All Gone to Look for America Read online

  Over the next half hour I learn more than I ever need to know about Red Sox and Black Sox, about how the Yankees are the Bronx and the Mets Queens, why there are two leagues – the National and the American – and that means it’s okay for there to be a World Series in a sport which only a handful of countries play and in any case doesn’t include them, being restricted to the winners of the two leagues. I also discover that Laurence is a university lecturer in English, a factor in his oblique attempt to explain why there’s no point in telling me the rules of baseball when I’ve never even been to a game: ‘You can read Bleak House, for example, and you’d know the story but you can’t really understand it unless you know the semiotics of Victorian literature.’ This loses me somewhat so I change tack and ask him if Dickens is his speciality.

  ‘No, not really,’ he replies. ‘I did my dissertation on Thomas Hardy, the Wessex novels.’

  ‘So you’ve been to England, then?’

  ‘No, never been there. Read all the books, know some of them by heart, but never been there at all,’ he says in that sort of tone of mild but relieved regret that betrays the fact that, though probably only in his late forties, he has no idea of ever going there. Laurence is a New Yorker born and bred and can’t imagine ever living anywhere else, not abroad and certainly not anywhere else in America which he refers to with a mildly patronising scorn.

  ‘They’re all fat out there. You’ll see.’

  I smile, nervously: it’s a stereotype of middle America I hadn’t intended to raise.

  ‘No really, look about. You don’t see many fat women here in New York City.’ I look about and realise he’s right, in fact I’ve been noticing since my arrival that there aren’t as many fat people as our European stereotype of modern Americans suggests.

  ‘It’s just New York,’ he adds. ‘Sex and the city, people here care. They work out, look after themselves. Out there,’ and he waves a hand vaguely in the direction of the Hudson River, ‘they are all lard-asses, you’ll see.’

  Laurence is proud of his own physique, ‘keeping in shape’ and no less proud of his sexual conquests, including several of his former students. He’s starting to remind me of Malcolm Bradbury’s sexual predator university lecturer in The History Man. But he is also inordinately proud of being a regular in the White Horse Tavern in particular, and a resident of Greenwich Village in general.

  ‘This bar preserves a sort of bohemian alternative lifestyle in the village. But we’re getting Starbucks coming in now, and once you get Starbucks, it’s the death of the community.’

  There’s an irony here that laid-back Seattle-founded Starbucks probably sees itself as ‘community-creating’ with its sofas and iTunes and internet, but it’s not what he means. He means the eccentricity and diversity of a neighbourhood in which the shops are owned by individuals, not licensed by franchises. What he means is the little mama-and-papa Anglo-Italian coffee bars I was sniping at earlier, the ones that grew up in London in the 1950s, in Soho particularly. I point out the parallel.

  ‘Your Soho, in London. Oh yeah, I forgot about that,’ he says.

  I laugh, though he doesn’t understand why: having a district named from an old fox-hunting cry from the days when it was a game preserve rather than a mesh of congested streets may sound silly but surely it is at least more real than naming one SoHo in imitation just because it is ‘south of Houston Street’. He at least has the good grace to laugh in acceptance, and goes on to list a whole cluster of New York’s daffy acronyms invented by gentrifying communities eager for a bit of self-definition: TriBeCa (the triangle beneath Canal Street), NoLIta (north of Little Italy). Could that make the area to the left of Little Italy possibly LoLIta, I ask? He reckons it will as soon as it gets smart enough and somebody thinks of it. You will, Laurence, you will.

  ‘Didn’t the East Village used to be a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood?’ I ask, trying to show at least a minimal grasp of New York ethnography.

  ‘This is New York. It’s all Jewish. I’m Jewish.’ And I laugh with him: after all the bagel is the city’s breakfast and there is surely a remnant of central European – perhaps mixed with a smidgeon of Irish – in that nasal Noo Yoik accent.

