Another Fine Mess Read online

  In truth, as I now learned, Adams was himself harking back to happier times. He put pen to paper in the depths of the Depression, and his words were a retrospective paean to the American Dream’s preludial golden slumbers. ‘As we compare America to-day with the America of 1912 it seems as though we have slipped a long way backwards,’ he wrote, referencing the year that the last two mainland states joined the union, and thus providing a handy date of birth for the dream that had just died.

  I read on, as Adams gamely fleshed out his shiny new catchphrase, defining what the American Dream meant by emphasising what it didn’t. ‘It has not been a dream of material plenty … nor physical comfort, and cheap amusements … It is not a dream of motor cars.’ Woah, Jimbo. I’ll have to stop you there. Keep the cheap amusements if you must, but let’s not be silly: take cars out of the American Dream, and you throw a bucket of iced water right in its peaceful, sleeping face. Ask anyone to envisage the Dream and they’ll describe a green-lawned, blue-skied consumerist wonderland, whose every cornerstone – suburbia, shopping mall, high school, the family vacation – is connected by road. Four-wheeled desire was the bedrock of the culture that underpinned the Dream, and of the work ethic that made it come true. If you wanted a car and worked for it, you got one. In 1964, when Lyndon B. Johnson announced his War on Poverty, even the most desperate regions were full of cars. In Appalachia, 40 per cent of the poorest residents owned one, and a third of those had been bought new. Car ownership was like some unwritten constitutional right.

  When the Chinese wanted to kickstart their own economic miracle in the early 1990s, they simply removed restrictions on private vehicle ownership. The ‘car carrot’, as I’ve just feebly dubbed it, sufficed to lure millions of young people from rural areas into cities. Upheaval, cramped loneliness and years of soulless toil seemed a small price to pay for your own set of wheels. In 1985, only sixty people in Beijing owned private cars. By 2000, over a million did. Even in 2008, with over three million cars on the city’s streets, first-time buyers could barely contain themselves. ‘I can feel it when they come into the showroom,’ one Beijing dealer told the Washington Post that year. ‘The whole family chooses the car together. I can read the eagerness in their faces. They pay attention to every detail of the car. After they take it home, they get up several times every night to see if their cars are OK.’

  Today there are six million cars in Beijing, and 163 million in China as a whole. The American Dream has gone on a world tour, by car. And it has done so because universal vehicle ownership is the American Dream’s most tangible expression: go-anywhere individual freedom and conspicuous consumption, in one handy package. One brief but glorious summer, my first as an ex-teenager, I lived that dream.

  It was 1984, and my father had secured a three-month contract in New York. Being a one-man concern, his microfilm publishing company drafted in a team of hardened mercenaries: me, my sister, her boyfriend and my girlfriend, all veterans of Mindata Micropublications’ pound-an-hour repetitive-task game. By day we sat in a dark room somewhere in upper Manhattan and depressed the shutter buttons of our Bell & Howell Filemasters several thousand times. Then we rode the subway back to our home-swap apartment in Greenwich Village, and tried to understand baseball as a platoon of questing cockroaches set out from beneath the TV cabinet. We took turns to cook, with my debut effort combining frozen onion rings and a full bottle of white Zinfandel in a casserole I have never been allowed to forget. We were being rudely awoken from our American Dream before we’d even nodded off. Then flung into a waking nightmare when some of the larger cockroaches were granted the gift of lumbering, wayward flight.

  After a week of this, my father and I began scouring the classifieds, and presently caught a commuter train out to Hicksville, halfway down Long Island. We returned, after dark and in a throbbing cloud of exhaust, on the yawning bench seat of a 1970 Oldsmobile Delta 88 convertible. Mindata’s new company car felt about 20 feet wide and 80 feet long, with an outermost layer of sky-blue paint largely applied by brush. It had three hubcaps and an eight-track tape player with The Concert Sound of Henry Mancini wedged in the slot. The passenger door was secured, after a fashion, by means of a bathroom latch bolted to its exterior. For an outlay of $350 this vehicle presented a novel twist on conspicuous consumption, though it was nothing if not conspicuous, and my word it consumed. Over the next ten weeks I think we saw about 9mpg out of it.

