All Gone to Look for America (33 page)

Now I don’t have a problem with national anthems. In fact, I sort of collect them. Some of them have remarkably good tunes – the British one being a bit of an exception here – and quite a lot of them have entertainingly quaint lyrics. The Marseillaise is a good example: cracking tune and those endearing words about ‘letting impure blood slake the thirst of our trenches’. I once embarrassed myself in Germany by singing the now unused first verse of theirs: the one that goes ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,’ while these days they only pick up at the ‘Unity and law and justice’ line. When the Soviet Union collapsed we held a party at home where we played their anthem with its cynically hilarious opening line about ‘Indestructible union of republics so free’. Corker of a tune too, to the extent that Vladimir Putin restored it. And the way things are going he may be thinking about bringing back the old words.

The American anthem has a fine tune too, one of the best in fact. It also has pretty par for the course embarrassing words: that bit about ‘the bombs bursting in air gave proof through the night that our flag was still there’ really does lack a little subtlety when you’re the only country to have dropped an atomic bomb or two, and has a worrying tendency to go in for the air strike as a weapon of first resort.

Not my problem, of course, I didn’t have to sing it. Or did I? Surrounded by the Stetsons, staying sitting was not an option – not that I’d intended to – but even that not to join in full-throatedly might be taken as an act of
irreverence
, disrespect or even treason, for which the excuse of being a foreigner might not be acceptable. I’m wary about these things since my childhood in Northern Ireland where they used to play the British national anthem when cinemas closed at 10:30 p.m. You had two choices: either make a run for it while the titles were rolling, or stand rigid and sing along in case someone thought your allegiances were to the Irish tricolour rather than Her Majesty. In Colorado therefore I decided to do what any brave Brit would do under the circumstances: I stood up and mimed.

And then they brought on the Rodeo Queen. This is an institution which is to the bucking bronco business what cheerleaders are to American football or page three to readers of the
Sun
: a bit of mostly harmless soft porn for the lads. The girl in question was your typical western American dream with long blonde hair and long tanned legs beneath a white leather cowboy suit with micro-mini skirt. A fetishist’s fantasy.

And then we got down to the serious – or depending on your point of view rather silly – business of blokes on broncos: men with leather leggings on their trousers flapping their hat and trying for dear life to cling onto a horse that thinks it’s in the Olympic equestrian trampolining final. Impressive, at least for the few seconds most of them manage to hang on, and undoubtedly very skilled, particularly for those who manage it for a bit longer. But – and I would never say this to my neighbour – it’s just ever so slightly… samey! Once you’ve seen one bronco buck…

Anyhow at this stage I decided the evening could only be improved by a couple of beers – which despite a general prudishness about alcohol are
gratifyingly
on sale at absolutely every American sports event – so I headed off to the beer tent. Lots of beer, none of it very interesting but all of it chilled. The only trouble was that when I tried to pick up a couple of cans the sweet young cowgirl responsible for taking the money asked if she could see my ID. It took a minute for me to realise what she was on about and then of course I launched into my – soon, no doubt, to be outdated – proud spiel about Britain being a free land which does not require its citizens to carry identity cards, much less have the state register how many beers we consume (although the way Britain has changed I fear it soon will). And then it dawned on me: she was checking to see if I was old enough to buy beer. This was really rather flattering. In fact absurdly so. It may seem insane to us – and it certainly does to me – to ban your citizens from buying a beer for three years after they have attained full legal adulthood, but the idea that a man approaching 50 might be mistaken for being under 21 was unlikely to say the least, even with my baby-faced
complexion
. She was obviously just complimenting me. I beamed and said
something
like, ‘Thanks luv, but I’ll just have the beers.’ Which is when she went and ruined it all: ‘No sir, it’s perfectly obvious you’re over age, but I need to see your ID. It’s state law.’ So off I trekked back to find my coat with my passport in the pocket. All for the sake of a few swigs of tasteless Coors Light.

That experience, however, was not to be repeated, Barry tells me: the rodeo season finished in September. At least he can promise better beer though. We’re due at the Phantom Canyon Brewpub about 5:30; it seems in the wild
west, everybody chows down at teatime. In the meantime, we’ve got shopping to fetch. I need new ear buds for my iPod and I’m still in search of a remedy for my parched sinuses. The air in Colorado is as pure as the blue skies it boasts in summer; there just isn’t enough of it. It’s not as bad as Salt Lake City but we’re still pretty high and dry here.

More at home on the ‘Springs’ grid than he was in Denver, Barry’s telling me what a small town boy he’s become even as we’re driving through miles of affluent low-rise suburbia to a Wal-Mart five miles across town. I’m not wholly sure why we’re heading to one Wal-Mart in particular given that the landscape we’re driving through is littered with things that if they’re not Wal-Mart are only marginally smaller and often specialised in slightly smaller product ranges (hardly difficult since Wal-Mart stocks most things known to man, and some known only to Americans). I suggest that ‘the Springs’ isn’t exactly a small town. Barry thinks for a minute or two before conceding that actually it has 400,000 inhabitants.

It seems that each of these inhabitants personally has several miles of urban expressway to themselves and lives at least half a dozen miles from wherever they routinely need to get to. Despite there being a compact ‘downtown’ area with a not wholly contrived ‘old west’ feel to it, everybody who lives outside it – which is more or less everybody – spends most of their time driving
somewhere
else.

Sprawling modern western cities such as Colorado Springs have not just adapted to the motor car, they have been designed around it. There are not only drive-through McDonald’s (and other fast-food chains) of the type we have come to know in our own American-cloned out-of-town retail parks, but also drive-through banks, drive-through
DVD
rental outlets and post boxes that you have to drive up to in order to post a letter. In fact, if you want to do
something
as quirky as post a letter and happen – even more quirkily – to be on foot, then the only way to do so is to venture out into the road and risk being run over just to get access to the post box. A substantial number of the sprawling retail outlets are tyre suppliers: the good people of Colorado Springs probably keep Goodyear and Firestone in business.

