The Lost Continent (27 page)

Contrary to popular belief abroad, it is possible, indeed quite easy, to get free treatment in America by going to a county hospital. They aren’t very cheery places, in fact they are generally pretty grim, but they are no worse than any NHS hospital. There has to be free treatment because there are 40 million people in America without hospital insurance. God help you, however, if you try to sneak into a county hospital for a little free health care if you’ve got money in the bank. I worked for a year at the county hospital in Des Moines and I can tell you that they have batteries of lawyers and debt collectors whose sole job is to dig into the backgrounds of the people who use their facilities and make sure they really are as destitute as they claim to be.

Despite the manifest insanities of private health care in America, there is no denying that the quality of treatment is the best in the world. My friend received superb and
unstinting care (and, not incidentally, they cured both her cancer and her pneumonia). She had a private room, with a private bath, a remote control television and video recorder, her own telephone. The whole hospital was carpeted and full of exotic palms and cheerful paintings. In government hospitals in Britain, the only piece of carpet or colour TV you find is in the nursing officers’ lounge. I worked in an NHS hospital years ago and once late at night I sneaked into the nursing officers’ lounge just to see what it was like. Well, it was like the Queen’s sitting-room. It was all velvety furniture and half-eaten boxes of Milk Tray chocolates.

The patients, in the meantime, slept beneath bare light bulbs in cold and echoing barrack halls, and spent their days working on jigsaw puzzles that had at least a fifth of the pieces missing, awaiting a fortnightly twenty-second visit by a swift-moving retinue of doctors and students. Those were, of course, the good old days of the NHS. Things aren’t nearly so splendid now.

Forgive me. I seem to have gone off on a little tangent there. I was supposed to be guiding you across Wisconsin, telling you interesting facts about America’s premier dairy state, and instead I go off and make unconstructive remarks about British and American health care. This was unwarranted.

Anyway, Wisconsin is America’s premier dairy state, producing seventeen per cent of the nation’s cheese and milk products, by golly, though as I drove across its rolling pleasantness I wasn’t particularly struck by an abundance of dairy cows. I drove for long hours, south past Green Bay, Appleton and Oshkosh and then west towards Iowa. This was quintessential Mid-western farming country, a
study in browns, a landscape of low wooded hills, bare trees, faded pastures, tumbledown corn. It all had a kind of muted beauty. The farms were large, scattered and prosperous-looking. Every half mile or so I would pass a snug-looking farmhouse, with a porch swing and a yard full of trees. Standing nearby would be a red barn with a rounded roof and a tall grain silo. Everywhere corn cribs were packed to bursting. Migrating birds filled the pale sky. The corn in the fields looked dead and brittle, but often I passed large harvesters chewing up rows and spitting out bright yellow ears.

I drove through the thin light of afternoon along back highways. It seemed to take forever to cross the state, but I didn’t mind because it was so fetching and restful. There was something uncommonly alluring about the day, about the season, the sense that winter was drawing in. By four o’clock the daylight was going. By five the sun had dropped out of the clouds and was slotting into the distant hills, like a coin going into a piggy bank. At a place called Ferryville, I came suddenly up against the Mississippi River. It fairly took my breath away, it was so broad and beautiful and graceful lying there all flat and calm. In the setting sun it looked like liquid stainless steel.

On the far bank, about a mile away, was Iowa. Home. I felt a strange squeeze of excitement that made me hunch up closer to the wheel. I drove for twenty miles down the eastern side of the river, gazing across to the high dark bluffs on the Iowa side. At Prairie du Chien I crossed the river on an iron bridge full of struts and crossbars. And then I was in Iowa. I actually felt my heart quicken. I was home. This was my state. My licence plate matched everyone
else’s. No-one would look at me as if to say, ‘What are you doing here?’ I belonged.

