All Gone to Look for America (11 page)

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 heart, but I did catch a glimpse of its soul.

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.

What I was not prepared for was to be sitting barely a few hours later on the upper deck of a restaurant shaped like a steamship sipping a piña colada and watching girls in skimpy bikinis play beach volleyball on golden sand against an ocean of clear blue water.

‘Ocean’, of course, is something of an exaggeration, but believe me it does not feel like it from the lower shore of Lake Michigan, with the far coast – in a straight line – more than 200 miles away. Lifeguards line the beach at regular intervals and when the trim tanned athletic bodies are not batting volleyballs to one another over nets on the sand they are keeping their shape by cycling or jogging along the shoreline.

There is something almost Australian about the scene which makes me realise why the Americans joined with our antipodean cousins to get beach volleyball included as an Olympic sport. The rest of us may have happily approved if only for the spectator value, but not without a lingering suspicion that it was more about voyeurism than actual sport. I can’t help suspecting it won’t be quite the same at the 2012 games in London where they intend to cover Horseguards’ Parade with sand, so we can huddle together with our brollies up watching shivering girls in tracksuits cavorting in the rain.

In any case my own interest is, of course, purely academic. Not least because I am sitting here next to my wife. This is not quite the surprise it might appear to be. She had planned for some time one of her biannual business trips to the US including a visit to contacts in Chicago, partly because it fitted in with my itinerary but also because we could visit her cousin Helen who lives here, ‘and you simply must see her kitchen’. I know, I know, but we’ll get there. Anyhow I am obviously pleased to see her, not least because it means I get to exchange my usual ‘Motel 6’ style accommodation for two nights in the opulent 1920s splendour of the Drake Hotel, whose great bulk looms behind us overlooking the beach – even if it did take the bellboys a moment or two to decide to let this rucksack-toting old buffer in frayed denims through the door; but who are they to object if the paying customer likes a bit of rough?

So here we are improbably sipping tropical cocktails just south of the
Canadian
border on the last day of September, with the temperature a blissful 26 degrees Celsius (or 79 Fahrenheit as the natives would have it), with the edge taken off the heat by a gentle version of the omnipresent inshore breezes that make this the ‘Windy City’.

Looking out in one direction, as the cheery Italian-American waiter serves burgers with ‘spicy fries’ (chips dusted with chilli powder), I can see white sails of yachts dotted around the bay, a small circular nineteenth-century island fort – like the one in Portsmouth harbour, here no doubt intended to guard against marauding Brits from Canada – and the imposing bulk of a cruise liner
rounding
the headland. In the other: the stone bulk of the Drake against the striking modernist skyscrapers clustered around the elongated twin-horned pyramid of the John Hancock tower, the Sears Building’s rival for the title of Chicago’s most iconic structure.

It is, in fact, quite beautiful in an austere sort of way, an almost perfect
minimalist
modernist prop for the organic activity on the beach in front of it. It also occurs to me that, for all people say about the view from the top of tall
buildings
, looking up can often be better than looking down (from up there the beach volleyball players would be mere specks). Nonetheless, we are going up. Not the Hancock but the Sears, for one simple reason: my past preference for the Empire State over the late World Trade Center in New York meant I have never been up the world’s tallest skyscraper. And as the Sears Building has
currently
regained that status at this very moment – I don’t count the CN Tower in Toronto which is merely an observation platform on a television mast – I’m not going to miss my fleeting chance. Fleeting because by the time this book comes out although the Sears Building will still be the tallest – if you take the
rather risible measure of judging by the top of the antennae on the roof (527.3 metres) – the actual top floor (412 metres), where the observation deck is
situated
, will have been surpassed by the Shanghai World Financial Centre (492 metres) due to open late 2008, which in turn will almost immediately lose out to the Burj Dubai, a veritable Tower of Babel that will top out several hundred metres higher. This is, of course, all just ridiculous male penis-envy hubris as any woman will tell you, while checking the size of the wallet of the men who built them. Anyhow, pathetic or not, I’ve decided that if I’m in the city with the world’s tallest building right now, then I’ve got to go up it.

What a mistake that is going to turn out to be. Not quite as big a mistake as that made by the two young Japanese tourists who stop us on the street on our way there. Would I take a photograph of them? No problem, and I take the neat little Olympus digital camera and frame the two of them side by side beaming happily. Make sure, he indicates by sign language, to get in the tallish building behind. So I oblige, kneeling down to include as much as possible of the maybe 50-storey high yellow-brick-faced apartment building behind them. Maybe it’s where they’re staying. I also get in the advert for the Sears Tower’s Skydeck Observation Platform. It’s only a few minutes later, as they acknowledge me with sheepish smiles in the ticket queue in the lobby of the glass and steel tower round the corner, do I realise they had misconstrued their monolith.

Tall buildings have a hold on us. They draw us to their summits so we can look down and see how insignificant our fellow human beings – and of course ourselves, if we are in that sort of philosophical mood – really are. The best – though it is not particularly tall but still offers a panoramic view of a relatively low-rise city – is the Guinness Visitors’ Centre in Dublin. Not only does it offer a 360 degree view over the Dublin skyline, the building itself is shaped
internally
like a pint glass, has three bars on the way up and a bar at the centre of the circular top-storey observation room, where, what is more, you are rewarded with a free pint for getting that far.

