The Lost Continent (17 page)

‘Oh, really,’ I replied, always ready to see a celebrity. I asked the security man when he would be arriving. ‘I’m not allowed to tell you that either, sir,’ he said and passed on.

I stood with the crowd for a while and waited for Mr Nakasone to come along. And then I thought, ‘Why am I standing here?’ I tried to think of anyone I knew who would be impressed to hear that I had seen with my own eyes the Prime Minister of Japan. I imagined myself saying to my children, ‘Hey, kids, guess who I saw in Washington – Yasuhiro Nakasone!’ and being met with silence. So I walked on to the National Air and Space Museum, which was more interesting.

But not nearly as interesting as it ought to be, if you ask me. Back in the 1950s and 60s, the Smithsonian
was
the Castle. Everything was crammed into this one wonderfully dark and musty old building. It was like the nation’s attic and, like an attic, it was gloriously random. Over here was the shirt Lincoln was wearing when he was shot, with a brown blood-stain above the heart. Over there was a diorama showing a Navajo family fixing dinner. Up above you, hanging from the gloomy rafters, were the Spirit of St Louis and the Wright Brothers’ first plane. You didn’t know where to look next or what you would find around each corner. Now it is as if everything has been sorted out by a fussy spinster, folded neatly and put in its proper place. You go to the Air and Space Museum and you see the Spirit of St Louis and the Wright Brothers’ plane and lots of other famous planes and rocket ships and it’s all highly impressive, but it is also clinical and uninspired. There is no sense of discovery. If your brother came running up to you and said, ‘Hey, you’ll never guess what
I found in this room over here!’ you would in fact guess, more or less, because it would have to be either an aeroplane or a rocket ship. At the old Smithsonian it could have been absolutely anything – a petrified dog, Custer’s scalp, human heads adrift in bottles. There’s no element of surprise any more. So I spent the day trudging around the various museums dutifully and respectfully, with interest but not excitement. Still, there was so much to see that a whole day passed and I had seen only a part of it.

In the evening I came to the Mall, and walked across it to the Jefferson Memorial. I had hoped to see it at dusk, but I arrived late and the darkness fell like a blanket. Before I was very far into the park it was pitch dark. I expected to be mugged – indeed, I took it as my due, wandering into a city park like this on a dark night – but evidently the muggers couldn’t see me. The only physical risk I ran was being bowled over by one of the many joggers who sprinted invisibly along the dark paths. The Jefferson Memorial was beautiful. There’s not much to it, just a large marble rotunda in the shape of Monticello, with a gigantic statue of Jefferson inside and his favourite sayings engraved on the walls (‘Have a nice day,’ ‘Keep your shirt on,’ ‘You could have knocked me over with a feather’ etc.), but when it is lit up at night it is entrancing, with the lights of the memorial smeared across the pool of water called the Tidal Basin. I must have sat for an hour or more just listening to the rhythmic swish of the distant traffic, the sirens and car horns, the far-off sounds of people shouting, people singing, people being shot.

I lingered so long that it was too late to go to the Lincoln Memorial and I had to come back in the morning. The Lincoln Memorial is exactly as you expect it to be. He sits
there in his big high chair looking grand yet kindly. There was a pigeon on his head. There is always a pigeon on his head. I wondered idly if the pigeon thought that all the people who came every day were there to look at him. Afterwards, as I strolled across the Mall, I spied yet more trestles and draped ropes, with security men hanging about. They had closed off a road across the park and had brought in two helicopters with the presidential seal on their sides and seven cannons and the Marine Corps Band. It was quite early in the morning and there were no crowds, so I went and stood beside the roped enclosure, the only spectator, and none of the security men bothered me or even seemed to notice me.

