Stephen Fry in America
Page 16
I look longingly across the river at Tennessee: I can just glimpse the top of the Peabody Hotel where my ducks will be settling in for the night. Memphis radiates prosperity and self-confidence, just as West Memphis radiates failure and disappointment. As I prepare the taxi for the journey north to the state of Missouri I can’t help feeling sorry for Arkansas. West Memphis will never be Memphis and Arkansas will never be Tennessee. But then, knowing American statal pride as I now do, I suspect most Arkansans would claim that this is exactly how they would want it to remain.
* * *
ARKANSAS
KEY FACTS
Abbreviation:
AR
Nickname:
The Natural State
Capital:
Little Rock
Flower:
Apple blossom
Tree:
Pine
Bird:
Mockingbird
Fruit:
South Arkansas Vine Ripe Pink Tomato
Motto:
Regnat populus (‘Let the people rule’)
Well-known residents and natives: William Fulbright, Bill Clinton (42nd President), Mike Huckabee, General Douglas MacArthur, General Wesley Clark, Eldridge Cleaver, Sam ‘Wal-Mart’ Walton, Maya Angelou, Amarillo Slim, Bill Hicks, Glen Campbell, Johnny Cash, Louis Jordan, Charlie Rich, Sonny Liston, Dick Powell, Alan Ladd, Mary Steenburgen, Billy Bob Thornton.
* * *
MISSOURI
‘I am shown round his old haunts, desolated factories and railhead depots, where the homeless still live.’
Still following the Mississippi River, I arrive in a snowy St Louis, humming (and who doesn’t arrive doing exactly the same thing?) the song ‘Meet me in St Louis, Louis’. Only, as I soon discover, the town is properly pronounced not St Louie, but St Lewis. No one told Judy Garland.
Some miles to the north of the city the Missouri River, arriving from the northwest, joins the Mississippi in a great confluence.
The feeling of having left behind the Delta and the Deep South is very strong. Which part of America am I now in? Missouri is bordered by three Southern states, Arkansas, Kentucky and Tennessee, but by five true Midwestern states too: Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Oklahoma and Kansas. If any state could lay claim to being the middle of middle America then perhaps it is Missouri. And what a splendid mixture of distinguished natives and residents she can boast: a range of literature from Laura ‘Little House on the Prairie’ Wilder to T.S. Eliot and Tennessee Williams by way of Mark Twain; an impressive roster of writers plus two of America’s most venerated five-star generals. Corrupt businessmen, powerful industrialists and innovators of ragtime and rock and roll: the picture is pleasingly mixed. The city of St Louis calls itself the ‘Gateway to the West’ and it is hard to avoid the concrete manifestation of this nickname in the shape of Danish architect Eero Saarinen’s enormous 1930s concrete construction, the ‘Gateway Arch’, which dominates the downtown and riverside townscape.
The City Museum
A pleasing sense of Missouri as an eclectic patchwork is reinforced by a morning spent in one of the most bizarre and beguiling museums I have ever visited. The City Museum, St Louis, is the brainchild of Bob Cassilly, who shows me around with the same enthusiasm and delight that is shown by the hundreds of thousands of children who come here daily to interact with his unusual creation. Museum is perhaps not quite the right word for so interactive and compelling a public amenity. A vast converted space, once the world’s biggest shoe factory, this dreamlike fantasy describes itself as ‘an eclectic mixture of children’s playground, funhouse, surrealistic pavilion, and architectural marvel’. I would be happy playing all day but I have a lunch appointment with someone who plans to show me another side of the city.
Homeless in St Louis
McMurphy’s Grill in North Street is a pleasant and well-run restaurant offering the best kind of mid-range American menu, somewhere between fast and fancy food. I am especially taken by the toasted ravioli, a St Louis speciality, but I have come more for the company than for the food and for once in my greedy life the person beside me absorbs more of my attention than the plate in front of me. McMurphy’s is a restaurant run by recovered alcoholics and drug addicts, by those who have slipped from the lowest rung of the ladder and are being given a lift back up. Owned by the city’s St Patrick Project, the idea (familiar to those of us who watched Jamie Oliver create his Fifteen restaurant in London) is to help the homeless and the addicted by giving them a skill in which they can take pride. It is not very easy to give up drink or drugs when there is nothing awaiting you the other side of addiction: the restaurant and catering trades seem to offer just the right blend of attainable skills, social interactions and high professional standards. Pride in self, my lunch companion William tells me, is the hardest thing to find when you wake up from the nightmare of addiction and start trying to live a new life. William should know. For a quarter of a century he survived on little more than alcohol and crack cocaine. St Patrick’s brought him in from the cold, literally. He worked the kitchen and the front of house here at McMurphy’s and he attends 12 Step programmes in the rooms above the restaurant. Giving up is only the beginning, he says: once you are free of your drugs and drink you then have to face the person, the real you, who’s been hiding under them all that while.
