Another Fine Mess Read online

  My motel TV began to seem like a porthole into the American Dream’s decadent, sickly endgame, a vision of consumerism eating itself. When I switched over to The Simpsons, pitched at a younger audience, the commercials almost exclusively urged viewers to gorge themselves silly. ‘Eat like you mean it at Hardee’s!’ ‘Here at Carl’s Junior we’re all about doubling down on breakfast!’ ‘Trip-le thick, trip-le thick, brown-sugar-bacon: at Arby’s WE HAVE THE MEATS.’ ‘All Red Robin burgers are just $6.99 – of course with our famous bottomless fries!’

  And then back on the news networks, the old were trying to tackle the bloated, immobile consequences of their indulgent youth, and turning on each other if they failed. ‘Hernia Mesh complications? Infection, wound-reopening, chronic pain? You may be entitled to compensation.’ America’s famously litigious healthcare culture has really gone into overdrive. Even CNN’s closed-caption subtitles were brought to me by the Mesothelioma Awareness Legal Helpline. Most compellingly, the downside disclaimers at the end of all those prescription drug adverts now lasted far longer than the upside sales pitch, and were no longer blurted in that incoherent after-garble of yore (may-cause-headaches-and-crutch-rot-don’t-blame-us-if-spleen-explodes).

  The net effect of all these extraneous costs – the billions spent on advertising and legal settlements – is that the average American now pays 50 per cent more for their healthcare than anyone else on earth. You’d never think it given the fuss about Obamacare and so on, but the US has for years been spending about the same on public healthcare, per capita, as countries like the UK, Japan, France and Germany. It’s just that they’ve also been spending the same amount again – twice as much as the Swiss, their nearest rivals – on private care.

  It’s scandalous, but also rather sad. Those watered-down, mealy-mouthed pharmaceutical adverts with their endless toll of disclaimers seemed so jarringly out of place in this country, a gung-ho, hard-sell nation now beset by faltering uncertainties. All that self-confident vigour exhausted, whittled down to bloated, lethargic sickbed blame and bickering. I remembered the scrawny loser in those Charles Atlas strip-cartoon ads, getting sand kicked in his face before turning the tables two frames later. Now there’d be asterisks all over the page. *Results not typical. *Prolonged muscular exercise may cause pain and boredom. *Stretchy spring device may twang into nose. *Consult your lawyer if bullying persists.

  CHAPTER 5

  On Independence Day the road began to rise and weave and the Appalachians took hazy shape before me: the actual Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, in my actual Laurel and Hardy car. The holiday brought a few other antiques out on to the road to exchange ahoogas with, and draped balconies with patriotic bunting. Someone had slung a big placard up on their porch: ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY AMERICA. HOPE YOU MAKE IT ANOTHER YEAR.’ Trumpophobe, doomsday prepper or both? That was a door I wanted to stop and knock on. But stopping, without ample notice and preparation, was a four-limb dance I had yet to master.

  ‘Ain’t no July Four for farmers,’ called the pimpled, straw-haired youth when I juddered and squealed to a complicated halt beside his tractor at a lonely four-way stop sign. ‘Get some eggs go see the chips wool fireworks if I git done playin’ the john naughty.’

  Appalachia was clearly going to present new challenges. Steep inclines would rank amongst them. The T had trundled redoubtably over its first blue ridge, a leafy, winding bona fide mountain momma that delivered me into West Virginia. (There are only so many times you can bellow the chorus to ‘Country Roads’, but it does seem to be an awful lot of times.) On the second pass, though, the engine began to falter, and my speed dropped to an erratic shuffle. If the car died on a steep gradient, so might I: Ross had warned me a Model T’s handbrake wouldn’t hold on a big hill. To this end he’d supplied a pair of plastic chocks, which now lay ready on the passenger seat beside me. Should the motor fail and the T begin to roll backwards, I was expected to snatch the chocks up, vault out, then in one fluid movement wedge them under the nearest two wheels. And to do all this before accumulated speed rendered it impossible, guaranteeing runaway destruction of the T, or me, or both.

  It was a scenario that concentrated my mind so completely that I failed to notice passing the bearded old guy in the army cap. A creak and a tilt and there he was beside me: up on the passenger running-board with one bony hand on the roof and the other braced to the frame of the windshield. ‘Mand if I catcher rad?’ he drawled, settling into a practised hunch and gazing casually straight up the hill. How very weird, but how very wonderful: a living link to the age of running-boards, when cars went so slowly you could jump aboard one as it passed. Furthermore, a handy quid pro quo now suggested itself. ‘That’s absolutely fine,’ I called out above the T’s jerky splutters, ‘but if the motor stops, could you do me a favour and jam these things under the wheels?’ He peered into the cabin and squinted doubtfully at the chocks, and the elbow I was jabbing in their direction. Then, without a word, he hopped off.

