Stephen Fry in America

by Stephen Fry

  Maybe it is the sheer exhilaration of being towed, nosed, tickled, slapped, prodded, swiped and barged by these boisterous, squeaking, clicking creatures–maybe that is therapy enough, coupled with the muscular toning resulting from active time in the seawater. I certainly feel entirely enchanted and emerge glowing with bien-être and a sense of one of nature’s highest privileges having been bestowed upon me.

  I ponder man’s fascination with the ‘higher’ mammals–great apes, whales and dolphins. When in their presence it is as if we are communing with royalty or Hollywood stars. A great grin spreads over our faces. Eye contact or attention causes our hearts to beat a little faster at the honour of having being noticed by such supreme beings. A shame that, given this, we can’t seem to share the planet with them. There won’t be many species of whale and gorilla left by 2020. Perhaps the dolphins are safe so long as they continue to play.

  ‘Dolphins,’ says Eli, ‘they got this instinct where they only approach those in the water who are the most nervous. They always seems to pay attention to the most vulnerable and the most wounded, physically or emotionally. You’ll see them gently prod these people into play.’

  ‘But confident people?’

  ‘Self-satisfied people, fit people, confident people they will leave alone.’

  I do not know whether to be flattered or insulted by the dolphins’ very clear attentions to me.

  Everglades Airboat

  The second sine qua non on the Miami tourist trail is the airboat trip around the Everglades. I drive back up from Key Largo towards this enormous national park, more than two thousand square miles in size, a limitless marshland of sawgrass sedge, mangrove, cypress, hammock and pine. Flat as a billiard table, the first impression as you drive through is of rich fertile green fields, until you catch the dark glint of reflections where land should be and you are finally convinced that the entire landscape is under water. There is only one feasible way to move across it–by airboat.

  Of all the freakish modes of transportation I have ever experienced, the airboat must be the noisiest and the most eco-dreadful. A caged aeroplane engine propeller hurtles one across the surface of the Everglades, skimming at great speed, belching exhaust fumes and snarling with a high-decibel din that one would imagine was guaranteed to send every species of animal running for cover. But animals can get used to anything, even the noxious roar of a Mad Max airboat. They appear to be the preserve of ageing hippies, like Jesse, my driver, who enjoy freaking one out with tales of alligators leaping into boats and pulling humans into the water.

  Jesse has a baby alligator back at his base. He passes it over to me.

  ‘Go on there, he won’t hurt you.’

  Strange how the young of such warty and frightening creatures can be so adorable.

  Sometimes the cheesiest, most clichéd touristic activity can be entirely satisfactory. So it was on the Everglades.

  * * *

  FLORIDA

  KEY FACTS

  Abbreviation:

  Fl

  Nickname:

  The Sunshine State

  Capital:

  Tallahassee

  Flower:

  Orange blossom

  Tree:

  Sabal palm

  Bird:

  Northern mockingbird

  Pie:

  Key Lime Pie

  Motto:

  In God We Trust

  Well-known residents and natives: Janet Reno, General Stilwell, Butterfly McQueen, Sidney Poitier, Fay Dunaway, Burt Reynolds, Ben Vereen, Pat Boone, Jim Morrison, Gloria Estefan.

  * * *

  ‘Sometimes the cheesiest, most clichéd touristic activity can be entirely satisfactory.’

  The latest in contemporary sculpture meditates in Lummus Park, Miami Beach.

  South Beach

  The following day I spend exploring South Beach, the southern part of the finger of separated land that runs down the coast of Miami. Fifteen or so years ago the area was a desolate ruin. Chris Blackwell, founder of Island Records, undertook with others the restoration of the string of pastel-coloured deco hotels that are now the glory of this most fashionable part of the whole city. On this same frontage, Ocean Drive, stands the large square, Roman-style house Casa Casuarina, on whose steps Gianni Versace was shot and killed in 1997.

  Signs of Christmas remind me that, despite all evidence to the contrary, we are in deep midwinter. I walk up towards the Lincoln Theatre, an art-deco cream and terracotta jewel of a movie house now the home of the New World Symphony Orchestra. Their Percussion Consort is practising the eccentric and exciting Ballet Mécanique, a wild futuristic, Dadaist percussion piece by George Antheil involving doorbells and aeroplane propellers not unlike those that power the airboats of the Everglades. In its first performance in Paris the propellers blew wigs and hats off the heads of audience members. I sit in on the rehearsal, pleased to think that in a metropolis whose nightclubs echo with the tedious bump of salsa, funk, mambo and soft rock there is also room for the wilder shores of experimental modernism, albeit a modernism that is now well over eighty years old.

