Another Fine Mess Read online

  Most significant of all, the loss of alcohol-related taxes kicked an unexpectedly huge hole in government revenues. New York discovered that almost three-quarters of its state income had been derived from liquor levies. The federal authorities found that a ban they’d paid $300 million to enforce had simultaneously deprived them of an extraordinary $11 billion in tax and duty. A challenge under usual economic conditions, maintaining this state of affairs in the Depression was arrant lunacy, and in 1933 FDR turned the taps back on. But small-town values are never sacrificed without a fight, and a rearguard action played out in the fundamentalist boondocks. Mississippi remained booze-free until 1966. There are still 500 dry counties in the US, largely in the south, and several thousand ‘moist counties’ with their own bespoke restrictions. A couple of days down the road, I asked for a beer to wash down my enchilada and was asked to fill in a club membership form. And the age of alcoholic consent – at twenty-one, the highest in the world – remains an unsettling obsession. Half the bars I went into had a booze-watch LED calendar on prominent display, showing the birthdate of the youngest legal drinker. Most Americans can buy an assault rifle three years before they can buy a beer.

  CHAPTER 10

  Heat and clouds coagulated into ominous darkness as I approached the Mississippi at Natchez, and by the time Mike got his front wheels on the gangly girder bridge to Louisiana, the oncoming headlights were pushing bow waves of rain before them. I could barely make out the end of my bonnet, let alone the storied waters beneath, which was a shame as it isn’t every day you get to see an old man rolling along.

  Mike’s stifling, porous side curtains went up for what would be the last time: their pointless erection still left me soaked, as it were, as well as suffocated, so to speak. Enclosure really locked in the T’s body odour, a challenging pot pourri of petrol, old trousers, old leather, solvents and dust. The smell of hot shed. My nose was put through its paces but my eyes had nothing to process beyond 20 feet of grey smear. All I really saw of Louisiana was the inside of the Burger and Brisket House in Jena.

  ‘Man, you talk just like Doctor Who!’ said the girl at the counter after I placed my order. ‘What’s that thing you folks say?’

  She looked at me promptingly.

  ‘Um … Glass of water? Tickety-boo? Fortnight? Wanker?’

  ‘“Gents.” Yeah – that’s it. Gents.’

  Jena was the capital of LaSalle Parish, previously referenced in my intriguing study of small-town America’s polarisation: 86 per cent white and 89 per cent Trump. The dominant local employers were a detention centre for immigrants, a police maintenance depot and a national guard armoury. The dominant local pastime – as it would be for the balance of my journey – was shooting animals. Glass-eyed trophies cluttered the diner walls, interspersed with photographs of extremely young boys posing with rifles beside their first kill. A poster by the door offered local hunters a ‘deer processing’ service. Louisiana doesn’t really have gun laws. An unlicensed vendor can sell you an assault rifle without asking any questions, and you won’t need to register it. Anyone can walk into a New Orleans bar with a loaded gun. Unastoundingly, the state has America’s highest rate of death by gunfire, twice the national average.

  So LaSalle subscribed to the Trump Belt work/play trinity: Huntin’, Shootin’ & Incarceratin’. All washed down with wristy lashings of Louisiana’s liquid fire. As I doused my Cajun dirty rice in hot sauce, a young man on the next table revealed his own troubled relationship with the devil’s condiment. ‘Man, I used to love that shit. In the army we had these little Tabasco bottles in our meal packs, and one evening my drill sergeant got bored and challenged me to a contest.’ A sort of proud wince annexed his features. ‘He drank seventeen, I did twenty-one. Kind of lost the taste for it after that.’

  I slooshed west on a wide, empty highway cut through the Portuguese pines. So many of these once bustling arteries had succumbed to Route 66 syndrome, their traffic sucked away by the opening of a nearby freeway. Authorised in 1956, the Interstate Highways System evolved into the largest public works project in human history: 47,000 miles of controlled-access freeways, constructed at a cost of $500 billion in today’s money. In its way the IHS was as much a symbol of American might as the space program. It’s now possible, in accordance with the stated aims of that 1956 declaration, to drive from coast to coast – and from Canadian tip to Mexican toe – without encountering a single stop sign or traffic light.

