BEGGARS, BUD & BURGERS
Vancouver has a peculiar relationship with smoking. By law all smokers have to stand on the street and be at least six metres from any doorway. Beaches and parks are completely cigarette free, but you can go into certain coffee shops and smoke marijuana to your heart’s content. I’d found one of these cafes quite easily by Googling ‘where to find ganja in Vancouver’ and printing off a map, on which a red line led me directly from the hotel on Alberni to the Amsterdam Cafe on Hastings Street.
It was far easier finding the cafe than it was finding some weed to put in the wide array of bongs and pipes and pothead paraphernalia on sale. In a part of Canada famed for its BC Bud, the actual sale of marijuana is illegal and therefore it is up to the user to track it down. This was my quandary as I shared a table with a likely looking character dressed up as a Hell’s Angel in a wheelchair.
“Motorbike accident?” I ventured, as an ice-breaker.
“Nope,” replied Grizzly Adams.
“Nice weather, huh?”
“Nope.”
“You from round here?”
“Nope.”
“Ahum,” I eyed the fat joint in his hand, “Any idea where I can get some of that?”
“Nope.”
“Well …. Erm … Would you mind if I had a go on your joint?”
“I don’t share!” he growled back, destroying any semblance of the communal hippy mantra in one short sentence; the whiff of Woodstock long gone.
So it was with some dejection that I sloped back outside and figured out that being a smoker, cast out onto the street, pretty much consigned to the gutter, immediately attracts the hobos, and, as if on cue, along came Gordy, a Bosnian Serb refugee from a village outside Sarajevo with a harmonica and an expression that suggested he’d spent the afternoon in a pub.
“Hey! Where you from, man?”
“England.”
“England!” he shouted, “Get a load of this, man!” and with that he launched into a rendition of a Beatles number, every now and then breaking off to bellow out, “Get back! Get back! Get back to where you once belonged!”
I hoped that wasn’t some sort of dark Balkan joke and when he took a breather, I posed the question, “You know where can I get some weed?”
“Weed? You mean bud?”
“Yep.”
“Give me the dough and I’ll sort you out, man. You trust me, don’t you?”
“Sure.”
“Hey man, I’m gonna give you my harmonica, just so’s you know I’ll be back, ok?”
“Just like the Beatles, eh?”
Nonplussed, he disappeared with my cash and I studied his mouth organ, which had ‘Gordy’ etched onto the wood paneling. Five minutes later he shuffled round the corner again, true to his word, and I disappeared into the café to roll up. But in doing so, and by using tobacco to mix with the green, I had committed the cardinal Canadian sin as a waiter with the nasal sense of a basset hound suddenly screamed, “Who’s smoking tobacco in here?!”
Having been in Canada for all of three hours, I’d already broken the no-smoking-fags-inside law and was thrown out onto the street where I carried on puffing away and heard then caught sight of Gordy in his de rigeur ex-Yugoslav, knee-length, black leather jacket, entertaining a bemused couple at a bus stop with Hey Jude.
*
Nine mile long Gabriola Island, just off Vancouver Island, which is bigger than Scotland, was a breath of fresh air after the dust and sands and summer inferno of Saudi where I had spent the previous six months, and one late afternoon, in a kayak, bobbing about on the Pacific Ocean, I asked the instructor if she’d ever seen a whale, and in 300 metres of water she told me that just last year a pod of Orcas had swum beneath their tiny vessels, a jet black fin, a meter high, had swept past her kayak before being attracted by something way more tasty in the form of tubby seals basking on rocks, which the Orcas then circled repeatedly; slowly at first, then gathering speed; closing the noose; the seals going crazy, barking and yelping in abject fear; before the sleek black and white whales picked them off, one by one; playing with them, tossing them in the air and then gorging on their blubber for supper.
There were bears too, thousands of them in western Canada, swimming the gap to Gabriola, and so many in number that they turn up in the Whistler Mountain resort (which had just hosted the 2010 winter Olympics) and where I went to spend a few days with a couple of itinerant Czechs. The bears don’t come to ski, but to forage in the trash cans, and are so prevalent that official advice is handed out to visitors: Don’t run! Don’t look a bear in the eye! Don’t get between a bear and its cubs! Don’t climb trees – that’s what bears do!
*
“Sir! Sir! Excuse me, sir!”
I turned to see a stick-thin black lady arrowing towards me, pulling a plastic bag over her head against the rain that was teeming down onto the concourse of Vancouver’s Pacific Central Station, putting out the fires that had raged all summer long throughout the interior of British Columbia.
“Sir!” she screeched again, despite her nose now being six inches from mine. “Sir! You gotta smoke, sir?”
“Sure,” I smiled, enjoying the drawn out, rounded emphasis she was putting on the ‘o’ in smoke, and I got a shy, toothy grin in return.
Her tiny fingers looked like chickens’ feet from a Chinese street food stall and they trembled as I lit her cigarette. She was a crack-head or a smack-head, probably both, and while she inhaled her attention was suddenly seized by another guy hurrying to shelter against the downpour.
“Sir! Excuse me, sir! Got any change, sir?”
Canadian beggars, I was soon to learn, were way more polite than their counterparts south of the North American divide.