  When the engine did give up the ghost, it chose a thoughtfully gentle incline just outside Harrisonburg: I coasted on to the shoulder, pulled up the bonnet and called Ross. Or tried to. As would increasingly be the case, I had no phone signal. After half an hour of hopeful prodding, a huge and macho pick-up pulled in, and from it emerged a matching gentleman. Bruce C. Wood II – ‘Bruce the Deuce’ – had country-star hair, a checked shirt and a big dog riding shotgun. It didn’t take him long to fix the T – my distributor’s points had cracked in half, and he installed a spare set from one of Bob Kirk’s tobacco tins – but in that time I learned quite a lot about Bruce. I learned that he was a military contractor in the field of aero electronics, who would shortly be off to pilot spy drones around Afghanistan in the search for improvised explosive devices. I also learned that he had a boat, lived alone, never locked his front door and always carried a gun: ‘Sure do, got one in my truck right now.’ He briskly flipped the distributor cover back on and bid me hit the starter. The car roared into life. Good old Bruce. Good old permanently armed, Taliban-bustin’ Bruce the Deuce.

  I was nosing deep into small-town Trumpland, and its inhabitants seemed very much nicer than my lazy imagination had feared. A Hells Angel in a Nazi helmet had given me the thumbs-up. Everyone I’d met had been friendly and helpful. They knew how to fix stuff, and did so with a smile. But my word they were conservative. The Adidas trainers I’d bought for this trip were chosen on the grounds of girth alone: my first farmyard test drive had proved that operating the T’s tightly clustered pedals demanded extremely narrow shoes, and those were the slimmest I could find. But because they were also a bit red, my feet were routinely gawped at in utter astonishment. ‘Neat ride you got there, what year w—Hot damn, that is one HELL of a pair of sneakers. Marlene, feller out here’s got him some shoes and they are R-E-D red!’ To create an equivalent footwear commotion on a British street, you’d need to go out in a pair of gold fishing waders. And nothing else.

  That stolid traditionalism extended to a genteel, almost Victorian primness in personal matters. Consider the excretion of human fluid – you know you want to. I encountered a phobic reluctance to admit this ever happened. It began with those euphemisms, that door in the gas-station corner prissily dedicated to bath or rest. Within, the urinals would invariably be divided by neck-to-knee privacy barriers, lest your fellow resters snatch even the tiniest peek of pecker. And the globally indulged tradition of the roadside splash-and-dash behind a tree – a permanent temptation thanks to my gallon-a-day water habit, and one to which I occasionally succumbed – was frowned upon so sternly that I never once saw a rival practitioner.

  Yet curiously, small-towners seemed much more relaxed about the solid small-room occupation – you know, the, um, the Full Bath, the Big Rest. Of all the strange and worrisome things I saw stickered to the rear of a pick-up – a crowded field from ‘IF YOU CAN READ THIS, YOU’RE IN RANGE’ to ‘I ♣ BABY SEALS’ – the worst, and by a margin, was ‘HONK IF YOU HAVE TO POOP’. I spott
ed three of those. After the third I did some online retail research. ‘Make driving fun with this “honk if you have to poop” magnet! Put it on the back of your car and see how many people around you need to use the bathroom! Use outside the USA at your own risk.’ Why would one ever wish to ask this of their fellow motorists? Why would they ever wish to answer? What an incredibly odd state of affairs.

  But then Americans could be incredibly odd, even the ones you really didn’t expect to be. Take Henry Ford and Donald Trump. Two very different characters in most ways: Ford was an honest, frugal grown-up who lived an unostentatious life bereft of scandal, and once said, ‘I would rather be right than be president.’ But less different in others. The towering arrogance. The distrust of mainstream media. Both dismissive of experts and intellectuals, both sometimes alarmingly ignorant and inarticulate (interviewers complained that Ford routinely offered ‘dubious quotations’ and ‘lacked the facility to explain his ideas’, and he once told a courtroom that the American Revolution had been fought in 1812). And both quite surprisingly eccentric.