After a couple of minutes, a wailing of sirens filled the air and a cavalcade of limousines and police motor cycles drew up. Out stepped Nakasone and some other Japanese men, all in dark suits, escorted by some junior-looking Aryans from the State Department. They all stood politely while the Marine Corps Band blared a lively tune which I didn’t recognize. Then there was a twenty-one-gun salute, but the cannons didn’t go BOOM! as you would expect. They went puff. They were filled with some kind of noiseless powder, presumably so as not to waken the President in the White House across the way, so when the battery commander shouted, ‘Ready, steady, go!’ or whatever it was he shouted, there followed seven quick puff sounds and then a dense cloud of smoke drifted over us and went on a long slow waft across the park. This was done three times because there were only seven cannons. Then Nakasone gave a friendly wave to the crowd – which is to say, to me – and sprinted with his party to the presidential helicopters, whose blades were already whirring to life.
After a moment they rose up, tilted past the Washington Monument and were gone, and everyone back on the ground relaxed and had a smoke.

Weeks afterwards, back in London, I told people about my private encounter with Nakasone and the Marine Corps Band and the noiseless cannons and how the Prime Minister of Japan had waved to me alone. Most of them would listen politely, then allow a small pause and say, ‘Did I tell you that Mavis has to go back into hospital next week to have her feet done?’ or something like that. The English can be so crushing sometimes.

From Washington I took US 301 out past Annapolis and the US Naval Academy and over a long, low bridge across the Chesapeake Bay into eastern Maryland. Before 1952, when the bridge was built, the eastern side of the bay had enjoyed centuries of isolation. Ever since then, people have been saying that outsiders will flood in and ruin the peninsula, but it still looked pretty unspoiled to me, and my guess is that it’s the outsiders who have kept it that way. It’s always the outsiders who are the most fiercely opposed to shopping malls and bowling alleys, which the locals in their simple, trusting way tend to think might be kind of handy.

Chestertown, the first town of any size I came to, confirmed this. The first thing I saw was a woman in a bright pink track suit zipping past on a bicycle with a wicker basket on the front. Only an urban
émigré
would have a bicycle with a wicker basket. A local person would have a Subaru pickup truck. There seemed to be a lot of these bike ladies about, and between them they had clearly made Chestertown into a model community. The whole
place was as neat as a pin. The sidewalks were paved with brick and lined with trees, and there was a well-tended park in the middle of the business district. The library was busy. The movie theatre was still in business and not showing a
Death Wish
movie. Everything about the place was tranquil and appealing. This was as nice a town as I had seen. This was almost Amalgam.

I drove on through the low, marshy flatlands, much taken with the simple beauty of the Chesapeake peninsula, with its high skies and scattered farms and forgotten little towns. Late in the morning I crossed into Delaware,
en route
to Philadelphia. Delaware may well be the most obscure of all the American states. I once met a girl from Delaware and couldn’t think of a single thing to say to her. I said, ‘So you come from Delaware? Gosh. Wow.’ And she moved quickly onto someone more verbally dextrous, and also better looking. For a while it troubled me that I could live in America for twenty years, have the benefit of an expensive education and not know anything at all about one of the fifty states. I went around asking people if they had ever heard Delaware mentioned on television or seen a story pertaining to it in the newspaper or read a novel set there and they’d say, ‘You know, I don’t think I ever have,’ and then they’d look kind of troubled too.

I determined that I would read up on Delaware so that the next time I met a girl from there I could say something droll and apposite and she might go to bed with me. But I could find almost nothing written about Delaware anywhere. Even the entry in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
was only about two paragraphs long and finished in the middle of a sentence, as I recall. And the funny thing was that as I drove across Delaware now I could feel it
vanishing from my memory as I went, like those children’s drawing slates on which you erase the picture by lifting the transparent sheet. It was as if a giant sheet were being lifted up behind me as I drove, expunging the experience as it unfolded. Looking back now, I can just vaguely recall some semi-industrial landscape and some signs for Wilmington.

And then I was in the outskirts of Philadelphia, the city that gave the world Sylvester Stallone and Legionnaire’s disease, among other things, and was too preoccupied with the disturbing thoughts that this called up to give Delaware any further consideration.

