All Gone to Look for America

by Peter Millar

  Meanwhile, I still have half a dozen hours to kill before the overnight Lake Shore Limited will take me onwards to Chicago. On the dubious advice of the Canadian in the bar in Niagara, who claimed to be a regular visitor to Buffalo, I head first for the Elmwood district which he assured me was the liveliest part of central Buffalo. He was not wrong, except in describing it as ‘central’. This has a lot to do with perspective. When I ask directions to Elmwood, I am told it’s just ‘five or 10 minutes down the road’, but then nobody is even remotely imagining I might be on foot. By now I’ve begun to get a grip of the scale of downtown Buffalo’s urban wasteland, and decide it’s time to investigate public transport. Of course, what passes for public transport in most of America is taxis. Except that you can almost never find one. They don’t cruise the streets in the hope of being hailed – except in New York – and the only way of getting one is either finding a rank (which you won’t because it’s called a ‘stand’) or knowing the number of a firm and then being able to explain where you are, and probably how to get there. Taxis are for people who have momentarily mislaid their cars (most Americans would take that to mean people who are about to lose their cars: ‘momentarily’ here doesn’t mean something of brief duration but something that’s going to happen ‘in a moment’. Confusing, isn’t it?).

  But I have already clapped eyes on the pride of Buffalo’s public transport system: a tramway that runs up and down Main Street. For the central stops it is free. The main reason for this is that public transport, in the sense we understand it in Britain, is intended for two groups: the destitute, and tourists. As a result, the trams don’t run all that frequently, every 15 minutes at best, and feel more like one of those little rubber-wheeled trains that ferry tourists around seaside resorts than a serious means of urban transportation. Even this far north, in what I would have assumed to be a typical ‘Anglo’ city close to the Canadian border, the ticket machines show just how rapidly Spanish is becoming America’s semi-official second language: ‘Pulse por su idoma,’ the LCD display says. I choose inglés, feed in a dollar to get beyond the city centre and it spews out a ‘permit to ride’.

  The tram, however, also only goes halfway towards where the minimalist city map suggests Elmwood might begin. That means getting back on shank’s pony despite my sore feet, but that doesn’t matter too much because this is Buffalo’s best bit, chiefly because nobody has done anything to it for most of the twentieth century. You know you have reached Elmwood when the parking lots start to fade away and little wooden houses dare to creep into view, skulking along the side of the road in the hope they won’t be noticed and pulled down. Most of them have got away with it, enough for them to survive until the first ‘bohemians’ moved in: middle-class kids with enough money to play at being artists, and who didn’t depend on heavy industry jobs that were no longer there. They stand knocking back bottles of Corona on the terrace of the Cozumel Mexican bar-restaurant in the weak autumn sunlight.

  I know I should be tucking heartily into that famous local speciality, ‘Buffalo Wings’, but somehow a plate of fattened wings from bloated factory-farmed chickens that have become the staple diet for bloated factory-working humans is the last thing I feel like. Anyhow this isn’t the place to have them; I should be in the Anchor Bar in bleak downtown where back in 1964 Teressa Bellissimo, wife of the owner, found her son Dominic and several pals from college arriving unannounced in search of something to eat. In a fit of inspiration she took the leftover chicken wings she normally boiled up for soup stock, deep-fried them and doused them with spicy tomato sauce. Or maybe not. At least two other bars claim the idea originated there – Buffalo has not enough claims to fame to let even that one go undisputed.

  Instead, I settle for tacos, a ‘free’ plate of tortilla chips and a chunky chilli and tomato salsa that almost tastes as if it might be homemade. Washed down with a pint of Yuengling. It could have been the alcohol, it could have been the pretty waitress with the big smile that it doesn’t take too much self-delusion to believe might be there for me instead of her tip, but before long some semblance of humanity has crept up on me unawares. I wouldn’t say I feel part of the human race again, or as near as I’m likely to get in Buffalo. The upbeat mood comes with me on the long tramp back into town. With the hours before my midnight train still stretching ahead of me like another empty parking lot, I’m going to try the Canadian’s tips for early evening Friday night nightlife: the ‘Chippewa entertainment district’. The name alone had me hooked. ‘Chippewa’ is one of those words that has been on my personal radar for more than two decades without me ever really having a clue what it meant. All because it features in the first line of Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot’s ‘Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’.

