Another Fine Mess Read online

  I did my best to croak along with the amens that chorused stridently out around me for the next half-hour. The young pastor steadily ramped up the tremulous, soaring intensity of his words, periodically muting them to a dramatic whisper, all the while concentrating his focus on that malleable sceptic the Lord had promised him over breakfast.

  ‘JESUS-uh, I do LOVE him-uh. I’m preaching to somebody here today-uh that doesn’t have the holy ghost-uh. Somebody who needs a helping hand with their family, their marriage, hallelujah, in their home, in their body, because they’re in the right place, there’s peace here [“YES, SIR! A-MEN!”], peace of mind, peace of soul, salvation, LIFE ETERNAL!’

  A shaft of multicoloured sun speared dramatically in through the garish stained glass beside me. For a moment I was caught in two minds. Sneak out the back or jump to my feet, cheeks wet with tears, and beg to be taken down to the water.

  ‘We all hear these people asking why do I need Jesus-uh, I’m a pretty good person, I don’t steal, I never killed anyone, I only drink sometimes, I only smoke dope at the weekends, I’m not that bad, I gave a five-dollar bill to that bum at the stop light. Let’s hear from Timothy! What does Timothy have to say?’

  My eyes widened. What did Timothy have to say? Before I had a chance to put him straight about the stop-light charity, and if we’re going lifetime full-disclosure the theft, he opened a bible.

  ‘First Timothy chapter 2, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth he will allow all men to be saved, willing that none shall perish-uh. I am not sufficient, I am not adequate. There is nothing God hates more than feeding man’s arrogance. Everyone that is proud at heart is an abomination to the Lord, HE SHALL NOT BE UNPUNISHED-UH!’

  Then the organ swirled and everyone chorally exulted in the name of Jesus-uh and suddenly the young pastor was right at my side, sweating freely, offering a hot embrace. I leaned woodenly in and he began to murmur urgently into my ear about the Lord, the details lost in the hubbub of exiting worshippers. ‘Um, congratulations,’ I said when he released me. ‘That was, you know, quite a performance.’ Then I considered these words, and blurted: ‘Obviously I don’t mean to, ha-ha, feed anyone’s arrogance. Definitely not yours. Christ no. I mean, not Christ like that, but the actual Lord Jesus. Amen.’

  The pastor’s damp brow furrowed; I clapped him briskly on the side of the arm and scooted out to the car park. ‘Coast to coast, huh?’ called an elderly Pentecostalist, opening the door of his Buick as I jabbed the T’s starter. ‘Hot as heck and dry as a powderhouse out west; you better take an up and a right or you gonna die!’

  I would hate to accuse Silsbee’s hospitable Pentecostalists of casting a wrathful curse upon me, especially as their church sent a very sweet postcard to my home which my wife read out over the phone a week later. Nonetheless, my soul began to sweat a little that day. An hour down the road I somehow endeavoured to inhale a mouthful of chilli vinegar from my lunchtime Hot Head pickled sausage, and pulled messily on to the verge, gasping and blind with tears. Shortly afterwards my winged motometer acquired a strange tilt, which became a lot stranger after I clattered over a cattle grid. The entire radiator neck had snapped off; I wedged it vaguely into place with strips of cardboard, crossed my fingers, and praised the good Ford that a Model T could always limp on after mishaps that would stop most cars in their tracks.

  Then, with Houston’s forest of silvered chimneys taking shape on the hazy blue horizon, Antony called: poor Bob Kirk had been rushed to hospital with a chest infection. Happily he later recovered, but by then I was far, far away. So I never did get to meet the man who was as old as the T he had owned for fifty-one years, one of the last living links with the age of Henry Ford and his Universal Car.

  Houston offered some solace: I sold it to myself as another living link, wellspring of the oil boom that powered the Model T boom. At the dawn of the auto age, petroleum was an obscure commodity that you typically had to order from a chemist – motorists tended to run their cars on cleaning fluid, which was both cheaper and more readily available. The cost and scarcity of fuel was such a serious issue that for a while the internal combustion engine seemed likely to lose out to the electric motor. All that changed on 10 January 1901, when a surveying team at Spindletop, in south-east Texas, broke through a 1,000-foot-deep salt dome, unleashing a gusher that blew thirty-six million gallons of oil 150 feet into the air before it was brought under control. Spindletop was the first of a series of vast Texan discoveries that would see the oil price plummet to 3¢ a barrel, cheaper than water in some areas.

