All Gone to Look for America (3 page)

The fact is that 90 per cent of all footwear these days is made in China, India or other Asian countries where they churn them out to what they think are global standards. That means if you pick up a 42 or a 43, you have at least a fair chance of getting what it says on the insole. The same goes if you pick up an 8 or a 9, and are American. But if you are a Brit, and seriously think that the vast shoe manufacturing sweat shops of the developing world are going to
remember
that there is one tiny part of the Anglo-Saxon world that has measurements just ever so slightly out of synch with its big brother, then you are probably one of those that thinks 50 per cent of the world map is still painted pink. And after nearly half an hour of trying to squeeze my size 9 (43) feet into relatively forgiving size 9 Converse sneakers (which proclaim on the label that they are 9 – UK), I finally give up and buy size 10. But at least my feet are no longer hurting as I go outside to face the aftermath of Armageddon.

Ground Zero, I’m afraid, is deeply underwhelming. I don’t know quite what I had expected: some vestige of the destruction, says the ghoul, some quietly imposing memorial, says the human being. But seven years after the disaster this is still one of the world’s biggest building sites. Plagued by
souvenir
hawkers, even though signs expressly forbid them. I’m ambiguous as to whether or not they’re in bad taste. What most offer are sets of high quality photographs of the attacks and their aftermath, not charred bodies but the twisted upright metal girders amid the wreckage that became such an iconic image of the destruction and I, for one, thought sure to be preserved as part of any memorial. These photographs or ones very similar can be bought in books all over the city, indeed all over the world. I can understand that perhaps the commerce of selling them on the site may seem dubious but here in the
capital of capitalism, when all the industry in the great hole behind the
hoardings
is dedicated to recreating commercial space and has been the subject of unseemly argument since almost the day after the atrocity, it does not seem totally out of place. Nor, despite the signs forbidding his presence, can I find fault with the guy selling bottles of ice-cold water. I need one, and buying and selling is better than begging. And already the one thing that has shocked me in less than 24 hours on the streets of America is the number of beggars. In the richest society on earth, it is one hell of a long way from the top to the bottom.

Apart from the flying flags around the boarded-off construction site, there is – until the memorial in the footprint of the felled towers is complete –
precious
little to commemorate the disaster. The most poignant thing is a plaque erected when the Twin Towers were still standing, giving their vital statistics. They still make awe-inspiring reading, from the nearly one billion dollars they had cost to build by the time the first tower was opened in 1972, to the 1.2 million cubic yards of earth and rock excavated and dumped in the Hudson River to form the hardcore base for the Battery Park City housing
development
. The towers contained 200 lifts serving 40,000 square feet of office space on each of the 102 floors. And being built in the early seventies they also had a virtual monopoly on one of the lingering images of the time: polystyrene ceiling tiles. The Twin Towers incorporated seven million square feet of them. There were also 1,200 ‘restrooms’, a statistic that produces a sad little laugh: one of the most lasting images of the Twin Towers was the
Simpsons
episode when Homer, desperate to take a leak, dashes to the toilet at the top of one of the towers, only to find a sign saying, ‘Closed, try next door’.

As it happens, the real memorial to that terrible day is virtually next door – just beyond the budget clothing warehouse: St Paul’s church, built in 1766, is the oldest building still standing in Manhattan. Its graveyard abuts Ground Zero. The church itself served as a place for firemen and others to rest during and after the rescue operation, and has become the atrocity’s de facto shrine. Next to the carefully preserved pew once used by George Washington are stands displaying tokens of sympathy and encouragement from around the world, most touchingly several thousand origami cranes folded by the
schoolchildren
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A genuine gesture of sympathy and at the same time a point most elegantly unstated 

I AWAKE NEXT MORNING
on a mission from god – the god of small cuddly toys. I’m going to spring an English hero from Guantánamo Bay. Or the next best thing. For longer than my lifetime, Winnie-the-Pooh, that arch icon of English childhood, along with his ‘collaborators’, Eeyore, Kanga, Tigger and Piglet, has been held hostage in a foreign land for 60 years and for the last 20 – contrary to the Geneva Convention? – put on public display by their captors in the New York Public Library. I had been warned about this. They are not in the grand Beaux Arts building on Fifth Avenue despite the famous lions
standing
guard at the entrance, but located in an altogether more discreet uptown branch: the Donnell Centre at 20 West 53rd Street, clearly a case of ‘
extraordinary
rendition’.

The building itself is anonymous, as you’d expect a detention centre holding some of the literary world’s greatest celebrities to be. After passing through security – well, having my bag checked – I make my way to the fourth floor. And there they are, peering out woefully at me from within their cage, looking nothing like themselves. Instead of those familiar figures in the prime of their youth cavorting around the hundred-acre wood, here are a collection of
worn-out
old has-beens, displayed in a nondescript wooden case that would not have looked out of place in the Victorian halls of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. I think briefly about a smash-and-grab and a dash for freedom, but it’s not just the thought of the bulky security woman on the door downstairs that deters me. Just one look at Eeyore and I realise that such an adventure would knock the stuffing out of him, while Piglet, even more diminutive now in his advanced age is far too frail to survive even being crammed into a pocket. And then Pooh, God bless him, looks after all like just any old teddy bear, rather than the rotund, pointed-nose-in-hunny-jar hero of his youth, EH Shephard’s imagination and the Disney films. These blokes are just not up for the great escape.