  Gordon Lightfoot is hardly a particular favourite of mine. But that one song, first heard sung by a Canadian student in a bar filled with nostalgic expats in the basement of a Moscow embassy in the latter days of the Cold War, has always seemed particularly evocative. Part of that comes from the sheer alien ‘otherness’ of the place names, places that might as well be on the moon, and yet obviously so deeply familiar to the narrator that they need no explanation. This haunting song tells the tragic tale of a shipwreck in which all 29 crew died. And yet if you’d never heard it the lyrics look like gobbledygook, something Homer Simpson would sing in the bath: Chippewa and Gitchi Gumee. But then words don’t just have meanings, they have resonance. Take two exotic, apparently meaningless terms that resonate together as if they come from a common language, then throw in a familiar but evocative word like ‘legend’ and you have a formula that grabs the attention and sung to a haunting melody in a low lit bar can send shivers down the spine.

  One of the reasons I have never simply ‘googled’ Chippewa is that part of me didn’t really want to know any more in case the truth diluted the magic. But when the Canadian in the bar in Niagara used the word, the look on my face prompted him to spell it out: ‘The Chippewa – you know, the Injuns.’ My obvious ignorance astounded him as much as it would have amused me had he said, ‘Paris, now tell me again, which country is that in?’ People here know the Chippewa as well as the Sioux or Cheyenne. Maybe it’s because they took the land from them. Gitchi Gumee, was their word for Lake Superior. Once you have seen the great cascades of Niagara, Lightfoot’s lyrics about this great chain of lakes – Superior, Ontario, Erie – come into their own. After looking out from Buffalo’s decaying city hall tower over the bleak, beautiful and empty expanse of Erie, with nothing but a few stationary sailboats, the vision of a great old freighter laden with iron ore, heading for Cleveland from ‘some mill in Wisconsin’, seems more than ever a poignant evocation of what at the time of the disaster was already a fast vanishing world. The wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald only happened in 1975. It was a cruel last gasp.

  ‘But what have the Chippewa got to do with bars in downtown Buffalo?’ I had asked the Canadian, vaguely wondering if like the Niagara casino local Indians they had done some sort of sale and leaseback arrangement. He’d shrugged, thought for a moment and said, ‘Not a lot. Hell, nothin’ at all that I can think of.’ He was right. No self-respecting Indian in his right mind would have been seen dead in the ‘entertainment district’ of Buffalo.

  Entertainment is always a relative term – think public hangings and throwing Christians to lions; there’ll always be a market for it, but it’s not everybody’s cup of tea. The ‘entertainment’ in and around the Chippewa district of downtown Buffalo is spot-on if you like bars that are pitch dark inside, even in the daytime, except for neon alcohol advertisements and where the music is so loud that you actually have to stand at least 10 yards outside to have a conversation, and order drinks in sign language. If that’s what rings your bell then Buffalo has a whole carillon on offer in a series of practically identical establishments about 20 yards apart. If not, that’s tough.

  So it’s in a mood of renewed resigned despondency, with more than four hours yet to go before my
train, that I tramp off once more – painfully aware of the pack on my back – in search of something a bit more congenial. Within half an hour I find what looks like the best bet. I should have guessed: this is where I came in, the Washington Tavern, the lonely-looking town bar standing amidst the wasteland on the edge of so-called Washington Square. Standing there, peering through the window and hoping not to be taken for one of the hobos from the bus shelter, wondering if this reasonable but dull-looking bar is really the best on offer, I’m suddenly accosted by a bloke who jumps out of a pickup truck. I’ve started to panic before I realise that he’s just trying to be helpful. He is concerned, in a well-meaning way that in most European cities would verge on the suspicious, in case I might be lost. Which, of course, is not far from the truth. I surprise myself by responding in kind, telling him I’m just looking for somewhere convivial to kill a few hours before making my way to a train station I don’t really know how to get to.

