The Lost Continent (20 page)

‘If you don’t take your hand off my shoulder I am going to dribble vomit on it,’ I said.

He removed his hand quickly and was silent for perhaps a minute. Then he said, ‘Would you help me look for an ashtray?’

It was seven in the morning and I was deeply unwell. ‘WILL YOU PLEASE JUST LEAVE ME ALONE!’ I snapped at him, just a trifle wildly. Two seats back a pair of Norwegian students looked shocked. I gave them a look as if to say, ‘And don’t you try anything either, you wholesome little shits!’ and sank back into my seat. It was going to be a long day.

I slept fitfully, that dissatisfying, semi-conscious sleep in which you incorporate into your dreams the things going on around you – the grinding of gears, the crying of babies, the mad swervings of the bus back and forth across the highway as the driver gropes for a dropped cigarette or lapses into a psychotic episode. Mostly I dreamt of the bus plunging over a cliff-face, sailing into a void; in my dream, we fell for miles, tumbling through the clouds, peacefully, with just the sound of air whisking past outside, and then the Indian saying to me: ‘Do you think it might be all right if I smoked
now
?’

When I awoke there was drool on my shoulder and a new passenger opposite me, a haggard woman with lank grey hair who was chain-smoking cigarettes and burping prodigiously. They were the sort of burps children make to amuse themselves – rich, resonant, basso profundo burps. The woman was completely unselfconscious about it. She would look at me and open her mouth and out would roll a burp. It was amazing. Then she would take a drag on her cigarette and burp a large puff of smoke. That was amazing
too. I glanced behind me. The Indian man was still there, looking miserable. Seeing me, he started to lean forward to ask a supplementary question, but I stopped him with a raised finger and he sank back. I stared out the window, feeling ill, and passed the time by trying to imagine circumstances less congenial than this. But apart from being dead or at a Bee Gees concert I couldn’t think of a single thing.

We reached New York in the afternoon. I got a room in a hotel near Times Square. The room cost $110 a night and was so small I had to go out into the corridor to turn around. I had never been in a room where I could touch all four walls at once. I did all the things you do in hotel rooms – played with the lights and TV, looked in the drawers, put all the towels and ashtrays in my suitcase – and then wandered out to have a look at the city.

The last time I had been in New York was when I was sixteen and my friend Stan and I came out to visit my brother and his wife, who were then living in a strange, Kafkaesque community in Queens called Lefrak City. It consisted of about a dozen tall apartment buildings clustered around a series of lonesome quadrangles, the sort of quadrangles where rain-puddles stand for weeks and the flower-beds are littered with supermarket trolleys. Something like 50,000 people lived there. I had never conceived of so many people gathered in one place. I couldn’t understand why in such a big, open country as America people would choose to live like that. But for all these people this was it. This was home. They would live out their lives never having their own
back yard, never having a barbecue, never stepping out the back door at midnight to have a pee in the bushes and check out the stars. Their children would grow up thinking that supermarket trolleys grew wild, like weeds.

In the evenings, when my brother and his wife went out, Stan and I would sit with binoculars and scan the windows of the neighbouring buildings. There were hundreds of windows to choose from, each containing a ghostly glow of television. What we were looking for, of course, were naked women – and to our amazement we did actually see some, though usually this resulted in such fervent grappling for control of the binoculars that the women had dressed and gone out for the evening by the time we got their windows back in view. Mostly what we saw, however, were other men with binoculars scanning the windows of our building.

What I particularly remember was the sense of menace whenever we left the building. Groups of leather-jacketed teenagers with no place to go would sit on the walls around the complex watching anyone who passed. I always expected them to fall in behind us as we went by and to take our money and stick us with knives they had made in the prison workshop, but they never bothered us. They just stared. Even so it was frightening because we were just skinny kids from Iowa.

New York still frightened me. I felt the same sense of menace now as I walked down to Times Square. I had read so much for so long about murders and street crime that I felt a personal gratitude to everyone who left me alone. I wanted to hand out cards that said ‘Thank you for not killing me’.

