Another Fine Mess Page 12

  I generally shared these places with long-termers, mostly families who I guessed were on welfare. Their giveaway was a baby gate across the open front door, with laundry draped over it. The bigger kids would always congregate silently around the T, curious but shy, until a harassed-looking mother stuck her head out of a window: ‘Jaydon and Leanne, you let that man fix his car in peace or I’ll send you both back inside.’ Walking into the reception of the Colonial Manor Motel in Bryan, Ohio, I found a fellow guest dandling a pink-vested baby in her lap by the water cooler.

  ‘What’s her name?’ I asked brightly.

  An open smile and a blithe shrug. ‘No idea.’

  The further south I went, and the more deeply rural, the longer it took to negotiate even basic transactions. These were places with very little experience of people who spoke English, but weren’t American. Every time I sat down for my evening meal I’d ask for a glass of water, and every time the waitress would recoil and dart appalled looks at neighbouring tables, as if to say: ‘D’yall hear that? Hugh fricking Grant over here just ordered a goddam hobo’s scrotum!’ After several attempts I’d flatten everything into a lobotomised John Wayne drawl: ‘A glaaaaaaaaass of waaahdur.’ This usually did the job, though one Indiana waitress came back with a frothing schooner of ale and a winning smile. ‘And here’s your Michelob Ultra!’

  I’d often find a copy of the town’s newspaper on the table. Every time I did my spirits were lifted. You couldn’t leaf through one and not feel warmly smitten by the people who wrote and read it; if my burrito was washed down with a margarita, I might fancy myself living amongst them for ever. The finest example I encountered, in Indiana, introduced itself thus: ‘The Liberty Herald – the Only Newspaper in the World to Give a Darn about Union County.’ Its front-page story related a recent excitement involving the school bus: ‘There were no students aboard the bus at the time of the accident, but the collision broke a light at the rear-left side.’

  The Herald’s centre pages were devoted to Liberty’s 4-H club, a defining small-town youth institution whose six million members are best described as farm scouts (the Hs in question: head, heart, hands and health). This was a two-margarita night, and I fear I may have welled up at the wholesome, earnest Union County 4-H Fair Queen nominees beaming timelessly out at me in black and white. ‘Alyssa is president of the Hoofbeats Horse & Pony Club … Olivia is sponsored by Progressive Homemakers … Madeline participates in cheerleading and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes … Emily is a member of the College Corner Presbyterian Church where she volunteers at the food pantry.’ And on the facing page, their young male counterparts, broad of neck and close of crop, outlining their hopes for the imminent 4-H livestock show: ‘My name is Ethan Hornung and I am a member of the Hopeful Homemakers Stateline Farmers Club. Within my ten years of being in 4-H, the only project I have ever done is swine, but do not let that fool you. Showing my hog in the arena is my favourite part. My future plans consist of going to taxidermy school in Idaho.’ God bless you, Ethan Hornung.

  And so, replete with tortillas and sentimentality, I’d wander out into the warm night. The temperature always seemed to rise for an hour or two after sundown, as the earth and the walls and the asphalt breathed out all the daytime heat they’d absorbed. I nearly always had the streets to myself. Nothing ever seemed to happen in these towns after dark. The only time it did – in Bryan again – was when an auto interiors shop caught fire a mile out of town, filling the night with screaming sirens and my motel forecourt with happy men in wifebeater vests. ‘Got five fire departments working down there,’ one of them called eagerly out to another, his smiling eyes fixed on a distant orange glow. ‘That baby sure is throwing up some smoke.’

  But in the main it was just me, the fireflies and a rabbit or two, lolloping about in the breezeless, blood-warm gloaming. I’d wander down main street, inspecting the foreclosed businesses – a drive-thru bank with its ATMs knee-deep in dandelions, a family photographer with a couple of fading fatties tying the knot above a carpet of dead flies – and playing count the flags. Stand in the centre of any American small town, no matter how desolate, and you will always see at least three Stars and Stripes without moving your head. Eight was a typical tally. And I’d cock an ear for the plaintive whistle of a freight-train locomotive, that defining small-town nocturne.