  His recommendation is the other bar I spotted in my first hour in Buffalo, the Lafayette, which he says on a Friday night has music you can actually listen to rather than just survive. What’s more, once he has picked up his fried fish supper from the Washington, he’ll give me a lift there. I’m completely taken aback, not for the last time in America, by the sudden spontaneity, the way in which a vast monolithic indifference to the fate of others cohabits happily with remarkable outgoing friendliness. Within less than 10 minutes I’m dropped outside the Lafayette by Ivor – I already know his name, family history and taste in music, with the advice to ask the barman about getting out to Depew and a warm – probably genuine – assurance that if I can’t get it sorted out I should ring his ‘cellphone’ (he writes down his number on a piece of torn cigarette packet) and ‘if I can still walk after a coupla beers back with the old lady’ he’ll come out and give me a lift.

  Stunned and grateful, I venture into the surprisingly welcoming Lafayette Tap Room. Unlike almost anywhere else I have been – or seen – in Buffalo, the Lafayette has atmosphere: an old dark oak bar all along one wall, with people on stools chatting to one another and small tables with people eating. I’m not that hungry but having wimped out of the ‘wings’ I can’t turn down Buffalo’s other speciality, one that hasn’t perhaps become ‘globally famous’ but looks as if it might be at least more interesting: Beef on Weck.

  This is another of America’s German inheritances (just how much America’s Anglo-Saxon roots are really Saxon – and Bavarian and Rhineland and Prussian – rather than ‘Anglo’ is something that is going to become more and more apparent to me over the next few weeks, particularly in Milwaukee). Kümmelweck is an old German dialect word for a caraway seed roll. It is not something you often come across in Germany and the Buffalo version is a genuine local speciality, even if nowadays they pronounce the ‘w’ the English way. It is a large soft roll dusted with caraway seeds and salt. It comes – at least in the Lafayette Tavern – packed with mouth-melting rare roast beef and a liberal sprinkling of pickled gherkins, surprisingly simple and surprisingly delicious.

  At the bar next to me, Gary, a petite, trim, dapper middle-aged man with a penchant for flat caps and eye-catching houndstooth check blazers, is fuming against a Canadian disc jockey: ‘This guy in Toronto, for God’s sake, he’s like saying nothing happens in Buffalo because nobody lives there.’ I almost find myself nodding in agreement here with the unknown but obviously savvy shock jock. ‘I mean,’ Gary says, ‘just look at us, are we nowhere?’

  Absolutely nowhere, I’m about to say, and then I realise he means right here, in this bar and I have to admit he has a point. The Lafayette Tap Room is somewhere, in fact it’s somewhere pretty nice. By now it has filled up and there is a cool, blues-skat-singing six-foot-seven black Californian guy warming up on stage and promising us he’s come straight from New York City and really wants a nap, but only after he’s sung his heart out. And that is what he’s doing!

  Gary is saying: ‘People just can’t help being nasty to Buffalo.’ Unfortunately, present company excepted, these people still have all my sympathy. ‘They think we’re about nothing but snow and ice and unemployment.’ I remember a sign by the bank opposite City Hall advising that hot water pipes are embedded in the pavement and realise I may not be seeing Buffalo in all its wintry glory. However grim it might appear in autumn, it has to be much, much worse in the dark depths of January.

  For all his fervent defence of his city Gary admits that Buffalo today is one of the poorest cities in America, its population at 300,000 less than half what it was half a century ago, with an average family income of barely $28,000 (about £14,000) and an astonishing 20 per cent of its inhabitants below the poverty line.

  ‘They say things like, “Buffalo is a dinosaur and since the steel went we’ve nothing,”’ he pauses for just a telltale instant before adding, ‘and obviously they’re not wholly wrong there.’ This sounds like a sad but accurate admission of unavoidable defeat, particularly as neither Gary nor his female friend Anne who has just arrived can remember exactly when it was the steel mills closed: ‘The sixties or maybe the fifties, no probably maybe the seventies.’