The border, marked by Zero Avenue, lining the 49th Parallel at Blaine, was cool and wet. The American guards were friendly and as one fingerprinted me, the other quizzed me gently about my trip to the US of A. I was vaguely concerned about the visa to Saudi Arabia occupying a full page in my passport but Officer Starsky seemed more concerned that I was travelling by Greyhound.
“You’re not gonna rent a car?” he asked, kind of worried for me.
“Oh no,” I said. “I like the bus.”
They laughed sympathetically and I was in to the US of A.
The bus dropped me off at Bellingham and I took a room at Motel 6 (happily not averse to smokers), deadbeat from a few nights on the Canadian tiles.
There was a pool and a sign next to it ordering: ‘No Horseplay!’ which I assumed was aimed at passing cowboys and somewhat more chipper than the signposts I'd seen in Vancouver with severe warnings of ‘No Idling’. So, after a dip in the water, steaming from the pouring rain, I sat in my room and checked out US TV, which transmits in a language that can only be termed ‘hyper-babble’.
This trip was the first in years where I’d been able to travel and use my native tongue. It came as a pleasant surprise and was a real novelty not having to pluck up the courage to ask something in a foreign language and no need for a phrasebook, although the speed of American English did take some getting used to and initially my brain was running in overdrive, struggling to keep up.
One TV channel was showing what I took to be homosexual pornography involving two men, going by the names of Crazy Horse and Dirty Dick Carson, writhing about in just skimpy underpants and kinky knee-high boots, cheered on by a frenzied, salivating male crowd dotted with one or two women who looked like men. After a few minutes, watching goggle-eyed, I realised that it was in fact a re-run of a 1970s all-in wrestling match.
David Letterman came up next with a heroically stoic Michael Douglas discussing his battle with cancer. Then CNN’s Wolf Blitzer bawled out at me, “Bin Laden could well be in the deep freeze!” Well, why the hell didn’t you tell us that nine years ago, Wolf? A whole lot of trouble could have been avoided! This groundbreaker was followed by a reporter putting a different spin on things with, “The truth is that Al-Qaeda is at war with Islam and we’re getting the spill-over.” I had the impression that in his keenness to get the words out at warp-speed, he was confusing religion with British Petroleum.
America’s Most Wanted came on and when each and every Dead or Alive fugitive turned out to be a Saudi I switched off and slept amid deep dreams, which somewhat worryingly featured Dirty Dick Carson, Mecca, Dick Cheney, Rin Tin Tin, Donald Duck (or, was it Trump?) and George Bush’s wife, whose name escapes me, although she only had a minor role.
The next morning, while a guy (who looked as though he could feature on the FBI’s most wanted list) cleaned my room, I was standing out on the balcony sipping a coffee when a car pulled into the parking lot below. All of a sudden it was dramatically penned in either end by two police cars, lights flashing, cops leaping out of each vehicle, guns drawn, and ordering the man to “Raise your hands above your head! Get out of the car real slow!” and I stood there thinking, ‘Wow, it really is like the movies over here.’ Once the felon had been handcuffed, read his rights and bundled into a back seat, one of the cops sauntered over, looked up at me and said, “Hi. Sorry to bother you, sir.”
“No problem,” I told him, reckoning that I could easily get a walk-on part in Chips.
Bellingham, just north of the Chuckanut Mountains, has a sea-faring history thanks to its easy passage into the Juan de Fuca Straits which lead through the Inside Passage, along the Canadian west coast to Alaska, and a ferry still plies the route today. The town is also home to the longest-running peace vigil in the United States, begun 48 years ago by Howard and Rosemary Harris, who continue to smoke the pipe of peace every Friday from 4 to 5 pm. Christ knows why.
*
Slowly, but surely, burgers came into view, appearing on every menu I perused. Heck! I saw Fat Burger, Burger Lounge, Burger Land, Bob’s Brew & Burger, Emporium Burger, Jack Burger, and Jack In The Box Burger, whilst, veering way off topic, I also read about a gay and lesbian alcoholics anonymous in the Bellingham Herald newspaper.
Only the Kyoto Steakhouse, where I'd gone to escape the latest downpour, seemed never to have heard of burgers. Here a smart-ass in a chef's hat did some sort of knife-wielding trick and chopped up the beef and cooked it in front of us on a hot-plate that had already set fire to my newspaper, much to the amusement of a mother and daughter combo to my left. When I told them where I came from they didn't speak to me again.
Thanks to the sixth sense of a dope-head I scored some weed from a guy optimistically selling twigs (Why? I’ll never know) outside the Horseshoe Diner, a timeless piece of Americana, and so I dexterously rolled one up in a bathroom cubicle. Job done, and puffing on the joint, I wandered downhill toward the docks, which were empty, not a boat in sight, and later I grinned sloppily as the white Jimi Hendrix (aka Randy Nelsen) thrashed out Voodoo Chile at the Wild Buffalo Bar, which was so much fun that I ended up in the same venue the following night and watched reggae meister Clinton Fearon groove the crowd, smoking outside in between sets with a lumberjack just out of jail, and watching the cop car K9 harass a drunkard trying to ride a monocycle.