  Mike would usually have drawn a fan club by the time I returned to the motel. The local Willie Nelson with a grey ponytail sticking out the back of his bandana, or a couple of white-beards in cut-off dungarees and caps advertising tractors or dog food. A horny hand would be held out: ‘My name’s Frank J. Weck, and this here’s Elway Buckridge. Real purty T you got. Headin’ on to that old car show in Revenge?’ These chaps always had an endearing habit of sprinkling their own adventures, no matter how peripheral, into the conversation that followed. ‘England, huh? One time I been to Anchorage, Alaska.’ Or, more effusively: ‘Let me tell you ’bout Mike Chapman, he was a Brit, half a one at least, I roomed with him down in Louisville in the mid-Seventies, guy had a stress thing, bit of a stutter, anyways he hooked up with this woman with big titties, I mean they were a green light for Mike, so maybe ten, twelve years ago I’m back in Kentucky, I go to a gas station and there’s a guy workin’ outside the tyre place next door, and shoot, it’s old Mike Chapman, so we have a bit of a hug and a handshake, then a week later I go back, and he’s not there, so anyways that’s my Mike Chapman story.’ Then they’d nod, very slowly, ten or twenty times, and add: ‘Elway’s just got him one of those hydraulic log splitters. Heck of a machine.’

  Some of these old boys were seriously decrepit, and it was extraordinary to see them shuffling clumsily back to their pick-ups. I kept wanting to snatch the keys away. The inalienable right to drive is an unwritten small-town amendment, a universal freedom that is blind to age, infirmity or drooling dementia. I suppose that’s the legacy of Henry and fifteen million Model Ts. One night a dented SUV pulled erratically into the motel car park and screeched to an untidy halt beside the T’s small coterie of admirers. The window buzzed down and a yellowy ghost eased its head out. ‘I had me a 1930 Model A convertible,’ it croaked. ‘Cat got in the roof and ate it all up.’ Then the window buzzed back up and the SUV returned to the road, via two kerbs and a flower bed.

  When the last old-timer had slalomed away into the dark I’d go back to my room and click on the TV news. After a slow-paced, amiable small-town evening it was always a shock to witness the fresh round of hate and rage that had ravaged the national airwaves all day. Commentators of both stripes raved and squealed and threw up their hands; wild-eyed interviewers shouted down guests; panellists ranted over each other, then pulled their mics off and stormed out. And behind it all sat Trump, propped up in bed with his phone and a lapful of cheeseburgers, tossing something soft and whiffy into every whirring news cycle. He’d declare Twitter war on the world’s most wayward nuclear power, or replace his communications chief with a ludicrous cartoon mobster, and then – after eleven days – replace the ludicrous cartoon mobster with a four-star Marine general. Attempting to formulate a response to his party’s failure to overturn Obama’s Affordable Care Act, he completely changed his mind three times in a single day. His only systematic strategy seemed to involve undermining every senior figure in his own administration.

  If I had to pick the defining moment from those crazy weeks, I’d probably go for Trump’s address to the National Scout Jamboree, when 35,000 fresh-faced teenagers who had turned up expecting a warm homily about comradeship and knots were instead treated to a rambling, vainglorious reminiscence of their president’s distant electoral triumph.

  ‘But you remember that incredible night with the maps, and the Republicans are red and the Democrats are blue, and that map was so red it was unbelievable. And you know, we have a tremendous disadvantage in the Electoral College. Popular vote is much easier. We have – because New York, California, Illinois, you have to practically run the East Coast. And we di
d. We won Florida. We won South Carolina. We won North Carolina. We won Pennsylvania. We won and won.’

  This sort of stuff was why you couldn’t sit on the fence about Trump, and why the news outlets had now abandoned any pretence of impartiality. Fox News, of course, had never even pretended, and though I did my best to give it a fair crack of the whip, I could never tolerate more than fifteen minutes in one sitting. By then I’d have endured at least ten ad-break idents that shouted ‘FOX NEWS – FAIR AND BALANCED!’ or ‘FOX NEWS – WE REPORT, YOU DECIDE!’ and heard at least three presenters pour scorn all over ‘the Pravda-like mainstream media’, with copybook shit-eating grins. Experiencing all this on a national TV network operated by Rupert Murdoch built up an Orwellian disconnect that soon made my temples pulse and my fists clench and my mouth yell: ‘YOU INCREDIBLY STRANGE AND DISTURBING PEOPLE!’