* * *
MISSOURI
KEY FACTS
Abbreviation:
MO
Nickname:
The Show Me State
Capital:
Jefferson City
Flower:
Hawthorne
Tree:
Flowering dogwood
Bird:
Bluebird
Nut:
East black walnut
Motto:
Salus populi suprema lex esto (‘The well being of the people should be the supreme law’)
Well-known residents and natives: Harry S. Truman (33rd President), Sen. Bill Bradley, John Ashcroft, General John Pershing, General Omar Bradley, Mark Twain, Laura Ingalls Wilders, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, William Burroughs, Langston Hughes, Tennessee Williams, Maya Angelou, Frank and Jesse James, Calamity Jane, Dale Carnegie, Max Factor, Charles Lindbergh, Edwin Hubble, Joseph Pulitzer, Adolphus ‘Budweiser’ Busch, James ‘McDonnell Douglas’ McDonnell, Bill ‘Jet’ Lear, J.C. Penney, Kenneth ‘Enron’ Lay, Walter Cronkite, Rush Limbaugh, Bob Barker, Yogi Berra, Payne Stewart, Scott Joplin, Charlie Parker, Basil Poledouris, Chuck Berry, Grace Bumbry, Burt Bacharach, Sheryl Crow, Eminem, Josephine Baker, Wallace Beery, Robert Cummings, Jean Harlow, Walt Disney, Betty Grable. John Huston, Ginger Rogers, Jane Wyman, William Powell, Fritz Freleng, Vincent Price, Robert Altman, Dick van Dyke, Dennis Weaver, John Milius, Kathleen Turner, Geraldine Page, John Goodman, Don Johnson, Scott Bakula, Chris Cooper, Linda Blair, Brad Pitt.
* * *
William has been stuffing me with toasted ravioli for a good reason. He wants me to see the streets and doss-houses that were his home for so long and at this time of year, with snow on the streets and a bitter wind howling, internal fuel is important. In a derelict area behind a disused power station I am shown round his old haunts, desolated factories and railhead depots, where the homeless still live. Mark and Lauren and Harry, three guests of the ‘Riverfront Hilton’, a ruined old warehouse, invite me to warm my hands round their fire. It is bitterly, bitterly cold and I stamp my feet hoping that I will soon be able to leave for the warmth of my cab. I find it impossible to imagine that this could be my home, my life. Harry and Mark take turns to show me piles of receipts they keep in their wallets, receipts which prove how much money they make selling old scrap.
Sharing warmth with the homeless.
‘See, three hundred bucks a day…I can make more than that some days.’
Despite their abject poverty, homelessness and alcoholism they think of themselves as successful people. The receipts are so old as to be illegible. This pride and self-delusion is touching and bewi
ldering.
We say goodbye and William takes me back to McMurphy’s where a poetry evening is promised.
People (even Americans) often find it difficult to talk about themselves. Poetry gives them a kind of verbal costume in which they can express themselves with more dignity and confidence than the common dress of everyday speech will allow. I stand to talk to William’s fellow addicts and poets, but I offer no poetry of my own. My own experiences seem so exotic, so well-fed and yet so ordinary next to theirs.
I drive north to Iowa alternately hugging myself and excoriating myself for my good fortune.
IOWA
‘I am in a thoroughly bad mood by this time.’
Iowa’s best known fictional native is probably James Tiberius Kirk of the Starship Enterprise. In several Star Trek episodes he is called, or calls himself, an Iowa farmboy. Indeed, most Iowan natives will be called that or something similar when they leave the state to start at university or a new career. There is corn in the state seal and there is corn in the state’s image and reputation. The seal also shows a riverboat, although in truth Iowa is wedged between the Mississippi and the Missouri, those rivers making up the border with Illinois and Wisconsin to the east and with Nebraska and South Dakota to the west. Iowa is known for illimitably huge flat cornfields, for Midwestern dullness: it is a place to escape from, as did Marion Morrison–wisely changing his name to John Wayne–and the two Supermen, George Reeves and Brandon Routh. The state’s reputation for sameness and tedium makes me determined to like it. Circumstances do not lend a hand in this well-meaning enterprise.
We have come to Fairfield, the county seat and principal town of Jefferson County, which lies somewhere between Iowa City and the Missouri state line. There is nothing much to mark it out from other small prairie towns in this part of the Midwestern United States: a square, a convention centre, a fine red-brick courthouse that looks like a mini St Pancras Station, a centre for the performing arts (notable for being the first named in honour of the composer Stephen Sondheim), remnants of the old railway lines that used to connect Fairfield to the greater world–all the amenities and municipal edifices you would expect in any medium-sized county seat.
Just north of the town there had flourished in obscurity for a hundred years an educational establishment called Parsons College, which enjoyed a brief bout of notoriety in the late sixties as a haven for Vietnam draft dodgers and academic last chancers. ‘Flunk Out U’, as it was known, eventually had its accreditation removed and was closed in 1973.
Whip-pan to a flashback of the Beatles arriving at Rishikesh, India to study Transcendental Meditation with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. TM becomes all the rage and adherents from around the world flock to courses and schools, nowhere more so than in the United States of America. With the business acumen that seems always to characterise self-styled spiritual people, the Yogi’s team happen on that recently closed Parsons College in Jefferson County, Iowa, which they buy for an undisclosed sum.