The next day I headed out of town and took a walk through the back woods, fingers crossed that I wouldn’t meet any gun-toting psychos out there, finally stumbling across civilization again in the form of neat, wooden all-American homes, tidy gardens without fences, and as I mused that this must be a nice place to grow up in, I came across a bus stop and lay down on a soft grass verge before a bus surprisingly turned up with only a young black girl on it, driven by a black man, and when the girl got off she cooed a very sweet “thank you” to the driver.
School had just started after the summer break and I mused that it must be tough for kids in America going in every day with the thought nagging at the back of their mind that one of their classmates may gun them down with an automatic weapon; a thought compounded by an article in USA Today that very day: ‘Oklahoma: Bray – A 13 year old boy is in juvenile custody after being arrested with a loaded hand-gun at Bray Doyle Public School.’ And in fact that polite little girl probably hadn’t even been at school because the front page headline in the Bellingham Herald told me, ‘Ferndale Teachers’ Strike Drags On.’ And the new term was only a week old.
The driver swivelled round in his seat and asked, “Where the hell you from?” before giving me an entertaining and informative guided tour of suburbia and the green and leafy Washington State University campus, dropping me off in town and asking if I needed any help.
“I think I’m alright, thanks mate. I’m just wandering about.”
He nodded his head and said, “Cool.”
Yes, sir. Kool and the Gang, my man.
*
Moving on, chasing the Autumn sun, I spent $124 on a one-way Hound down to Sacramento, transferring in Seattle for what should have been a two hour break that turned into five hours, and so I moseyed down to the Pacific through an eerily deserted downtown in mid-week to watch the Rockies drop into the ocean, no Bill Gates in sight, but I did walk by the HQ of Real Player, passing coffee shop after coffee shop, finally succumbing to a latte on Alaskan Way where the begging really started.
“Hey!” One guy shouted from underneath a cowboy hat, not even bothering to get up from the bench he was sprawled on. “Hey! You! Gotta dollar? Got any change!” I ignored him, and, still seated, he bellowed, “Potatohead! I’m talking to you! Gotta dollar!”
Now that's what you call dossing.
In the line-up for the bus a dreadlocked, polite, older, black man bummed a smoke and as I handed it over he pulled out an ID card and held it up like a cop. I thought he was gonna bust me for either making charitable donations (any form of welfare state being the anti-thesis of American politicians) or for being a mere 5.97583 metres from a doorway, but he said, “You did a good thing there - I’m a vet” and his ID turned out to verify him as a US army veteran.
Watching this interchange, a guy sitting cross-legged at our feet, also in the queue, leaped up and asked if I had another smoke, and so we stood there like some sort of spontaneous vagrants’ convention and the cross-legged guy, John as it turned out, who was swilling something from a Coke bottle that wasn’t Coke, shouted, “I was in the Service too! A three star general once gave me a ride in his chopper!” which prompted the vet to move quickly on, a wink of thanks to me, and John squinted, his face all screwed up like a paper bag, and said, “Where the hell are you from?”
“England.”
“England! You like Iron Maiden? Judas Priest? Man, I love that music. Hey! You smoke bud?”
“Now and then.”
“We’re gonna smoke together, me and you, when we get to Portland. I’ve got some great bud with me, man. You ever been to Alaska … I mean Australia?”
That was something to look forward to and the Greyhound (more like a two-legged daschund) eventually got going, steering us past Tacoma as the sun set on Washington State, tingeing the glaciers pink on 14,441 foot, volcanic Mount Rainier to the west, rising simultaneously in Vladivostok, Tacoma’s twin city, 4,700 miles to the west.
Portland wasn’t far, only 140 miles south, with a two hour rest stop, so it wasn’t long before we were bounding off and John was rummaging through a garbage container on the station’s forecourt looking for something to make into a bong. He gave a shriek of delight when he found a beer can, and with his Swiss Army knife he bored a hole into the aluminum, pushed in a clump of weed and lit it. We were in full view of people going in and out of the station as well as any passing vehicles concerned with upholding law and order.
“Erm, John,” I ventured, “Don’t you reckon we should go somewhere less obvious?”
“Oh, you think so?”
“Yeah. We look like a couple of crackheads.”
“Ooh. Ok.”
So he un-crossed his legs and we found a spot, vaguely hidden behind a couple of empty barrels of oil, and took turns at blasts on the can. Then a ginger hippy showed up out of nowhere, looking like he’d walked off the Walton’s set, and asked for a hit and we stood around nicely stoned, chit-chatting about this and that when John said, “You gotta a dollar I could have?”
“No,” the redheaded guy replied despondently, “Geez, I was gonna ask if you had one.”
Back outside the station I guzzled on a water fountain and straightening up a figure loomed over me, right in my face, demanding rather than asking, “Gotta smoke?” Feeling zippy and benevolent, despite the lack of a polite please, I gave him one.
“Gotta dollar?” was the inevitable follow-up.
“Nope.”
“Fuck you!”
John’s chuckles came out of the shadows where he sat, back against a wall, cross-legged.
“Welcome to America! Where you headin’ anyways?”
“Lake Tahoe.”
