American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light (20 page)

We talked a little about Ballard. Gibson remembered Jim, from the old days, as a John Bull figure in a gold waistcoat and funny Hawaiian shirt, genial and very sure of his ground.

The Gibsons found that Vancouver provided adequate cover and distance, a strategic territory in which to operate without too much doorstep interference. ‘A place where it is always Sunday night,’ Bill said. Which is not to say that nothing happens. A local restaurant critic, enthusing over Guu Garden, apologized for the delay in publishing his review: ‘I’ve been helping out at the warehouse with the online Olympic Store. Now I’m back to my regular eating schedule.’

The restaurant sat nicely with the subtle, cross-Pacific vortex of investment. Money in downtown Vancouver is always in transit; new developments were appearing, fully formed, with no dusty, crane-heavy construction interim. The malls, banks, residential towers were changed overnight like sets for touring musicals, try-outs for Phoenix or São Paolo. There was enormous enthusiasm for the
concept
of rebuilding. A dangerous addiction. It soon becomes the critical state, evidence of progress, positive employment statistics: whatever is being made at a given moment is
work.
A successfully completed apartment complex is waiting, as soon as the launch party in the penthouse is concluded, to be torn down. In the marina there are lines of yachts for sale. Seaplanes tout flights to the islands, second homes for fixed migrants.

Deb Gibson grew up around Dollarton with a view over what is now Cates Park, the forest path to the spring. Lowry’s account of stumbling, crazed with thirst, through this community, in search of the house of the local bootlegger, is wildly off-balance and fired with hurt: ‘Gin and Goldenrod’. A highway it would be death to negotiate. Felled trees. Ditches. Sewage pipes. Real-estate offices. A new schoolhouse: ‘a great concrete block of mnemonic anguish’. The Lowry figure, Sigbjørn Wilderness, remembers a night drinking with Indians. Deb remembers, as a child, the stories of the English writer in his squatter’s shack. She couldn’t wait to grow up and get into town. The community above the park knew little of
Lowry’s reputation, books written for foreigners, but they mistrusted him. It was said that he stole booze from the only shop. He was a man to be watched, a bad lot.

When Burroughs came to Vancouver on tour, Bill Gibson met him for dinner at the Sylvia, where the countercultural hero was established in a suite. They had one of those institutional meals nobody mentions as a selling point for the legendary hotel. The advantage of the low lighting and the windows on the bay is that you don’t spend much time trying to identify what’s on your plate. Afterwards, upstairs, Burroughs offered Gibson a choice of pharmaceutical pick-me-ups and a hit of vodka from his white plastic flask. Gibson waited for his moment, and in a lull excused himself, as the police manual instructs, to visit the bathroom and have a quick nose through the Burroughs kit. Along with a primitive razor from the 1950s, there was a rusty flip-lip Elastoplast tin, looking as if it had come safely through a combat zone. Inside were two black coins stamped with Nazi insignia. Curiosity made Gibson take his chance, when Burroughs was out of the room, to ask one of the minders, the young men in white tennis shoes, about the swastika coins. ‘Bill takes them everywhere. They’re going into his eyes when he passes over.’

The train slides slowly backwards into the Expo city, allowing us plenty of time to appreciate the giant black gladiatorial portraits on the side of the Seahawks Stadium by Union Station. It had been a famous ride from Vancouver, despite the loud and unbroken yatter of a group of matrons heading for a shopping spree in Portland. I kept the pocket camera rolling on smudgy-windowed shots of ripped hillsides, sawdust alps, lumber yards; narrow creeks with fishing boats crossing the frame at the optimum moment. Anna’s hero of the day was our train captain, the feisty Crystal, who licked us into shape for the customs routine at Bellingham. Which passed smoothly after the initial 5 a.m. shakedown, before we boarded the Amtrak Cascades in Vancouver. Empty all satchels and cases on to the inspection table and pay a premium for infringing on sacred American soil. Out in the main concourse, so wired you could smell it at twenty paces, a grunge hippie couple are sending paranoid telegrams through their nervous systems; checking and rechecking every soiled item of fancy dress in their bulging plastic sacks, every odd sock, psychedelic tin can and pouch in their fat rucksacks.

