All Gone to Look for America (41 page)

If even an iota of that atmosphere had evolved in this big, over-lit,
under-populated
stadium then it would have been dispelled in an instant by the message that appears on the big neon scoreboard: ‘Keep the game clean,’ – wellllllll, yes, maybe, we’re used to slogans against racism and about respecting referees, so I can just about take that, except that it’s spoken
OUT LOUD
, while the team are playing, in fact just as Becks is about to take another – well-placed but futile – corner. Talk about putting a man off his stride! And as if that’s not bad enough, here comes the punchline: ‘And keep your weekly wash clean with Tide!’ It’s a bloody advert, on screen and in our ears in the middle of a game. Does nobody understand? This isn’t just ‘not done’, it’s tantamount to heresy. Sacrilege even.

Maybe the American game’s too nice – maybe Americans are too nice – maybe the concept of sports teams as mobile franchises rather than rooted in local communities (which is something I fear could yet happen to our
increasingly
foreign-owned Premiership stuffed with foreign players) means they just don’t care. But until they do, and until their players play with passion because they know their fans live for it, and until they understand the exquisite agony of a 0–0 draw in which both teams had chances, or the untrammelled joy of a fightback from 3–0 down to win 4–3 in a goalfest, then ‘soccer’ hasn’t a golf ball’s hope in a bunker.

And then all of a sudden, from a far corner of the pitch, where a solid group of fans, all in LA Galaxy shirts are standing – against modern English rules but
according to old football tradition – I make out the strains of a familiar chant that is pure music to my ears. Can it be true? Can those really be Americans? Yes, it is and they are. With almost a tear in my eye, I make my way round towards them – unthinkable in a tight-packed, seating-only European ground, but here there are people wandering all over the place – and watch with genuine warmth in my heart as the stewards gather with consternation and bemusement on their faces this deliriously joyful, increasingly drunk,
beer-clutching
crowd emulate scenes they can only have witnessed on European television, howling for blood in time-honoured fashion, bellowing at the top of their lungs, in chorus, the hallowed refrain beloved of every English football crowd: ‘The referee’s a wanker!’

Maybe there’s hope yet.

Which leaves me with just the slight matter of getting ‘home’. And preferably not by the route I came. There’s a bus stop outside the stadium – by which I mean just over half a mile from it, i.e. beyond the car park – but the
timetable
is less than encouraging: one bus an hour, and the last one left just before the game ended. Am I missing something here? I mean, this isn’t baseball; we know what time it’ll be over at. And it may not match the Home Depot on sale day, but there’s at least 15,000 people here. And nearly, as I look around me at the building jam at the car park exit, 15,000 cars!

I’m reluctant to hang around here for an hour but I don’t see much alternative.

Nor do the three other people – just three out of a crowd of 15,000 – who within the next 10 minutes join me. And two of them are Scottish. Out of the fairly large crowd that has made its way to this football ground (soccer stadium) tonight, only one Angelino did so by public transport! His name is Ivan, he comes from Seattle, and he apparently makes a habit of it: ‘My friends think it’s kinda weird. But like, you know, it’s a green thing too.’

It’s the first time I’ve heard anyone in the US apparently take the green/global warming agenda seriously. I know lots of people do, or at least say they do, including both presidential candidates, but I’ve never come across anyone who actually lets it affect their way of life. Ivan, however, does. He’s – fairly obviously – a Democrat, and also the first person I’ve met who actively wants to talk politics. He is campaigning enthusiastically for Barack Obama, though he thinks John Edwards would have been a better candidate; he has serious
reservations about the willingness of middle America to elect their first black president.

‘Aye, ah dinnae know about that either,’ says Mark, the rangy tall
Scotsman
who’s over here visiting his sister and just came to the football, ‘because I hadne seen a game for a while.’ Ivan asks us a genuinely interested question about British politics – this is a first too – as in whether we think ‘the new guy’ – well, come on, you would hardly expect even him to know Gordon Brown’s name – is a good successor to Tony Blair, who remains something of an icon for Americans, even on the left.

‘Blair was a right wanker,’ says Mark, which seems to me as fair a way of putting it as possible. But we stay clear of discussing Brown. Maybe because we just can’t be bothered.