  The Snowbirds

  The evening is to expose me to music again–music and so much more. For generations the warm winters of Miami have attracted temporary visitors of a certain age, especially Jewish couples from New Jersey and New York. These winter visitors are called ‘snowbirds’ and have made Palm Beach and the surrounding environs north of Miami almost entirely their own, creating enormous gated communities which contain their own shops, cinemas, beauty parlours, pools, synagogues and theatres. In the theatres the communities’ paid Entertainment Officers arrange special dance evenings and it is to one of these that I have been invited tonight.

  A gated snowbird world is like a cruise ship stuck on land. The same posted lists of Things To Do, the same excited clusters of guests checking dates, times and dress codes with the Entertainment Officers. I have come because tonight is Dance Night in one of the theatres and I am to witness snowbird world close up.

  Snowbirds dancing.

  Marvin, the happiest ninety-year-old I ever met.

  I talk to a group of professional male dancers. The youngest of them will not see fifty again, but to the more man-hungry dancing ladies of the community they are toy boys to be hooked and swung around the floor until they drop. The rapacity and dance mania of some of the women, I am told, must be seen to be believed.

  ‘Sometimes we get home with torn jackets and pants,’ says one of them, Morris.

  As one who loathes dancing with a loathing so deep, so entire and so fundamental that the very prospect of swinging a shoe causes me to come out in a trembling sweat of fury, fear and distress, the prospect of being grabbed by one of these dance-mad harpies fills me with horror and I determine to hide behind our film camera for the evening.

  So dotty, dreadful and glitzily, vulgarly charming is the whole evening however, that I am tempted to the floor, almost to the point of moving my body more or less to music. A little old man called Marvin is so charming, in his sparkly hat and with his delightful Walter Matthau grin, that I cannot resist chatting to him.

  ‘Did you ever see such pretty ladies?’ he asks excitedly. ‘Pretty ladies everywhere!’

  ‘And you’ve got the prettiest,’ I say, gallantly bowing to the woman on his arm, who giggles and snuggles further into him.

  ‘We been together twenty years,’ Marvin tells me.

  ‘Married?’

  ‘No. We’re a dance team. My wife passed eight years ago. Her husband passed seven years ago. They call us M and M.’

  ‘Marvin and…?’

  She speaks for the first time. ‘Muriel.’

  ‘Marvin and Muriel.’

  ‘Ain’t she a princess, though?’

  ‘Certainly. May I ask how old you are, Marvin?’

  ‘Sure you can ask. It’s a free country, despite that schmuck in the White House.’

  M and M. Marvin and Muriel.

  Bidding farewell
to Florida.

  ‘So, how old are you?’

  ‘Ninety years young.’

  Muriel, only a foot taller than him, nudges him and they spin off into the crowd of seven hundred other dancing couples.

  It is a strange world, and one I would commit suicide to avoid being a part of, but they all seemed very happy. As soon as it is decent to do so, I tip-toe away, the triumphant snarl of ‘If My Friends Could See Me Now’ from Sweet Charity getting fainter and fainter until I reach the safety of the taxi.

  The next morning I stand on the rocks of the beach and bid farewell to Florida. I have travelled down the east coast as far south as I can and now I must point myself west, across the gulf, to Louisiana.

  THE DEEP SOUTH AND THE GREAT LAKES

  LOUISIANA

  ‘No town carnivals like New Orleans. You had better have a strong head and a forgiving liver if you mean to enjoy New Orleans at Mardi Gras.’

  Beignets, lagniappes, jambalaya and gumbo. Jazz, jalousies and jelly shots. Streetcars, the levee and Tabasco. Po’boys, zydeco, voodoo and the bayou. Bienvenu à Nouveau Orléans.