Bill Gibson told us, with relish, that the border country of tumbledown shacks, scrawny rivulets, stands of scrubby trees, was acknowledged as prime serial-killer terrain; proud redneck folk, self-sufficient, keeping relationships strictly in-house, as incest or worse. There were some very nervous cattle in wet fields. But that was the cartoon version, the Robert Crumb head comic. There were also pioneers, migrants, survivalists. Gary Snyder, I knew, grew up on what he called ‘a stump farm’, north of Seattle. From the train, we could choose between the ocean and, from the other
window, the North Cascades with Mount Baker. The landscape of Snyder’s earliest inspiration.

‘A walked line,’ said the artist Hamish Fulton in a retrospective show at the Turner Contemporary in Margate, ‘unlike a drawn line, can never be erased.’

Our hotel was midtown, between the busy interstate and the Alaskan Way Viaduct. It was hedged by generic blocks, car parks, warehouses, mall buffets and a sex-aid wholesaler. Grey dawn light flattered illuminated gantries advertising
GOODYEAR
and FM local radio shows:
OLDIES ARE BACK!
It was hard to shake off the
War of the Worlds
tripods and the quaintly sci-fi Space Needle spike of the 1962 World’s Fair. The detritus of that ambitious civic project hung around as an entropic tourist attraction. Half-closed conference halls with Jimi Hendrix fused-guitar memorials, Native American neo-totems, branded ephemera from
Star Wars
and peace gardens serviced by the Alweg Monorail were somewhere to shelter from the perpetual rain of Washington State. The Seattle Center, as it was now called, blended the melancholy of Margate’s abandoned Dreamland funfair with one of those yards where they store the unwanted statues of Lenin.

Wherever I walked, on my first damp circuit, I couldn’t shake free of this horizon of skinless steel armatures and bare trees; Seattle’s enduring tribute to the transitory, to boosterism, the space race, Boeing. A persistent microclimate of downloaded gloom referenced Jack Kennedy’s conveniently ‘heavy’ cold, the one that allowed him to duck out of attending the closing ceremony. (He was otherwise engaged with the Cuban Missile Crisis.) Taking a detour through the deserted park, I appreciated what they still had on offer: a ticket to another planet, the past of unadulterated Darwinianism, lunar colonialism, Mob politics in high places. And Jimi Hendrix.

The whole town, from the container ships and grain silos to the office women puffa-swaddled like Inuit, to the freighters, to the softly spoken junkies making their approach between the red hand
and the white leg of the
WALK DON’T WALK
sign, had been translated into a Danish crime film. Into recovery trauma: Korea, Vietnam, Bosnia, Iraq. Into leisure-dressed corporations with impossible-to-satisfy global ambitions operating out of anonymous business parks. Into grunge rock stars in Cape Cod-look mansions fondling trophy weaponry in the room above the garage.

This was the Denmark of Céline’s exile. As haunted as Elsinore. The presiding goddess was Courtney Love, playing the murdered Joan Vollmer: and she wasn’t at home. I watched her, legs crossed, little black dress, grey boots, being interviewed on YouTube about Seattle. The woman was a miracle of intelligence expressed as manifest physical being; every move, every gesture. Hair flicked back. Hands making that elegant teapot-handle shape on her hips. She said that she didn’t come from here, she was a runaway kid. But she would
never
send Kurt Cobain’s ashes down the coast to LA to be buried in that big cemetery with Jayne Mansfield.

Coming away from the hotel, where Anna tossed and turned in restless sleep, it took an act of will to spin from the interstate, the older smarter properties that spoke of green spaces, Japanese tea gardens, museums, universities, to the rain-slicked shopping centre and the working streets that offered a lift of harbour light; Pike Place Market and Elliott Bay. Vagrant figures were on the move with me, keeping dry in doorways; asking for nothing. Bill Gibson recommended the market and it was everything he promised. Heroic metaphors of excess: oceans of fish as performance aids to barkers in white overalls and white rubber boots; Kew Garden jungles of flowers; fruits so waxed and fat they looked fake; breads, sweets, biscuits; herds of raw red meat. Even bookstalls were piled high with maps and magazines and newsprint: the final deposit of the printed word before leaving the homeland for some Alaskan wilderness.
READ ALL ABOUT IT. ARABIC. JAPANESE. CHINESE. OUT OF TOWN
. The big clock is set to New York Time.