Eventually – though unfortunately not before its timetabled hour – the bus arrives and we join the now thinned throng of northbound traffic. I tell Ivan how impressed I am by the sea of change in downtown Los Angeles. He beams back, ‘Yeah, it’s been a real revolution. People like me, young
professionals
, are moving back, converting lofts and stuff, it used to be dangerous but now it’s a pretty cool scene. I got lucky too; I bought a condo near the Staples Centre.’ Ivan credits the recent multi-million dollar sports venue and concert arena, financed by the eponymous office supplies company, as being a crucial element in restoring respectability to the downtown area.

Ivan wants to know what I’m going to call a book about train travel round America, so I toss out a few options: partly inspired by memories of Colorado: Iron Horse Rodeo, or in reference to my scant funds: Iron Horse Bareback. And he smiles and says, ‘Well, that’s certainly an arresting title,’ and adds that this is his stop. As he leaves I pick up a leaflet lying on the seat opposite
advertising
LA’s Midtowne Spa: a ‘place for the gay and bisexual community to play safely: no drugs, no alcohol, condoms provided – no bareback.’ Whoops. A bible for unprotected sex wasn’t exactly what I had in mind…

I HAD NO IDEA
. Absolutely no idea. Nothing in America prepares you for New Orleans. I'm standing like an overdressed man in a Turkish bath on the rotting wood of the balcony tilted at a precarious angle towards the street below, running my fingers over the thick layers of paint on the wrought iron as I watch the gas lamps flicker in the onset of a tropical dusk. Exotic, romantic, and just slightly forlorn. I could be in Abidjan, Réunion or Martinique. But surely, surely, not in the United States.

Most striking of all is the quiet. No roar of traffic, no parping of horns, just the quiet drip of condensation forming on metal and falling onto wood, and maybe the occasional creak from an opening shutter. There are ‘for sale' signs on railings down the street, past the little neighbourhood convenience store that sells fresh watermelon and wine and cold beer. You could sit here, and watch the sun set, maybe forever. And then I remember, this is New Orleans: there's no such thing as forever.

My mind had been convulsed between anticipation and apprehension as we rolled across the vast waterways of the Mississippi Delta, yawning mouth of one of the greatest river systems on earth, and looked out at the docks that stretched for miles upriver, at the heavy freighters moored at them, resting low in the swollen tides, and at the freeway systems improbably suspended above the lake water and the low-lying retail parks defended only by patched-up levees. In LA a cab driver downtown had asked me where I was heading next and when I said New Orleans, he just gave me a rueful smile and shook his head and said, ‘Man, they got nuttin' down there. I know folks left there and they ain't never goin' back.'

As we pulled out of LA across the deserts of southern California, past the veritable Golgotha of wind farms on the hills outside dry-as-dust Palm Springs, the flooding that swamped the fabled ‘crescent city' on the Gulf of
Mexico during Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, seemed almost
unimaginable
. I would like to tell you I gloried at the magnificent Texan landscape as the train rushed through it on the longest of my individual routes, but I would be lying: the fact is that Texas is not only vast, it is mostly extremely dull – not so much cowboy country, as cow country. And not very many cows per square acre either. Rancher Mike's old joke about the vast size of Texan farms, told as we rumbled through Montana, now came home as achingly true. Out here 25,000 acres is nothing. Literally nothing. Look out the window once every hour and you'll be lucky if the landscape has changed. I had thought of making a stop or two in Texas, but with a train service that only came by every other day at best, decided against it, and booked – for the first and only time on my journey – a sleeper instead. Ladies and gentlemen, I take my hat off and admit it: I mostly slept through Texas. And why not, with Louisiana and the Big Easy on the horizon?

Prior to Katrina, my only real awareness of New Orleans was Paul Simon praying for someone to take him to the Mardi Gras in the city of his dreams in a pronunciation which I have already learned is much-mocked: ‘It ain't Noo Or-LEENS, honey, it's N'Awlins,' said the female conductor when I showed her my ticket. Over dinner as we trundled across the dry, dull endless scrub that makes up most of Texas I met Clarence who came from there but was going back. Not without regrets: ‘I lost plenty. Folks, mostly. My grandmother. She died. She was in her nineties, she wouldn't leave. She didn't have no means to anyhow. Lots of poor black folks didn't. The government just didn't care.'

Other people did, though, like Harrison and Joanne, a stocky
middle-aged
couple dressed in what I at first take for a uniform: a dark maroon shirt and trousers on the man and a dress the same colour for his wife, who is also wearing an old-fashioned bonnet-style hat. And then I'm struck by the
resemblance
to the travelling Amish. I'm not far wrong. I get talking to them and Harrison explains that they're Mennonites, a religious grouping closely related to the Amish. The both live in Kentucky but have been travelling down to New Orleans for three weeks out of four for the last two years, to help with
reconstruction
work. They live in a hostel and work as carpenters. Both of them. Helping out after natural disasters, he told me with one of those surreal gentle smiles that religious people sometimes spook me with, is something the
Mennonite
community considers a social obligation.