  Donald Trump smirks and gurns but never, ever laughs, not even when he’s launching his own-brand steaks or vodka. The twelve daily cans of Diet Coke. The hair. This is a self-styled germophobe who won’t touch elevator buttons, but will shake hands with visiting statesmen for whole minutes, in ludicrous parody of an alpha-male executive. For his part, Henry Ford burst into song every morning to ‘start the day right’, and liked to dine on ‘roadside greens’: clumps of random weeds plucked from the verge and stuffed between two slices of bread. He nurtured a fixation with the nursery rhyme ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’, employing a team of researchers to investigate its possible origins, and in due course publishing his theories in a forty-page treatise (he later bought the early-nineteenth-century Massachusetts schoolhouse that Mary Sawyer was purportedly once followed into by a baby sheep). It seems wholly unfair to toss Ford’s lifelong pacifism into this madcap mix, but the American press certainly did. When war broke out in 1914, he was ridiculed for pledging to burn down his factories rather than see them repurposed for munitions manufacture, and for suggesting that ‘MURDERER’ should be embroidered on every service uniform. After Henry blew $500,000 on a 1915 ‘Peace Ship’ mission in a naive bid to keep the US out of the war, journalists dubbed it the ‘Good Ship Nutty’ and poured scorn all over ‘Ford’s folly’.

  Still, however cheery and practical small-town Americans might be, and however traditional yet rather peculiar, they can also be extremely thin on the ground. Nobody was about when the car died in a silent Appalachian valley a few miles beyond the little town of Franklin, and for an hour nobody passed. Then, as I sat in that lonely lay-by, bonnet up and clueless, something abruptly possessed me. Without quite knowing what I was doing or why, I unscrewed the ancient ignition switch from the dash, prised the cover off and scraped ninety-six years’ worth of sooty crud off its brass contacts. Ker-BRRAAAGH! Beneath that glorious roar of triumph I heard John-Boy narrating his monologue at the end of a Waltons episode. ‘The truth is: things rarely go just the way we want them to, and when they don’t, there’s no shame in getting a hand from someone a little wiser. Because one day, maybe even later that same day, that someone might be you, motherfucker.’

  I turned back and stayed at Franklin, in a $42 motel with a polystyrene ceiling and a bed propped up on bricks. ‘You got a real purty old car, sir,’ said the young waitress at the motel’s conjoined diner, watching me wipe Texas Pete hot sauce from the plate with my final wodge of fajita. The reflexive bonhomie of America’s service industry is so often delivered with dead-eyed phoniness, a product of their tipping culture, but out in the small towns the warmth was always genuine. ‘Now, how ’bout some ass cream?’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘We got vanilla or strawberry.’

  ‘Oh, right. I really couldn’t.’

  She greeted my refusal as if I’d ordered a 10-gallon sundae. ‘Awesome! A coffee?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Alrighty!’

  I looked out through the window, where my T sat alone under a broken neon VACANCY sign. The Model T singlehandedly spawned the age of the motor vacation, America’s default holiday for the balance of the twentieth century. Families who had never ventured past the nearest lake or mountain would pile into their Ts and spend summer on the road, exploring the boundless majesty of their nation and tapping into the migratory heritage that had delivered their immigrant forebears to its shores. The American Dream went on tour: by 1919, ten million motorists were stopping to sleep in new ‘auto courts’, and the word ‘motel’ was coined the year after my T was born, in 1925. A typical family road trip lasted a month, and cost around $100 all in. But younger and bolder motorists set off on much more ambitious tours, and the cheap and doughty Flivver was their conveyance of choice: after it went out of production, you could pick one up for peanuts.

  The modest library of related literature I had brought along described several such adventures. In July 1934, Darlene Bjorkman, a twenty-two-year-old schoolmistress from Bradford, Illinois, crammed five friends into a silver-painted 1926 Model T her dad bought for ten bucks, and set off on the first of seven summer tours that would take them through forty-four states, covering a remarkable 80,000 miles in the process. Less epic but more personally resonant was the story of Dib Fewer and Tod Snedeker, two nineteen-year-old San Franciscans who completed a three-month road trip to New York and back in 1931. Their T was a black 1921 coupé that Dib had been given free by a neighbour who’d written it off at a busy junction, breaking his arm in the process.

