The Lost Continent (18 page)

Things have changed now, naturally. Philadelphia is no longer the third biggest city in America. Los Angeles pushed it into fourth place in the 1960s, and now there are freeways to whisk you into the heart of town without soiling your tires in the ghettos. Even so, I managed a brief, inadvertent visit to one of the poorer neighborhoods when I wandered off the freeway in search of a gas station. Before I could do anything about it, I found myself sucked into a vortex of one-way streets that carried me into the most squalid and dangerous-looking neighborhood I had ever seen. It may have been, for all I know, the very ghetto we passed through all those years before—the brownstone buildings looked much the same—but it was many times worse than the one I remembered. The ghetto of my childhood, for all its poorness, had the air of a street carnival. People wore colorful clothes and seemed to be having a good time. This place was just bleak and dangerous, like a war zone. Abandoned cars, old refrigerators, burned-out sofas littered every vacant lot. Garbage cans looked as if they had been thrown to the street from the rooftops. There were no gas stations—I wouldn’t have stopped anyway, not in a place like this, not for a million dollars—and most of the storefronts were boarded with plywood. Every standing object had been spray-painted with graffiti. There were still a few young people on the stoops and corners, but they looked listless and cold—it was a chilly day—and they seemed not to notice me. Thank God. This was a neighborhood where clearly you could be murdered for a pack of cigarettes—a fact that was not lost on me as I searched nervously for a way back onto the freeway. By the time I found it, I wasn’t whistling through my teeth so much as singing through my sphincter.

It really was the most uncomfortable experience I had had in many years. God, what it must be like to live there and to walk those streets daily. Do you know that if you are a black man in urban America you now stand a one-in-nineteen chance of being murdered? In World War II, the odds of being killed were one in fifty. In New York City there is one murder every four hours. Murder there has become the most common cause of death for people under thirty-five—and yet New York isn’t even the most murderous city in America. At least eight other cities have a higher murder rate. In Los Angeles there are more murders on schoolgrounds alone each year than there are in the whole of London. So perhaps it is little wonder that people in American cities take violence as routine. I don’t know how they do it.

On my way to Des Moines to start this trip, I passed through O’Hare Airport in Chicago, where I ran into a friend who worked for a St. Louis newspaper. He told me he had been working extra hard lately because of something that had happened to his boss. The boss had been driving home from work late one Saturday night when he had stopped at some traffic lights. As he waited for the lights to change, the passenger door opened and a man with a gun got in. The gunman made the boss drive down to the riverfront, where he shot him in the head and took his money. The boss had been in a coma for three weeks and they weren’t sure whether he was going to live.

My friend was telling me this not because it was such an incredible story, but simply by way of elucidating why he was having to work so damned hard lately. As for his boss, my friend’s attitude seemed to be that if you forget to lock your car doors when you’re driving through St. Louis late at night, well, you’ve got to expect to take a bullet in the head from time to time. It was very odd, his deadpan attitude, but it seems to be more and more the way in America now. It made me feel like a stranger.

I drove downtown and parked near City Hall. On top of the building is a statue of William Penn. It’s the main landmark downtown, visible from all around the city, but it was covered in scaffolding. In 1985, after decades of neglect, the city fathers decided to refurbish the statue before it fell down. So they covered it in scaffolding. However, this cost so much that there was no money left to do the repairs. Now, two years later, the scaffolding was still there and not a lick of work had been done. A city engineer had recently announced with a straight face that before long the scaffolding itself would need to be refurbished. This is more or less how Philadelphia works, which is to say not very well. No other city in America pursues the twin ideals of corruption and incompetence with quite the same enthusiasm. When it comes to asinine administration, Philadelphia is in a league of its own.