And then, as the sound of children singing nursery rhymes wafts in from the reading room beyond the lifts and my eyes run down the vast list of names in the visitors’ book – several dozen this week alone – I realise I’m far too late anyway. Like many a hero before him and since, Pooh has been sold out by the men in charge. Taken to America and left with AA Milne’s publishers in 1947, he was moved to the children’s section of this library 40 years later. Pooh might not quite have gone native, but he is by now a settled expat happy with his lot, the Alastair Cook of cuddly toys. In retirement.

The Pooh that lives on in celluloid is the Pooh whose soul was sold to the Walt Disney corporation, which has since indulged in various, high-profile, expensive, protectionist scraps with other claimants, including an American lawyer, Winchester School and London’s Garrick Club. Ask most people about Winnie-the-Pooh these days – even in Britain – and the image they’ll conjure up is the brightly coloured Disney version talking with an American accent rather than Shephard’s understated line drawings and Milne’s
uncompromisingly
English prose.

And then I realise that there is not a mention of Disney here, not a cartoon image nor a single reference to ‘A Blustery Day’, just the original animals – loved half to death – and the original books. Ditto. And there are children round the corner reading together and singing nursery rhymes in a traditional manner I fear rarely happens in modern Britain.

Maybe Pooh and chums are perhaps better off here after all. He wouldn’t like being stuck in the Garrick Club. There are enough stuffed shirts there already.

I have one more British icon whose Manhattan shrine needs to be visited: Dylan Thomas, that great Welsh windbag and wordsmith who wowed America and accidentally drank himself to death here. And that means a pilgrimage to an institution of an altogether different ilk, the White Horse Tavern, famously frequented by Jack Kerouac, who was thrown out, and Thomas who downed his last drink there in 1953. At the post-mortem it was disappointingly
discovered
that the actual cause of Thomas’s death was pneumonia, exacerbated by emphysema, caused in turn by heavy smoking and use of morphine. To the astonishment of all concerned, his liver was found to be surprisingly healthy. I can’t think of anywhere better to have a few beers to round off the evening, and step boldly out into the road to hail a cab.

New York’s yellow cabs are as much an institution as London’s black ones, their low-slung shape as distinctive as our upright square boxes, the difference being that they never considered having to accommodate a gentleman wearing a top hat. The iconic cab was originally made by the Checker company back in the 1950s – the term ‘Checker cab’ refers to the brand, and not as I long thought to a former cross-hatching ‘chequered’ paint job The last was only replaced in 1999. Most New York cabs today are Ford Crown Victoria saloons, a line that has been running since 1992, but to climb into one you could be forgiven for thinking it is a good 30 years older. Certainly this one, driven by a genial Indian bloke, looks as if it’s been in service since the Cuban revolution. I know what I am talking about here. I have been to Havana and had the dodgy delight of travelling in one or two of the ancient pre-Castro Lincolns and Dodges that the locals lovingly patch up with whatever they can get hold of. And I have seen several in a lot better condition than this. Electrical wires hang down below the steering column held together with gaffer tape, the suspension has gone and so have the springs in the back seat, as well as most of the ripped and torn leatherwork. This isn’t a beaten-up exception; it’s the rule of thumb. I wind one window down – manually – to let the warm breeze in as we cruise off into the sticky Manhattan night.

When I give him my destination we convincingly turn sharply and head uptown, except that I know that is totally the wrong direction. That’s the moment I realise that my cab driver has no more than the vaguest notion of where I want him to take me. We’re ‘downtown’ here, but in New York City the expression has a totally different meaning to what it has in every other city in America. Out there – across the inland empire – ‘downtown’ means the city centre; here it means the bottom end of the island – Lower Manhattan – the oldest part of the city, where the streets meander and taxi drivers despair. Your typical New York cabbie, like most New Yorkers themselves, save for the elite little clan who actually inhabit one of the ‘villages’ downtown, navigates by the grid, and the grid alone. He can cross-reference streets and avenues, knows on which streets the traffic runs east-west and on which it runs west-east (it’s supposed to alternate but doesn’t always), but ask him to take you off the grid and he’s guessing.

I know the White Horse is at 567 Hudson Street, but whereas a London cabbie would know which end of the street that was nearest and where best to turn on to it, my guy hasn’t a clue. He wants an intersection and that’s a problem because down here the streets don’t go east-west, or rather some of them do and some of them don’t and there aren’t any north-south avenues,
or at least not very many and those that do have a disconcerting tendency to change their names to streets and often change direction too. I tell him it’s near West 11th Street, but this is a problem because when it gets far enough west, West 11th Street does something New York streets aren’t supposed to: it bends, which throws my driver completely. In the end he drops me on an intersection where five roads meet – which is clearly more than he can cope with – and tells me he reckons one of Lower Manhattan’s most celebrated pubs ‘oughta be around here somewhere’.