The people who run the Sears Tower nowadays – the original Sears Roebuck department store moved out some 16 years after it was completed back in 1974 – would do well to take a lesson. Not only do they not offer you a drink, they manage to deceptively conceal the length of the queue ahead of you by snaking it through a succession of rooms and corridors which I feel certain the Chicago Fire Department – a highly organised and much called-upon service – would immediately condemn as a potential death trap. This includes – just when you’re least expecting it – a wholly superfluous auditorium film presentation
on the tower’s construction. Maybe they feel they are giving value for money, but frankly, even the genuinely jaw-dropping views to be had from the top barely excuse a wait of nearly an hour – much more in peak periods – crammed into a sweaty basement.

There are, understandably, security checks to be gone through, though these are disconcertingly perfunctory. The only thing I hadn’t been expecting and which takes me aback is when a man in an official yellow T-shirt insists on taking my photograph. I know passport officers do this now on entry to the country, but are they really going to match them up with pictures of everyone who goes up the Sears Tower?

‘Check it out when you come back down, sir. No obligation to buy,’ and he points to a photograph of a perfect American family displaying their
perfectly
straight cosmetically whitened teeth against a Chicago skyline and an azure sky. Wonderful! There you have it: captured forever on a silicon chip, the perfect memory of the scene you haven’t seen yet.

A group of pensioners from Omaha, identifiable by their baseball caps and big round button badges with their names written in huge letters – designed for identification purposes not just in both face-to-face situations but possibly also when looking in the mirror – are keen to take up the offer. I reckon at least a couple of them are aware it might be the only memory that had any chance of being durable. A tall stooped woman called ‘Arleen’ with glasses so thick she was probably hoping to spot the Eiffel Tower from the top, appears genuinely worried that her ‘companion Tom’ might not even make it up there. Tom, to be fair, looks as if he was long past caring. I know how he feels. A fussy type called ‘Jan’ oozing a thin veneer of optimism with all the charm of water
leeching
from supermarket bacon keeps insisting it’ll ‘be really worthwhile when we get there’.

It isn’t, of course. Things that make you wait in sweaty queues for anything more than half an hour rarely are. The view is remarkable enough – on one side the clear blue waters of a lake that even from up here seems to have no
opposite
shore, and on the other, straight lines of freeways running uninterrupted across vast flat plains for what looks to be half the way to Tokyo. But that’s it really. And you can’t see the beach volleyball players at all. The trouble is that skyline panoramas seldom look quite as good as the postcards or the
wide-angle
photographs you’ve been staring at in the queue for the last 40 minutes to the extent you no longer need to consult the tableau of landmarks because you’ve already memorised the ones you care about. In real life it never looks that good anyhow, not least because the windows are dirty.

Now I can see why if it’s your job to clean the windows on the Sears Tower you might be tempted to throw a sickie now and then, especially when the rota says today’s the day for the 103rd floor. Frankly I would rather eat ground glass with chilli fries than hang outside a tapering building some 1,440 feet above the ground. But if somebody’s got to do it, then surely somebody’s got to do it, particularly if you’re charging the punters a healthy chunk of cash to get up there; believe me they’re not doing it for the fun of the lift ride, no matter how fast it goes. It could be, of course, that these days such jobs are done by some sort of robot, but if so, he had been throwing a sickie lately too.

The other reason it never looks as good as the postcards, of course, is that the weather is never as good. This may be true of most postcards but it’s doubly true of skyscrapers. At that height, in fact, weather conditions are always
notoriously
unpredictable: if there are clouds on the horizon one minute then like as not you’re going be in them the next. It’s not called the Windy City for nothing. And that sign right next to the ticket office on the ground floor saying
NO REFUNDS FOR POOR VISIBILITY
is a bit of a dead giveaway, isn’t it?

As it happens, we’re as lucky as most people get and the view is clear as far as the distant curved lines of the horizon in all directions, except of course that the sky is not as blissfully blue as it might be, and anyway even if it had been, every time I try to get my picture taken against it, a pensioner from Omaha with a baseball cap and button badge wanders into the frame. Still at least the button badges serve a purpose; back home you can say, ‘Oh yes, and there’s Arleen. From Omaha.’

Back down to earth – almost – it’s time for a rattling ride on Chicago’s famous ‘El’, which to most natives is more of a symbol of the city than even the world’s highest building. The Elevated Railway began back in the 1890s as a series of trains coming into the centre of Chicago from the growing suburbs. It was only when the notorious Charles Tyson Yerkes, a Pennsylvania financier, became involved and bribed, blackmailed and bullied his way into getting them all linked up in the middle around the central business district known then and forever after as The Loop that the institution became what it is today.

And what it is, is an ancient rickety, rattling, incredibly noisy urban railway raised to first-floor level making like hell for anyone whose windows open onto it, causing intolerable congestion on the roads below, hemmed in by its supports. Not hard, therefore, to see why almost anyone with any sense in the
city centre opposed Yerkes in the first place. In a city that was not to be known for its principled uninfluenced public office, Yerkes got his way, the ‘El’ got built and nobody in Chicago today can imagine the city without it.

The only thing to be thankful for – from a British point of view – is that when he finally got squeezed out of Chicago by a reforming mayor, and devoted his attentions to London instead, taking control of half the Tube lines between 1900 and 1905, he at least had the decency to keep them underground. What saves Chicago, though, from being dominated at ground level by the
rattling
‘El’ is the river, another aspect of the city I hadn’t quite imagined. The Chicago winds gently through the city named after it, providing a mode of transport – primarily for sightseers – but more importantly, a riverbank for cafés and restaurants to spread out along, oases of relaxation in a bustling but surprisingly relaxed city.