All Gone to Look for America (2 page)

I’m not about to hang around to see Paris flounce out again though. I’m hungry. And I need a bit more New York inside me before I return to the spartan comforts of the ‘Y’. On the advice of an English friend who used to live in New York I’m heading away from the neon bustle of Times Square for the bohemian delights of ‘the village’. Greenwich Village, that is, though for those of us who actually live near the original Greenwich village in south London, the expression always sounds odd. Time to find myself an entrance to the Tube!

No, I know I can’t call it that. The movies have fixed ‘subway’ so firmly in the collective English-speaking consciousness that I know even Londoners who see a sign above stairs leading under the street marked ‘Subway’ and almost subconsciously assume it is referring to the Underground (which it often also leads to), when actually it just refers to the underpass to cross the street. And yet, as I am to discover in other cities, we are completely wrong to think therefore that ‘subway’ is American for what we call ‘the Tube’ or, officially, the ‘Underground’. In most of America, if you ask someone where the ‘subway’ is, they’ll direct you to the nearest branch of a takeaway chain selling giant
sandwiches
. This is not just because very few American cities actually have
underground
railway transportation systems, but also because those which do call it the ‘metro’. Don’t ask me how the French won this battle behind our backs, but believe me, outside New York, they did. 

Just to make the point, a ticket on the New York subway is called a ‘Metro’ card. I buy mine and load it up with enough dollars to cover a three-day stay and head down into the bowels of Manhattan. ‘Veins’ might be a better word as the subway lies literally just below the surface. The days are long gone when the Manhattan Transport Authority was famed only for the risk of being mugged in its stations and rattling trains so covered in spray-painted graffiti that there was even a fashion for praising them as urban artwork in an attempt to make light of their awfulness. Mugging is a relative rarity and if the trains still rattle they are remarkable nowadays for the pristine silver sheen of their metal
exteriors
. That said, by European standards it’s still a useless system shuttling up and down beneath the avenues like a glorified underground bus service,
replicating
rather than complementing the pattern of the streets above.

But it gets me downtown, beyond the grid, into ‘the village’ the city
established
before the planners took control of it, where haphazard European-style street patterns predominate and probably perversely, we Europeans somehow find it easier to find our way around. Down here the streets are of average length and not anything up to five miles long, so if you get yourself to the right one at least you know you’re probably within walking distance and not about to discover that it’s still a cab ride away. Down here street numbers might run to 200 or 300 but never to 2300. Even so, it doesn’t always mean you get where you want to, or rather in a city with an evolutionary churn like New York’s that the place you were aiming for is still there. That’s why with detailed internet instructions to hand to find one of the city’s more recondite but supposedly convivial drinking establishments, I still find myself walking in circles around a small block even though I’m certain I’m in the right place. It turned out I am, but just at the wrong time. Two blokes sitting on steps of a nineteenth-century tenement that probably cost a king’s ransom, confirm, ‘Oh yeah, that place, it was neat, but it’s gone. They might reopen it though, but not yet.’

Which was how two hours later than intended I finally find myself tucking into a burger in a half-empty bar picked at random. But in the funny way fate has of throwing bad luck and good luck at you alternately it turns out to be a great burger, served as I’d asked, medium-rare, still pink in the middle and oozing just the tiniest trace of blood along with flavour. The waitress is cute and sassy in that New York way that makes you feel like you’re flirting when you’re just ordering a meal and makes you fork out the outrageous amount of tip she’s expecting without feeling a victim of extortion.

And the beer is excellent, in the way only modern American microbrewed beer can be, gassy for British tastes but tasting of hops and malt rather than
the weak rancid rat’s piss their big brewers now try to sell to susceptible Brits. This particular beer, however, comes from one of America’s oldest breweries but has still kept its taste and tradition. Even the name makes me smile, a
typically
American fusion of English and German that manages to look and sound Chinese: Yuengling. Once upon a time it would have been written Jüngling, and been German for ‘youngster’, until the Anglos – perhaps some
immigration
officer out on Ellis Island – wrote it down the way it sounded, with the result that most bartenders today pronounce it ‘Ying Ling’, as if it was made by Bruce Lee’s cousin.

And then there’s the muzak. If I have any residual religion, which I’d prefer to think I haven’t, it is a quasi-pagan, wholly superstitious ingrained belief in the divine power that governs incidental music, or to give it a name, the ‘small god of the iPod’. Maybe it was the waitress who had programmed the jukebox, or else my minor deity really had tickled the laws of chance to produce as
background
buzz, Lou Reed’s proto-heavy-metal anthem of Big Apple street life, ‘Waiting For My Man’, followed seamlessly by Sting’s rendition of ‘
Englishman
in New York’. I’m not really an Englishman, of course, but it’s the thought that counts. For a blissful moment or two, as the clocks tick heedlessly past 11:00 p.m., still chucking-out time even in most post-licensing-liberalisation England, and the waitress brings me another Yuengling with a wink and a smile, I felt totally at home.

Cool.

Jesus Christ, I’m even learning the language.

My first thought on waking next morning is to get out of the squalor of the ‘Y’ to find some breakfast and an internet connection to start sorting out some of the basics needed before undertaking an odyssey across an alien continent: like a mobile phone that works on America’s quirky network, and a new pair of shoes, having discovered in barely 18 hours on the ground that the clunky trainers which are all I’ve packed are far too heavy and far too hot to cope with this semi-tropical climate and my feet are not just sweating but turning wrinkly.