With a little bit of observation I work out I’m at the bottom end of Eighth Avenue which splits into the diverging Hudson Street and Bleecker Street with Bank Street and Bethune Street going off at other angles – proper names, you see, not just numbers. The White Horse turns out to be about 100 yards away. It’s unmistakable: a proper English Victorian boozer, at least from the outside, and inside too with moulded plasterwork ceilings and a great gin-palace-inscribed mirror behind the dark mahogany bar. The only difference is the ceiling fans, more suited to New York’s climate than
London’s
, and the brace of televisions displaying the inevitable baseball game. And of course, the life-size – or probably slightly larger – black-and-white portrait of the great Welsh windbag himself pontificating, glass in hand, carried away by the effortless brilliant breeze of his own tale-twisting words. For a moment I almost fear that the White Horse has betrayed Thomas’s legacy to it by becoming a theme pub in his honour, but nobody pays it any heed; they’re all too busy drinking, which is, after all, what the great man would have wanted.

The crowd in here could be the crowd in any central London pub: mixed ages, mixed sex, a slight preponderance of young, metrosexual types, a
studenty
element, earnest conversations, noisy banter and serious chatting-up going on in equal proportion. There are a few blokes standing at the bar,
chatting
or watching the baseball. I find a space and order a pint of ESB – not from the London brewery Fuller’s but from west coast brewery Red Hook. It’s a rich, malty beer and once you’ve got used to the fact that American beer is kegged, and therefore carbonated, it’s a fine drink. Standing there sipping, soaking in the atmosphere, and wondering how different it would have been in the fifties when Thomas and Kerouac and crew hung out here, I can’t help noticing that the two televisions are showing different baseball games, and that both give the impression of being broadcast live which is mildly surprising seeing as it’s gone 10:30 p.m. Even under floodlights, most British evening sport is finished by 10:00 p.m. at the latest.

I mention this, casually, in a sort of friendly, bloke-at-the-bar,
stranger-in-a-strange-land
, kind of fashion to the middle-aged man next to me who’s been paying attention to one of the games rather than the other. He give me an odd look for a moment and then realises that I am obviously an alien, and explains: one television is showing the New York Mets game and the other the New York Yankees, and yes, of course they’re still going on, why wouldn’t they be, they’re not over yet. I realise this is sort of obvious as it seems is my
follow-up
question: so what time do they finish. This gets an incredulous, not to say sceptical look, and the reply, ‘When they’re over,’ which does me no good at all, and then the explanatory, ‘When one team wins.’ As a football fan where 0–0 is sometimes not even a disappointing score, and aware than even cricket occasionally ends in a draw, it had simply not occurred to me that baseball doesn’t: it’s not over until one team wins.

This certainly seems to explain why the games on TV are still going on at a time when anyone sensible would be down the pub – so, even though I’m not exactly fascinated by the topic but am enjoying having a conversation with a native, I ask him to explain. I won’t bore you with the details – primarily because I didn’t really understand beyond the fact they play nine innings and if it’s a draw keep going until the next run, a sort of ‘golden goal’ situation – but what struck me was how initially reluctant he was to tell me. Normally asking most blokes about their favourite sport is like pleading to be bored to death for the next hour, just try asking about the offside rule in football next time you’re down the pub after a game. But after bursting into a brief explanation, he suddenly clams up and retreats into his pint. Realising I may have pushed the social niceties a bit far somehow or other, I say thanks and by the way, my name’s Peter. He gives me a perfunctory nod back and says nothing. Fair enough, I think, man doesn’t want to be bothered by strange character at bar who doesn’t know the most elemental rules of the national sport, and order another ESB.

A few minutes later, however, he turns to me and says, ‘Sorry, my name’s Laurence, by the way.’ And goes on to explain the ‘golden goal’ bit in more detail than I ever needed (see what I mean). It just gradually dawns on me that rather than just talking to a bloke at the bar, as you might do in London, we have been going through a strange sort of courtship ritual here. And then almost simultaneously when he makes a vivid point of ogling a girl in a tiny halter top, I realise that I am both right and incredibly wrong. He has just been fencing around to check whether I might be gay, not because he is, but because he isn’t and before he gets into a conversation he wants to make sure he isn’t
just responding to a pick-up line. Which seems a good time to tell him I’m a football fan but my wife isn’t, just to indicate that she exists really. He nods and tells me that his ex couldn’t stand baseball – which I am beginning to think may have been a prime factor in their divorce.

Over the next half hour I learn more than I ever need to know about Red Sox and Black Sox, about how the Yankees are the Bronx and the Mets Queens, why there are two leagues – the National and the American – and that means it’s okay for there to be a World Series in a sport which only a handful of countries play and in any case doesn’t include them, being restricted to the winners of the two leagues. I also discover that Laurence is a university lecturer in English, a factor in his oblique attempt to explain why there’s no point in telling me the rules of baseball when I’ve never even been to a game: ‘You can read
Bleak House
, for example, and you’d know the story but you can’t really understand it unless you know the semiotics of Victorian literature.’ This loses me somewhat so I change tack and ask him if Dickens is his speciality.