My usual tactic, which I shared with Lowry, was to make my tour, early and alone, sniffing out potential breakfast bars to share with my wife on a second circuit; hazards of transit smoothed over.
Seattle was a challenge. We had to steer very wide of the first Starbucks, retained in its original form and now operating as a major waterfront attraction.

‘Primrose was asleep,’ Lowry wrote. ‘It was about six-thirty. He woke her up, and they took the same walk he had made.’

Towards breakfast, respite; porridge, orange juice, green tea. Palliatives to take the edge off what I sensed was becoming a challenging frontier for both of us. I was not looking forward to the long drive south. It had to be done, or I’d be stuck here for years. All my instincts were for a ferry across Puget Sound and then to start walking through the Olympic National Park. Like the Lea Valley on steroids.

Seattle as I understood it – very little – was not a place designed to make you feel comfortable. How could we expect that within the active magnetic field of Starbucks, Boeing, Bill Gates and Microsoft, Amazon and Kindle? There was, as Gary Snyder said, in a book I found in the Pike Place Market, danger on peaks. ‘Give up! Give up!’ Where else could you imagine Sven Nykvist, Ingmar Bergman’s austere photographer from
Persona
and
Hour of the Wolf
, shooting a romantic comedy for Nora Ephron?
Sleepless in Seattle
is what Anna would call ‘the ultimate ironing film’. There was a quality in Expo town that implanted or sustained the germ of Pacific Rim odysseys, epic hikes, hunger marches as driven as that of Cabeza de Vaca.

In December 1957, while working as an oiler on a tanker ploughing through the Aegean Sea, Gary Snyder wrote to his friend Will Peterson. ‘Visualize long thousand-mile walks. I’ve even contracted a notion of walking from Seattle to San Francisco by devious rural and woodland routes.’

It wasn’t just Snyder, the native, the mountain man. Seattle was a notable pit stop in the dream cycle of William Burroughs, in his Kansas exile of cats and shotgun paintings. ‘Why do I keep saying “Seattle”?’ The old man, asleep in his narrow Lawrence bed, finds himself translated to a dirty grey loft occupied by a messenger in a slovenly blue uniform. He doesn’t have the Elastoplast tin in his fist.
There are no Nazi coins to seal the eye sockets. ‘Cities are being moved from one place to another.’ The coins are the fee, initiating Burroughs into an occulted geography.

It happened to Lowry; he was given the map, the cabbalistic chart. Margerie helped him manage it, she collaborated in his delusions: if this hopeless drunk was not a genius, it was all for nothing. Reynal and Hitchcock (perfect name for it) agreed to publish
Under the Volcano
in February 1947. Too late, too late. As disastrous, this public triumph, as the long delay of Kerouac’s
On the Road.
A chorus of approval. No way but down. And out. The rest is a painful obituary. The New York publishers will pick up the tab for a trip east (wrong direction). Margerie removes the galley proofs before they are reduced to sodden pulp; she returns them. Lowry, premature psychogeographer, sets himself to plotting the worst route between the Dollarton shack and the world city on the Hudson. Try this: plane to Seattle, bus across the States to New Orleans (uneasy rider), converted Liberty ship carrying bauxite to Haiti (one step ahead of Graham Greene), up the East Coast to New York. Lowry said that he now understood why Hart Crane jumped overboard.

The road trip intersects with Kerouac. 1947: Kerouac plots a ride to Hollywood, then Tijuana. By way of Oregon, Washington, Idaho. ‘The great unknown Montanas, the mysterious Dakotas, the undiscovered places of America.’ Or else: visit Burroughs. Arizona, New Mexico, Texas. A huge work
must
emerge. He mentions Céline. ‘The only thing I’m worried about is the inevitable Siberia.’ Bad journeys take on their own momentum, an irresistible illogical logic. The traveller witnesses his dissolution, only to confirm the potency of place. Lowry in Cheyenne, Wyoming: ‘Just like the cinema!’ Lowry in Kansas City. The notebook fills with uselessly monumental sunsets, slag heaps of vanished industries, the same automobile fatalities on empty desert highways noticed by Robert Frank; mammary billboards, toilet bowls in dry-retch bus stations, heavy breakfasts like jukebox headaches. Shreds of graffiti are broken sentences from a magical primer in a foreign language.
Malcolm can’t use this stuff. It will be franchised to Kerouac. Lay your head on another bottle, brother. Make it a compass.