Arriving in New Orleans even years after the 2005 cataclysm that was
Hurricane
Katrina it's not hard to see why people here still think that central
government
doesn't give a damn, and why volunteer workers are so needed and
appreciated. The little wooden houses alongside Louis Armstrong
International
Airport are poignant testimony to the essential fragility of so much of the globally envied American way of life. These are homes that would have had refrigerators, colour TVs, heating and air-conditioning, but in the wake of a hurricane – three years on – look like the hovels on the edge of Harare, Zimbabwe, trashed and looted, where they have not been plain blown away.

Three-storey brick houses along the railway line still lie derelict, without doors or windows, skips piled high with rubbish lined up outside. On the left is the great bulk of the newly restored and refurbished Superdome, the sports arena that was turned into emergency housing for 30,000 residents unable to flee the hurricane. On the right, the damaged buildings of a furniture
warehouse
and a depot for a dairy company based in Houma, a small town further out into the Gulf swamps and even more vulnerable. The adverts painted on the brickwork are for ‘creamery butter': ‘American Beauty since 1892'. The windows are smashed, broken air-conditioning units lie on the ground next to an old school bus, its distinctive yellow smeared with graffiti, mattresses piled on its roof, ripped blue plastic tarpaulins strewn across the ground next to a tiny two-man tent. Obviously still in use. It is not an optimistic arrival.

The station has the feel of a railway in wartime: busy with people jostling one another, faces lined and drawn, tired. Out front I climb into a taxi – I have no enthusiasm for tramping these streets – and all of a sudden I know why this city is still called the Big Easy: it's behind the wheel, half the size of a butter mountain squeezed into a lime green tropical shirt and shorts,
grinning
broadly, sipping constantly from a quart-sized container of fizzy pop as he slides his ancient Dodge along the wide streets, before we crawl into the
rectilinear
warren of the Vieux Carré, the French Quarter, and with a hand wiped across his lips, a loud belch and a laid-back demand for 10 dollars – the meter in this cab was no more in the habit of running than its driver – deposits me on a corner outside St Peter House. Welcome to the edge of America.

You only have to look at Google Maps and see New Orleans from space to realise how insanely fragile this city's existence is. South Louisiana isn't really
terra firma
at all: it's a transition zone where the land bleeds into the sea in 10 thousand spidery veins. Most of the modern city is built on reclaimed muck – there is no bedrock for more than 50 feet down. This is the
bayou
: a unique word for a unique landscape where the vegetation – mangroves and cypresses growing out of the slimy algae-covered water – surreally extends the false impression that this is territory naturally inhabitable by life forms other than egrets and alligators. Even on the way north, inland, solid ground is the
exception rather than the rule: the railway hugs the swampy coast of the great expanse of Lake Pontchartrain which when the weather turns, joins forces with the Mississippi to the south to roll over the levees or burst through them. It is uncannily, eerily wild and beautiful, the tarmac causeway across the lake a thin, straight concrete line in a world of weird contorted organic forms,
pelicans
with full beaks and trees with slime-covered branches that reach out like zombie arms. It is easy to see why there have been so many horror stories set in the bayou swamps.

The French built their little city in the early years of the eighteenth century on one of the very few bits of raised land – they sensibly referred to it as an island – in a rigid grid pattern with a wooden church and military parade ground – Place d'Armes – on the river frontage. A map made in 1770 by Captain Pittman of the British Army shows it with its fortifications:
wedge-shaped
wooden ramparts and ‘a trifling ditch'. Incredibly, the rectangle within his map's walls is preserved almost perfectly today between Rampart Street and the Mississippi and Canal Street and Esplanade Avenue. This is the Vieux Carré – the old square – universally known as the French Quarter, even if many of its buildings date from the subsequent, brief, late eighteenth-century period of Spanish rule. And this is where I find myself standing on the balcony outside my room in St Peter House, a modest but beautiful little B&B in its heart, wondering what continent I'm on and in which century.