  A quarter of all American vehicle miles are now clocked up on interstates, and an awful lot of native drivers know no other way from A to B. ‘You didn’t come in on I-10?’ asked a nonplussed motelier a few days down the line. ‘So how d’you get around the swamp?’ The rise of the interstate has probably done as much as anything to kill off motor touring as a leisure activity. Freeways are very good at crushing distance, but crushing distance isn’t much fun. Parents no longer bung their kids in the station wagon every summer and hit the open road. So many of those local attractions that depended on this holiday institution – the Wonder Caves, the Dinosaur Canyons, the Funtown Mountains – were now just fading billboards along my route, their passing trade siphoned away by an interstate and a related shift in vacation habits. Family road trips were what your parents went on, or maybe just your grandparents: Americans now expected more glamorous holidays, flying out to the coast or to Vegas, or Mexico, or the Bahamas. Motels that had clearly been built for family road-trippers now announced their struggle for solvency with drifts of leaves in drained swimming pools, pining for responsible, respectable guests who didn’t steal the hairdryers and the remote batteries or use the ice bucket as an ashtray. Plenty more – generally one or two in every sizeable settlement – stood boarded up. I invariably had picnic areas to myself, even on the splendid Natchez Trace Parkway, deserted on a beautiful afternoon in the school holidays. It sometimes felt as if I alone was driving the American Dream as it was first dreamed.

  I left Louisiana on Highway 8, a little two-lane blacktop that crossed the Sabine River and became Highway 63. ‘Drive Friendly – The Texas Way!’ read the first sign. The second: ‘SPEED LIMIT 75.’ Almost at once a truck overtook at lunch-loosening close quarters, demonstrating that this monstrous ‘restriction’ was open to all. Texas would duly present Mike with his stiffest non-urban traffic challenge.

  Crossing state lines meant an instant change in the road surface and a Forrest Gump chocolate-box adventure: you never knew what you were going to get, or get done for. I was welcomed into Ohio by a stern reminder that transporting non-coniferous firewood from Michigan carried a $5,000 fine. Whatever ‘jake brakes’ might be, using them in West Virginia would have gone down even worse than my ‘fake brakes’. Almost every state seemed to have conflicting regulations on the wearing of crash helmets and seat belts. In Texas I could use my cellphone to talk at the wheel but not to text, with neither permitted in a demarcated school zone; in Louisiana, all cellphone use was granted to drivers with at least one year’s licensed experience (Massachusetts allows drivers to use phones as long as they keep one hand on the wheel; Florida, splendidly, allows the same ‘as long as the sound goes through only one ear’). In Oregon, you can’t pump your own gas (unless, as I would discover, the attendant doesn’t fancy sticking his hose under your antique seat). State sales taxes are all over the place. So are can and bottle deposits. A packet of cigarettes that costs $5 in Kentucky would set you back $13 in New York. And – hold on to your Pilgrim-father bonnets – twenty-five US states impose no minimum age limit on marriage. In 2001, three ten-year-old girls in Tennessee were married to men aged twenty-four, twenty-five and thirty-one. Across the nation, 985 fourteen-year-olds have pledged their troth in the last two decades.

  One night I watched a dramatised documentary about Bonnie and Clyde and was amazed to learn that the FBI couldn’t pursue the pair for armed robbery or murder, which weren’t covered by federal jurisdiction, and had to wait until they transported a stolen vehicle across a state line,
which was. The programme offered an instructive insight into lean and desperate times. When W. D. Jones joined Clyde Barrow’s gang on Christmas Eve 1932, he didn’t even own a pair of shoes. The local police who tailed them had to supply their own weapons, pinging small-calibre revolvers at a gang that had relieved a military depot of several enormous machine guns. Small wonder that two-thirds of US murders went unsolved in the era, as did 90 per cent of all serious crime. County police even had to provide their own cars, quite often Model Ts that were embarrassingly outrun by Barrow’s half-inched Ford V8s. Even terrible people embodied the go-getting energy of America’s golden age. The Barrow gang often drove 600 miles a day on the run, and once topped a thousand. Clyde famously wrote to Henry Ford in praise of the V8’s speed and durability:

  Tulsa Okla

  10th April 1934

  Mr. Henry Ford

  Detroit Mich.