  In short order the fortunes of a dusty ranching state were utterly transformed: by 1940, the GDP of Texas had increased by 24,000 per cent. The state rode out the Depression, and still prospers, courtesy of a hundred-year oil boom that doesn’t know when to quit. Every time it seems US oil production has peaked, some lucrative but contentious reserves come to light – Alaska, offshore fields in the Gulf of Mexico, the frack-fest shale sands. Almost half of America’s oil still makes its way down to Houston, the world’s largest petrochemical cluster, where 100,000 Texans refine it and store it and hose it into tankers. An astonishing panorama opened out as I crossed Burnet Bay on a little ferry, every shoreline cluttered with gleaming flare stacks and cranes and gantries and pylons that marched right across the water. For an hour thereafter I puttered through a petrochemical dystopia, the T dwarfed by hissing, rumbling, chrome-plated Pompidou Centres that filled the air with an eye-stinging miasma of solvents, eggs and burning rubber. Crossing over an interstate I gazed out at the smog-rimed Gulf of Mexico, my journey’s southernmost tip and an unanticipated sea between the seas, and thought: Wherever I eat tonight, hold the shrimp.

  The Guardian recently declared Houston ‘one of the last places you can live the American Dream’, which in native terms just means it’s getting bigger and richer. The shale-oil boom has pushed the population of Greater Houston up by a third since 2000: it now stands at 6.3 million, larger than half the countries on earth. I drove for long and harrowing hours up US-6, the second outermost of Houston’s four ring roads, an eight-lane, 90-mile strip mall whose every last gap was being busily filled in by men in yellow hard hats. After all that decay and dereliction this was a realm where everything turned to gold, no matter whether it deserved to or not (exhibit A, above a packed car lot: ‘SMOKES, LINGERIE, NOVELTIES – YOUR ONE-STOP SHOP’).

  Even at 8 p.m. on a Sunday the traffic was relentless, jockeying about, cutting me up, weaving right alongside for a suicidal selfie. I ploughed on, rigid and vacant, shooting helplessly through a good half-dozen freshly red lights at the kind of intersections that really didn’t lend themselves to such behaviour. The light began to fail and I still only had one headlamp. Prosperous, bustling, big-town America is no place for a Model T.

  ‘That your car?’

  It was gone eleven and I’d stepped out of my motel room for the now traditional driver’s-seat night-cap: Mike was parked directly outside the door. This wasn’t the seediest place I’d stayed at, but it was by a long chalk the sleaziest. After flumping on to my bed I’d opened my eyes to find my reflection staring down at me from a huge ceiling mirror.

  My questioner was a middle-aged black guy with very red eyes and the smouldering stub of a cigar in his teeth, leaning back against the door next to mine. I nodded; he pincered the cigar out of his mouth and spat emphatically into the gutter before us.

  ‘You a millionaire?’

  I supplied the answer and he spat again.

  ‘Well, you might wanna put a tarp over that shit in the back, this ain’t a real good area.’

  This sentence, delivered as a continuous wayward sound, made me aware that my companion was extremely drunk. If it had taken a while to realise, that’s because I was too. All I’d found to eat in the gas station across the street was a long-life cream-cheese croissant, so colossally repulsive that I’d only managed two bites. But that didn’t seem to matter now, and nor did anything e
lse, because I had also purchased and fully ingested a can of Lime-a-Rita. I say can but it was more of an aluminium pillar box: 25 fluid ounces of 8 per cent citric-flavoured malt beverage that had really done the job on an empty stomach and a weary soul, hitting the spot so hard it went completely out of focus. An alfresco tooth-mug of bourbon seemed the obvious sequel.

  ‘So izzat your car, then?’

  I flicked a matey finger towards the ostentatious vehicle parked beside mine, a very shiny, low-slung white saloon with black glass and the most extraordinary wheels: long chrome spikes jutted a good ten inches out from the hubs, in the fashion of a Ben-Hur chariot. It was the most compelling car-lot double-act Mike would star in, an era-spanning display of the Texan showmanship that had inspired Bob Kirk to paint Mike’s wheels purple.

  His derisive snort segued into another extravagant expectoration. ‘Not mine, man. Them wheels are swangers, they’re nasty. Cost you ’bout two or three grand a set. You ride on swangers, you better be strapped.’