  As a coast-to-coast drive in a black T, this adventure struck a chord. The cast of characters probably helped. I mean: Dib Fewer! And that neighbour? Pinky Robinson. Their car got in on the act too. One of Dib’s old school chums ran an identical black coupé, and their friends had dubbed the cars in honour of a set of twins who appeared in a popular newspaper strip cartoon: ‘Mike and Ike – They Look Alike.’ Dib’s T bagged the former appellation, and before he and Tod set off, he painted the name across its nickel-plated radiator grille, in bold, black capitals. MIKE. I’d bought a couple of books with me to dinner, and flicked through one until I came to the relevant photo. It would always raise a smile. Dib and Tod – jeans, open shirts, slicked-back hair, Errol Flynn moustaches – are the debonair embodiment of America’s coming generation. But the frail, stiff-backed car they’re standing astride, though barely a teenager, seems a cart-wheeled, matronly relic of an already distant age. And that name on its grille did me every time, so blunt, so bland, so defiantly, gloriously antiheroic. It did me again now. I liked Mike. Then I looked back out the window at my own fragile black old-timer. ‘Evening, Mike,’ I said, without thinking.

  ‘If you’re wanting to drive that vee-hickle north I would go around the mountain, sir. It’s raining like all heck up there and you got some 10 per cent grades.’ Small-town America is infested with sheriffs, who seem to have little else to do beyond dispensing helpful and courteous advice to foreign antique motorists. ‘You take care now.’

  The rain had built all morning, and I’d spent a wet and sweaty hour out on the motel forecourt wrapping up my car – Mike! – in Bob Kirk’s weather curtains: four sheets of greasy, semi-transparent plastic attached by turnbuckles and leather straps around the open sides. It was like a leaky engine room in there, hot, moist and noisy, the T’s throb amplified to clattering thunder. Rain dripped steadily from the dashboard and flew into my eyes through the half-inch gap betwixt roof and windscreen. Fumes that were normally dispersed through the open sides began to fill the cabin. I gave up on the stubby hand-powered windshield wiper after a single smeary sweep, and pressed my face right up to the spattered glass, trying to make sense of the unfolding impressionist roadscape.

  The sheriff had walked up as I was disembarking at a gas station, an awkward and humiliating grovel through the tiny under-curtain door hatch. It was like crawling out of a catflap. Re-entry was worse still: I sq
uirmed in on all fours, raised my bowed head and introduced the iron throttle stalk firmly into my right eye. I was beginning to understand why old Bob had got rid after fifty-one years: driving a T just wasn’t an old man’s game. Especially over long, wet distances, when I wasn’t driving a T at all, more attempting to control a deafening, runaway gazebo. Part of me began to regret this whole undertaking. That part was my brain.

  As advised, I went around that mountain, though there would be plenty more to follow. The detour took Mike and me through a funeral procession of struggling valley settlements, their main streets cluttered with derelict retail hulks and bookended by moribund industrial concerns. The principal source of wealth and employment in this part of West Virginia appeared to be industrial-grade poultry farms and processing plants, whose squawking, stinking trucks slooshed past me at regular intervals. By the state’s class-leading standards of poverty and decline, towns like Moorefield and Petersburg weren’t in fact doing too badly: their populations had dipped rather than collapsed, and only a fifth of the citizens lived below the poverty line. But in the residential outskirts, I noticed what would become a durable trend. The people with money, who pottered about in trim clapboard homes with neat yards, who drove past in shiny Buicks looking well-kempt and placid, were always old. When I saw someone scowling under a saggy porch, or slamming the door of a lichen-streaked pick-up with mismatched wheels, they were men of my age or a bit younger. Those silvery gentlefolk enjoying a prosperous retirement were their parents. The drive-by demographics were stark, and by general socio-economic agreement conclusive. I was watching the end of the American Dream.

  Ford’s Highland Park assembly line might have seemed a wonder of the world to the notables and journalists who toured the factory, but for the workers it was a deafening, monotonous hell. Few could hack it for long. By the end of 1913, labour turnover at the plant hit 380 per cent, and Henry was having to employ a thousand people just to expand his workforce by 100. On 5 January 1914 he revealed his dramatic solution: the company’s daily wage, hitherto $2.34 for a nine-hour shift, would henceforth be $5 for an eight-hour one. The announcement sent shockwaves around the nation. Every newspaper in the land led with Ford’s $5 day, with quotes that read like standing ovations: ‘A new epoch in the world’s industrial history!’ ‘A magnificent act of generosity!’ One commentator heralded Ford as ‘one of God’s noblemen’; socialists and unionists hailed the $5 day as ‘the solution of the labour wars in the country’. Down the other end of the economic spectrum, of course, disquiet merged into blind panic. ‘He’s crazy, isn’t he?’ asked the publisher of the New York Times when he heard the news. ‘Don’t you think he’s gone crazy?’ The Wall Street Journal called the $5 day ‘a blunder, if not a crime’. ‘Good for him if he can afford it,’ said J. J. Cole, a rival car maker. ‘Others can’t.’ But as it transpired, they could.