^fn1
1,472

WHEN I WAS
a child, Philadephia was the third biggest city in America. What I remembered of it was driving through endless miles of ghettos, one battered block after another, on a hot July Sunday, with black children playing in the spray of fire hydrants and older people lounging around on the street corners or sitting on the front stoops. It was the poorest place I had ever seen. Trash lay in the gutters and doorways, and whole buildings were derelict. It was like a foreign country, like Haiti or Panama. My dad whistled tunelessly through his teeth the whole time, as he always did when he was uneasy, and told us to keep the windows rolled up even though it was boiling in the car. At stop lights people would stare stonily at us and Dad would whistle in double time and drum the steering wheel with his fingers and smile apologetically at anyone who looked at him, as if to say, ‘Sorry, we’re from out of state.’

Things have changed now, naturally. Philadelphia is no longer the third biggest city in America. Los Angeles pushed it into fourth place in the 1960s, and now there are freeways to whisk you into the heart of town without soiling your tyres in the ghettos. Even so, I managed a brief, inadvertent visit to one of the poorer neighbourhoods when I wandered off the freeway in search of a gas station. Before I could do anything about it, I found myself sucked into a vortex of one-way streets that carried me into
the most squalid and dangerous-looking neighbourhood I had ever seen. It may have been, for all I know, the very ghetto we passed through all those years before – the brownstone buildings looked much the same but it was many times worse than the one I remembered. The ghetto of my childhood, for all its poorness, had the air of a street carnival. People wore colourful clothes and seemed to be having a good time. This place was just bleak and dangerous, like a war zone. Abandoned cars, old refrigerators, burnt-out sofas littered every vacant lot. Garbage cans looked as if they had been thrown to the street from the rooftops. There were no gas stations – I wouldn’t have stopped anyway, not in a place like this, not for a million dollars – and most of the storefronts were boarded with plywood. Every standing object had been spray-painted with graffiti. There were still a few young people on the stoops and corners, but they looked listless and cold – it was a chilly day – and they seemed not to notice me. Thank God. This was a neighbourhood where clearly you could be murdered for a pack of cigarettes – a fact that was not lost on me as I searched nervously for a way back onto the freeway. By the time I found it, I wasn’t whistling through my teeth so much as singing through my sphincter.

It really was the most uncomfortable experience I had had in many years. God, what it must be like to live there and to walk those streets daily. Do you know that if you are a black man in urban America you now stand a one in nineteen chance of being murdered? In World War II, the odds of being killed were one in fifty. In New York City there is one murder every four hours. Murder there has become the most common cause of death for people
under thirty-five – and yet New York isn’t even the most murderous city in America. At least eight other cities have a higher murder rate. In Los Angeles there are more murders each year on school-grounds alone than there are in the whole of London. So perhaps it is little wonder that people in American cities take violence as routine. I don’t know how they do it.

On my way to Des Moines to start this trip, I passed through O’Hare Airport in Chicago where I ran into a friend who worked for the
St Louis Post Dispatch
. He told me he had been working extra hard lately because of something that had happened to his boss. The boss had been driving home from work late one Saturday night when he had stopped at some traffic lights. As he waited for the lights to change, the passenger door opened and a man with a gun got in. The gunman made the boss drive down to the riverfront, where he shot him in the head and took his money. The boss had been in a coma for three weeks and they weren’t sure whether he was going to live.

My friend was telling me this not because it was such an incredible story, but simply by way of elucidating why he was having to work so damned hard lately. As for his boss, his attitude seemed to be that if you forget to lock your car doors when you’re driving through St Louis late at night, well, you’ve got to expect to take a bullet in the head from time to time. It was very odd, his deadpan attitude, but it seems to be more and more the way in America now. It made me feel like a stranger.

I drove downtown and parked near City Hall. On top of the building is a statue of William Penn. It’s the main landmark downtown, visible from all around the city, but
it was covered in scaffolding. In 1985, after decades of neglect, the city fathers decided to refurbish the statue before it fell down. So they covered it in scaffolding. However, this cost so much that there was no money left to do the repairs. Now, two years later, the scaffolding was still there and not a lick of work had been done. A city engineer had recently announced with a straight face that before long the scaffolding itself would need to be refurbished. This is more or less how Philadelphia works, which is to say, not very well. No other city in America pursues the twin ideals of corruption and incompetence with quite the same enthusiasm. When it comes to asinine administration, Philadelphia is in a league of its own.