The mighty Tower of Invincibility, seen here looking up at an architectural feature of the Maharishi University.
M.U.M.
Since 1974 the Maharishi University of Management (formerly Maharishi International University) has opened its doors to students from around the world. I have come to have a look round both at its campus and a new township that has been built just outside, Maharishi Vedic City.
I look in on the office of one Dr Fred Travis, who has got his daughter Dariana wired up with dozens of electrodes to a computer. He is monitoring her EEG activity as she goes in and out of TM states. He explains to me what these data on screen reveal, but I am ashamed to say the theory has all gone out of my head. I seem to recall being surprised that the claim for TM is not that the brain relaxes but that it becomes more active. I may have got that wrong. I have never met any regular TM practitioner who has struck me as having a mind of any especial speed, dynamism or creative energy, but I have no doubt the practice gives pleasure and rewards to many. When the electrodes are implanted in my brain I cannot tell what it is that is different about the readings, but Dr Travis, whose qualifications are real enough, assures me that these experiments prove something. He is less comfortable when I ask him about yogic flying and other aspects of Vedic ‘science’. Ah well.
Next I wander around the campus, noting the Maharishi Tower of Invincibility. There are almost no signs of the original Parsons College. Despite most of that campus being on the National Register of Historical Places, nearly all of it was bulldozed to make way for new buildings that accorded with the Maharishi Sthapatya Veda, which is a kind of Vedic Feng Shui. A few years before he died the Maharishi informed the world that it was vital for the whole planet to live and work in buildings constructed according to Sthapatya. It seems to come down to everything facing east and looking like a ghastly impersonal hotel.
I am in a thoroughly bad mood by this time. I wouldn’t mind all this nonsense if it didn’t arrogate half-understood principles of Western science, attempting to marry its ‘philosophy’ with the ideas behind quantum mechanics, probability, chaos theory and other essentially mathematical and empirically derived concepts. You cannot simultaneously insult Western thinking and use its precepts to ‘prove’ your moronic theories: not without losing my respect at least.
I go to the dining hall and eat with some of the students. The food at least is excellent, all organic, all fresh, none processed or frozen. I sit with some students, mostly Muslims, who come to the university to study computer science, which seems to be far and away the most popular course. They all appear to put up with the strictures of the university (lights out by 10.00 p.m., enforced physical exercise and TM) as a price they are willing to pay for an American education. I ask them if they will continue to adhere to the Maharishi’s teachings and to TM after they leave. They all laugh. Of course not.
A painful night follows. I am staying in a hotel in Vedic City, which turns out to be a collection of houses off the main road with no focal centre and no sense at all of being a city or a community. The hotel does not serve alcohol. No winding down glass of wine or warming tumbler of whiskey for Stephen. I go to bed in a very bad mood indeed.
Early the next morning I watch the rush of studentry to the main dome. They have to get there by eight o’clock to swipe their cards through a machine, pad into the hall and meditate for twenty minutes, which gives them course credits. If they miss more than a few of these daily rituals, they will be fined and docked their credits. I find this all very creepy. The film crew say that they think the students look too pale, too thin and too unhealthy. Where is the laughter, the fun, the boisterousness? Cynical about this weird place as I am, I point out that it is after all five minutes to eight in the morning. To find a student awake at that hour is miracle enough–to expect boisterousness would surely be asking too much.
I am pleased to put Maharishi University of Management and its Vedic City behind me, pleased to see the Tower of Invincibility diminishing in the rear-view mirror as I join the Mississippi once more and prepare to head back east and towards the Great Lakes.
* * *
IOWA
KEY FACTS
Abbreviation:
IA
Nickname:
The Hawkeye State, the Tall Corn State
Capital:
Des Moines
Flower:
Wild Rose
Tree:
Oak
Bird:
Eastern Goldfinch
Rock:
Geode
Motto:
Our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain
Well-known residents and natives: Herbert Hoover (31st President), Mamie Eisenhower, ‘Buffalo’ Bill Cody, Grant ‘American Gothic’ Wood, Meredith ‘Music Man’ Wilson, Bix Beiderbecke, Bill Bryson, Johnny Carson, George ‘Superman’ Reeves, Donna Reed, John Wayne, Kate Mulgrew, Tom Arnold, Michelle Monaghan, Ashton Kutcher, Brandon ‘Superman’ Routh, Elijah Wood.
* * *
‘I wish I could tell you of great adventures enjoyed in Ohio. I am photographed at the state line and…well, that is it.’
Yes, Ohio’s State Beverage really is tomato juice. Not a word of a lie. I have not included the other states’ choice of beverage because all but five choose milk (mostly because they are states that have cattle in them) and the lists would become repetitive. Only Ohio goes for tomato juice. Maine has Moxie listed, a weird fizzy potion composed of gentian root and other bitter herbs. It claims to be America’s first soda pop. Alabama is the only state to elect an ardent spirit, Conecuh Ridge Whiskey. California has wine, predictably enough, while Florida and Massachusetts each opt for their native orange and cranberry juices. Indiana, pathetically, chooses water. Twenty-three states do not have a State Beverage at all. What spoilsports. Boo to them.