  As a liberal elitist I obviously felt much more at home watching CNN and MSNBC, though it was plain that even in the short weeks since I’d set off, both networks had steadily retreated from a position of nominal even-handedness towards one-eyed propaganda. The presenters now switched between two expressions: harrowed disbelief and derisive disgust. Sometimes I’d turn off the sound, and try to imagine what they might be reporting on if I didn’t already know. The best fit was that the nation’s children had all been lured away by a flatulent, cross-dressing giant. There were fewer and fewer pro-Trump guests, and the brittle courtesy they’d been accorded in the first interviews I’d watched had given way to sneering contempt. This was what Trump did: he polarised, he divided, he compelled you to side with him or against him. So it was now possible – indeed almost unavoidable – for every American to spend his or her life shut in their own echo chamber, only hearing the news they wanted to hear, hardening their prejudices and fostering their fears. You could live either in a world where Trump was forever an infantile narcissist or in one where the fake-news liberal mainstream media was forever foiling his doughty efforts to make America great again.

  For many decades, the Federal Fairness Doctrine obliged all US TV and radio networks to cover both sides of every political story or debate, much like the BBC’s Charter. But under conservative pressure – there was that hated ‘F’ word again – the doctrine was repealed in 1987. Rush Limbaugh launched his witheringly anti-liberal radio talk show within a year: soon he was on TV, in a syndicated show that paved the way for Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, launched in 1996. Year Zero, the year America was irreconcilably cleaved in two. By way of example, let us examine the recent electoral history of LaSalle Parish in Louisiana, the thirty-seventh Trumpiest voting district on my list. This was an area that traditionally leaned Republican, but often not by much: in the 1996 election, the Democrats pulled in 39 per cent of the votes, and the Republicans 45. But at every subsequent election, the gap grew, until it stretched into a yawning chasm. Trump picked up 89 per cent of the votes in LaSalle, a full 80 points clear of Hillary Clinton.

  After I came home, a Kansas man tweeted a photo that went viral. It captured an RSVP his parents had received for their golden wedding party from one of their oldest friends: ‘Happy 50th, quite an achievement! Sorry we cannot attend as I have nothing in common with liberals – we live in a different world, ethics and morals, and I would not feel comfortable.’ I mean – a golden wedding! Could any social event tick as many conservative boxes? In 1960, only 5 per cent of American adults said it would ‘disturb’ them if their child married a member of the party they didn’t vote for. Asked the same question in 2010, a third of Democrats and 40 per cent of Republicans answered ‘yes’. This was the new America: the battle lines had been drawn, and there could be no fraternising with the enemy. That Scout jamboree was memorable for more than the president’s incoherent boast-athon. For though some of those fresh-faced teenagers had booed, an awful lot of them had clapped and cheered wildly.

  An hour of news was all I could ever take. It was so relentless, and so punishing. Battered and fearful, I’d flick off the telly, pour two inches of bourbon from a plastic half-bottle into a plastic motel cup, and head out towards a friendly chrome face smiling in a pool of sodium light. Then I’d sit in my Universal Car, warmed within and without by Jim Beam and the summer breeze, and unwind to a serenade of chirruping insects and the mournful whistle of a distant locomotive.

  One dawn a bitter mist came down, and I shuddered through the ghostly fields of southern Indiana, hunched over the wheel with my jacket buttoned right up to the neck. That morning marked my debut dabble with the hefty radio I’d brought along for the trip. For long minutes my chilly fingers fruitlessly worked the dial; then a steel guitar twanged out of the ether and I homed in on it. A man was singing the blues, country style, and these, I swear, were his first clear words: ‘If you could see how I’m living in this old car I drive, well you’d probably wonder why I even want to stay alive.’ Then the drawled melancholy was swallowed by crackle and pop, and I drove on in wide-eyed silence.

