Another Fine Mess Read online

  Music halls rang with comic doggerel: ‘My Bonnie leaned over the gas tank, The depth of its contents to see, I lighted a match to assist her, Oh bring back my Bonnie to me.’ America’s earliest in-car fumbles were celebrated in a popular ditty, ‘On the Old Back Seat of the Henry Ford’. Up the other end of the cultural spectrum, the avant-garde composer Frederick Shepherd Converse wrote a fourteen-minute fantasia entitled Flivver Ten Million, scored for real car horns and featuring squeaks, rattles and a tremendous collision, which was well reviewed and performed by several leading orchestras. It was all good publicity. Ford didn’t even mind when the likes of Laurel and Hardy kept brutalising his beloved machines on screen, as the joke depended on those flattened, halved and submerged Ts proceeding doggedly onwards.

  Henry’s Universal Car went global during the Great War, when 125,000 Model Ts served the Allied cause, impressively out-performing their heavier European rivals in muddy, shell-pocked combat zones. Assembly plants were duly opened in France, Denmark, Argentina, Spain, Uruguay, Italy, Belgium, South Africa, Mexico, Germany, Malaya and India. Some 300,000 Model Ts were built at Ford’s factory in Manchester, and over 750,000 at Ford Canada, the British Empire’s largest manufacturing concern. In 1921, when Ford shifted a million Ts at $325 each, almost two-thirds of the cars in America were Model T Fords. So were half the cars on earth. Black and black and black all over.

  Peak T was reached in 1924, when Ford built and sold two million Model Ts at a unit price of $260. It was all downhill from there. But what an extremely big hill it had been. By the time production ended on 26 May 1927, more than fifteen million Ford Model Ts had been manufactured in nineteen years. The VW Beetle took almost twice as long to match the feat, and no other car has come close.

  ‘You have more speed at your command than you can safely use on average roads, or even on the best roads save under exceptional conditions, and a great deal more than you ought to attempt to use until you become thoroughly familiar with your machine, and the manipulation of brakes and levers has become practically automatic.’ So reads a section in the 1909 Model T owner’s manual, headed ‘Go It Easy’ and aimed at the novice driver. It’s an intriguing insight into the constraints of the early motoring age, when a car with a top speed of 39mph could be considered a liability in the wrong hands.

  I had two of those hands and a pair of matching feet, all of them a very long way from automatic manipulation. But I was also driving on roads that were better than the very best on offer in 1909. By 1920, a billion dollars were being spent every year on new and improved roads, and speeds nosed steadily upwards. Heading back north-west through Virginia I cruised down broad, empty tarmac, past mailboxes with five-digit house numbers on them, past plagues of yellow school buses parked up for the summer, past founding-father settlements: Gloucester, Essex, Port Royal. Confidence laid its comforting hand upon my shoulder, then began to tug surreptitiously at the throttle lever. The GPS flashed up 39mph. The T settled into a thrumming, sweet-spot rhythm. I unhunched just a little, relaxing as much as those wooden beads allowed, and let the warm, green world spool towards me through that split windscreen, the winged motometer bobbing steadily up and down on my prow like a figurehead. This was better. This was much better.

  And so, for a few hot and heady days, I fell into something like a routine. I’d be up early to beat the heat, bung in a bottle of oil, then chug and rumble north-east in the general direction of Detroit, via the reddest blots on my map. I broached the prosperous outposts of pick-up country, trim clapboard farmhouses with a boutique vineyard out front, golf courses set amongst the sun-kissed maize. The road began to pitch and roll through hills stacked with hickory, oaks and sugar maples. It was an idyll compromised only by the over-ripe death pasted across the rural tarmac, delivering waves of the very headiest putrefaction through my open cabin: raccoons, deer, foxes, squirrels, fat-rat opossums, the question mark of a flat black snake. And those poor little Mohawk-tufted skunks, wrinkling my nose from a mile away.