  Dear Sir:—

  While I still have got breath in my lungs I will tell you what a dandy car you make. I have drove Fords exclusivly when I could get away with one. For sustained speed and freedom from trouble the Ford has got ever other car skinned and even if my business hasen’t been strickly legal it don’t hurt enything to tell you what a fine car you got in the V8—

  Yours truly

  Clyde Champion Barrow

  He didn’t have breath in his lungs for long. Six weeks later the couple’s V8 sped into a police ambush on a Louisiana lane about 70 miles north-west of Jena, and was extravagantly ventilated. The TV voiceover cheerfully revealed that at least forty of the 130 shots that went through metal and glass also went through flesh.

  Texas felt more like a stand-alone nation than just another state. For one thing, it’s vast – by far the largest state in the lower forty-eight, more than half as large again as its nearest rival, California, and three times the size of the UK. But there was also a distinct otherness about it. The Texas Lone Star hung from every other mailbox and porch, and appeared in colossal hand-painted form on the side of barns and elevators; I barely saw the Stars and Stripes. When I opened my mouth people said, ‘Well, you sure ain’t from Texas,’ a styling conspicuously absent from encounters in other states. The tropical colours of the south – those purple crepe myrtles and bright red cardinal birds – gave way first to dense, green forest, then the sandy-soiled scrub that is the default Texan landscape. The sun came out and didn’t go away. Everything seemed bigger and more open. I very often found myself without a phone signal.

  Texas had been Mike’s home for at least the last half-century, and I awoke in Jasper – a beat-up hunting town in the Deep East woods – to find an exciting related mission flashing on my phone. Antony, an MTFCA member from southern Houston, had sent a message letting me know that Bob Kirk, Mike’s ninety-three-year-old previous owner and a fellow Houstonite, was keen to meet up. I redrafted my route accordingly, and gave Antony a rough ETA that allowed for breakdowns and another kind of service: it was Sunday, and I was heading into the Bible Belt’s last holes. Michael, take me to church.

  It seems fair to assume that almost every single one of those fifteen million Model Ts would have been driven to church at some point, and most on a weekly basis. Churchgoing, like the T, was a predominantly rural institution. And so it remains. Since the 1970s, the proportion of Americans who go to church every week has dropped steadily in the coastal cities but increased in most flyover states. Weekly attendance at Alabama’s churches alone is now twice that mustered by the Church of England across the entire UK. More than half of Texans go to church at least once a week. Across the Bible Belt, regular worshippers pay a tithe to their church that typically totals 10 per cent of earnings: in 2016, US churches received a remarkable $123 billion in donations. Pertinently, a detailed analysis of recent presidential contests has shown that frequency of church attendance is now the strongest demographic predictor of voting behaviour, much more so than income or age, and rivalled only by race.

  Until around 1980, nobody spoke about ‘the Christian right’. As late as 2008, three-quarters of the Republican party’s presidential candidates proclaimed a belief in evolution; by 2012 it was a third, and last time around Jeb Bush was the only non-creationist out of sixteen Republican runners (and even that came with an asterisk: ‘Yeah, but I don’t think evolution should actually be part of the school curriculum, to be honest with you.’).

  Donald Trump has offered few convincing suggestions that he truly believes in any power higher than himself, and let forth an especially muddy torrent of Trumpism when asked to volunteer his favourite passage of scripture: ‘Well, I think many. I mean, you know, when we get into the Bible, I think many. So many. And some people – look, an eye for an eye, you can almost say that. That’s not a particularly nice thing. But you know, if you look at what’s happening to our country, I mean, when you see what’s going on with our country, how people are taking advantage of us, and how they scoff at us and laugh at us.’ The interviewer chose not to point out that ‘an eye for an eye’ only appears in the Bible as a course of action specifically repudiated by Jesus in his ‘turn the other cheek’ riff. Seventy per cent of Americans believe in God, but Trump just didn’t convince as one of their number. It was certainly difficult to imagine him saying what I heard his chief of staff, Reince Preibus, say after he’d been ousted during the Scaramucci debacle: ‘God is good and everything works to good in the end. I believe that. I live for God, my family, my kids, and I know everything is going to be just fine.’