  The Midwest’s broad, flat sea of green began to gently rise and fall, then abruptly plunged down to the mile-wide Ohio River. This counts itself as the Mississippi’s mightiest tributary, and the giant bulk barges battling its midstream currents were shrunk to bath toys. We crossed it rather gingerly on one of those rusty-Meccano girder bridges, the kind that always look as if they’re about to be dive-bombed by Stukas. Mike would slither horribly on the gridded steel that typically surfaced these crossings. Driving a Model T, I had by now established, would be a joint enterprise, a pact between man and machine. The best I could hope for was that Mike might do what I asked of him more often than not: start, stop, turn left, turn right, drive over bridges rather than off them. Once resigned to the potentially fatal downsides, I found this a liberating revelation. It was all about giving Mike fewer decisions to make. Modest applications of throttle and wheel. Steady and gentle on the brakes. No more than a rare tweak of the spark lever, to boost power going up hills and enhance engine braking coming down them. Things only unravelled in urban traffic, where the need for more urgent and drastic adjustments reprised the panicky lurching skitters of my early days at the wheel. But towns were now few and far between, and ever sleepier.

  Kentucky’s storied Bluegrass region was an upscale, manicured dominion of racehorse stud farms and bourbon distilleries, its plump hills accessorised with majestic oaks and smart white fencing. I felt a little homesick: this was like some idealised, epic-scale England, with more money, blazing sun and stronger booze. Mike led a column of placid weekend tourists through the twisty hills of bourbon country, and some rather less easy-going locals in and out of small towns that rang with the cries of competitive dads at Little League baseball games.

  Then, very gradually, we nosed into another Kentucky. There were abandoned farmhouses, the first I’d seen, and a lot of soaped-up shop windows. A family with too many children and not enough teeth sat around a cannonball stack of watermelons under a camping gazebo. Hillbillies were out doing hillbilly things, like sawing a big hole in the side of their house, or rolling vast plastic drums down a steep meadow, or drinking beer in an old wrecked car with a Confederate flag on its bonnet. The pick-up was now undisputed king of the road: one idle afternoon out on the Cumberland Plateau I counted nineteen overtaking me in succession. A front-seat passenger in the last was cooling his bare feet out of the window. People were communicating in what one might charitably describe as measured tones, and my own accent was becoming ever more impenetrable. After Bob Kirk’s beaded seat cover wore through the seat of my trousers, I developed a sort of Eliza Doolittle hillbilly training mantra: ‘There’s a ghastly vast hole in the ass of my pants,’ I talk-sang, over and over again, ‘and all the daft bastards are laughing.’

  It began to feel like the south: hot, lazy and slightly mad. This trinity coalesced at the Super 8 motel in Danville, Kentucky, as I was chocking Mike’s wheels on the tilted, sticky car-park tarmac.

  ‘Mah name is Calvin T. Parr Junior,’ announced a slightly unkempt ol
d chap in a grimy check shirt and a cap with a bulldozer on it, ‘and I would lack you to give me your wedding ring.’

  My faith in small-town America’s lawful decency already ran deep, and without hesitation I pulled my gold band off and dropped it in the old man’s open palm.

  ‘Now, this is an all-natural product,’ he said, tipping a crumpled sachet of chalky powder on top of the ring, before clasping his hands and rubbing them together vigorously. After a few seconds of this he pincered the ring between his thumb and held it aloft with an expression of rapture. ‘The Lord just gave it to me in a dream.’

  ‘No, hang on a minute,’ I said quickly. ‘I just gave it to you in this car park.’

  He wasn’t listening.

  ‘Look at it glint in the sun! Don’t that gold just shan?’

  I leaned close and took the opportunity to pluck my ring back. It didn’t appear to have been switched. It also didn’t appear to shan any more than it had.

  ‘It’s a shale-based polishin’ powder. Recipe between me and the Lord.’ He took a quick peek over his shoulder, then dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘I had the op-toonerty to go on TV with it, but the Lord told me, “No, Calvin – you need to take this to Japan.”’

  This seemed a good moment to lug my bags out of the car and prepare to take my leave.

  ‘Ain’t just a polish, neither. See how good it makes my hay-ands!’

  He held them up. They might have belonged to someone who juggled bricks for a living. I wished him luck and hauled my belongings off towards the reception, accompanied all the way by his fading exhortations.