  Our après-Filemaster routine was instantly and gloriously transformed. After dark we cruised through Chinatown and Alphabet City with the grubby white top down, Mancini’s weapons-grade muzak quavering out above that throaty rumble. We would pull up outside some hip, fairylight-swagged street eatery, cut ‘Moon River’ off in its orchestral prime and make a showy exit, often including a bench vault straight out on to the sidewalk. An hour later we’d come out to find the car gone. ‘Tow truck just came right up and took it away, man, whaddya want me to say?’ We never learned. The car-pound fees cost us more than the car did.

  Every weekend was a pocket road trip, barrelling up and down the eastern seaboard, in and out of New England, all the way across to Virginia. We stopped at every yard sale we passed, filling the Oldsmobile’s giant, corpse-ready trunk with ironic daywear and cast-off Americana – old diner signs, a baseball mitt, the extraordinary tail lights off a 1950s Mercury, like scale models of the Sydney Opera House fashioned from chrome and red glass. The sun always shone and Henry’s swelling strings always filled the warm breeze. Summertime, and the listening was easy. The driving sometimes wasn’t, though. Hubcaps would routinely detach themselves and skitter gaily off into the dappled verge. The passenger door swung open on the sharper left-handers, and one day the brakes completely failed as we dived into the Lincoln Tunnel. My father somehow got us back using heavy applications of emergency brake and clenched-teeth profanity.

  He was the only insured driver, which obliged me to live out my hands-on American Dream on private roads. I am still regularly reminded that when the rest of our party went off to improve themselves at Thomas Jefferson’s home and many of Frank Lloyd Wright’s more notable architectural creations, I was burbling around a car park the size of Hampshire with my left elbow on the top of a hot blue door. I still don’t regret it. Even at walking pace there was a heady, epic quality to the experience, a sense of initiation: look at me, driving this huge car in this huge country. My formative behind-the-wheel experiences had done nothing to prepare me: this absolutely was not a Morris Minor van, and nor was it Ealing. The car was the undisputed star of that trip. When I ruminatively consult my memory’s USA 1984 photo album, the Oldsmobile crops up on every page. Though, regrettably, the cover shot is that guy with the huge afro who once roller-skated past us down Fifth Avenue, wearing nothing but a yellow backpack.

  One Saturday we drove out to Rhode Island and overdid the yard sales; when darkness crept upon us, my father felt too tired to drive home, and too prudent to finance three motel rooms. We bumped off the road, down a lane, and parked up in the corner of a forgotten field. But huge as the Oldsmobile was, it was not a bedroom for five adults. After an hour or two of communal fidgety huffing, my sister’s boyfriend issued a frustrated imprecation, climbed noisily outside and spreadeagled himself on the bonnet. Incredibly, I soon heard him snoring.

  In the frailest light of a new day, blearily unrested and blistered with insect bites, I stumbled off through the crispy weeds for a pee. I was stumbling back when a pair of headlights bounced slowly up the lane behind me. An engine died, a window buzzed down and a flashlight clicked on.

  ‘Sir?’

  I did my best to explain our situation to the very straight-faced state trooper who now stepped out of his patrol car, but it was never going to be easy. My future brother-in-law still lay out cold on the bonnet, limbs splayed to their widest extremity, with a black Lee Van Cleef hat over his face. It had been a bumper day at those suburban trestle tables, and as the trooper walked up to the Oldsmobile and peered in, I followed hi
s flashlight beam over a sleeping riot of edgy kitsch and gaping mouths. I remember a lot of lurex and fur. Even my dad, chin on chest behind the wheel, had a tangerine-trimmed yachting cap on. Only now did I think to remove the Davy Crockett hat and over-sized John Lennon shades I had donned in a desperate small-hours bid to keep the mosquitoes at bay.

  I’ve still got the hat, and the Mercury tail lights. And a fading Polaroid, which I chanced upon in a bedside drawer just a few days after Trump’s election. It’s me, in an appalling Hawaiian shirt and those wonky Lennon shades, standing on a Manhattan sidewalk with my arm around a cardboard cut-out of Ronald Reagan. We’re both beaming: that’s as happy as I’ll ever look beside a Republican, especially one I’ve just paid five dollars to embrace. In 1983, a street entrepreneur could have profitably unfolded Ronnie on any sidewalk in the land. But a flat-pack Trump would be radioactive Marmite. Especially in Manhattan, his home turf, where more than 90 per cent of voters put their cross elsewhere.