“Oh yeah? I’ve heard there’s good money to be made there.”
“How’s that?”
“On the street.”
“What, begging?”
He flinched a little, “You could put it that way” before perking up again, “15 to $20 an hour, I heard!”
And it was then that I realised that America’s 100% capitalist credo was based on greed from the bottom up.
*
I woke in the dark in Medford, Oregon with a sense of disappointment because I’d missed the unmissable crossroads of Wanker’s Corner (no shit) at about midnight and the intriguing town of Weed at about 3am where a friend had asked me to steal him a road sign.
Medford was home to the Ginger Rogers’ Theatre - she was born here, as was the high jumper Dick ‘Flop’ Fosbury, wrestler Les Gutches and Bill Bowerman who would go on to co-found Nike - and this was also where John disembarked, bear-hugging me in the town through which Bear Creek flowed.
Pretty certain that my new-found buddy had barely two dimes to rub together, his bottle of hooch had run dry, and we’d smoked his supply of bud in Portland, I was surprised by his answer to my question about what he was going to do in Medford.
“I’m here to party, man! Hey, you got any change, you know, for the smoke?”
Redding was next up, as the sun rose, and the driver only gave us a 15 minute break after 8 hours on board.
“You’ve got to give us longer than that,” I protested. “And surely by law you have to rest for longer?”
“15 minutes is all you’re getting! And don’t none of yous go over to Jack in the Box, ’cause I ain’t waitin’!”
Even at this early hour, he clearly recognised his passengers need for a burger fix and so in Jack's place we filed into the gas station to buy sandwiches filled with processed cheese: the second most important item in the American diet.
Back on the bus I found a black girl, about 14 years old, as my new companion in the adjacent seat. Her big white eyes peered at me while her head pointed straight ahead, twisting away when I looked at her, darting down to her feet when I said 'hi', a smile creeping onto her mouth and a whispered 'hi' in return. Once I’d finished my breakfast of processed cheese sandwich, jumbo pack of potato chips and three salami sticks at a speed that would have left even post-steroids Ben Johnson in the starting blocks (early morning manic munchy attack) I ripped open a pack of Reese’s peanut butter cups and offered her one, which she took very carefully, said thank you and nibbled on like a bird (she got half way through it before putting the rest in her pocket, I noticed), whereas mine were devoured in a couple of mouthfuls.
"What's your name?" I asked with difficulty as the peanut butter had all-but cemented my teeth together.
"Dina."
“Where are you going?”
“California.”
“Aren’t we in California?”
"Oh, yes," she giggled.
Clearly, I’d have to drag it out of her, and it took a fair few miles. Bless her.
“Bin stayin’ with my Grandma while school’s out … Goin’ back to Momma in San Francisco.”
I didn’t ask what had happened to her Dad, and at the revelation that I was from England, her eyes grew as big as saucers, and she sniggered, “Oh, that’s why you talk so funny.”
"Can you understand me?"
"Sometimes."
"What do you know about England?"
"You gotta Queen ... and I seen the big clock on TV."
With that she nodded off to sleep with a soft smile on her face.
That famously blue Californian sky appeared, leaving the Oregon rain behind, and the highway crossed enormous olive groves and fields of wheat; the state’s Central Valley and agricultural heartland, yellow and dry, stretching up to a mountain range on our right that we’d been following all morning - the Western Cascades, which include Mounts St Helens, Hood, Baker, Shasta, Rainier. This is the range that runs north to south out of Canada and accounts for the high levels of rain and snowfall in the Pacific North West.
From my seat at the window I began to notice that the size of an average American vehicle is truly staggering. Michael Moore attributes this to Bill Clinton, who, when President and faced by a belligerent Green lobby, passed laws punishing small cars for their polluting emissions, but let off scot-free the huge, monstrous sports utility vehicles and pick-ups you see today.
There was acre after acre of lots selling hundreds, if not thousands, of motor homes, just one of which could have housed five Hong Kong families; and other places with row after row of jeep type things waiting to get out onto that highway and blast oxygen into history.
In Vancouver I’d seen the same brutally over-sized vehicles, with meter high wheels, used as run-arounds, which I find ironic when California enacts similarly draconian anti-smoking laws to British Columbia, where the same self-righteous pillocks will persecute those smoking a cigarette and then climb into a vehicle causing infinitely more damage to the environment. The average car dumps five tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually and will pollute more in a day than a smoker will in a lifetime.
At noon we finally pulled into Sacramento’s Greyhound bus station, located slap-bang in the middle of the Californian state capital, within spitting distance of the Governor’s own miniature White House. After an afternoon there I had discovered that more than a few citizens would like nothing better than to spit on the incumbent.
“Gotta dollar?” Mr Inyerface demanded as soon as I stepped outside into brilliant sunshine.
“No, but I bet he has,” I replied, pointing to Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger’s mansion.
Apparently Arnie – a self-proclaimed eco-warrior - doesn’t enjoy living in Sacramento and commutes daily, by private jet, from his home in Los Angeles. In fact, Ronald Reagan, in the 1960s, was the last Governor to actually live in the state capital.