  But the whole historic, cosmopolitan, eccentric, and diverse melting pot is all, according to Laurence, perpetually at risk. Greenwich Village is a threatened anomaly in a country that has been bought by big business and sold as suburbia, repackaged and franchised. The book I need to read, he tells me, hell, the book all city officials throughout America need to read, should be ashamed for not having read, is The Death and Life of American Cities by Jane Jacobs. I confess my ignorance, and Laurence explains that Jacobs, who died in 2006, was the only reason Greenwich Village still exists in anything like its old form. She was the sworn enemy of Robert Moses, the man who more than any other is responsible for the way most of the rest of New York looks today. She accused him of turning streets over to cars rather than people, of neglecting public transport and of championing the concept of ‘urban renewal’ in terms of zoning that separated out commercial, industrial and residential neighbourhoods and as a result created isolated, unnatural urban spaces and stripped communities of their uniqueness. Curiously, as I am to discover over the next couple of weeks, New York is perhaps the one city in America to which Moses’ ideas were applied least. Others have all but been destroyed by them. I would soon discover that for myself.

  Laurence brings the conversation full circle, blaming Moses for causing two of New York City’s most famous baseball teams to decamp. The Brooklyn Dodgers, he says, moved to Los Angeles because Moses wouldn’t let them build a new stadium in the site they wanted – which he had earmarked for a parking garage – followed by their traditional rivals, the New York Giants, who relocated to San Francisco, partly because the league required at least two major teams in close proximity to one another. Baseball plays the same role in American society that football does in Britain – more even than their football, it is the true national sport. But to date we have had only one movable franchise: created when Wimbledon F.C. departed south London for the new town of Milton Keynes, giving themselves the very American-sounding name MK Dons. But they had to surrender most of their history, handing their trophies back to Wimbledon borough. For a British club to transform itself from a local team with roots deep in the community to a movable ‘business franchise’ remains anathema, though with growing American (and other foreign) investment in the game and huge armies of fans in Asia who support English clubs, the risk is growing.

  I try to make the comparison to Laurence, eager to show how much I have understood the ‘semiotics’, as he might put it, of his argument, but I might as well be talking about quidditch to someone who has never read Harry Potter: ‘We just don’t have an affinity with soccer. It’ll never catch on.’ And who knows, on the evidence – including that of my own eyes a few weeks later – he might well be right.

  It seems only proper that before leaving New York, I remedy my ignorance about this vital part of American life and go to see ‘a ball game’. A ball game in America is only ever baseball. American football and basketball – the other two great, but lesser passions – may also be played with a ball, but a ‘ball game’ only means baseball. It started out as the New York Game, first referred to in records from 1792 as being played just outside the city, on land that is today Greenwich Village.

  The most surprising thing to me is the fact that I can get a ticket at all, especially given that the two New York teams both had home games last night. Unlike our football – or theirs – baseball games are played in series, like cricket test matches, over several days. There’s a ‘ball game’ on virtually every day of the season, and for those teams that do well enough, on into post-season and the World Series. Today is officially the last day of the season and will decide which teams go through, but even so there’s no problem at all getting a ticket, I’m told on the phone. But then maybe it’s not all that strange when every game is also shown
live on television.

  The game it’s easiest to get to is the Mets at Shea Stadium, the legendary venue where back in the sixties the Beatles pioneered the use of giant outdoor venues for pop concerts. They allegedly played only 25 minutes and the screams of adolescent American girls were so loud and their amplifiers so small nobody could hear them. But it’s one of those events in rock history that made the venue famous. Best of all, I can get there by boat, up the East River. The Mets Express leaves Pier 17 at 5:00 p.m., more than two hours before the game and has a scheduled return time of 10:30 or ‘20 minutes after the end of the game’. Tricky thing organising transport for an event that is open-ended.

  A brochure at the ‘Y’ lists Pier 17 as ‘the historic heart of New York’s seaport district offering fine views of the Brooklyn Bridge’. The latter at least is true, and the big old bridge, famous from a million movies and the longest suspension bridge in the world when it was completed back in 1870, is an impressive site seen from below, hanging there against an azure, almost tropical, sky that still seems wrong to me for early autumn. But South Street Seaport is a sorry disappointment; like so many ‘historic’ sites in America its preservation has meant its Disneyfication, old warehouses being transformed into bijou boutiques catering almost exclusively for tourists lured there – like me – by advertisements in brochures.