  And as I gazed at the Gipper and me, smiling side by side, I thought back to the summer of ’84, and those halcyon top-down days on the open road, mourning my lost youth and America’s lost fellowship. I thought back further, to 1912, when the American Dream was born. A mission began to take fuzzy shape: there I was, driving through the small-town, big-country states that everyone now flew over, those suddenly alien outposts of Trumpland. The route had already laid itself out, in the form of a compelling election map I’d come across in the Washington Post. This split the nation into its 3,142 counties, and coloured each of them Trump red or Hillary blue, with the depth and darkness of these hues reflecting the strength of the candidate’s majority. I downloaded it and printed it out, noting the crimson bruise that blotted the Appalachians and the Midwest, and the spine of rich mahogany that spread north from Texas right up to the Canadian border. Peering closer, I found it was possible to drive all the way across the nation in Trump-voting territory, with a lot of weaving and a willingness to more than double the beeline distance to a touch over 6,000 miles. That was it, then. A road trip through the American Dream, from coast to coast, and cradle to grave. In the car that had launched it, over a hundred summers before.

  CHAPTER 2

  Learning to drive a Model T Ford is a fiendish, vexatious and often terrifying process, entirely at odds with the car’s jolly and biddable demeanour. When you first sit behind the wheel of a T, take a while to savour the familiar feel of that circular rim before you, and its reassuringly traditional relationship with your desired direction of travel. I make this recommendation because everything else you have ever learned about driving a motor vehicle – absolutely everything – is about to be torn to shreds, stamped on and burned before your wild and weeping eyes.

  Look down at your feet. There are three pedals, which appears encouragingly standard, but deceitfully so. The right-hand one, doubtless familiar to you as the accelerator, is the brake. The left-hand one is the clutch, but don’t get too excited. Press it halfway down and the car is in neutral. Mashing it to the floor selects low gear; take your foot off and you put the car in high. There are no other forward gears, and no gearstick. Welcome to Henry Ford’s planetary transmission: ‘the automatic gearbox you drive with your feet’. By now you may not be too surprised to learn that the central pedal, the one you will have learned to love as the brake, engages reverse.

  Now, with unease already puckering those inner buttocks, let us direct our attention to the big steam-engine lever that sticks high up out of the floor, and is now chafing intimately against your left thigh. Surely that’s a handbrake. Why, yes – yes it is! A bit. Though it’s also a kind of auxiliary clutch, which functions as a quirky parody of its foot-operated counterpart. All the way forward engages the planetary transmission in high gear. Halfway sets it in neutral, though in this position the car may proceed in low gear or reverse. Pulling it all the way back maintains neutral, applies the brakes and drives two sharpened bolts through the rim of the steering wheel and deep into your palms. I mean it might as well. Oh yeah, and that other floor lever, the one you snagged your knackers on when you climbed in? Well, that operates the Ruckstell two-speed rear axle. Look, I dunno. Says here it’s an ‘underdrive’.

  Right – let’s go for a petrifyingly chaotic drive! Slow down, sailor. You don’t even know where the accelerator is yet. You won’t find it either. See those two stubby iron stalks sticking out either side of the steering column, just behind the wheel? The one on the right is the gas. I’m serious: you pull it down to go faster. And the one on the left? Come on, silly, that adjusts or retards the ignition spark as appropriate. Anyone who understands how cars work will know exactly what that means. It would be great if one of them came over and told me.

  ‘Spark up, gas down!’