In the fading light, I drove almost randomly around north-east Iowa. Every couple of miles I would pass a farmer on a tractor juddering along the highway, heading home to dinner on one of the sprawling farms up in these sheltered hills above the Mississippi. It was Friday, one of the big days of the farmer’s week. He would wash his arms and neck and sit down with his family to a table covered with great bowls of food. They would say grace together. After dinner the family would drive into Hooterville and sit out in the cold October air and through their steamy breath watch the Hooterville High Blue Devils beat Kraut City 28–7 at football. The farmer’s son, Merle Jr, would score three of the touchdowns. Afterwards Merle senior would go to Ed’s Tavern to celebrate (two beers, never more) and receive the admiration of the community for his son’s prowess. Then it would be home to bed and up early in the frosty dawn to go out hunting for deer with his best friends, Ed and Art and Wally, trudging across the fallow fields, savouring the clean air and the companionship. I was seized with a huge envy for these people and their unassuming lives. It must be wonderful to live in a safe and timeless place, where you know everyone and everyone knows you, and you can all count on each other. I envied them their sense of community, their football games, their bring-and-bake sales, their church socials. And I felt guilty for mocking them. They were good people.

I drove through the seamless blackness, past Millville, New Vienna, Cascade, Scotch Grove. Every once in a while I would pass a distant farmhouse whose windows were pools of yellow light, warm and inviting. Occasionally
there would be a larger town, with a much larger pool of light scooped out of the darkness – the high school football field, where the week’s game was in progress. These football fields lit up the night; they were visible from miles off. As I drove through each town, it was clear that everybody was out at the game. There was nobody on the streets. Apart from one forlorn teenaged girl standing behind the counter in the local Dairy Queen, waiting for the post-game rush, everyone in town was at the football game. You could drive in with a fleet of trucks and strip the town during a high school football game in Iowa. You could blow open the bank with explosives and take the money out in wheelbarrows and no-one would be there to see it. But of course nobody would think of such a thing because crime doesn’t exist in rural Iowa. Their idea of a crime in these places would be to miss the Friday football game. Anything worse than that only exists on television and in the newspapers, in a semi-mythic distant land called the Big City.

I had intended to drive on to Des Moines, but on an impulse I stopped at Iowa City. It’s a college town, the home of the University of Iowa, and I still had a couple of friends living there – people who had gone to college there and then never quite found any reason to move on. It was nearly ten o’clock when I arrived, but the streets were packed with students out carousing. I called my old friend John Horner from a street corner phone and he told me to meet him in Fitzpatrick’s Bar. I stopped a passing student and asked him the way to Fitzpatrick’s Bar, but he was so drunk that he had lost the power of speech. He just gazed numbly at me. He looked to be about fourteen years old. I stopped a group of girls, similarly intoxicated, and asked
them if they knew the way to the bar. They all said they did and pointed in different directions, and then became so convulsed with giggles that it was all they could do to stand up. They moved around in front of me like passengers on a ship in heavy seas. They looked about fourteen years old too.

‘Are you girls always this happy?’ I asked.

‘Only at homecoming,’ one of them said.

Ah, that explained it. Homecoming. The big social event of the college year. There are three ritual stages attached to homecoming celebrations at American universities: (1) get grossly intoxicated; (2) throw up in a public place; (3) wake up not knowing where you are or how you got there and with your underpants on backwards. I appeared to have arrived in town somewhere between stages one and two, though in fact a few of the more committed revellers were already engaged in gutter serenades. I picked my way through the weaving throngs in downtown Iowa City asking people at random if they knew the way to Fitzpatrick’s Bar. No-one seemed to have heard of it – but then many of the people I encountered probably could not have identified themselves in a roomful of mirrors. Eventually I stumbled on the bar myself. Like all bars in Iowa City on a Friday night, it was packed to the rafters. Everybody looked to be fourteen years old, except one person – my friend John Horner, who was standing at the bar looking all of his thirty-five years. There is nothing like a college town to make you feel old before your time. I joined Horner at the bar. He hadn’t changed a lot. He was now a pharmacist and a respectable member of the community, though there was still a semi-wild glint in his eye. In his day, he had been one of the most committed drug
takers in the community. Indeed, although he always strenuously denied it, everyone knew that his motive for studying pharmacology was to be able to create a more exotic blend of hallucinogenic drugs. We had been friends almost forever, since first grade at least. We exchanged broad smiles and warm handshakes and tried to talk, but there was so much noise and throbbing music that we were just two men watching each other’s mouths move. So we gave up trying to talk and instead had a beer and stood smiling inanely at each other, the way you do with someone you haven’t seen for years, and watching the people around us. I couldn’t get over how young and fresh-looking they all seemed. Everything about them looked brand new and unused – their clothes, their faces, their bodies. When we had drained our beer bottles, Horner and I stepped out on to the street and walked to his car. The fresh air felt wonderful. People were leaning against buildings everywhere and puking. ‘Have you ever seen so many twerpy little assholes in all your life?’ Horner asked me rhetorically.