  The one consolation however is that it does have a branch of the Heartland Brewery, New York City’s new and so far only micro, which offers a welcoming place for late lunch and cold beer on a sweltering afternoon. I opt for their ‘taster’ tray of tiny glasses of half a dozen ales and something that calls itself ‘popcorn shrimp’: scampi you eat with your fingers. Coming soon to a franchise near you! It’s okay, but the beers are better, particularly one in the distinctive dry, hoppy English IPA style called – with a better than average attempt at humour – India(na) Pale Ale.

  The meal is marked only by a moment of embarrassment when two Irishmen come in and sit up at the bar next to me. They order fish and chips and large cokes and wolf them down. But when it comes to paying, despite the waitress’s silken-tongued service manner and her obliging help in explaining how they needed to use a different area code to call Brooklyn on the younger one’s mobile phone, they make the classic foreigner’s error. As they hand over the $30 for their two meals and giant cokes, the older one, as if an afterthought, turns and adds a tip: a single dollar. To her everlasting credit, the waitress smiles and says, ‘Thank you,’ and the pair grunt and nod as if they’ve done her a service, both blissfully unaware that they’ve just committed a major faux pas.

  The American service economy’s reliance on tipping is inexplicable to most foreigners but an attempt to subvert it by undertipping is as likely to succeed as an attempt to destroy London’s overpriced taxi system by refusing ever to get into one. It is also not just incalculably rude to waiting staff who really do offer ‘service with a smile’, even if it is for mercenary gain, it is also threatening their livelihood. Waiting staff are paid wages that are in European terms derisory. The government recommends a minimum wage but it is not compulsory and many states have none, leaving employers to offer pay rates on a ‘take it or leave it’ basis. Kansas has a near criminal minimum wage of $2.65 per hour, while New York with a cost of living equal to London’s sets a minimum of only $7.15, only slightly above what we are allowed to pay schoolboys on paper rounds, and even with exchange rates distorted by the fall of sterling, lower than the average British legal minimum for adults. Waiters and waitresses rely on generous tipping to earn a basic living. The cheap mobile phone I’ve just purchased to avoid the punitive rates of using a British mobile over here, includes a ‘tip calculator’ function, which lets you decide between a 10 per cent, 15 per cent, 20 per cent and 25 per cent level. New Yorkers will leave up to 30 per cent and anything less than 15 per cent is considered an insult to the staff and you’d be advised not to eat there again. The same goes for drinks too, which is a radical culture shock for those Brits and Irish who are used to taking every last penny or cent back from their barman, in exchange for maybe buying him one later in the evening. But when in Rome… like I said, just because they sort of speak the same language, it doesn’t mean you automatically understand them.

  By now 5:00 p.m. has rolled around, time to board the Mets Express, a cheery launch sporting blue team colours. The round trip price is an even $20 which is a lot more than I’d have paid on the subway but then it’s a treat of a trip on a warm evening with the sun slowly lowering behind the skyscrapers. They sell cans of beer from an ice-filled cooler at a bar in the cabin, not the good beer from the modern microbreweries, but the thin, tasteless stuff Americans put up with for years from the mass manufacturers, Anheuser-Busch, Coors and Miller. Ball game beer. I buy one anyhow. It’s cold liquid on a hot evening and hey, I’m going to a ball game.

  The ride upriver, away from Manhattan to where the stadium is located in the northern part of Queens borough (actually the southwest end of Long Island) is strangely reminiscent of that downriver from Westminster and central London to Greenwich and the old docklands. The familiar landmarks recede to be replaced by a widening waterscape bordered by rusting remnants of industrial decay. Except that there is no sign here of the renovation that has marked eastern London, led by financial services and now spurred on by the upcoming Olympics. This part of Queens is bleak and abandoned, rusting frames all that remain of old waterside warehouses. And then the great bulk of the stadium rears up, and behind it, squatting in the old parking lot like a cuckoo in the nest, the soaring skeleton of its successor waiting for flesh to be put on its bones for an expected opening in 2009.

