The Lost Continent (20 page)

I’ve never seen so much food. I couldn’t see over the top of my plate. It was all delicious and pretty soon everybody knew everybody else and was having a great time. I ate so much my armpits bulged. But still the food kept coming. Just when I thought I would have to summon a wheelchair to get me to the car, the waitress took away all the platters and bowls, and started bringing desserts—apple pies, chocolate cakes, bowls of homemade ice cream, pastries, flans and God knows what else.

I kept eating. It was too delicious to pass up. Buttons popped off my shirt; my trousers burst open. I barely had the strength to lift my spoon, but I kept shoveling the stuff in. It was grotesque. Food began to leak from my ears. And still I ate. I ate more food that night than some African villagers eat in a lifetime. Eventually, mercifully, the waitress prised the spoons out of our hands and took the dessert stuff away, and we were able to stumble zombielike out into the night.

We got in the car, too full to speak, and headed towards the greenish glow of Three Mile Island. I felt as if I had eaten the contents of a cement mixer. I lay on the back seat of the car, my feet in the air, and moaned softly. I vowed that I would never eat again, and meant it. But two hours later, when we arrived back at my brother’s house, the agony had abated and my brother and I were able to begin a new cycle of gross overconsumption, beginning with a twelve-pack of beer and bucket of pretzels from his kitchen and concluding, in the early hours of the morning, with a plate of onion rings and two-foot-long submarine sandwiches, full of goo and spices, at an all-night eatery out on Highway 11.

14

I
t was ten minutes to seven in the morning and it was cold. Standing outside the Bloomsburg bus station, I could see my breath. The few cars out this early trailed clouds of vapor. I was hung over and in a few minutes I was going to climb onto a bus for a five-hour ride into New York. I would sooner have eaten cat food.

My brother had suggested that I take the bus because it would save having to find a place to park in Manhattan. I could leave the car with him and come back for it in a day or two. At two in the morning, after many beers, this had seemed a good plan. But now, standing in the early-morning chill, I realized I was making a serious mistake. You only go on a long-distance bus in the United States because either you cannot afford to fly or—and this is really licking the bottom of the barrel in America—you cannot afford a car. Being unable to afford a car in America is the last step before living out of a plastic sack. As a result, most of the people on long-distance buses are one of the following: mentally defective, actively schizoid, armed and dangerous, in a drugged stupor, just released from prison or nuns. Occasionally you will also see a pair of Norwegian students. You can tell they are Norwegian students because they are so pink-faced and healthy-looking and they wear little pale blue ankle socks with their sandals.

By and large a ride on a long-distance bus in America combines most of the shortcomings of prison life with those of an ocean crossing in a troopship. So when the bus pulled up before me, heaving a pneumatic sigh, and its doors flapped open, I boarded it with some misgivings. The driver himself didn’t look any too stable. He had the sort of hair you associate with people who have had accidents involving live wires. There were about half a dozen other passengers, though only two of them looked seriously dangerous and just one was talking to himself. I took a seat near the back and settled down to get some sleep. I had drunk far too many beers with my brother the night before, and the hot spices from the submarine sandwich were now expanding ominously inside my abdomen and drifting around like that stuff they put in lava lamps. Soon from one end or the other it would begin to seep out.

I felt a hand on my shoulder from behind. Through the gap in the seat I could see it was an Indian man—by that I mean a man from India, not an American Indian. “Can I smoke on this bus?” he asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t smoke anymore, so I don’t pay much attention to these things.”

“But do you
think
I can smoke on this bus?”

“I really don’t know.”

He was quiet for a few minutes, then his hand was on my shoulder again, not tapping it but resting there. “I can’t find an ashtray,” he said.

“No fooling,” I responded wittily, without opening my eyes.

“Do you think that means we’re not allowed to smoke?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care.”

“But do you
think
it means we’re not allowed to smoke?”

“If you don’t take your hand off my shoulder I am going to dribble vomit on it,” I said.

He removed his hand quickly and was silent for perhaps a minute. Then he said, “Would you help me look for an ashtray?”

It was seven in the morning and I was deeply unwell. I jumped up. “WILL YOU PLEASE JUST LEAVE ME ALONE!” I said to him. Two seats back a pair of Norwegian students looked shocked. I gave them a look as if to say, “And don’t you try anything either, you wholesome little shits!” and sank back into my seat. It was going to be a long day.