  But Trump’s dubious faith – not to mention his studiously unchristian egomania and pussy-grabbing pastimes – seemed almost irrelevant to the evangelical right. All those dark doubts were bleached out by the hopes and values they projected on to him with blinding intensity. ‘Millions of Americans’, declared Robert Jeffress, a Texan tele-evangelist whose programme is broadcast on 1,200 Christian TV channels across the US, ‘believe the election of President Trump represented God giving us another chance – perhaps our last chance to truly make America great again.’ Electing Trump was another act of faith, and one that must have come pretty easily to the churchgoing millions who had already put their trust in God, guts and guns.

  And so I headed south on the super-heated US-96, assessing my ecclesiastical options via the message boards posted outside every church. ‘ETERNITY – IT’S YOUR DECISION’ – hmm, bit heavy for a Sunday morning. ‘SEVEN DAYS WITHOUT PRAYER MAKES ONE WEAK.’ Too cheesy. ‘TOO HOT TO KEEP CHANGING SIGN.. SIN BAD, JESUS GOOD, DETAILS INSIDE.’ Now that I liked. But there weren’t any cars in the lot behind it, so I was either too early or too late.

  What I really wanted was a Pentecostal service, which Richard Grant had recommended for the full-fat experience. Pentecostalists spoke in tongues and laid on hands. Some of their pastors handled rattlesnakes to prove their faith, and more than one had died after being bitten and opting to leave the outcome in the hands of the Lord. On the outskirts of Silsbee, I passed the First Pentecostal Church, a large, brown building of recent construction, with a lofty pitched roof and a packed car park. The sign outside didn’t pull any funnies, but it did name the resident preacher as Pastor Homer Looper. That would definitely do. I swung Mike round and pulled in.

  You can never make a surreptitious entrance in a 1924 Model T, and by the time I’d installed myself in the very back pew, most of the 150-odd worshippers – very smart, very white – had come up to welcome me. Word seemed to travel back through the ranks of pale grey suits and crisp, demure dresses, so that the last ones who held out their hands were very fully informed.

  ‘’Preciate you stoppin’ by in your antique vee-hickle, Mr Moore.’

  ‘Now, I ain’t ever been to London, but I would be mighty tickled if you wrote your address down here. Visited Aberdeen one time, though. You happen to know Ann and Steve McCarthy?’

  ‘That’s a beautiful Model T, Mr Moore. God bless you. Now we get noisy sometimes, but don’t be alarmed.’

  Nobody else needed a haircut or had a T-shirt
with pink cats on. I doubt too many were silently urging themselves not to blaspheme either.

  A Hammond organ whirled and began to swell, then a ten-piece band and a gospel choir kicked in. Homer Looper was a personable and mellow character who didn’t seem the snake-charming type at all, but when he picked up the mic and held restrainedly forth about glory and grace and God’s salvation, a number of middle-aged men and women rose erratically from their seats and began to sway, eyes closed, arms aloft, pulling guitar-solo gurns. Prayers were said on behalf of an ancient and very frail parishioner who was pushed up to the altar in a wheelchair and at once engulfed by worshippers. Somebody called out to give Sister McDaniel a touch from heaven, and I supposed that deep in that ruck of bodies, hands were laid on. Then she was wheeled away.

  ‘My, it’s good to be in church,’ said Homer, beaming, and the tubby family in front of me all warmly embraced each other. ‘I’m so happy I’ve been converted, that I’ve been down to the water.’ I looked about and saw big, lazy smiles smeared across every face, arms clasping shoulders, everyone acting the way I only ever do after five pints. These people hadn’t turned up as an automatic act of duty. They were here because they believed. It was all a very long way from the mist-breathed Eleanor Rigby muttering that defines the British churchgoing experience.

  ‘I’m so happy to hear we’ve got a brother all the way from the UK with us today.’ A hundred and fifty faces turned towards mine, and with a wan smile I noted that Homer had given way to a younger preacher, a more intense chap wearing the suit and glasses Kevin Costner wore in JFK.

  ‘And that’s interesting, because I got up early this morning and was praying and talking with the Lord before I had my sausage biscuit, and I heard something from Him, I heard there would be somebody here for me today. A-MEN!’