There was an elderly and portly lady selling hot dogs in front of the Capitol building, so I stopped and bought one and she led forth about the chronic economic crisis Schwarzenegger has presided over since taking office back in 2003. Despite the state being the 10th largest economy in the world, the budget deficit now stands at $26.3 billion and Arnie’s answer is that big American no-no: higher tax. When that wasn’t enough to reduce the debt, he began laying off state employees and cutting salaries by 5% (against rising inflation) for those still in work. The fifth day of the week was to be unpaid and (from the Governor’s very own website) a saving of $1.0444 billion was made by eliminating the California Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids programs. Yet, even these anti-social measures would only save $4.6 billion, so he’s still got a way to go.
“But there’s plenty of money here,” the hot dog lady summed up, “They just don’t share it out.”
‘Good luck Arnie,’ I thought as I made my down to the river, ‘And by the way, your movies suck.’
There was some sort of Civil War re-enactment going on in the old part of town, with Confederate soldiers riding in a wide line on sweating bay horses up a dusty street with two statuesque Daisy Duke type chicks following in a horse and cart. Hot damn, now I know how the west was won! A Pony Express office had been rebuilt, the forerunner to today’s US Postal Service, and gunshots (I prayed they were blanks) were let off.
A woman, who wasn’t part of the act, came flying out of a doorway screaming, “Yeah! That’s you, you slut! You fucking slut! I’m gonna getcha one of these days; just you fucking wait and see!” Maybe she was auditioning for The Wire but had turned up on the wrong set.
The queue for the bus was snaking out of the door when I got back, so I stood in a 'safe smoking zone' and watched a cop on a bicycle ride by then point at a young black guy holding a skateboard to my right. The cop shouted something incoherent at him.
“Motherfucker,” the black man muttered and I asked what the problem was.
“Nuttin’,” he answered, “He don’t like me, that’s all.”
“Oh, life can be like that, huh? Anyway … ahum … you know where I can get some weed,” I asked hopefully.
“You mean herb?” he squinted, suspicion in the slits of his eyes.
“Herb, yeah.”
“How much you want? It’s ten bucks a bag.”
“I’ll take two bags.”
“Follow me.”
We went into the toilets, me in one cubicle, and him in the next. American public toilets are surprisingly open to the outside world. The walls aren’t more than five foot high, there’s a huge gap at floor and ceiling level, and a wide crack between the door and the jamb.
“Let’s see your money,” he said, with his nose peeking over the partition.
“Let’s see the herb,” I countered, on tiptoe, wise in the ways of dealers making a fast buck.
We did a little swap of necessities. With both parties satisfied, he then wrapped the merchandise in a newspaper and as we walked back out into the bus station he said by means of a cover story, “And I want you to carefully read that article there.”
The queue still wasn’t going anywhere and the Greyhound customer service centre was completely devoid of any staff to answer my query about the chances of any chance of service that week, so I scooted round to the park area opposite Schwarzenegger’s white house, laid down on the grass, with half an eye on the street where the bus might arrive, rolled a joint and browsed through the newspaper thinking, ‘Hmm ... good herb, bruv.’
‘California state authorities estimate marijuana could bring in nearly $1.5bn a year in much needed tax revenue if it were legalised. This has led to increased support among the state’s voters for the full legalisation of the drug.’
Now that is something we can agree on, Arnie.
Eventually the bus came in, four hours late, and thanks to the warm weather I couldn’t help but notice the tattoos (later, I heard them described as ‘tramp stamps’) liberally embellishing the necks, ankles, thighs, feet, arms and boobs of the female forms waiting in line. It was an awful sight.
*
As dusk fell we pulled into Truckee, my destination for the night, and I trudged doggedly up the road with my bag on my shoulder to find a bed that would be the first in 36 hours. Set back in some woodland, I spied a likely looking place, did a quick check for gun-toting psychos – an image of Jack Nicholson in my mind - spotted none, so went in.
“Do you have any rooms free?” I asked the receptionist.
“No,” the wretched hag squeaked, “we don’t. You have to pay for them!”
After I’d coughed up $150, the hotel turned out to be no-smoking and then, after I’d wrestled the fly trap off the window, pretty much breaking it as I did so, intent on defying regulations and smoking with my head stuck outside, I noticed a sign on the back of the room door stating that any evidence of smoking would result in a $500 fine. I wondered what the cost of a new fly trap would be.
Intrigued by the name, I discovered that the town of Truckee was so-called after a native Indian, the father of Chief Winnemucca, by all accounts a friendly fella who greeted the growing hordes of newcomers looking to ransack his tribe’s land for personal gain, no doubt raping a few squaws in the process, with the greeting ‘trokay!’ meaning ‘everything is OK’. Judging by the greeting I’d got at hotel reception, the modern-day natives hadn’t progressed far from their ancestors.
In 1886, the USA as a whole was conducting a virulent anti-Chinese campaign - pretty rich after Chinese labor gangs had built the railroads across the nation - and Truckee duly kicked out all of its 1,400 Orientals who were becoming successful businesspeople in their own right, which is satirical in comparison to the present day when the Chinese have almost single-handedly undermined the American economy and are now baling it out.