  My first lesson in starting a Model T was delivered by James Dean. East of Eden, adapted from John Steinbeck’s novel, was set in the early T era and thoughtfully featured an entire scene dedicated to the exercise, during which Dean and a bevy of assembled cast-mates chant the above phrase with manic enthusiasm. As fifteen million Ts rolled off the lines during Hollywood’s dawn, it was no surprise to find them popping up in umpteen period productions, though my related pre-departure viewing procured little further practical advice. In sorry truth, a Model T only ever seemed to be wheeled on to the silver screen for derisive comic effect. In It Happened One Night, a young Clark Gable borrows a Model T – a 1924 Touring exactly like mine – for an urgent romantic mission, only to find this hopeless old jalopy steadily overtaken by every other car on the road. Sad trombones all round. That scene in East of Eden was built around the rib-tickling palaver required to get a Model T running: after pushing the spark lever up and pulling the accelerator lever down, there remain no fewer than seven further stages for Jimmy and friends to enact and bellow aloud. Even Steinbeck, a writer who typically dealt with grandparents starving to death in lay-bys and the mercy killings of gentle giants with learning difficulties, couldn’t resist having a giggle at the Model T’s expense. There was something about the T – its ubiquity, its sloth, the curious marriage of spartan virtues and maddening operational complexity – that made the car an irresistible figure of fun. Inevitably, the Model T found itself a staple prop in the slapstick works of Fatty Arbuckle, Buster Keaton and, most regularly, Laurel and Hardy. I watched a lot of those before I left. If nothing else, they offered a handy primer on what facial expression to adopt should my T find itself compressed between two streetcars, bisected in a sawmill or driven into a bottomless, slurry-filled pothole.

  But as helpful as the Chant of Jimmy Dean most surely was – I would intone it silently before my first few hundred starting rituals – it needed padding out. I was preparing for a drive that would occupy several months, in a car I’d been warned might take a year to master. So a few weeks before leaving home, I’d plugged myself into the UK’s Model T network, whose throbbing nodes of helpful activity swiftly put me in contact with Ross Lilleker, and coordinated two test drives.

  The first took me around a damp Buckinghamshire farmyard in the company of Neil Tuckett, a straight-talking old T hand with curly grey hair, red cheeks and a boiler suit. The second, through the sunset-dappled lanes of deepest Kent, was undertaken with Deke Martin and his wife Rachel, who met me in full period costume: flapper hat and floral dress for her, waistcoat and Peaky Blinders cap for him. Aside from their common generosity, Deke and Neil were very different people, with very different cars. Neil’s Model T, or the one he selected for me from his extensive fleet, was an early model with big brass coach-lamps and wooden cartwheels: two parts Chitty, two parts Bang. Deke’s was one of the last Ts, a wire-wheeled, more compact dark-red 1926 Touring model.

  Together these drives had totalled perhaps four miles. But despite their brevity and umpteen contrasts, the two experiences had left many consistent impressions. The clattering explosion of start-up, all hisses, clanks and lateral shudders. The painful threshes and howls as the planetary transmission bit
into its fabric bands and I groaned off the mark, at once replaced by the sensation of wobbly runaway speed. Neck-snapping kangaroo hops, then the death lurch of a stall. And the inescapable, creeping dread that something was just about to go mechanically awry, mainly because in both cases it had. Neil spent his time in the passenger seat continually rapping his oily knuckles against a wooden box bolted to the firewall, an activity that sometimes roused its resident ignition coils to full attention, but twice left us coasting to a silent halt. Deke kept his ear cocked doubtfully throughout my micro stint at the wheel, and when I bumped to a stop in his orchard he leapt out, yanked up the bonnet and began muttering about band slip. That seemed like a lot of issues to face in four miles, particularly when considered on the start line of a journey 1,500 times longer.

  And so, three weeks on and an ocean away, I said a silent prayer, jabbed that silver button and shattered Virginia’s Sunday calm with roaring, spluttery judders. Some experimental twiddling with the gas and spark levers amplified this crackpot-inventor’s cacophony into a thunderous biplane flypast, then, via a startling volley of shotgun backfires, muted it to an irregular tugboat burble. I heaved the brake lever forward and planted my left foot heavily on to the clutch, filling the air with protesting moans as the T trundled down Miles’s drive. How could this ancient machine possibly tolerate such a wild and injurious procedure? And how would I ever tame it? I swung the wheel right and weaved off into the morning on the wrong side of the road.

  As a tale of desperation, upheaval and spectacular triumph over tragic adversity, the story of Henry Ford is the story of fledgling America. Huddled-mass refugee voyage – tick. Serial bereavement – tick. Back-breaking toil, surfeit of children, gung-ho foolhardiness in dogged pursuit of opportunity – tick, tick, tick. Ford’s humble ancestry and hard-won glory might qualify him as the most representative American in history. In fact, I’ve just decided it does.