  Anne says her ‘sugar daddy’ used to be a steel roller and ‘goes on all the time about it’. So how old is he? ‘He says he doesn’t know, doesn’t have a whaddayacallit, birth certificate, but like maybe 83 or something.’ Which, I want to reply, is probably how old you have to be if you can remember having a good time in Buffalo. But then it occurs to me that she probably reckons she shows her ‘sugar daddy’ a good time, and out of sympathy for both of them I keep my mouth shut. Anyhow, as Gary was trying to tell me earlier, I’m not exactly having a bad time at the moment, with a drinkable beer in my hand, moderately entertaining company and a fine performer playing the blues up there on the stage. If only I knew how the hell I was going to get out to the train station I’d be fine really.

  At which point, Gary perks up and says, ‘Hey, what the hell, you know, I can take you out to Depew if you don’t want to leave for another half hour or so.’

  Which puts a smile on my face in Buffalo after all, and I buy him a beer which of course he says he shouldn’t have because he’s driving but what the hell, and then he buys me one and then eventually we stagger out into the night and he fires up his Japanese people carrier in the midst of the vast sprawling parking lot, which now has maybe two dozen cars in it but could take another few hundred without feeling crowded and we drive off into the darkness.

  I haven’t a clue where we’re headed and after a while it emerges that neither has Gary as he’s never been to the Amtrak station before, never ever been on a train actually. The only clues we have are his vague idea of where it is located and my note of the address, 55 Dick Street which I still have a horrible lingering feeling might be a joke.

  And then we cross under the freeway – which is what I am learning you do a lot in America unless you are actually on one – and spot a sign about the size of a shoebox lid pointing in the opposite direction. It only takes about two miles before we can turn around and miraculously we spot the sign again on the way back, and Gary swings the people carrier off the carriageway and onto an unmade road which leads to what looks like a Portakabin on a piece of waste ground and I know we must be there.

  I climb out, throw my rucksack on my back and grab Gary’s hand and shake it and he slaps me on the rucksack and looks at the Portakabin – which actually isn’t a Portakabin but a medium-sized, nondescript concrete building which manages to look as if it hasn’t decided whether or not to hang around for long – and slaps me on the rucksack again.

  ‘Good luck,’ he says, meaning it. ‘Write nice things about Buffalo.’ I give him a smile instead of a lie.

  Then in a screech of wheels on gravel Gary is gone and there’s just me and Depew depot. But at the end of the day – or even 45 minutes into the next one as the 11:59 p.m. Amtrak departure is put back to 12:30 a.m. and then 12:45 a.m. – I realise I may not have found Buffalo’s beating hea
rt, but I did catch a glimpse of its soul.

  BUFFALO TO CHICAGO

  TRAIN: Lake Shore Limited

  FREQUENCY: 1 a day

  DEPARTS BUFFALO DEPEW, NEW YORK: 11:59 p.m. (Eastern Time)

  via

  Erie, Pennsylvania

  Toledo, Ohio

  Bryan, OH

  Elkhart, Indiana

  South Bend, IN

  ARRIVE CHICAGO, ILLINOIS: 9:45 a.m. (Central Time)

  DURATION: approx 8 hours, 45 minutes

  DISTANCE: 520 miles

  6

  Hell of a Town

  LIFE IS A BEACH, then you die. It may be a stale old joke, but you can give it a lot of new life by imagining it first spoken by Al Capone on the occasion of the St Valentine’s Day massacre. You see, the one thing I had absolutely not expected about Chicago was that it would be a great seaside resort.

  As the early morning Amtrak rolled through the golden cornfields of northern Indiana I was ready for my first glimpse of the ‘Windy City’s’ famous skyline, with the spires of the Sears Building – still the world’s tallest in terms of actual accessibility to human beings – towering over the rickety tracks of the ‘El’, the city’s famous nineteenth-century elevated urban transport system.