All Gone to Look for America (14 page)

At one stage, it appears, they even pumped in several million gallons of water from the lake to push back an oil slick approaching Gertie and her brood, while a local fireman became a celebrity when he set out in a rowing boat with a net to rescue one of the ducklings that had fallen into the water from the nest before it could swim properly. Personally I had always thought ducklings could swim automatically, but I am not going to argue with Herb’s story.

Eventually, he tells me, a safer solution for the proud mother and her young nestlings was found by Mr Gimbel, the owner of the town’s biggest
department
store, who opened up one of his show windows that faced the riverside and moved Gertie and brood in until they were all old enough to be released in the city park. It’s one of those stories that, as Herb says, needs its context to be understood. He’s also surprised that I haven’t heard of Mr Gimbel: ‘He was the owner of Gimbels, started right here in Milwaukee, went on to be the biggest department store chain in the USA, bigger than Macy’s. Gimbels was where they set that movie
Miracle on 34th Street
, and that recent load of rubbish
that was supposed to be a remake or something,
Elf
.’ I leave him wondering at this European visitor’s ignorance, but that’s the thing about America, you learn something new here every day.
2

The next thing I am about to learn is, surprisingly, that some of these small neighbourhood bars impose their own dress codes on customers. A bar on nearby Brady Street sports a notice over the door that strikes me as odd, but is my first indication of the subtle sartorial signals sent out in a society that pioneered ‘dress down Friday’ for office workers, and in general prides itself – outside the world of high fashion and big money – on an overwhelmingly casual attitude to clothing: ‘Caps to be worn straight or back. No excessively baggy clothing!’

Now, the bit about baggy clothing, I get. It has to do with ‘attitude’, with built-in inverted commas. In Britain we’re already familiar with the teen fashion that dictates young men should wear trousers that would fit a
medium-sized
and particularly well-hung hippopotamus, broad in the beam,
enormously
wide-legged and with a crotch hanging substantially below the normal human male’s knee level. Despite being no paragon of sartorial style myself, I am, I’m afraid, in sympathy with the view that says if someone dresses like an ape, there’s a fair chance they might act like one.

But the cap business throws me. The baseball cap may have become, after blue jeans, America’s most successful sartorial export but more than a few
foreigners
who have tried eventually realise that often it simply makes them look silly. The most famous case is former British Conservative Party leader William Hague who wore one throughout the 2001 general election campaign, and
possibly
as a direct result came a cropper among an electorate who thought that being bald did not excuse a broad-vowelled Yorkshire man wearing American teen headgear.

In America, however, it’s a different thing even for older men, especially when many of them are passionate baseball fans. People wearing it back to front is another matter, apart from the immediate impression that they’ve got their heads screwed on the wrong way round. Perhaps in the southern states, the reversed peak functions as a sunshade for the neck, like the flap dangling from a French Foreign Legionary’s
képi
. A sort of ‘baseball beau geste’.
Whatever
I may think, as the sign outside this particular pub makes clear, wearing your baseball cap backwards is now so common as to be almost orthodox.

The only remaining sign of rebellion, therefore, it would appear, is to wear it sideways. Partly an evolution from the original northwest Seattle-specific ‘grunge’ fashion – which as I was to discover is as inspired as much by the weather as anything else – and partly an independent development among young east coast black kids, the sideways cap, in combination with the
low-slung
baggy trousers, and often matched with ski-jacket style top inflated to Michelin man proportions, mark the wearer out as the sort of person
bar-keepers
in Brady Street, Milwaukee – and elsewhere, I was to learn – do not want in their bar.

That is not to say they aren’t broad-minded folk around here though. Sitting over a pale ale at the bar, I open a copy of a magazine I have come across before and not really paid any attention to: the
Onion
. A free weekly, the
Onion
purports
to be over 150 years old and says it acquired its name because it was the only word its German immigrant founder Hermann Ulysses Zwiebel knew in English (‘Zwiebel’ is German for ‘onion’). Happily this is not the average standard of its wit or it would only confirm that British stereotype of ‘the German sense of humour’.

The
Onion
’s Milwaukee-German roots are genuine enough, though it goes back to just 1988 when it was founded by two students at the University of Madison-Wisconsin. Surprised by its own success, it has since gone national and has its HQ in Manhattan. But if surnames are anything to go by, the
editorial
team retains a fairly strong Germanic genetic element, including ‘Schneider, Guterman, Dickkers, Reiss, Loew, Kornfeld, Klein, Stern and Ganz.’

With all due acknowledgement to the
Onion
, therefore, I offer a small sample from a much longer piece by Bonnie Nordstrum entitled ‘I’m in an Open Relationship with The Lord’, a scrumptious fusion of religious
infatuation
and the adolescent crush.

