Llama for Lunch (2 page)
In the morning I made up for these dietary deprivations by attacking the hotel’s buffet breakfast, anticipating future meagre repasts. Back at the airport I waltzed through ‘exegration’ (the opposite of immigration) and found myself on another massive chock-full double-decker plane. This time, however, I didn’t need to see over the person in front because, wonder of wonders, every seat had its own little TV screen. On take-off it showed you, via a camera in the plane’s nose, what the pilot could see (we hoped!) from the cockpit. As the aircraft trundled out to the runway, there was the tarmac speeding away underneath. I found this disconcerting – it was something I would rather not have witnessed – but my eyes stayed compulsively glued to it.
Having seen the plane safely in the air I concentrated on the video program. You could switch between six films or play games. The flight lasted twelve hours, crossing the Pacific Ocean then flying over northern USA. We left at half past eleven in the morning and, spookily, arrived before we left, at nine the same day. The sun was rising on one side of the plane as it was setting on the other.
The descent to Chicago’s O’Hare airport, the busiest in the world, through a murky sky, was extremely bumpy. The next day I heard that a plane had sat on the tarmac for eight hours unable to take off due to the bad weather.
My first impression of America was that I could have been anywhere – all these huge modern airports look the same. The one difference was that all the staff I saw were Afro-American. I asked the airport shuttle-bus driver if he would take me to the Three Arts Club in Dearborn Street, where I had a booking, and was safely landed on the doorstep. It was still only half past ten and check-in time was not until one, so I had to sit in the drawing room almost stupefied from lack of sleep, with my internal clock insisting that it was long past bedtime. You’d think they could have let me at a bed. The room was ready. Rules are cast in stone to some people.
But I had been impressed when deposited here. The Three Arts Club is housed in an elegant building in a lovely treelined street that contains three-storey apartment blocks, a coffee shop and a classy boutique hotel called the Claridge. The street verges have gardens surrounded by little fences and more of the same front the buildings. Dearborn Street runs all the way down to the centre of Chicago, a few kilometres away.
Looking back I realised that until I reached the club I had not understood one word of the English that had been spoken to me since I left Australia. I was beginning to think I’d gone deaf. Most of the announcements on the Japanese planes had been, naturally enough, in Japanese and the subtitled English ones might as well have been. And in Chicago everyone I had spoken to so far had been African-American and I found their distinctive patois hard to decipher.
The Three Arts Club is a great place. Built in 1912 as a residence and club for women, it was executed in the grand manner of the age. On the front of the building one brass plaque confirms its age and another states that it has been declared a National Trust building. It has an imposing entrance flanked by columns and the facade sports bas-reliefs of three women in flowing Greek robes who represent the Three Arts – music, painting and literature. Constructed of dark reddish brown brick, it has four storeys and a flat roof-top area. A flight of steps up from the street gets you in the front door, then another brings you to a set of double doors where you press a hefty brass bell for admission to a massive lobby. On one side of the lobby is an immense room that contains a stage and an entire wall of French doors that open onto a large and lovely courtyard where a fountain tinkles into a pool that has a statue of a small naked boy in its centre. Around the courtyard sit wrought-iron chairs and tables, and huge flower pots from which cascade red, pink, and white petunias and impatiens.
The drawing room, a long, high-ceilinged chamber with a polished wooden floor on which lie a few worn but good old oriental rugs, is on the other side of the lobby. In here are some lovely pieces of well-polished antique furniture, several elegant couches and, in one of the cabinets, some fine antique china. Next to the drawing room is a gallery called the tea room; attached to it is a small library. All the ground-floor rooms have many glass doors onto the courtyard, which creates a feeling of light and space and makes them ideal for art exhibitions and functions. Behind the reception rooms lie the spacious dining room and kitchen and a couple of guest bathrooms and toilets that have been preserved in their original condition. The elaborately decorated ceramic pissoir on the wall of the Gents is a work of art. The basement is used by the residents as a TV room and the washing machines are also housed there in a Dickensian dungeon that has a welter of enormous pipes overhead like the engine room of a ship.