  I’d refill gas tank and stomach at petrol stations, shooting the breeze with the aimless sheriffs who always seemed to congregate there. Quite often an amiable old-timer would shuffle up and lean into the T’s cabin. ‘Learned to drive in one of these,’ said one, with a wheezy chuckle. ‘That there’s the brake pedal, that’s reverse, and that’s the one that puts you straight through the side of the barn.’ Some drastic maintenance issue would typically manifest itself during these early pit stops. I’d check the tyre pressures and find them all 70 per cent below Ross’s recommendations, or discover that half my wheel nuts had rattled themselves loose, or hear a faint chink when I slammed the door, then get out and spot a large mystery bolt on the concrete below. This was the shakedown: after decades of fitful pensioner pottering, my blameless old car was being rattled apart by the rigours of long-haul use.

  And I joined battle with my first serious traffic, enmeshed in many jockeying lanes when I passed close to larger towns. Reluctant to hazard a glance over my shoulder through the letterbox back window, my awareness of rearward activity was restricted to the shuddering, juddering driver’s-side mirror. It was like Tom’s view of the world after Jerry belts him in the face with a frying pan. Was that one truck steaming up behind me, or six? Out on the open road it hardly mattered: in a Model T, whatever’s behind you will shortly be in front. But in traffic the uncertainty was deeply unsettling, especially with unseen undertakers shooting up my blindside. I’d veer gingerly across into the slow lane, braced for impact, then find it filled with a stationary motorhome, or evolve into a compulsory right-turn filter, or simply disappear. The stress was compounded by the parade of red lights that clutter American ring roads: it would be more than a thousand miles before I encountered the reviled symbol of nannying European traffic socialism that is the roundabout.

  One early motorist neatly described the activation of a Model T’s braking system as ‘a ritual, not a function’. Mine was an ill-starred marriage of uselessness and wayward instability, which when applied in extremis would have the car fishtailing helplessly about the carriageway, rear wheels locked, with only the tiniest diminishment of speed. ‘Good brakes encourage bad driving,’ said Herbert Austin, the British Henry Ford, a man who very unfairly died of pneumonia.

  When a light ahead changed from green to amber, I had to make a snap decision: floor the brakes and risk careening into the middle of the intersection, sideways, or yank the throttle wide open and shoot through the red with a volley of warning ahooogas. And all this whilst endeavouring to respond in kind to the supportive waves, and answer all those bellowed and ever more familiar through-the-window questions (‘Sweet ride – what year?’), and force a smile for the camera-phones. How very closely overtakers would weave in the quest for the optimum snap. But however alarming, I could hardly condemn their insouciance. Of all the thoughts that might suggest themselves on passing an extremely old motor car – Ah, that’s cute; What a terrible racket; Praise be for the twenty-first century – there is one that never would: I bet the guy driving that has absolutely no idea what he’s doing, and might at any moment swing blindly over and kill us all.

  Into another gas station to take aboard fluids and nutrition; a few hot hours later, into another to offload them. As I came to discover, a lot of small-town life revolves around the local petrol stop. Rural Americans drive a lot, and generally in a pick-up truck with the fuel economy of an icebreaker, so they need to refill a lot. And not just with unleaded. Even the tiniest gas station is almost walled in by batteries of towering glass-doored fridges, all geometrically stacked with rows of shiny, garish soda cans. I was transfixed. With their clinical interior lighting and wisps of cryogenic mist, these installations had a reverential, futuristic air, a climate-controlled preservation facility for life-giving treasures.

  Rare was the customer who left without condensation-beaded refreshment. In the larger gas stations, they’d also have fast-food-style soda dispensers with nested cups alongside, ranging in ca
pacity from top hat to water butt. On my third morning, I saw a well-built sheriff emerge from a gas station nursing a beaker the size of an office bin. As I walked inside to pay, I took a sidelong glance into his patrol car and saw him carefully wedging it in an extended funnel-shaped adaptor stuck in the console cupholder.

  Now that we’ve passed Peak Cig, America’s addiction to soda pop stands alone as the greatest first-world public-health scandal of our age. Let’s take a look at the sticky-faced facts. In the past three decades, as America’s consumption of sugary beverages has doubled – to 45 gallons per head annually – its diabetes rates have trebled. The incidence of obesity has more than doubled for adults, and quadrupled for children aged six to eleven. J. D. Vance, the Appalachia-reared author of Hillbilly Elegy, was nine months old when his mother started putting Pepsi in his bottle. More than a third of Americans are now classified as obese – that’s twice the British ratio, and we’re the fat man of Europe.