But the only people who assaulted me were panhandlers. There are 36,000 vagrants in New York and in two days of walking around every one of them asked me for money. Some of them asked twice. People in New York go to Calcutta to get some relief from begging. I began to regret that I didn’t live in an age when a gentleman could hit such people with his cane. One guy, my favourite, came up and asked if he could borrow a dollar. That knocked me out. I wanted to say, ‘
Borrow
a dollar? Certainly. Shall we say interest at one per cent above prime and we’ll meet back here on Thursday to settle?’ I wouldn’t give him a dollar, of course – I wouldn’t give my closest friend a
dollar
– but I pressed a dime into his grubby mitt and gave him a wink for his guile.

Times Square is incredible. You’ve never seen such lights, such hustle. Whole sides of buildings are given over to advertisements that blink and ripple and wave. It’s like a storm on an electronic sea. There are perhaps forty of these massive inducements to spend and consume, and all but two of them were for Japanese companies: Mita Copiers, Canon, Panasonic, Sony. My mighty homeland was represented by just Kodak and Pepsi Cola. The war is over, Yankee dog, I thought bleakly.

The most riveting thing about New York is that anything can happen there. Only the week before, a woman had been eaten by an escalator. Can you beat that? She had been on her way to work, minding her own business, when suddenly the stair beneath her gave way and she was plummeted into the interior mechanism, into all the whirring cogs and gears, with the sort of consequences you can well imagine. How would you like to be the cleaner in
that
building? (‘Bernie, can you
come in early tonight? And listen, you’d better bring along a wire brush and a
lot
of Ajax.’) New York is always full of amazing and unpredictable things. A front page story in the
New York Post
was about a pervert with AIDS who had been jailed that day for raping little boys. Can you believe that? ‘What a city!’ I thought. ‘Such a madhouse!’ For two days I walked and stared and mumbled in amazement. A large black man on Eighth Avenue reeled out of a doorway, looking dangerously disordered, and said to me, ‘I been smoking ice! Big bowls of ice!’ I gave him a quarter real fast, even though he hadn’t asked for anything, and moved off quickly. On Fifth Avenue I went into the Trump Tower, a new skyscraper. A guy named Donald Trump, a developer, is slowly taking over New York, building skyscrapers all over town with his name on them, so I went in and had a look around. The building had the most tasteless lobby I had ever seen – all brass and chrome and blotchy red and white marble that looked like the sort of thing that you would walk around if you saw it on the sidewalk. Here it was everywhere – on the floors, up the walls, on the ceiling. It was like being inside somebody’s stomach after he’d eaten pizza. ‘Incredible,’ I muttered, and walked on. Next door a store sold pornographic videos, right there on Fifth Avenue. My favourite was
Yiddish Erotica, Volume 2
. What could this possibly consist of – rabbis with their trousers down, tarty women lying spread-eagled and saying, ‘You wanna fuck already?’ ‘Superb, incredible,’ I mumbled, and plodded on.

In the evening, as I strolled back along Times Square, my eye was caught by a strip-tease club with a photograph of the strippers in the window. They were nice-looking
girls. One of the photos was of Samantha Fox. Since Ms Fox was at this time being paid something like £250,000 a year to show off her comely udders to readers of British newspapers such as the
Sun
, it seemed to me improbable, to say the least, that she would be peeling off for strangers in a smoky basement room on Times Square. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that there was a little fraud at work here. It’s a mean trick to play on a horny person.

They always used to do this to you at the Iowa State Fair. The strippers’ tents behind the rides would be covered with wildly erotic paintings of the most beautiful, silky-haired, full-breasted, lithe-bodied women you ever saw – women whose moist and pouty lips seemed to be saying, ‘I want you – yes, you there, with the zits and glasses. Come and fulfil me, little man.’ Aged fourteen and delirious with lust, you would believe these pictures with all your heart and many of the neighbouring organs. You would hand over a crumpled dollar and go inside, into a dusty tent that smelt of horse manure and rubbing alcohol and find on stage a weary stripper looking not unlike your own mother. It was the sort of disappointment from which you never really recover, and my heart went out now to the lonely sailors and Japanese photocopier salesmen who were down there drinking sweet, warm cocktails and having a night of overpriced disappointment. ‘We learn from our mistakes,’ I remarked sagely to myself with a rueful smile and told a panhandler to piss off.