By one o’clock, when I was finally allowed into my room, I was a total zombie. I had tried taking a walk, but it had been pointless – I felt as though I was walking around underwater. I fell on the bed and slept for three hours until, it being dinner time (and only imminent death can keep me from a meal), I got up and took myself down to the dining room.
Before each meal you had to go to the office and collect a ticket to give to the cheerful kitchen staff, who all looked like they came from south of the border. The food was very good but it leaned heavily, especially at breakfast, on sweet stuff like waffles, pancakes, Coco pops and sticky buns. I counteracted this with cheese and lots of lovely fruit. You could order eggs any way you wanted them by writing your request on a piece of paper and giving it to the attendant, who would disappear into the nether regions of the kitchen to appear shortly after with the goods. You could never complain, as I have been wont to do in other places, that there wasn’t enough to eat. But best of all was the wonderful, freshly brewed coffee.
The next morning I woke very early and did not feel really rested. My time clock was out of kilter. When I was respectable I headed off to the book fair, the putative reason for my visit to the States, by taxi and found out the hard way that it is obligatory to tip the driver at least ten per cent of the fare. Book Expo America, an annual Mecca for those in the trade, was being held this year in Chicago’s McCormack Centre. Irreverently referred to as ‘the mistake on the lake’ by the locals, it is a monstrous 2.2 million square feet of convention space. I’d never seen anything like it. It started with a ginormous entrance hall that a couple of air strips would be lost in while upstairs, in an unbelievably huge area, were four thousand or more stands for exhibitors. All kinds of books were on display: children’s, educational, novels, travel, foreign language, even some erotica. Every time I tried to walk around the exhibition space I failed and after an hour or so had to return for a rest. But boy, you could collect some loot here. I could have amassed hundreds of free books on my rounds. It broke my heart to leave them but I did get a couple to read on my travels. There were also give-away pens, mugs, phone cards and bags. But before you hop on a plane en masse I should point out that the fair is only for book sellers, publishers and buyers with special dispensation for the odd writer. And some were very odd, I noticed.
At four o’clock I returned to the club by the free shuttle bus that dropped people from the fair at various hotels. I crashed on my bed and again only got up to feed. Then I woke in the middle of the night. It took me four days to wake at the right time in the morning.
Next day at the fair I had lunch at McDonald’s. Their food outlets were everywhere and everyone seemed to eat their food,
and
freely admit it. Not like at home where most people I know do it on the sly and would never confess to it on the rack. A Coke from a machine cost five Australian dollars. I was horrified. I found the States high-priced due to the awful rate of exchange for our dollar at the time – parking downtown was advertised at eight dollars an hour as though it was a bargain!
On the last day of the fair I managed to get through the wine tasting and book signing that had been arranged. A line of people waited for me to appear. This would have been more flattering if my publishers hadn’t been giving my books away.
On the way back the bus driver said that she would take the scenic route. It certainly was; along the edge of Lake Michigan and past the sensational-looking museum and art gallery and other grand public buildings. Passing a pretty park she explained that the lone grave that stood in it surrounded by an iron fence was there because, when all the other remains had been moved, this person’s relatives couldn’t be found to give permission to relocate him. The driver also told us that the great fire of Chicago in 1871, from the ashes of which the modern city grew, was alleged to have been started by Mrs O’Leary’s cow kicking over a lantern. I think the cow may have been much maligned.
My room at the club was large and pleasantly oldfashioned and had an adjoining bathroom that I shared with the person next door. After three days and nights of creeping around in the bathroom so as not to disturb my neighbour, I discovered that she was a permanent resident who was away on holiday. I could have been having jazz parties in there. My room had a Spartan look because the cement floor was painted red and had only a smidgin of carpet in its middle. The furniture was old, functional stuff that included a comfortable bed and two big central-heating hot-water radiators, monstrous iron affairs that were fixed under the windows. Massive pipes lumbered through the room from top to bottom, I had no idea to what purpose. Part of one wall had been built in sections to provide two walk-in wardrobes with a rail for a curtain in front of them. The bathroom was extremely ancient-looking but everything was painted shiny white and it was squeaky clean.