The Phantom Canyon Brewpub is a relief. They do not just an excellent range of beers but a decent menu. Ever more proof what a thriving
institution
the gastro-brewpub has become in modern America. The real Phantom Canyon, a roadless remnant of pioneering days, is actually way to the north of Denver but the brewery named after it produces excellent beers: from
Zebulon’s
Peated Porter, a rich dark drink, to aromatic Bavarian-style effervescent
Hefeweizen and Coulter’s Kölsch, a pale golden beer in the style of Cologne in Germany.

It goes down a treat, though I’m not sure whether it’s the beer or the
conversation
that is making my head swim. Barry is big on alternative
explanations
, for life, the universe and everything, ranging from the pyramids of Giza in Egypt and Chichen Itza in Mexico, crop circles and the Pleiades, before getting on to Area 51, who shot JFK and whether or not the moon landings were faked – actually Barry is pretty sure they weren’t, he remembers them too well – before settling down to 9/11.

Barry has just come back from Oahu, Hawaii, where his son is based. ‘
Everywhere
on that island they have these stickers that say “9/11 was an inside job” – and y’know I dunno, have you heard this guy who says the other
buildings
that collapsed were obviously taken down with controlled explosions? You know, like they didn’t fall over but just sort of folded down into their own footprint? Like there was some command post in one of them, for the spooks, who orchestrated the whole thing so Bush could get his war on terror? Huh? You know, would you put it past him?’

No, I wouldn’t. But then you only have to google ’9/11 conspiracy’ these days to get, on average, 7,740,000 hits. Which is a lot of hits. You can either take the ‘eat shit: a hundred million flies can’t be wrong’ attitude, or you can apply Ockham’s Razor and say the real answer is likely to be the simplest. And however far-fetched the idea of a gang of terrorists learning to fly airliners, then hijacking a couple and flying them into the World Trade Center may seem – and it did seem pretty far-fetched even as they did it – the idea of Bush and the CIA planning the whole thing in collusion with Mossad just so they could invade Afghanistan and Iraq and clamp down on personal liberty all over the so-called free world is even crazier. Isn’t it?

I’m starting to get the feeling that what people perceive to be reality – other than what they can see, hear and feel immediately around them – has a slightly tenuous hold on existence for some of them. Including my cousin. Everybody watches television almost constantly – even in bars and restaurants – but what they’re mostly watching is just whatever’s on. First-class drama series like the
Sopranos
or
Sex and the City
draw huge audiences, as do chat shows like
Oprah
, but news is another matter. With no real national daily newspapers – you can hardly count the lightweight
USA Today
– and the sprawling diversification of TV news, most of it heavily opinionated, means any semblance of unbiased reporting on air is rare.

The only constant is the adverts, so frequent and so interlaced with other
programming that the two are often hard to separate. Fox News, the Rupert Murdoch-owned, madly jingoistic, out-on-a-limb tabloid television news channel has even signed a product placement agreement with McDonald’s for its regional news shows. For that’s what the news mostly comes down to: a show. The closest most people get to watching informed current affairs
programmes
is the chat shows, which is why people like David Letterman, Jay Leno and Jon Stewart wield such influence: the people believe their jokes more than they believe the newscasters. The problem is a collapse in faith in the old ‘anchor’ system as it has moved towards flashy teeth and shiny smiles rather than any semblance of investigative authority, while there was virtually never any concept of informed neutrality other than in the sober organs of the major newspapers in the big cities which in any case only a tiny, already
well-informed
section of the population reads.

Barry, to be fair, gets most of his serious news either online or from BBC World or his favourite, the English-language service of Germany’s equivalent,
Deutsche Welle
: ‘You feel at least they’re aware there are other countries out there as well as their own.’ Inevitably one beer flowed into another and with the chauffeuring services of Barry’s girlfriend, Pat, for us soaks to rely on we ventured out finally as far as Manitou Springs. Virtually a suburb of Colorado Springs these days, Manitou has been surprisingly successful in maintaining the atmosphere of a small western town, without succumbing to too much tourist tat.

Manitou is an old Native American word for ‘spirit’ and at the low point of Barry’s life it had served to maintain his. The bar we have come to find is The Ancient Mariner – I can only suppose with very loose apologies to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, because of his fondness for hallucinogenic substances, Colorado Springs being about as far as you can get from anything imaginably marine. But it has been a favourite place for Barry and his son to hang out for a spot of father-and-son mutual solace while the boy’s mother was seriously ill. They had played pool there to escape for an hour or two from the strains of living with daily evidence of mortality – the lad was under age but in the circumstances everyone turned a blind eye.

Subsequently it turned into a lesbian bar, but, as Barry adds with his
trademark
mischievous wink, ‘not aggressively so, if you know what I mean, and is still full of some nice women who didn’t mind you looking, up to a point’. He has no idea what it’s like now, as it’s been a few years since he’s been here. As it happens, the lesbians have gone and ‘The Mariner’ has expanded, taking over the small shop next door to become a music bar, with a fine band playing
interesting experimental jazz-flavoured rock, including an outstanding female electric violinist. But most importantly for Barry, it still had the pool table. We shot a few games, then gamely lost to some locals. And then it was time to hit the hay: we had an early start the next morning if I was to make Raton in time to catch the Southwest Chief. And there was a mountain pass to cross on the way.

As Barry’s girlfriend said before we turned in: ‘Fall’s a comin’ in. There could be snow, sweeties. Oh yeah. And black ice.’