  As we step off onto the jetty there is a great roar overhead as a passenger aircraft drops into its approach pattern to land at LaGuardia airport, New York’s domestic terminal. Before adjustments were made to the flight paths, games at Shea frequently had to be halted while an incoming aircraft passed low overhead, though I am not sure whether this was just because of the horrendous noise or because they feared some hard-hitting batsman could knock a Boeing out of the sky. As predicted I have no difficulty getting a ticket: Shea can seat 55,000 and has rarely been as full as it was when the Beatles played. The cheapest seats, right up high, cost little over five dollars, but I splash out on one lower down, closer to the action at $21 which these days works out at half what I pay to watch even a game in the second tier of English football, let alone the extravagant cost of watching Chelsea or Arsenal. The ticket salesman tries to coax me into a $35 seat, lower down and in a ‘better position’. But as I haven’t much idea of what goes on and can’t quite see myself sticking it out for the full three and a half hours or more, he’s on a no-win.

  The arena itself is impressive – as big sports stadia are – but seems curiously incomplete with the seating on just two sides behind the batsman (called ‘the batter’), so that when he hits a six – or whatever they call it – he is unlikely to kill anyone (inside the stadium at least). This has at least one clear advantage over cricket, where to avoid risk of injury a live audience has to be so far back as to need binoculars to see much of the action. With the words of Laurence from the night before in my head I am very much aware that all this speaks to the American soul like a cricket pitch or a football ground does to most Englishmen. Indeed, Roger Kahn, the dean of American sports writers, goes further: ‘The ball field itself is a mystic creation, the Stonehenge of America.’ Heavy.

  Then everybody stands up, and they play the national anthem. I wasn’t expecting that, and it’s not the last time American patriotic displays will take me by surprise. We only play the national anthem at international games. Here they play it before every game, the way they fly the Stars and Stripes all year round. They did it before 9/11, but they do it even more now. Most of the crowd sing along, some with their hands on their chests. I stand and smile and remind myself that over here we Brits can rely on a residual goodwill towards us as a ‘loyal ally’, even those of us who though
t all along Bush’s war in Iraq was cynical, stupid and probably illegal, and Tony Blair weak and foolish to go along with it. I remind myself I’m just here to watch the baseball.

  As the two teams are introduced individually on huge billboard-sized screens opposite, they don’t just tells us their names, they give us little behavioural tips too, like: ‘If you throw things onto the pitch, you will be arrested’ (fair enough, should be made more clear at football games too) but I can’t see ‘Don’t use bad language!’ getting anything but a ‘Bronx cheer’ from a footie crowd in Britain, the origin of that little expression (the noise of disapproval made by New York Yankees fans) showing that baseball fans at least once upon a time had attitude too. The English-speaking players’ words are subtitled in Spanish, and one or two of them even add a gracias after their ‘thank you’. Spanish-speaking players speak Spanish, with subtitles in English! And even the coach finishes off with a spoken, ‘Thanks, gracias.’ De nada, de nada. America is slowly imperceptibly mutating from within.

  One element of its soul, however, remains unchanged: an unrestrained commitment to commercialism. The loudspeakers have not long finished introducing the teams and the first innings is just getting underway when they burst into life again: ‘Congratulations to the hungry fans in row 115 who’ve all won vouchers for Bubba Burger. Just take your tickets to the franchise to claim!’ Note, now, this is during actual play. Do that in a cricket game in England and people would tut-tut alarmingly at the bad manners, do it in the middle of a football match and, far from queuing up for ‘Bubba Burgers’ the crowd would probably hurl food at the screen. That is if they noticed at all. Because that’s another thing: at a soccer game – there, okay, I said the funny ‘s’ word – fans are committed; apart from the few wallies up in the corporate entertainment seats, everyone in the ground is concentrating on the game, their only diversion being to sing or chant in support of their own team and occasionally hurl taunts at the opposing supporters. There’s a chant here – ‘Let’s go, Mets!’ – but it’s pre-recorded and booms out to a rhythmic beat from the loudspeakers at sporadic intervals in a mostly vain attempt to get the supporters to join in. And parents may approve, but it lacks the irony-laden exchanges familiar to British football: ‘You’re supposed to be at home’, and the retort, ‘We forgot that you were here’, not to mention that Falstaffian old favourite, ‘Your support is fucking shit.’