  In the 1970s, the largest ‘fountain drink’ sold at McDonald’s was 20 fluid ounces. It’s now 40 fluid ounces, more than a litre. In 1995, the Wendy’s fast-food chain introduced the 42-ounce ‘Great Biggie’, billed as ‘a river of icy cold enjoyment’. A standard 12-ounce can of soda contains the equivalent of nine teaspoons of sugar. Down a Great Biggie and you have just ingested thirty-one teaspoons. Yet this fizzy, sweet river is dwarfed by a syrup tsunami that defies physiological logic: at 50 fluid ounces, the 7/11 Double Big Gulp is 156 per cent larger than the stomach capacity of an average human. Young men aged twelve to twenty-nine now consume an average 160 gallons of carbonated soft drinks a year – nearly two quarts, or well over two litres, every single day. That’s an extraordinary level of dedication, almost a part-time job.

  I’d first confronted the helpless, hardwired extent of this addiction at a Civil War re-enactment in the Louisiana woods ten years before, during the research phase of a book I wrote about living history. The civilian refugees I camped with ranked amongst the most fanatically authentic re-enactors I met anywhere. They had built their ox wagon from scratch, even forging the nails in a backyard, charcoal-fired iron foundry. They made their own buttons out of animal bone, wove clothes on a hand loom, spooned grits from onion-tainted wooden bowls and said ‘good enough’ instead of ‘OK’. They knew more about English history than I did, whimpered a lot less about spiders, and didn’t disgrace themselves when somebody said they lived in Knob Lick. Then one night, a blacksmith beckoned me to the back of the mess tent with a shifty wink, and lifted the lid of a big wooden pail. Inside it sat three enormous bottles of Mountain Dew.

  ‘Don’t tell anyone I showed you this,’ he whispered.

  ‘Good enough,’ I lied.

  For the avoidance of doubt, I point out none of this from a position of moral or nutritional superiority. The only reason I didn’t – spoiler alert! – drink myself into a diabetic coma on this trip is a historic personal correlation between the consumption of liquid sugar and the development of agonising kidney stones. But along with those 99¢ gallon drums of water perched precariously in my lap all day, I still drank plenty of total rubbish. As I grew more at ease behind that ancient wheel, and those mind-focusing splurts of adrenalin ebbed away, I had to rely on a hefty afternoon dose of sugar-free taurine to maintain alertness. Energy drinks really are the silliest, crappiest grocery products known to man, with those puerile, death-metal names – Relentless, Monster Rehab, No Fear – and logos like a footballer’s tattoo. As a bonus, they’re also way more dangerous than straight soda, and in an excitingly immediate manner: energy drinks have been linked to dozens of fatal heart attacks in recent years.

  Neither did I resent having to sustain myself on the fearsomely processed fare that fills every gas station. Not once did I gaze wanly along the shelves and shelves of plastic-sealed snacks and think: Oh no, Fire Cracker Giant Red Hot Pickled Sausage for elevenses AGAIN. The truth is I love all that crap. I love staining my puckered lips with extreme and unearthly snack sensations, the scarlet-red Flamin’ Hot Pork Rinds, the peanuts encrusted with honey chipotle, those unspeakable dill pickles that come in a clear pouch of psychedelic flavoured vinegar, like take-home souvenirs from the intimate gangrene clinic. I drew the line at beef jerky, but only because it was so bloody expensive. Seven bucks a pack? Why, that’s a week’s supply of the foot-long finger of mechanically recovered, deep-smoked meat that is the Slim Jim – the snack you can eat behind the wheel of a speeding antique vehicle and STILL maintain partial control!

  But I could afford to eat all this delicious garbage, and to savour doing so, because I was on holiday, sort of, and in the fullness of time would be returning to a Nordic-run, snack-intolerant household with enforced access to fresh food. What on earth must this diet do to you in the long term? And in such button-popping profusion? The Model T was a slim and nimble car for a hungry, go-getting nation. When Americans had a body-image problem back then, it was unappealing scrawniness. After Angelo Siciliano changed his name to Charles Atlas in 1922, he pitched his bodybuilding regime at ‘97-pound weaklings’, and went as far as patenting the phrase, ‘Hey Skinny, Your Ribs Are Showing!’ Right up to the early 1960s, US newspapers were full of ads for feminine weight-gain supplements, depicting mildly curvaceous women in swimsuits with speech bubbles saying things like ‘I have plenty of dates since I put on 10lbs!’ and ‘It’s hard to believe they once called me skinny!’