  Southern Louisiana is dominated by New Orleans, a city of such distinctness and quality that it has earned more nicknames than New York: The Big Easy, the Crescent City, 504, NOLA, The City That Care Forgot. I came here once before, sent by Paramount Studios in 1997 to get background for a screenplay adaptation of John Kennedy Toole’s great New Orleans novel A Confederacy of Dunces. Since that visit one catastrophic event in late August 2005 has reshaped everything we think about this enchantingly seductive town: Hurricane Katrina. For New Orleans, time is divided into pre-Katrina and post-Katrina.

  Mardi Gras

  I arrive at the beginning of February. A good time to visit, for it is the weekend leading up to ‘Fat Tuesday’, the literal English translation of Mardi Gras. In Britain we call it ‘Shrove Tuesday’ and celebrate with pancakes. In more observant times this day preceding Ash Wednesday was when the faithful said their goodbye to meat, for it signalled the start of Lent and forty days of fasting and prayer. The Latin for ‘goodbye meat’ is carne vale. Hence the word ‘carnival’. With the possible exceptions of Rio de Janeiro and Aberdeen, no town carnivals like New Orleans. (I was lying about Aberdeen.)

  Zulus on parade.

  You had better have a strong head and a forgiving liver if you mean to enjoy New Orleans at Mardi Gras. Fat Tuesday is merely the culmination of Fat Saturday, Fat Sunday and Fat Monday. Each of those days sees drinking, parades, drinking, marching bands, drinking, the wearing of costumes, drinking, drinking and drinking. By Sunday the gutters in the streets of the French Quarter are already filled with hundreds of thousands of shiny green, gold and purple beads. Green for faith, gold for power and purple for justice–the official colours of the New Orleans Mardi Gras. In Bourbon Street, the scuzzy touristic heart of the Quarter, there is also human matter of a not dissimilar colour in the gutters, but let us try to concentrate on the positive. Necklaces of these coloured beads are dropped from every balcony and hurled from every parade float. It is impossible to walk ten yards without becoming festooned. With the beads comes a growing acceptance of the spirit of Mardi Gras. I soak up that spirit, and suck it down too, in the form of jelly shots, the kind of disgusting alcohol-for-people-who-don’t-like-grown-up-alcoholic-drinks in which America specialises. The kind of disgusting comestible, in fact, one is secretly pleased to have an excuse guiltlessly to enjoy from time to time. In the time off between visiting Florida and coming here to Louisiana I filmed for the BBC in Brazil, where I managed to break my left arm in Amazonia, so for my journeys through the French Quarter I am escorted by members of the film crew, who protect me from being barged by those revellers too lost in drink to notice that my arm is in a sling.

  Mardi Gras:

  baubles

  bangles

  beads.

  At the bar of Napoleon’s on Chartres Street, I fall into conversation with a group of boisterous New Orleanians and get a lesson in how to pronounce the name of the town. No two of them appears to agree, native born as they all are. N’Orlins, N’Orleeyuns, Noo Orlins, Noo Orleeeens, Noo Orleeyuns–they all seem to be acceptable. Indeed what is not acceptable in this pearl of a town? My new friends offer the opinion that New Orleans has more in common with the great ports of the world, Marseille, Rio, Amsterdam, London, Sydney, than it does with any other American cities, except perhaps San Francisco, which is also a port of course. They offer me much to eat and drink too: if nothing else, they say, I must eat a muffuletta sandwich (a feast of cheese and olive salad in good bread), a beignet (a square doughnut, dusted with icing sugar) and drink a milk punch (a kind of Brandy Alexander made with bourbon instead of cognac). I do all three gratefully and totter away into the night. All cities of consequence have their own ways of eating and drinking, and their specialities always seem to taste best in situ.

  By the time Tuesday itself comes I am beginning to feel my age a little as I limp, at eight in the morning, a mile and a half to the back of the queue of carnival floats that winds all the way around the Superdome Convention Centre, that same Superdome that was a scene of such awful misery, stench and despair in the hours and days following Katrina.

  I am amongst the Zulus. It is hard to explain quite who and what the Zulus are. They are a kind of club or ‘krewe’, made up predominantly of African-Americans and every year thousands of them pay to take part in the parade. It began in the early twentieth century as a kind of spoofing of the white Rex, the official Mardi Gras King, and has grown into a mammoth, integral and hugely popular element of the carnival. Zulus black up (despite already being that colour), put on fuzzy wigs, whiten their lips and eyes and lob thousands of painted coconuts into the crowds as they pass through the streets. This is all about mocking white America’s old tradition of mammy-style minstrelsy. When I talk of walking a mile and a half I am not exaggerating. The Zulu parade is at least that long and takes many hours to pass by. Each float is pulled by a tractor and each float has its name, theme and tradition.