Consider: in 1985, a bizarre sect called MOVE barricaded itself into a tenement house on the west side of town. The police chief and mayor considered the options open to them and decided that the most intelligent use of their resources would be to blow up the house—but of course!—even though they knew there were children inside and it was in the middle of a densely populated district. So they dropped a bomb on the house from a helicopter. This started a fire that quickly grew out of control and burned down most of the neighborhood—sixty-one houses in all—and killed eleven people, including all the children in the barricaded home.

When they aren’t being incompetent, city officials like to relax with a little corruption. Just as I was driving into town I heard on the radio that a former city councilman had been sentenced to ten years in jail and his aide to eight years for attempted extortion. The judge called it a gross breach of public trust. He should know. Across town a state review board was calling for the dismissal of nine of the judge’s colleagues for taking cash gifts from members of the roofers’ union. Two of those judges were already awaiting trial on extortion charges. This sort of thing is routine in Philadelphia. A few months earlier when a state official named Bud Dwyer was similarly accused of corruption, he called a press conference, pulled out a gun and, as cameras rolled, blew his brains out. This led to an excellent local joke.
Q.
What is the difference between Bud Dwyer and Bud Lite?
A.
Bud Lite has a head on it.

Yet for all its incompetence and criminality, Philadelphia is a likable place. For one thing, unlike Washington, it feels like a big city. It had skyscrapers and there was steam rising through vents in the sidewalk and on every corner stood a stainless steel hot-dog stand, with a chilly-looking guy in a stocking cap bobbing around behind it. I wandered over to Independence Square—actually it’s now called Independence National Historical Park—and looked respectfully at all the historic buildings. The main building is Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence was drawn up and the Constitution ratified. When I had first been there in 1960, there was a long line stretching out of the building. There still was—in fact, it seemed not to have moved in twenty-seven years. Deep though my respect is for both the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, I was disinclined to spend my afternoon in such a long and immobile line. I went instead to the visitors’ center. National-park visitors’ centers are always the same. They always have some displays in glass cases that manage to be both boring and uninformative, a locked auditorium with a board out front saying that the next showing of the free twelve-minute introductory film will be at 4
P
.
M
. (just before 4
P
.
M
. somebody comes and changes it to 10
A
.
M
.), some racks of books and brochures with titles like
Pewter in History
and
Vegetables of Old Philadelphia,
which are too boring even to browse through, much less buy, and a drinking fountain and rest rooms, which everyone makes use of because there’s not much else to do. Every visitor to every national park goes into the visitors’ center, stands around kind of stupidly for a while, then has a pee and a drink of water and wanders back outside. That is what I did now.

From the visitors’ center I ambled along Independence Mall to Franklin Square, which was full of winos, many of whom had the comical idea that I might be prepared to give them twenty-five cents of my own money. According to my guidebook, Franklin Square had “lots of interesting things” to see—a museum, a working book bindery, an archaeological exhibit and “the only post office in the United States which does not fly the American flag” (don’t ask me why)—but my heart wasn’t in it, especially with piteous and unwashed winos tugging at my sleeves all the while, and I fled back to the real world of downtown Philadelphia.

Late in the afternoon, I found my way to the offices of the
Philadelphia Inquirer,
where an old friend from Des Moines, Lucia Herndon, was lifestyle editor. The
Inquirer
offices were like newspaper offices everywhere—grubby, full of junk, littered with coffee cups in which cigarette butts floated like dead fish in a polluted lake—and Lucia’s desk, I was impressed to note, was one of the messiest in the room. This may have accounted in part for her impressive rise at the
Inquirer.
I only ever knew one journalist with a truly tidy desk, and he was eventually arrested for molesting small boys. Make of that what you will—but just bear it in mind the next time somebody with a tidy desk invites you camping.