  I took a sip of bourbon and gazed placidly into the warm breeze. The crown of a palm tree rustled gently above the reception office; each of the streetlamps around it sported a fuzzy halo of flying insects.

  ‘You better be what?’ I drawled at length.

  ‘You better have a gun. Guy I know got shot for a set of swangers.’

  A rather bigger sip seemed in order.

  ‘Now I don’t know who owns that car, man, but I can tell you he sells drugs. Betchoo he’s got a TV in the back to watch butt-naked movies. Those guys will fuck you up. That’s Houston, man. That shit is just the way it is.’

  I waited for him to spit into the gutter, which he did with immense feeling, twice. Then I nodded wearily, in attempted emulation of a man who knew all about that shit, maybe too much, who if anything was pretty bored with it being the way it was. As casually as I could, which was much less casually than I hoped, I drained my tooth mug and set about transferring Mike’s waist-deep rear-seat accumulation of tools and spares and quarts of oil into my room. On the final and noisiest trip – in one spectacular action I dropped the oil-drain pan and punted it straight in through the door – my companion took a step forward.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, his voice low and suddenly sober, ‘you gotta woman in there witchoo?’

  I slept like a baby. A baby with third-degree nappy rash and five teeth coming through.

  CHAPTER 11

  From Houston I struck out north by north-west, away from the swangers and palms and into Texas proper: a lonesome, prone landscape of ranches, corn and cotton, the horizons steadily stripped of trees and pulled taut, distant pick-up trucks trailing plumes of dust across a flatness sparsely studded with grain elevators and nodding-dog oil derricks. This would be my default backdrop for a thousand miles, along with those blurts of yee-hah Texan exuberance that sporadically enlivened it. A 12-foot revolver erected barrel-up in a front yard; the gates to the Deep Shit Cattle Company; a state-wide anti-litter campaign sloganed ‘DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS!’ Texan motorists had a habit of honking their appreciation as they overtook me, but because they generally did so at around 90mph I often felt a few internal organs change place.

  ‘What have YOU done for your marriage today? NOW is a great time to do something EPIC.’ I will never know what inspired a rural Texan to paint these words on a billboard, and erect it in their front yard. Nor can I explain why my wife phoned about a minute after I’d passed by it, to say she was planning to fly out and join me for a few days, in a fortnight’s time. It took her a while to transmit this proposal: I’d pulled over to take the call, but my ears still rang with the echo of all those accumulated roars and creaks and grinds. ‘No, a fortnight. Can you hear me? Two weeks. TWO WEEKS. Hello? Hello?’ My deafened plight offered its own compelling testimony of just what my wife was letting herself in for. But in two weeks I’d be approaching my journey’s bleakest, loneliest ordeal, up in the wind-torn badlands of Montana, and the last thing I wanted was to put her off. ‘It’s a terrible line,’ I said. Then, as I’d already started lying, I added: ‘Seriously, it’ll be fantastic. You won’t regret it.’

  College Station, halfway between Houston and Waco, was another Texan boom town, this time built around its eponymous attachment to the ever-swelling Texas A&M University. The enormous stadium that dominates its centre is apparently the fifth largest sports arena on earth, fitted with a 163-foot video screen as part of a recent billion-dollar refit. Every year, it hosts precisely six games of college football. The scale and economics of the US college system are difficult to grapple with. Texas A&M, which I’m afraid I’d never heard of, educates 68,600 students, each of them paying an average $27,200 a year for the privilege.

  On the town’s arid outskirts, I pulled up by vague appointment in front of a great big metal shed with ‘FORD – THE UNIVERSAL CAR’ emblazoned across its lofty gable. A distantly familiar figure rolled out from under a pick-up, stood up and greeted me with distantly familiar badinage. ‘Bloody hell, not you again. Never expected you’d make it this far.’

  I would spend two days with Ross Lilleker, sleeping in a trailer pitched halfway between his vast workshop and the house he shared with his wife Jennifer and their two extremely sweet young daughters. Their sprawling property was bestrewn with animals – chickens, dogs, cats, a sullen donkey – and shipping containers full of Model Ts in various states of repair. It was an environment that almost demanded idle pottering, an activity to which Ross seemed constitutionally allergic. He was up at 5.15 a.m. every morning, and long after flicking off my trailer’s bedside light I could still hear him restlessly out and about, feeding livestock and banging away at old metal. ‘I can sleep when I’m dead,’ he told me.