  The rest of Fat Tuesday flies by in a whirl. What I do and where I go I shall probably never know.

  Oystering with the Croats

  I wake up in my hotel room on Ash Wednesday fully ready to do penance and be shriven for my sins. Down to the very mouth of the Mississippi I go, to join the crew of an early morning oyster boat all of whom happen to be Croatian. Croats started coming to Louisiana to work on the oystermen over a century ago and they are still coming to this day. With my arm in a sling, it is my pleasure to stand back and swallow a freshly shucked bayou oyster from time to time, while they haul nets and sort the catch. The sun shines in a cloudless sky, the pelicans flap lazily above us and all is well. But there is no one you can talk to in southern Louisiana who does not have their story of Katrina. Here, huge ten-ton boats were flung around like dried leaves. John, the captain of our oysterman, tells how the levee defending the road and the neighbourhood broke. The water came up to his house to a level of seventeen feet. John is a prosperous fisherman, and he has been able to rebuild. It has been hard, but he is back at work with a new and better defended home. For others, the story has been much, much tougher…

  John shucks an oyster.

  Isaiah and Augustine of the Lower Ninth.

  The Lower Ninth

  After saying goodbye to John and his crew, I travel to a district that has died. The Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans was once a vibrant, humming community of African-Americans about two and a half square miles in size, lying below (hence the ‘Lower’ in its name) the Mississippi and the Industrial Canal that forms one side of its boundary. If any piece of land anywhere in the world is below a piece of water, whether it be the sea, a river, a canal or a lake, it is necessary to defend that land, else it will (gravity being gravity and water being water) become a piece of that sea, river, canal or lake. The Lower Ninth was defended by a levee. For those of us who, pre-Katrina, only knew the word ‘levee’, thanks to the song ‘
American Pie’, as a place to take a Chevy and watch good ole boys drinking whiskey and rye, it is worth thinking of a levee as simply raised earth. A bank. A bank built between land and water to protect the former from being flooded by the latter. In the Fens of East Anglia and the polder lands of Holland they are called dykes, but the principle is the same everywhere.

  On the night of 23 August 2005 came Katrina, the third-strongest hurricane ever to make landfall in the United States. Nowhere was the destruction more terrible than in the Lower Ninth. Water poured in from at least three different sources, from St Bernard Parish above and from two breaches of the Industrial Canal–one of which brought with it a huge barge which itself flattened buildings as it barrelled along in the surge. The force of the floodwaters alone was great enough to pull buildings up from their concrete foundations. I am told that 1,600 citizens of the Lower Ninth died as a result.

  Today, two and a half years later, the area is a stinking, rat-infested wasteland. A terrible, desolated rectangle of waist-high weeds and rubble. What appear to be randomly placed stoups, chimney breasts, fallen roofs and mailboxes offer pathetic reminders that this was once, unbelievably, a place where thousands lived out their lives. In a state of horrified bewilderment and disbelief, I drive around in the company of Isaiah, a young man from the neighbourhood. Isaiah was on his way to Iraq, for his second tour of military duty there, when Katrina struck. A self-possessed, articulate, intelligent, handsome and charismatic young man, Isaiah the Patriot, the marine who fought twice for his country, has found himself politicised, radicalised even, by what he and so many from the Lower Ninth see as the neglect and betrayal of his people. At a local, city, state and federal level he feels nothing has been done. ‘These are wild black people, looting savages, we are well rid of them.’ This is how he bitterly characterises what he interprets as the establishment’s response to the devastation of the ward. More sinister theories suggest that the Lower Ninth was deliberately sacrificed, that the breaches of the levee were avoidable, may even have been purposely made to protect other, more ‘valuable’ parishes and districts, such as the French Quarter. I cannot judge the truth of this, but I can certainly attest to the bitterness and sense of betrayal prevalent in the blighted neighbourhood. I visit Augustine, Isaiah’s grandmother and I can see the newly accreted layers of misery and anger that have grown over a woman who was otherwise born to laugh and to enjoy life. Even through the misery of her present existence she, her grandson and other friends insist on our taking a photograph on her porch.