Dylan Thomas wasn’t the only Welshman Lowry saw in Vancouver. The saturnine figure of Charles Stansfeld Jones, a census-taker for voter registration, turned up at the shack door like a refugee from John Cowper Powys’s
A Glastonbury Romance.
Jones was an adept. Lowry had dabbled in Swedenborg and Böhme, in Blake, and systems of correspondences. But this accountant and minor council official was Frater Achad; cabbalist, magician; a former initiate of the Golden Dawn and Ordo Templi Orientis. He was the mystical child of Aleister Crowley and Jeanne Foster (Soror Hilarion): the collateral aftermath of a period of sex-magic rituals. He came to Lowry carrying the black spot, in the form of a chart, huge as Kerouac’s teletype roll for
On the Road
: the Sephirotic Tree. Here was the occult vocabulary for Lowry to factor into the latest draft of
Under the Volcano.
Permission to undertake astral journeys, expeditions to islands of the dead, by taking dictation from Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies. In company with Jones, long evenings were passed in Eridanus, doling out tarot cards, casting divinatory sticks, reading MacGregor Mathers. And contemplating the unravelling of the great scroll of the Pacific, the plane ticket to Seattle.

Jones took the ‘Oath of the Abyss’, an attribute of his cult grade as Magister Templi. Lowry tumbled, wrecked on mescal, tequila, habanero, after the poisoning of two pets cats, and a 24-hour binge, into an irrigation ditch flooded with raw sewage; the barranca where his fictional consul would be thrown with a dead dog. Writers are such literalists. In the rented Cuernavaca house, the cook Josefina, who despised Lowry, this foreign drunk who was not even an American, put a whole rabbit, ears, eyes, teeth, cotton tail, paws and fur, in a large pot of barely simmering water. They ate by candlelight, having no idea what was on the end of the fork. They gummed and tongue-probed with care, spitting out bone and pelt.

Crowley wrote to Stansfeld Jones congratulating him on the ritual he had devised. ‘You create a vortex of force which will suck in
all the people you want. Treat death as an ordeal, an initiation. In short be the founder of a new and greater Pagan cult in the beautiful land which you have made your home.’ Jones went mad. He fulfilled the fantasy of his sozzled compatriot Dylan Thomas: he wandered Vancouver naked under a raincoat, which he would throw off to declare that he had crossed the Abyss, having divested himself of all the Veils of Illusion. Crowley cursed his former protégé, calling on the Demon Servitors to destroy him utterly.

Burroughs made several entries in his dream diaries noting how the European cities of his past were grafted on to the American wilderness. Like Kerouac in 1947, and Gary Snyder in 1957, Burroughs saw himself trudging impossible miles on nightmare journeys through real but transposed continents. Nazi coins, made into blind spectacles, badged him through sinister frontiers. ‘I have walked across Siberia. It took two months. I had to kill five people. New York is gone.’

I was astonished to see how closely the somatic diary of the Beat senior citizen, with his cats and his canes, duplicated the model for the looped walks I was trying to undertake, every morning of our Pacific Rim trip, as a way of rolling up the deranged invasion path tramped and recorded by Albert Speer in the prison garden at Spandau. ‘I have, it seems, walked westward from the Bering Strait,’ Burroughs wrote. ‘Across Siberia and Northern Europe.’ Speer, Hitler’s architect of ruins, having successfully concluded a trial hike, Berlin to Heidelberg, set out, through the long years of his imprisonment, having confirmed the length of his stride, to calculate a pedestrian progress across Germany, Siberia, the Bering Strait, to America. Then down the Pacific Coast to Mexico, achieving thirty-five kilometres south of Guadalajara, before they let him out into an afterlife of self-justifying interviews. Speer’s activities were viewed with disdain by his fellow prisoners, a numbered rump of high Nazi officials, admirals, diplomats; delusionists who were fortunate to escape the noose after the Nuremberg Trials. Spandau was a sinister holiday camp for ghosts, policed by bored (and bribable) soldiers of the occupying powers.