The morning brought another bus and I got chatting to a fellow passenger whose mother had been nanny to Mick Jagger’s kids and he pointed out the lakeshore house where Godfather II had been filmed. At our first change we went into a small store, packed with holidaymakers on Labor Day weekend and stocking up on the commodity that I’d read about in so many American novels and is essential to every driver in the USA – beer. Henry Chinaski never drove without one. Nor, it seemed, did this lot.
In the end it took three different buses to cover 40 miles to the resort town of South Lake Tahoe, and the last bus, an open-topped and gaudy red antique with wooden seats, had obviously been retired from Disneyland. We pulled over to pick up a man who took an age to attach his bicycle to a grille at the front. Finally he got on and puffed, “Geez, there sure are a lot of squirrels squashed on them roads”, as if that was the reason he’d decided to take the bus. Five minutes later he got off and forgot his bike and when a few miles down the road this was pointed out to the driver, he took his hands off the wheel, with a precipice to his left plummeting into Emerald Bay, threw them up in the air, and shouted, “Well, what the hell can I do about it!”
We drove up and down Squaw Valley, location of the 1960 winter Olympics back in the day when skis were made of wood. Nobody got on and nobody got off, but 150 years ago the valley would have been awash with prospectors, horses, covered wagons, saloons and loose women because this was where one of the first significant gold deposits had been unearthed, sparking gold fever and the foundation for America’s wealth and future power; and also where Charlie Chaplin had come in 1923 to make his movie Gold Rush, lodging himself and crew in Truckee, no doubt paying for the rooms too. In the end, for reasons not apparent, he abandoned everything shot in Truckee bar the opening scenes and filmed the rest (the story was supposed to be taking place in Alaska) in his studio back in sunny Los Angeles. The movie, released in the 1920s, went on to become a worldwide smash hit and made $4.25 million.
*
Lake Tahoe is pretty much split down the middle: half in California (no smoking) and half in Nevada (smoking), so I knew exactly which 50% I was going to stay in. On arrival in South Lake I eyed a map at the bus stop and decided to walk the two miles down to the lakeshore and the state line that would get me into good old lung-busting Nevada.
It was a pine-lined route, interspersed with diners – taco, burger, burrito, burger, sushi, burger, pizza, burger, fried chicken, burger and another burger – then from behind a tree a guy appeared and said, “Gotta dollar?” and when I laughed and said no, he added, “I haven’t eaten for 2 days.”
“Do you smoke weed?” I asked.
“Yeah,” his eyes lit up in anticipation of a joint.
“Do you sell it?”
“No.”
“Why not? If you provide a useful service then I am more than willing to part with some of my hard earned cash to help you out. If not, then you’ll get nothing because you are offering me jack shit. This, after all, is the land of business.”
He stood, slack-jawed, watching me walk away and didn’t even give me so much as a “fuck you!” Hell, I was trying to stimulate the stagnant economy, not encourage loafers!
Once I hit the state of Nevada, spotted a likely establishment and walked through the doors, it took a further 20 minutes to locate the reception desk of the Horizon Casino and Hotel, a monolithic structure surrounded by about five other identical ventures. I worked my way across acre upon acre of slot machines, roulette and poker tables.
The large and friendly lady who gave me a room said, “I just lurve that accent. Keep on talkin’”, finally handing over a key that opened a door into a bedroom that looked like almost every other hotel room in the world, fragrantly perfumed with the aroma of fags.
After a day spent by the pool reading USA Today (Washington, Seattle – Police have recaptured a burglary suspect who escaped an arrest by driving off in a patrol car… Police found the man near his house) and peeping over the pages at the chicks readjusting their plastic boobs, I found an advert for improvised comedy at 9pm in my casino. When I turned up at the appointed time I walked into an empty theatre, not a comedian or audience member in sight, so I sat down and waited ten minutes before realising that the show doesn’t go on, told myself a joke and left.
The next day, hung-over from the free whisky every gambler is plied with, I took a walk down to the lake and got annoyed by the plethora of motor boats and jet skis spewing petrol out into its waters. This was just another form of driving where the lake replaces tarmac.
Although it was picturesque, I wasn’t particularly enamored by Tahoe. There was something in the air, a bad vibe that turned me off it. America was angry, the economy sliding down the pan. After the euphoric optimism of Obama’s election, when he was expected to wave a magic wand and fix everything over night, the Americans were discovering that life ain’t like the movies, and Barrack, even though he had two cute daughters, a stunning wife and a dog called Bo, wasn’t going to do it single-handedly in a matter of weeks. The legacy of eight years of gun-toting, dead or alive, George Bush mark II - surely the most cretinous individual to hold office anywhere and more inept dog-catcher than leader of the free world - was far-reaching and deeply entrenched, and this was kind of confirmed by a chat with a Philipino waiter in a bar of the Mont Bleu casino.
“The police were called here 14 times last night.”
“Oh yeah, why was that?”
“Fighting.”
As I looked around at the throngs of Labor Dayers feeding their salaries into slot machines, which are even embedded in the bar counter, I noticed that this was an almost exclusively all-white environment, doused in drugs, booze and losers; the non-whites were represented by Asians and Hispanics working in the service industry. I finished my drink, took in a bar owned by Van Halen's Sammy Hagar, where I slung back a final whisky with a couple of hot but empty headed chicks called Candy and Crystal, and called it a night.