From my position on the third floor there was a pleasant view from the two original, old sash windows that were located in each outside wall. They looked into the roof tops of other apartment buildings one floor below me. I could see a woodenpaling-edged balcony that had an Asian look and the backdrop to that was a spreading tree that gave me pleasure to contemplate.
The club was rather like a boarding school, or worse, a reformatory. Everyone was pleasant but the list of rules was endless. You even had to make an application in writing to use the lift. One morning I found three police officers bristling with guns in the dining room. During the night the club’s female guard had seen a man lurking in the back alley. I got the feeling that they might be a little edgy about men here. It wasn’t as though he could have got in.
One night a wedding was in progress when I arrived for dinner. Two large white bows on the pillars that flanked the front door warned me of this, and once I was inside I saw that the reception rooms had been divinely decorated. Large bowls and urns of white flowers had been placed around the courtyard; drifts and drapes of white gauze tied with bows and frills wafted around the French doors. We lesser beings who merely lived there couldn’t go through these rooms now, but had to circumnavigate to the dining room via the back stairs and the basement. The next day there was another wedding with more beautiful flowers and decorations. During the ten days of my stay several functions were held in the courtyard while we were eating dinner and we could watch them through the glass doors – it made me feel like an orphan putting her nose to the window. I couldn’t help but notice that the guests were eating better stuff than we were (and wasting a lot of it) and the devil whispered to me that fifty per cent of them were too fat to need feeding anyway. But we residents did well out of these bun fights. The orphans in the storm inherited the flowers, great bowls of vibrant colours on our dining tables. And we also scored some very fine left-over food.
The evening that the fair finished it started to drizzle with rain and by the next day it was raining good and hard and was really cold, just fifty degrees Fahrenheit. I wasn’t prepared for this weather clothing-wise but I put on all the woollies I had and went out prepared for a great adventure with Chicago public transport. Two ladies at the tourist bureau in the McCormack Centre had emphatically denied that there was such an animal as a subway. When I asked about those steps I had seen going down under the street they gave me blank looks, consulted each other and decided that, no, there was definitely so such thing. Unconvinced, I started walking in the direction that I thought I had previously seen the subway entrance but found myself in the wrong street and ended up strolling all the way downtown along Dearborn Street. I took my life in my hands every time I crossed the road because, naturally, I looked the wrong way, and the traffic was coming at me from the other direction.
On the edge of the city I discovered that I was underneath the overhead train which goes around the loop of the city centre. Not very imaginatively, it is named the Loop. This seemed foolproof, so I mounted the steps to a platform to try it. The only flaw was that you have to know which part of the loop to get on at and which direction the train is going. I had no idea how to even get started with a ticket – you needed to play all sorts of games with machines that required money. But kind people helped me. I didn’t have enough change so the woman attendant and a woman passenger between them managed to rake up enough money to subsidise me. Nice, I thought, here I am pan-handling in America. This happened again at the next station, where the guard gave me the ten cents I was short. I rode six of these trains and in between spent a couple of hours sitting on windy stations above the city waiting for them.
First I waited for the purple line because I thought it was a pretty colour then I discovered that it didn’t run at that time of the day so I got on another train. This one went out to Midway airport after completing its loop, but eventually after an interesting ride I was back in town and heading in the right direction. Getting off I boarded another train but, discovering that its destination was the outer suburbs, I decided against another foray out of town and got off again. Five trains later I arrived at the station where I could change to the subway that would return me home. I had a marvellous time, with many people pointing the way and many wrong turns, but you can ride for two hours on the one ticket for three Australian dollars and I certainly got my money’s worth.