I slept fitfully, that dissatisfying, semiconscious sleep in which you incorporate into your dreams the things going on around you—the grinding of gears, the crying of babies, the mad swervings of the bus back and forth across the highway as the driver gropes for a dropped cigarette or lapses into a psychotic episode. Mostly I dreamed of the bus plunging over a cliff face, sailing into a void; in my dream, we fell for miles, tumbling through the clouds, peacefully, with just the sound of air whisking past outside, and then the Indian saying to me, “Do you think it would be all right if I smoked
now?
”

When I awoke there was drool on my shoulder and a new passenger opposite me, a haggard woman with lank gray hair who was chain-smoking cigarettes and burping prodigiously. They were the sort of burps children make to amuse themselves—rich, resonant, basso profundo burps. The woman was completely unself-conscious about it. She would look at me and open her mouth and out would roll a burp. It was amazing. Then she would take a drag of her cigarette and burp a large puff of smoke. That was amazing too. I glanced behind me. The Indian man was still there, looking miserable. Seeing me, he started to lean forward to ask a supplementary question, but I stopped him with a raised finger and he sank back. I stared out the window, feeling ill, and passed the time by trying to imagine circumstances less congenial than this. But apart from being dead or at a Bee Gees concert I couldn’t think of a single thing.

We reached New York in the afternoon. I got a room in a hotel near Times Square. The room cost $110 a night and was so small I had to go out into the corridor to turn around. I had never been in a room where I could touch all four walls at once. I did all the things you do in hotel rooms—played with the lights and TV, looked in the drawers, smelled the little cake of soap in the bathroom, put all the towels and ashtrays in my suitcase—and then wandered out to have a look at the city.

The last time I had been in New York was when I was sixteen and my friend Stan and I came out to visit my brother and his wife, who were living there then. They had an apartment in a strange, Kafkaesque apartment complex in Queens called Lefrak City. It consisted of about a dozen identical tall, featureless buildings clustered around a series of lonesome quadrangles, the sort of quadrangles where rain puddles stand for weeks and the flowerbeds are littered with supermarket carts. Each building was like a vertical city, with its own grocery store, drugstore, laundromat and so on. I don’t remember the details except that each building was taller than the tallest building in Des Moines and that the total population was something like 50,000—bigger than most Iowa towns. I had never conceived of so many people gathered in one place. I couldn’t understand why in such a big, open country as America people would choose to live like that. It wasn’t as if this were something temporary, a place to spend a few months while waiting for their ranch house in the suburbs to be built. This was home. This was it. Thousands and thousands of people would live out their lives never having their own backyard, never having a barbecue, never stepping out the back door at midnight to have a pee in the bushes and check out the stars. Their children would grow up thinking that supermarket carts grew wild, like weeds.

In the evenings, when my brother and his wife went out, Stan and I would sit with binoculars and scan the windows of the neighboring buildings. There were hundreds of windows to choose from, each containing a ghostly glow of television, a separate glimpsed life, another chapter in the endless story of the naked city. What we were looking for, of course, were naked women—and to our amazement we did actually see some, though usually this resulted in such excited grappling for control of the binoculars that the women had dressed and gone out for the evening by the time we got their windows back in view. Mostly what we saw, however, were other men with binoculars scanning the windows of our building. It was all very strange. This was August 1968. In the background, I remember, the television was filled with news of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia and Mayor Daley’s men kicking the crap out of demonstrators at the Democratic convention in Chicago. It was a strange time to be young, full of lust and bodily juices.

What I particularly remember was the sense of menace whenever we left the building. Groups of hoody-looking teenagers with no place to go would sit on the walls around the complex watching anyone who passed. I always expected them to fall in behind us as we went by and to take our money and stick us with knives they had made in the prison workshop, but they never bothered us, they just stared.

New York still frightened me. I felt the same sense of menace now as I walked down to Times Square. New York scared me. I had read so much for so long about murders and street crime that I felt a personal gratitude to everyone who left me alone. I wanted to hand out cards that said, “Thank you for not killing me.”