In an attempt to find the hotel lobby, a runty guy deliberately bumped into me. I carried on but he didn’t, and instead he came after me and grabbed my shoulder, “Don’t bump me motherfucker!” This made a change from “Gotta dollar?” but I was grumpy and now annoyed and so we eyeballed each other for a few seconds and then his girlfriend came up and lashed out at my face with pink talons. I looked behind them where a group of their friends stood, more than willing to help him out, so I shrugged, held up fingers in Churchill’s V and walked away.
The South Tahoe Express minibus took us through the rocky brown Sierra Nevada Mountains into a 1,400 metre high valley known as the Great Basin filled with grazing cattle and memories of the cowboy films that had held my attention so firmly as a youth. Nevada state capital Carson City went by and soon we were deposited at Reno airport where hippies were saying extravagant goodbyes more reminiscent of al fresco sex following the Burning Man festival: an annual gathering of 50,000 people in the Nevada desert, run on solar energy and a gift economy, ie. you buy a ticket and everything inside is inclusive. Apparently there are a lot of drugs plus a lot of naked liberalism, great bands and ... damn, I'd just missed it!
Reno, population 220,000 (home to Sharon Stone, Creedence Clearwater Revival drummer Doug Clifford, and good old Randy Messenger, a baseball player) is a mini version of Las Vegas, the big brother that lies 335 miles further south, and a whole different ball game to Tahoe. It became known in the 1930s as an easy place to get a quick divorce in an age when the puritanical whiff of the Pilgrim Fathers still hung heavy, but nowadays down at heel came immediately to mind as the taxi took me to the El Dorado Hotel & Casino (by now I’d worked out that casinos were the best and cheapest places to stay). Boarded up storefronts, fenced off derelict motels, dark bars with silhouettes of drinkers, vagrants, ne’er-do-gooders and streets all-but empty of vehicles, a trickle of people wandering through them. The Amtrak station looked as though it hadn’t seen a train since Cary Grant was last here.
‘My kind of town,’ I thought as I went in search of a cigarette shop. ‘Smoking permitted, anywhere.’
“Where are you from, mate?” I asked the guy who was tucking hungrily into a bowl of yellow rice behind the counter of his grocery store.
“India,” he munched.
“Oh yeah? You like cricket?”
“Cricket? Oh yes, sir.”
“I bet you don’t get much cricket on American TV, eh?”
“Cricket on American TV?” this puzzled him at first, but then he got it and let out a roar of laughter so loud that a pack of drunk hyenas couldn’t have matched, rice grains flying in all directions, especially towards my face and clean clothes.
“Hoooowahahahahahaha! Cricket … on …. American TV! Hoooo … wahahahahahahaha!”
It was the funniest joke he’d ever heard, even though it wasn’t a joke, and I could still hear him howling as I strolled up the road and under the arch that announced ‘Reno the Biggest Little City in the World’, and came across a busker standing there with a hang-dog expression, one tooth in his mouth and a battered guitar in his hands.
“Got any change?” he pleaded, as if on the verge of tears.
“Business bad?”
“Sucks man. Barely made a dollar all day.”
“Give us a tune then and I’ll cough up some cash.”
“Ooh, ok,” he seemed to be struggling with this concept and sought further help by adding, “Got any songs in mind?”
“How about a bit of Elvis?”
“Cool, I know some of that,” and as he set about Hound Dog, twanging away on an out of tune, three-stringed instrument, I realized exactly why business was so bad but chucked a dollar into his cardboard box anyway.
“Ain’t nothin’ but a …. Hey! Couldn’t you spare more than that!” He broke off strumming as I walked away with “Godamned jerk” ringing in my ears. He certainly did rudeness better than music.
An attack of the manic munchies came upon me and I grasped that the streets were probably deserted because you didn’t even have to leave the casinos as they were all inter-connected by a series of walkways. So, in search of steak, mashed potatoes and ice, I chose a random door and roamed through five different, albeit identically titanic gambling establishments, loving the music that blared from hidden speakers: Boogie Wonderland, Disco Inferno, Stayin’ Alive, Another One Bites the Dust, Stand By Me, and when I heard Gimme Shelter I thought, ‘Forget Mick and Keef, the Stones are all about Lisa Fisher.’
The restaurant I chose offered Surf ’n Turf with a lobster tail, the first time I’d ever eaten this crustacean (on consumption it tasted like a massive great shrimp), and it was served up by a retirement-approaching man who clearly didn’t enjoy his job. Along with the coffee, the atmosphere was dire and gloomy and tables were littered with overweight white retirees with nothing to say.
I’d begun to notice a lot of white males, perhaps recently made redundant from socially acceptable cubicle careers in insurance, banking and accountancy, now forced to work as ihop waiters or, if they put their backs into it, assistant managers, bus drivers and bartenders, resenting every second they were spending in the service industry. If the economy dives further – as Reno’s almost empty casinos seemed to indicate - they may even find themselves back in the turnip fields, getting their necks red.