There are banana plants growing in the courtyard, and a smell of cigar smoke in the air, as I saunter – there's no other way to walk in New Orleans – up triple-named St Peter Street/Calle San Pedro/Rue St Pierre in the early evening savouring the tropical warmth in the air, admiring the intricate
curlicues
of the ironwork on the balconies. Hurricane? What hurricane? Up ahead is Bourbon Street, and I'm slightly apprehensive that the famed 24-hour party zone will either be Disney or down-and-out. To my surprise, it's neither, at least not exactly. It's loud, tacky, sleazy, relaxed and perversely exhilarating all at once, utterly self-conscious with its jazz bars and street-drinking culture, its strip joints and souvenir shops with a local turn on the tacky T-shirt motto: ‘I drove my Chevy to the levee and the levee was gone.' Here a ‘Hurricane' is a sticky sweet cocktail of light rum, dark rum, grenadine and passion fruit juices. A man with a sandwich board on the street is advertising Huge Ass Beers To Go. A man with a huge ass is drinking one next to him. There's a smell of garlic and gumbo in the air.

I pick a restaurant at random amid the clutter on and off Bourbon and sit down to a plate of Creole cholesterol with Karin Carpenter in my head singing
about crawfish pie, jambalay, and filee gumbo. Until now I'd never known what ‘filee gumbo' was – specifically the
filee
bit – it turns out to be a thickening agent made from plant leaves used as an alternative to okra. My plate of ‘shrimp gumbo' – I have just about got used to the strange American habit of reversing our definition of prawns and shrimp size-wise – oozes rich tomatoey goo and I follow it up with a jambalaya of chicken and spicy sausage with tomatoes and celery and rice, and feel fit to burst. Time for a beer. Maybe even two.

Not a ‘Huge Ass', though. Across the street is a bar with a jazz band playing Dixie and a beer called Abita on tap which I've never heard of. The guy next to me at the bar has, though. His name is Gary and he's in computers, lives in Houston but comes to New Orleans regularly on business. Not as regularly as he used to – ‘before Katrina' – but enough to know that Abita is made by a microbrewery in Abita Springs 30 miles away. Their ‘Amber' is the colour it says, rich and malty and full of flavour. And to round it off, Gary offers me a cigar, only he pronounces it ‘see-gar', ‘coz we're in Louisiana, man'. And we light up and lighten up and listen to the music. And have another beer.

And then we hit the cigar shop for a couple more. I've never really been a smoker – at least not of cigarettes – but a good cigar is an occasional pleasure, not least since I visited Havana a couple of years back. It is of course illegal for Americans to buy Cuban cigars – even if you're Arnold Schwarzenegger – but that doesn't mean you can't buy a cigar hand-rolled by Cubans,
especially
in New Orleans. At the Cigar Factory on Decatur Street they sit there in a line, speaking Spanish to one another, separating out the leaves –
medium-leaf
binders and long-leaf fillers – like I watched them do at the La Corona factory in Havana. The salesmen are locals, African-Americans with cigars firmly between their lips setting the right example to their customers,
offering
tips to choose between the robust Vieux Carré or the full-bodied Tres Hermanos. The tobacco can't come from Cuba either, so instead they use Nicaraguan, Honduran and Dominican. I'm sure a connoisseur could tell the difference, but I'm just a dilettante who's had a couple of beers and enjoys the taste, although perhaps not so much the Purito, which boasts a ‘sweet dip', as if the end had been dipped in honey.

Puffing proudly Gary and I head for the Music Legends Park back on Bourbon, where a couple more Abita await us at the open-air bar along with bronze life-size statues of New Orleans jazz heroes. Did you know that ‘Fats' Domino's real name was Antoine Dominique Domino? I didn't. He stands there in bronze effigy with a keyboard fixed to his fingers, alongside trumpeter Al (Alois) Hirt and clarinettist Pete Fountain, born Pierre Dewey
LaFontaine. I had somehow never quite realised the French input into the jazz gene pool.

There's a real-life jazz trumpeter too and a fine skat singer, and it's easy to sit back and soak in the music in the warm air, the heady mood dulled only slightly by a few drops of rain from a heavy night sky. As the rain made its presence more tangible we migrate to one of the premises of the anomalously named Bourbon Street Blues Company, where there's a rock band playing. It would be easy to say New Orleans ought to be about jazz and blues, but that would be like saying that Liverpool ought to be about nothing but the Beatles. Even nearly half a century later. What New Orleans – and certainly Bourbon Street – is about is hedonism: eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow… And let's face it, there are not many cities where that is a more appropriate motto. That's what they celebrate with those famous jazz funerals that have origins in Dahomey and Benin. That's what Mardi Gras is all about, ‘Fat Toosday' as the locals say.