Not just funny, but clever. That’s the thing about America, every time you start to get stuck on a stereotype, along comes its opposite. For every
Lion King
or
Bambi
there is a
Simpsons
, for every TV evangelist an episode of
South Park
. In a country where for a political candidate to say he or she was an atheist would be the kiss of death, and ‘church’ is still perceived as the pillar of most communities, the
Onion
’s Bonnie Nordstrum had made me cry: Halleluja! Pennies from heaven.

It was early next morning that I was due to make my own pilgrimage to a place many Americans – and more than a few Britons – regard as a holy site.
Especially
if they are Hell’s Angels. The Harley Davidson factory at Wauwatosa, The problem turns out to be that although Wauwatosa is billed as a ‘suburb’ of Milwaukee, they mean suburb in the American sense: the plant is 14 miles out of the centre of town. I’m not even a motorbike fan, but I have a friend who is – and keeps a Harley Davidson in his living room to the less than avid delight of his long-suffering wife – and I’d promised him that I’d at least get ‘the lousy T-shirt’.

The tours are free before 1:00 p.m. each day which suits me fine as my train leaves mid-afternoon. All I have to do is work out how to get there and back on schedule and at a semi-reasonable price. That turns out to be just about manageable thanks to a taxi-driver called Khalid who’s willing to cut a deal – another example of how immigration makes its way in waves through the taxi ranks: 10 years ago he’d have been a Russian called Boris. Americans are not good at seeing themselves from the point of view of the ‘enemy’, and even if they did, they might find it hard to accept that the best analogy is not the Klingon, but the Borg: their greatest weapon is not martial prowess but the power of assimilation.

The Harley Davidson tour isn’t quite what I’d been expecting: big
machinery
and lots of noise and roaring engines, and maybe there is that somewhere
else, but at Wauwatosa these days they make the Powertrain engines, and that is basically a job for semi-skilled production-line workers, sitting at little desks doing their bit as the next item of machinery is trundled in front of them hanging from a mechanical arm. I’m sure my motorbike mate Steve would have found it fascinating – he’s the sort of bloke who finds making
modifications
to a computer motherboard fascinating – but I don’t even know where to start asking questions. Instead I just stand there along with a group of about half a dozen American Harley fans, mostly middle-aged blokes with the sort of figure that suggests they’re even more fond of the occasional beer than I am, with not dissimilar wives in tow, all kitted out in studded leathers emblazoned with trademark Harley motifs.

Not that even they have any more questions than I have for our guide, whose name is Karl. He tells us he came over from Mannheim, Germany, in the 1960s but he still speaks with an accent out of old British war movies. The Viennese waitress in Mader’s notwithstanding, Karl’s accent suggests ‘
Milvokee
’ even today might not be the place for German immigrants set on instant assimilation. He seems perfectly satisfied that he is giving the answers and that we are not asking the questions.

Khalid dumps me back downtown, still slightly mind-numbed from the engineering experience, only to realise that I’ve forgotten to buy the ‘lousy T-shirt’. Sorry, Steve. But I’ve other things on my mind: food, for the first
seriously
long-distance leg of my journey, a 21-hour, nearly 1,200 mile overnight marathon into the heart of cowboy country where I have a rendezvous with some prehistoric Americans.

Down by the river there’s an attractive beer bar, offering microbrews and a menu that could come from a Lederhosen theme park – ‘chicken schnitzel, bratwurst soaked in beer, sauerkraut with sweet potatoes, pretzel pudding.’ But even if experience suggests that Amtrak have a way to go before they make the trains run on time, I don’t have time for the indulgence of a long lunch. Instead, I need to make closer acquaintance with another of the great German-
Jewish-American
traditions, the deli.

The deli may reach its apogee in New York City but it is Jimmy John’s in Milwaukee where they tell novices how to order, literally, in a big poster on the wall before the counter, usefully entitled, with just a hint of, dare I say, Germanic efficiency: ‘How to Order a Sandwich’.

1. Decide what you want.
   
2. Get your money ready, i.e. out of your pocket and unwadded.
   
3. Pick your bread and toppings.
   
4. Want onions and sauce? Say you want it ‘loaded’.
   
5. Want hot chilli peppers? Say ‘with pep’.
   
6. Say it loud and clear. We are not responsible for mumbled orders
   

That’s telling ’em. But properly followed, I have to say, it works. Without the instructions I would have stood there mumbling and pointing at stuff for hours and still not have got the sandwich I wanted. Instead, I’m out again in two minutes flat with a salt beef, pickle, mustard and onion on rye sandwich that is the most impressive thing between two slices of bread that I’ve tasted until I hit – or get hit by – the New Orleans
muffuletta
. But that’s another story. Equipped for the next stage of the journey, it’s back to the station. There’s half a continent to cross yet.

And then just as I cross the bridge, which I notice for the first time is on Wisconsin Avenue, I see something small and brown standing on a pillar, not just one but several of them, at intervals. And then it comes to me, and I can’t help smiling: it’s a statue, or rather a little series of bronzes: of a duck and
ducklings
. Herb wasn’t kidding. I tug a respectful forelock to Gertie and her brood:
Auf Wiedersehen
, Pet
.