But the only people who assaulted me were panhandlers. There are 36,000 vagrants in New York and in two days of walking around every one of them asked me for money. Some of them asked twice. People in New York go to Calcutta to get some relief from begging. I began to regret that I didn’t live in an age when a gentleman could hit such people with his stick. One guy, my favorite, came up and asked if he could borrow a dollar. That knocked me out. I wanted to say, “Borrow a dollar? Certainly. Shall we say interest at 1 percent above prime and we’ll meet back here on Thursday to settle?” I wouldn’t give him a dollar, of course—I wouldn’t give my closest friend a
dollar
—but I pressed a dime into his grubby mitt and gave him a wink for his guile.

Times Square is incredible. You’ve never seen such lights, such hustle. Whole sides of buildings are given over to advertisements that blink and ripple and wave. It’s like a storm on an electronic sea. There are perhaps forty of these massive inducements to spend and consume, and all but two of them are for Japanese companies: Mita Copiers, Canon, Panasonic, Sony. My mighty homeland was represented by just Kodak and Pepsi-Cola. The war is over, Yankee dog, I thought bleakly.

The most riveting thing about New York is that anything can happen there. Only the week before a woman had been eaten by an escalator. Can you beat that? She had been on her way to work, minding her own business, when suddenly the stair beneath her gave way and she plummeted into the interior mechanisms, into all the whirring cogs and gears, with the sort of consequences you can well imagine. How would you like to be the cleaner in
that
building? (“Bernie, can you come in early tonight? And listen, you’d better bring along a wire brush and a
lot
of Ajax.”) New York is always full of amazing and unpredictable things. A front-page story in the
New York Post
was about a pervert with AIDS who had been jailed that day for raping little boys. Can you believe that? “What a city!” I thought. “Such a madhouse!” For two days I walked and stared and mumbled in amazement. A large black man on Eighth Avenue reeled out of a doorway, looking seriously insane, and said to me, “I been smoking ice! Big bowls of ice!” I gave him a quarter real fast, even though he hadn’t asked for anything, and moved off quickly. On Fifth Avenue I went into the Trump Tower, a new skyscraper. A guy named Donald Trump, a developer, is slowly taking over New York, building skyscrapers all over town with his name on them, so I went in and had a look around. The building had the most tasteless lobby I had ever seen—all brass and chrome and blotchy red and white marble that looked like the sort of thing that if you saw it on the sidewalk you would walk around it. Here it was everywhere—on the floors, up the walls, on the ceiling. It was like being inside somebody’s stomach after he’d eaten pizza. “Incredible,” I muttered and walked on. Next door a store sold pornographic videos, right there on Fifth Avenue. My favorite was
Yiddish Erotica,
Volume 2. What could this possibly consist of—rabbis with their trousers down, tarty women lying spread-eagled and saying, “You wanna fuck already?” “Superb, incredible,” I mumbled and plodded on.

In the evening, as I strolled back along Times Square, my eye was caught by a striptease club with a photograph of the strippers in the window. They were nice-looking girls. One of the photos was of Samantha Fox. Since Ms. Fox was at this time being paid something like £250,000 a year to show off her comely udders to readers of British newspapers such as the
Sun,
it seemed to me improbable, to say the least, that she would be peeling off for strangers in a smoky basement room on Times Square. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that there was a little fraud at work here. It’s a mean trick to play on a horny person.

They always used to do this to you at the Iowa State Fair. The strippers’ tents at the back of the midway would be covered with wildly erotic paintings of the most beautiful, silky-haired, full-breasted, lithe-bodied women you ever saw—women whose moist and pouty lips seemed to be saying, “I want you—yes, you there, with the zits and glasses. Come and fulfill me, little man.” Aged fourteen and delirious with lust, you would believe these pictures with all your heart and many of the neighboring organs. You would hand over a crumpled dollar and go inside into a dusty tent that smelled of horse manure and rubbing alcohol and find onstage a weary stripper looking not unlike your own mother. It was the sort of disappointment from which you never really recover, and my heart went out now to the lonely sailors and Japanese photocopier salesmen who were down there drinking sweet, warm cocktails and having a night of overpriced disappointment. “We learn from our mistakes,” I remarked sagely to myself with a rueful smile and told a panhandler to piss off.