I went back to my room, pleased not to have been mugged, more pleased not to have been murdered. On top of my television was a card saying that for $6.50 I could have an in-room movie. There was, as I recall, a choice of
four –
Friday the Thirteenth Part 19
, in which a man with a personality disorder uses knives, hatchets, Magimixes and a snow blower to kill a succession of young women just as they are about to climb in the shower;
Death Wish II
, in which Charles Bronson tracks down and kills Michael Winner;
Bimbo
, in which Sylvester Stallone as Rambo has a sex-change operation and then blows up a lot of Oriental people; and, on the adult channel,
My Panties Are Dripping
, a sensitive study of interpersonal relationships and social conflict in post-modern Denmark, with a lot of vigorous bonking thrown in for good measure. I toyed for a moment with the idea of watching a bit of the last one – just to help me relax, as they say in evangelical circles – but I was too cheap to spend $6.50 and anyway I’ve always suspected that if I did punch the requisite button (which was worn to a nubbin, I can tell you), the next day a bellboy would confront me with a computer print-out and tell me that if I didn’t give him $50 he would send a copy of the room receipt to my mother with ‘Miscellaneous charges: Deviant Porno Movie, $6.50’ circled in red. So instead I lay on the bed and watched a rerun on normal television of a 1960s comedy programme called
Mr Ed
, which was about a talking horse. Judging by the quality of the jokes, I would guess that Mr Ed wrote his own material. But at least there was nothing in it that would get me blackmailed.

And thus ended my day in New York, the most exciting and stimulating city in the world. I couldn’t help but reflect that I had no reason to feel superior to my fellow lonely hearts in the strip-tease club twenty floors below. I was just as lonesome as they were. Indeed, all over this big, heartless city there were no doubt tens of thousands of
people just as solitary and friendless as me. What a melancholy thought.

‘But I wonder how many of them can do this?’ I remarked to myself and with both hands and both feet reached out and touched all four walls at once.

IT WAS THE
Columbus Day weekend and the roads were busy. Columbus has always seemed to me an odd choice of hero for a country that celebrates success as America does, because he was such a dismal failure. Consider the facts: he made four long voyages to the Americas, but never once realized that he wasn’t in Asia and never found anything worthwhile. Every other explorer was coming back with exciting new products like potatoes and tobacco and nylon stockings, and all Columbus found to bring home were some puzzled-looking Indians – and he thought they were Japanese. (‘Come on, you guys, let’s see a little sumo.’)

But perhaps Columbus’s most remarkable shortcoming was that he never actually saw the land that was to become the United States. This surprises a lot of people. They imagine him trampling over Florida, saying, ‘You know, this would make a nice resort.’ But in fact his voyages were all spent in the Caribbean and bouncing around the swampy, bug-infested coasts of Central America. If you ask me, the Vikings would make far more worthy heroes for America. For one thing, they did actually discover it. On top of that, the Vikings were manly and drank out of skulls and didn’t take any crap from anybody. Now
that’s
the American way.

When I lived in America Columbus Day was one of those semi-bogus holidays that existed only for the benefit
of public workers with strong unions. There was no mail on Columbus Day and if you innocently drove all the way over to the east side of the town to the Iowa State Vehicle Licensing Center to renew your driver’s licence you would find the door locked and a notice hanging in the window saying ‘Closed for Columbus Day Holiday. So Tough Shit To You.’ But otherwise life was no different than on any other day. Now, however, it appeared that the Columbus Day holiday had spread. There were lots of cars and recreational vehicles on the highway and the radio announcers kept talking about things like the number of fatalities that were expected ‘this Columbus Day weekend’. (How do they know these things anyway? Is there some kind of a secret quota?) I had been looking forward to reaching New England because I wanted to see the autumn colour. In addition, the states would be small and varied and there wouldn’t be that awful rolling tedium that comes with all the other American states, even the attractive ones. But I was wrong. Of course. New England states are indubitably tiny – Connecticut is only eighty miles across; Rhode Island is smaller than London – but they are crowded with cars, people and cities. Connecticut appeared to be just one suburb. I drove up US 202 towards Litchfield, which was marked on my map as a scenic route, and it was, to be sure, more scenic than suburb, but it wasn’t exactly spectacular.