We drove in my car out to the district of Mount Airy, where, conveniently for me—and for her too, come to that—Lucia lived with another old friend of mine from Des Moines, her husband, Hal. All day long I had been wondering, vaguely and intermittently, why Hal and Lucia liked Philadelphia so much—they had moved there about a year before—but now I understood. The road to Mount Airy led through the most beautiful city park I had ever been in. Called Fairmount Park and covering almost 9,000 acres, it is the largest municipal park in America and it is full of trees and flowering shrubs and bosky glades of infinite charm. It stretches for miles along the banks of the Schuylkill River. We drove through a dreamy twilight. Boats sculled along the water. It was perfection.

Mount Airy was out in the Germantown section of the city. It had a nice settled feeling to it, as if people had lived there for generations—which is in fact the case in Philadelphia, Lucia told me. The city was still full of the sort of neighborhoods where everybody knew everybody else. Many people scarcely ever ventured more than a few hundred yards from their homes. It was not uncommon to get lost and find that hardly anybody could reliably direct you to a neighborhood three miles away. Philadelphia also had its own vocabulary—downtown was called “center city,” sidewalks were called “pavements,” as in England—and peculiarities of pronunciation.

In the evening I sat in Hal and Lucia’s house, eating their food, drinking their wine, admiring their children and their house and furniture and possessions, their easy wealth and comfort, and felt a sap for ever having left America. Life was so abundant here, so easy, so convenient. Suddenly I wanted a refrigerator that made its own ice cubes and a waterproof radio for the shower. I wanted an electric orange juicer and a room ionizer and a wristwatch that would keep me in touch with my biorhythms. I wanted it all. Once in the evening I went upstairs to go to the bathroom and walked past one of the children’s bedrooms. The door was open and a bedside light was on. There were toys everywhere—on the floor, on shelves, tumbling out of a wooden trunk. It looked like Santa’s workshop. But there was nothing extraordinary about this: it was just a typical middle-class American bedroom.

And as for American closets, they seem to be always full of yesterday’s enthusiasms: golf clubs, scuba diving equipment, tennis rackets, exercise machines, tape recorders, darkroom equipment, objects that once excited their owner and then were replaced by other objects even more shiny and exciting. That is the great, seductive thing about America—the people always get what they want, right now, whether it is good for them or not. There is something deeply worrying, and awesomely irresponsible, about this endless self-gratification, this constant appeal to the baser instincts.

I should point out that I am not talking about Hal and Lucia in all this. They are good people and lead modest and responsible lives. Their closets aren’t full of scuba diving equipment and seldom-used tennis rackets. They are full of mundane items like buckets and galoshes, ear muffs and scouring powders. I know this for a fact because late in the night when everyone was asleep I crept out of bed and had a good look.

In the morning, I dropped Hal at his office downtown—correction, center city—and the drive through Fairmount Park was as enchanting in the morning sunshine as it had been at dusk. All cities should have parks like this, I thought. He told me some more interesting things about Philadelphia: that it spent more money on public art than any other city in America—1 percent of the total city budget—and yet it had an illiteracy rate of 40 percent. He pointed out to me, in the middle of Fairmount Park, the palatial Philadelphia Museum of Art, which had become the city’s top tourist attraction, not because of its collection of 500,000 paintings, but because its front steps were the ones Sylvester Stallone sprinted up in
Rocky.
People were actually coming to the museum in buses, looking at the steps and leaving without ever going inside to see the pictures. As we were driving we listened to a radio talk show hosted by a man named Howard Stern. Howard Stern had a keen interest in sex and was engagingly direct with his callers. “Good morning, Marilyn,” he would say to a caller, “are you wearing panties?” This, we agreed, beat most early-morning talk shows hands down. Howard queried his callers with arresting candor and a measure of prurience I had not before encountered on American radio.

Unfortunately, I lost the station soon after dropping Hal off and spent the rest of the morning searching for it without success, and eventually ended up listening to a competing program in which an ear specialist gave advice to callers with hearing difficulties. Later there was a woman who was an expert on dealing with intestinal worms in dogs. As this principally consisted of giving the dogs a tablet to make the worms die, it was not long before I felt as if I were something of an expert on the matter too. And so the morning passed.