  Well, whatever those hungry go-getters were after back then, they’d long since gone and got it, and stuffed it down their throats. Americans spend six times more on processed savoury snacks than the per-capita global average. A standard serving of McDonald’s fries is now three times larger than it was in the 1950s. Let us consider the current president’s standard – and very regular – McDonald’s order, as revealed by his former campaign manager: two Big Macs, two Filets-O-Fish and a chocolate milkshake. Weighing in at 2,500 calories, that single meal is rather more than the recommended daily intake for a man of his age. As the embodiment of the American Dream’s bloated, decadent endgame, Trump leads from the front. Of the twenty-five fattest states in the US, only two didn’t vote for him.

  Henry Ford, however, despised obesity, evidence of indulgent laziness and guarantor of ‘a sluggish brain’. ‘If people cut down on their rations,’ he opined, ‘they wouldn’t need doctors.’ How very upset he’d have been to learn that many twenty-first-century Model T owners turned their steering wheels back to front to allow a couple of extra inches of gut clearance, or fitted a hinged ‘Fat Man’ wheel that could be folded back down over their bellies once they had taken their station. While searching for a suitable T, I’d read two or three classified ads penned by regretful owners who explained they were now ‘too big’ to drive one.

  My word, what a protracted outburst! Let us return, with a jarring jump-cut, to a day in the life of our antique motorist, as he putters gamely towards the Appalachians. After 150 or so miles of heat, noise and carbonated taurine, his day is drawing to a close, and he pulls into some forlorn motel, a relic of that ‘King of the Road’ no-pool-no-pets era. There’ll be a Gideon bible and a chunky old phone on the bedside table, and a yellow glow from the underpowered lamp will pick out walls scarred by long-gone decades of high jinks and hot tempers. Perhaps there’s a Mexican restaurant nearby. If there isn’t, he will make a regrettable mistake with some leftover stubs of Subway, adding many new layers to the room’s ingrained odour of male-pattern transience. Then he’ll click on the telly.

  A White House staffer once described working there as ‘trying to take a sip of water from a fire hose that never shuts off’. That was me trying to take stock of Trumpland in those early days, lost in the jarring disconnect between the benign, bucolic world outside my hinged windscreen and the cacophonous panic that ruled inside it. No time to ponder the state of the nation with more pressing and immediate mysteries to resolve, like how the fuck to reverse and why the passenger door kept flying open. The TV news was my hope for a calm, insightful o
verview of developments, but it only ramped up the manic bewilderment, a shouty confusion of backstabbing, frontstabbing, fear and loathing as Trump’s presidency careered madly on. Harrowed correspondents would stare blankly down the lens and say: ‘Jim, in thirty years of political reporting I have never witnessed anything like this.’ Then the next day they’d have to say it again.

  And the adverts; oh my, the adverts. We’re always being told that television news is on the way out, and in America that’s because its viewers are old, fat, sickly and therefore dying in droves. (Not just a heartless insult but a startling demographic fact: the life expectancy of white male Americans has been in slow but steady decline since 2009, and in some West Virginian counties now stands at sixty-four, the same as Namibia’s.) Almost every single commercial I saw on the big three news stations – CNN, MSNBC, Fox News – related to serious ill-health, obesity treatment or aged frailty. I’d jab the motel remote and there’d be Marie Osmond in a belted pink dress, patting her stomach and trilling, ‘Bye-bye, stubborn belly fat!’ Or a swimsuited old dear beaming away in a plastic sarcophagus: ‘A walk-in tub – with a heated seat!’ ‘Find the catheter that’s right for you with our free sample pack – there are so many catheters to choose from! Pre-lubricated catheter! Anti-bacterial catheter! Steel-barbed catheter! High-voltage catheter!’