  I did my best to keep up, filling the days watching Ross re-solder the radiator neck and fix my broken headlamp, failing to befriend his donkey, and shooting stuff. He was most insistent on this latter activity. ‘I’m the only man I know who doesn’t own a gun, but they’re such a big part of life down here. I’d say 70 per cent of the locals have one on them at all times.’ A customer had recently offered a barter deal for a Model T engine rebuild: ‘He led me out to his car, and there was a belt-fed machine-gun on the back seat.’ Ross rolled his eyes. ‘But, you know, I can get my hand on a gun when I need one. Had a black Labrador, lovely dog, but he was old and got sick with a tumour. The wife asked what we were going to do for him, and I said, “What d’you mean? We’re going to shoot him.”’ On the face of it, Ross made an unlikely Texan, but his blunt Derbyshire banter seemed a decent fit with the regional mentality.

  The Champion Firearms Indoor Shooting Range sat at the edge of a shopping mall, in a long beige building shared with a cellphone store and a Starbucks. I walked through its doors with an air of sombre disapproval, the face of a pinko Yurpean federalist appalled by this gung-ho firearms free-for-all. The range’s shop was flogging AK47s for $495, and a Barbie-pink .22 ‘My Little Rifle’ for a lot less.

  I flashed my driving licence and the range cashier tossed us some ear protectors and school-lab glasses, then waved an airy hand across a shelf stacked with pick-and-mix handguns: ‘So whaddya wanna shoot, guys?’ I tutted gravely as Ross made our selection. Forty deafening minutes later, I shuffled stiffly out into the sun with adrenalin drooling from the corners of a rictus grin.

  ‘Every Texan thinks he’s a crack shot,’ Ross had said as he loaded up our introductory weapon, a 9mm pistol. ‘But they’re all full of shit. I was brought up on Friday-night punch-ups in Chesterfield, and I reckon I could land a good English smack in the mouth on any idiot with a gun before they got an accurate round off.’ I nodded without paying much attention, already hopelessly in thrall to the macho theatrics: the little boxes of gleaming ammo, the deft click of rounds being slotted into the cartridge, the deeply satisfying whack as it slammed home. And above all, that dead-weight heft of the gun in your hand, and the shock-and-awe tumult that raged out when you let the distant paper target have it, from whip-crack sonic bo
om to the delicate tinkle of spent cartridge on concrete. Ross notched up bullseye after bullseye – ‘Not bad for a bloke with one eye,’ he said after scoring three in a row – but I barely cared where the bullets went. BANG-BANG-BANG! Fire came out of the barrel and everything.

  ‘Just keep the guns pointed down range, guys,’ said the cashier, marching in to interrupt the intemperate, whooping aftermath of my final salvo with an Eastwood-grade Magnum, evidently witnessed on his CCTV monitor. ‘Not cool to wave loaded weapons about.’ It was, though, which may have been the problem.

  Yet this was merely a ballistic warm-up for the die-hard, full-bore main event. Half an hour later we were parked up by a warehouse-sized workshop out in the sticks. ‘GUNS ARE WELCOME ON PREMISES,’ read the largest of the many signs neatly affixed to the shop’s stout steel doors. I politely scanned the others while Ross rapped his knuckles on the metal. ‘DUE TO INCREASE IN PRICE OF AMMO, DO NOT EXPECT WARNING SHOT’; ‘HEAVILY ARMED – EASILY PISSED’; ‘HIPPIES – USE BACK DOOR. NO EXCEPTIONS.’

  The door clanked ajar and we were met by a man with a thin silver moustache, metal-framed glasses and a blue T-shirt pulled taut over a round belly. Mark was a machinist who bored out, skimmed down and reground large pieces of car for Ross and others, using the lathes and drills lined up in the workshop shadows around us. But he was also a doomsday-ready firearm fanatic with a number of deep-seated grudges that trickled from his lips as we followed him through the heavy-metal gloom. ‘Mike Pence can kiss my ass … Hillary, let’s not go there … College Station city council … That royal family of yours.’ Ross had pre-warned me about this one, and its improbable chief focus. ‘Don’t get me started on Camilla,’ muttered Mark as he led us through an office littered with double-take still-lifes. A sheaf of invoices paper-weighted with a desert-camouflaged assault rifle. An open flight-case on top of the printer, home to four Magnums neatly ensconced in foam cut-outs. A desk tidy with compartments full of paperclips, ballpoint pens and shotgun cartridges.