's that the heart of that country is not what you see on the television screen, and that for every ego that will puff its chest into the camera, for every monstrous opinion that will be shouted out across the angry crowds, there will be a thousand others in the shadows who will happily spend an hour talking with you in a cool, empty workshop, and shake your hand when you leave.

The skies retract quickly when you depart for London, and seem even smaller when you touch down. But you know those bigger ones are still out there, and you know the quality of the people who live beneath them.