‘And they’re all just fourteen years old,’ I added.

‘Physically they are fourteen years old,’ he corrected me, ‘but emotionally and intellectually they are still somewhere shy of their eighth birthday.’

‘Were we like that at their age?’

‘I used to wonder that, but I don’t think so. I may have been that stupid once, but I was never that shallow. These kids wear button-down collar shirts and penny loafers. They look like they’re on their way to an Osmonds concert. And they don’t know
anything
. You talk to them in a bar and they don’t even know who’s running for President. They’ve never heard of Nicaragua. It’s scary.’

We walked along thinking about the scariness of it all. ‘But there’s something even worse,’ Homer added. We were at his car. I looked at him across the top of it. ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

‘They don’t smoke dope. Can you believe that?’

Well, I couldn’t. The idea of students at the University of Iowa not smoking dope is . . . well, simply inconceivable. On any list of reasons for going to the University of Iowa, smoking dope took up at least two of the first five places. ‘Then what are they here for?’

‘They’re getting an
education
,’ Horner said in a tone of wonder. ‘Can you believe that? They
want
to be insurance salesmen and computer programmers. That’s their dream in life. They want to make a lot of money so they can go out and buy more penny loafers and Madonna albums. It terrifies me sometimes.’

We got in his car and drove through dark streets to his house. Horner explained to me how the world had changed. When I left America for England, Iowa City was full of hippies. Difficult as it may be to believe, out here amid all these cornfields, the University of Iowa was for many years one of the most radical colleges in the country, at its peak exceeded in radicalness only by Berkeley and Columbia. Everybody there was a hippie, the professors as much as the students. It wasn’t just that they smoked dope and frequently rioted; they were also open-minded and intellectual. People cared about things like politics and the environment and where the world was going. Now, from what Horner was telling me, it was as if all the people in Iowa City had had their brains laundered at the Ronald McDonald Institute of Mental Readjustment.

‘So what happened?’ I asked Horner when we were
settled at his house with a beer. ‘What made everyone change?’

‘I don’t know exactly,’ he said. ‘The main thing, I guess, is that the Reagan Administration has this obsession with drugs. And they don’t distinguish between hard drugs and soft drugs. If you’re a dealer and you’re caught with pot, you get sent away for just as long as if it were heroin. So now nobody sells pot. All the people who used to sell it have moved on to crack and heroin because the risk is no worse and the profits are a lot better.’

‘Sounds crazy,’ I said.

‘Of course it’s crazy!’ Horner answered, a little hotly. Then he calmed down. ‘Actually a lot of people just stopped dealing in pot altogether. Do you remember Frank Dortmeier?’

Frank Dortmeier was a guy who used to ingest drugs by the sackful. He would snort coke through a garden hose given half a chance. ‘Yeah, sure,’ I said.

‘I used to get my pot from him. Then they brought in this law that if you are caught selling dope within a thousand yards of a public school they put you in jail for ever. It doesn’t matter that you may only be selling one little reefer to your own mother, they still put you away for eternity just as if you were standing on the school steps shoving it down the throats of every snivelling little kid who passed by. Well, when they brought this law in, Dortmeier started to get worried because there was a school up the street from him. So one night under cover of darkness, he goes out with a hundred-foot tape measure and measures the distance from his house to the school and damn me but it’s 997 yards. So he just stops selling dope, just like that.’ Horner drank his beer sadly. ‘It’s really
frustrating. I mean, have you ever tried to watch American TV without dope?’