The ‘Y’, needless to say, doesn’t offer wi-fi internet access but that doesn’t mean it isn’t available, right outside the front door, I gather, spotting half a dozen kids with open laptops perched at various levels up and down the
external
iron fire escape, ‘air-surfing’: piggy-backing on someone’s unsecured wi-fi 
connection. In a city like this, surrounded by apartment blocks and offices, there are bound to be at least a couple of them. I try asking one of them, a girl in her twenties staring intently at her notebook about five feet above my head on the first landing of the fire escape.

‘Excuse me,’ I ask her politely, ‘but have you got a wi-fi connection there?’

In return I get a blank stare. I hadn’t said something accidentally obscene, had I? You never know in another country. Maybe Americans didn’t use the expression ‘wi-fi’ but that seemed a bit unlikely; it’s one of those phrases that had ‘made in America’ stamped all over it. Perhaps she was a deaf mute. Perhaps she just didn’t like strange men asking her questions. I reckon it’s worth one more try:

‘Do you have a wi-fi, a wireless internet connection?’

Another blank look, but not quite as blank as first time around. She looks at least moderately interested in my question. And then all of a sudden her face brightens up and she exclaims with a smile, ‘
Ahhhh, weefeee. Internyet. Da, da.
’ We used to fear the Russians were coming. Today, they’re already here. Everywhere.

Even so, I think better of opening up my laptop and fighting for a space on the higher rungs of the fire escape and decide instead to try the easier, if more expensive, option of the nearby Borders bookshop. It has the advantage of comfy seats and, American bookshops being what they are, I can have
breakfast
at the same time. Breakfast in New York means bagels which are eaten by everybody, and come both savoury and sweet, but best of all warm with cream cheese and a decent cup of coffee. I may complain – and I will – about the Americanisation of Britain but I have to add that in New York there is almost no such thing as a bad cup of coffee and we have Americans to thank for
transforming
the watery bitter brew that even our old Italian delis had degenerated into producing, before Starbucks mugged them. The Borders bagel is
excellent
, warm as a puppy dog and almost as comforting, with a consistency like thick dough which sounds nasty but is actually delicious.

But there’s a pilgrimage to be made. In the summer of 2001 on a flying visit to New York we chose to take the children up the Empire State Building rather than the World Trade Center – luckily, you might say, since it could have been that August day rather than three weeks later on September 11 – that the suicide attacks took place. We made the choice because the Empire State was more iconic, from its starring role in
King Kong
. Had 9/11 not happened the World Trade Center might have garnered similar cult status with the release of
Spiderman
2 in which the baddies’ helicopter got trapped in a web strung between 
the towers. Under the circumstances, obviously, the plot had to be rewritten
1
as video of the towers attained iconic status for altogether more tragic reasons.

Now I have no alternative but to go and see Ground Zero, worried slightly that it might be ghoulish behaviour, but consoling myself that it’s no more so than visiting Auschwitz: the scene of an atrocity of historical dimension. There is also an added, personal if rather venal, advantage: right next to Ground Zero is the biggest budget footwear shop in New York. In the inferno of 9/11 when the Twin Towers collapsed, weakening the structure of half a dozen
surrounding
buildings to the extent they required demolition, they left the budget shoe superstore next door unmarked. And when I say next door, I mean right next door, as I discover when I emerge from the subway. The blue hoardings that keep the public back from what is still the world’s biggest urban hole in the ground stand just feet from the front door of the Century21 discount clothing store. It is sobering to think that those who might have escaped certain death at their office desk that morning could have done so because they had nipped out to buy a cheap pair of sneakers or a new pair of tights.

But then there are few things that need sorting more urgently than your feet. I’ve already decided what I want to replace my waterproof, weatherproof, but totally unwearable trainers with: Converse sneakers. The one thing
troubling
me about this is that I have only remembered their existence because the British press has highlighted them as the casual footwear of choice of David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party. You have to understand what an existential trauma this is. I have never before coveted the footwear of a Tory leader. Or indeed any politician. Cameron’s Converses, on the other hand, I immediately recognised with a swallow of nostalgia as the ‘baseball boots’ of my youth. In the early 1970s these imports from America became an overnight sensation that made anybody wearing the previously commonplace white plimsolls – ‘guttees’ in our charming Northern Irish patois – hopelessly out of touch. It’s only now I realise how out of touch we were, seeing my fondly remembered ‘baseball boots’ correctly labelled as the ‘classic basketball shoe’.

Buying them isn’t that easy though. First of all you have to find them, and then make them fit. Okay, I’ve known for years – in theory at least – that
Americans
are uniquely like Russians in not having a concept of ‘ground floor’. But that doesn’t stop me seeing on the store index that what I want is on the first floor and then start climbing the stairs to get to it. It’s not much better when I
come back down again and try them on. Those ‘imperial’ British stalwarts who think that the Americans will preserve their ‘non-continental’ measures for them – like Fahrenheit – rejoice in the fact that American sizes – 8 or 9 rather than 42 or 43 – seem the same as British ones. They aren’t. In the same way – sort of, I’m not sure where the correlation is – that you can order a pint of beer in an American bar but you won’t get one. Not a British one. The US pint is 16 fluid ounces rather than 20; in fact it’s pretty much half a litre. So American shoe sizes are – to use an old English expression that will only complicate the issue – not quite the full shilling. If you wear a British 8 (42) you really need to buy an American 9. This would be well and good, in an unsatisfactory sort of way, if you could a) remember it, and b) rely on it. And most importantly of all, c) the people who actually make the shoes either knew or cared about it. They don’t.