All Gone to Look for America

by Peter Millar

  Unlike most of America, Manhattan is a pedestrian’s city. The West Side YMCA is on West 63rd St, a short walk from Central Park, the city’s great green lung and one of the finest city parks on the planet which has long outlived its once dangerous reputation. I’m told that over two decades New York has metamorphosed from the murder capital of the world to one of its safer cities, at least as far as street crime is concerned. Even so, I’m wearing my cash in a well-concealed money belt, not the most comfortable thing given that according to a temperature sign by Columbus Circle it is 86 degrees Fahrenheit, which a few seconds later thankfully translates to 30 Celsius. Older Britons may cling to Fahrenheit and love the Americans for preserving it, but a scale that goes from 32 to 212 rather than zero to 100 has always seemed doomed to me.

  This is maybe the fourth time in my life that I have been to New York and I’m trying hard to be blasé. It doesn’t work. It never does. There is only one thing constant about New York: the sheer, awe-inspiring, jaw-dropping, colossal, cluttered, sky-clogging, perpetually self-reinventing vibrant immensity of the place. From Columbus Circle down towards the insane, pulsing, tourist-ridden, high-tech, low-life, urban jungle arena that is Times Square, New York is so in your face you can hardly step back and see it properly. I know from my minimal experience that this is the best time to confront it, in early evening when the heat is beginning to subside, the day turning quickly to a violet dusk as the kaleidoscope of neon and whirling promotional projections start to wheel across the soaring, jutting, idiosyncratic façades of the sky-scraping (think what a good phrase that was when it was first coined) architecture, fusing them surreally with the onrushing night. You can’t do Times Square without thinking they should never even have attempted to make Piccadilly Circus emulate it. Except perhaps as a focal point for tourists, the garish little clutch of neon lights around the statue of Eros never was and never will be on a par. It looks today much as Times Square did on my first visit: and that was as a child in 1968. Forty years ago.

  The truth is that Times Square has never been a place on the ground so much as a space in your head. A commercial space at that. One that has far, far less in common with the quaint concept that we still call ‘the bright lights’ and far more to do with Ridley Scott’s vision of future Los Angeles in Blade Runner (in fact far more than Los Angeles). This is a sea of architecture in motion awash with moving faces and shimmering images. The buildings – themselves ever-changing over the decades as stone, brick and concrete have yielded to steel, glass and carbon fibre, rising and falling and rising ever higher in tune with the demands of the commercial property market – are just the backdrop. The Times Square–Broadway interface is a figment of a fevered imagination enacted fleetingly in real life and constantly subject to reinterpretation, as the neon yields to laser, hologram and HD digital projection.

  Even before I reach what passes for the ‘square’ itself, on the corner of 53rd Street and Broadway, crash barriers have been erected to cordon off a whole section of street and hay bales positioned around a half dozen trademark New York yellow taxis parked in close order next to one another. At one end there is a ramp and beyond it a man in padded clothing is revving a high-powered quad bike, clearly with the intention of driving it up the ramp in an insane Evel Knievel attempt to jump over the cabs. This is too potty, too archetypal ‘Noo Yoik’ nuts not to stop and watch, except there is nothing much to watch. He is spending a lot of time not actually doing it, just sitting there revving his engine, spewing clouds of noxious diesel into hot night air that already reeks of engine fumes. Meanwhile the film crews bustle here and there, as if they aren’t really sure when or if he’s going to do it or if, improbably, the whole set-up is about to be moved 50 or 100 yards in one direction or the other. But then they aren’t really there for him at all, it appears, as a surreally-stretched limo glides in from the far end of the street, through the hastily opened barriers. And in between a couple of burly black-suited minders, a pretty, bottle-enhanced blonde in a tiny black dress, steps out and heads for a door in the wall.

  It’s the first time I’ve noticed the door or the fact that a sign above it says ‘Ed Sullivan Theater’ and realise this is the stage door for one of America’s most famous venues, long-time home of the show hosted by the eponymous Ed but for the past decade and a half the setting for the Late Show with David Letterman. As to the leggy luvvy stepping out of the limo I’m not left long in the dark about her identity as a vast scrum of hacks armed with microphone booms and television cameras crushes against the crowd barriers and begins calling, ‘Paris, Paris, over here, over here.’ For it is she, the Hilton heiress, famous for being infamous – and of course rich – primarily because thanks to her ex-boyfriend Rick Salomon, several million people on the internet have watched intimate details of her having sex. And also because she has been jailed for drink driving, discovering God in prison (amazing how many people bump into Him there) and emerging to declare herself ready to work for peace in Rwanda. Rwanda, I am sure, is thankful.

  ‘Paris, Paris, talk to us, we’ve been with you through all your trials and tribulations,’ shouts one overly devoted member of the media (though both trials and tribulations there have been in her silly pampered artificial existence). She trips across and trots out what I take to be the usual platitudes – I’m not close enough to hear and really couldn’t care less – and then trots off through the stage door out of our lives and into those of the millions watching Mr Letterman on TV. The minders scowl at the disassembling press pack and disappear after her. Exit pursued by bears.

  And then all is dark again, or at least relatively so in the absence of the television arc lights, and the other bear-like figure, the man in the padded jacket on the quad bike, has climbed off and is lighting up a cigarette by the hay bales, clearly in search of some alternative means of living dangerously. The one he had previously anticipated, it is rapidly becoming clear, is no longer on the cards, as the ramp is being dismantled by stage hands and a lorry has backed into the street where the limo was, ready to be loaded with the bales. I am left there in a state of some confusion and minor disappointment: had I missed the show? No, there was no sign of any previous attempt. Had he simply changed his mind? Seemed unlikely. I asked one of the hired hands, who just shrugged in a very Noo Yoik way and said, ‘I guess it was just in case…’ ‘In case of what?’ I asked. But he just waved his hand at the stage door and got on with shifting bales of hay.

  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 enoug
h 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 rewritten1 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’.