*
In the US you go round in squares and rectangles, so it’s not easy to get lost, even after a long, post-lunch session in your room smoking the last of Tahoe’s finest bud. I found myself engaged in a sociological reccy through the Reno suburbs, thoroughly enjoying the leg stretch. I came across Herbie, the white beetle, parked up in a side street; a house that Hitchcock undoubtedly based one or two movies on, dead trees in the yard flinging ghoulish shadows onto the peeling clapboard; many houses with the stars and stripes fluttering from a flagpole out front; a man at a window with binoculars following my path down a street; an adult services store the size of a Wal-Mart; and a section of railroad on a grass verge where I sat to smoke and read that Chinese chain gangs had put down this track in 1871, connecting Reno to Virginia City, from where huge silver deposits were extracted that would fund the foundation of San Francisco. For sure, those Chinese were booted out of town as soon as the white man learned how to drive a train.
With the sun setting I wandered back into town, crossing the Truckee River that is more like a stream; the gambling dens 30 storey monoliths - Reno’s sole industry - rising up, layer after layer, like a stack of poker chips; a few people winning, the rest on a never-ending losing streak; the London Times reporting at the same time I was visiting that one in seven Americans now live in poverty; and when I got back onto the main drag I saw a long line of people, mostly punky-trendy youngsters trailing round a corner of the block and, going over to see what that was all about, a tough black guy sporting a large medallion started making his way towards me with a big smile on his face.
“Wanna ticket?”
“What for?”
“Smashing Pumpkins.”
I’d heard of them but couldn’t identify one of their songs, so when he said entry would set me back $100 I said I’d think about it and went back to the hotel for a shower and some food.
‘Hell,’ I thought, under the jet of hot water, ‘why not go? You never know, you might get lucky with a chick who has a Mohican and tattoos on her tits.’
An hour or so later I walked up the road and found the same guy, only to be told that he’d sold out. So I asked him the next question that was playing on my mind.
“Here, mate. Any idea where I can find some weed?”
“’Erb? Sure, just ask any of the brothers.”
With that I went off to look for a few brothers and found a sister who said it’d be a taxi ride, and not really wanting to end up in the gutter in the ghetto I thanked her kindly and wandered back to the concert venue where I was sure some of those punks would come up with something.
The audience had already been let in for the show and so I chatted with the scalper who was now asking every passer-by if they had any spares to sell him. Nobody did, so when I flagged down a likely looking hippy chap who said he could sort us out, the black market dealer, William, tagged along too and we took a pleasant walk by the river to where the local Herberts were hanging out, and, typical to stonedom throughout the world, it was a long and drawn out affair just to get hold of the dealer. In the end, three of us trooped off and Carlos the hippy finally got a connection on his cell phone to place the order.
“Who wants some?” he asked for the seventh time.
“I do,” said William, “And England here wants some too.”
Off we went and after 30 minutes walking round the Reno suburbs for the second time that day I said, “We’re gonna be fit after this, William.”
“No shit!” and he shouted out to Carlos, “Hey, if you don’t come up with the goods soon, I’m gonna kick your skinny white ass into your godamn Truckee river.”
“No sweat, man, we’re almost there.”
Twenty minutes later we sat down on the steps outside a condominium next to the bus station.
“Godamn, that’s the bus station! We’ve been going round in circles!” William shouted.
Needless to say, the dealer wasn’t at home, he’d be back in 10 minutes, a passage of time that in the world of whacky baccy means at least 30, which it turned out to be, and so while we waited I entertained them with a detailed account of how the Saudis execute criminals with a three foot sword, often in public, and the executioner (a full-time professional job) has to take more than one slice out of the neck because the spine prevents him getting a clean chop in one go, and every now and then William interjected with a wide-eyed “No shit, man!”
The dealer finally arrived with his girlfriend and a Big Kahuna burger and did the deal. So we rolled one up, said goodbye to Carlos and sat by the godamn Truckee River talking about this, that and the other, laughing our asses off, the neon of the city aglow in front of us. Round about midnight, William, a black marketeer of 30 years standing, had to scoot back to Berkeley on the Hound, not for a seminar, but in time for a concert the following day, and so we said our farewells and I summed up my options for the rest of my time in Reno; a flight to Seattle looming the following afternoon.
So where does any self-respecting, single, straight, non-gambling kind of guy go of an evening? To the Men’s Club, of course, and even Chinese President Jiang Zemin was there, sitting alone in the corner with his hands folded suspiciously over his groin area like a naughty schoolboy in the darkened lounge bar with its mini-skirted waitresses and strippers galore, from dusk til dawn.
When not shedding clothes on stage, the women work the floor, sitting on laps, gyrating on laps and attempting to lure us men into a “private booth” for what one pneumatic blonde described as “A trip to paradise and back.” Eyeballs soldered to her jugs, I could believe that, and when Maya, an ebony beauty from San Francisco, tried the same trick, I told her, “When I’m completely stoned, women aren’t my number one priority.” She liked that and settled back on my lap with a cigarette, and whispered, “I wanna smoke some dope an’ chill wit chu.”
With the aid of THC enhanced conversational powers, I started rabbitting on about Mike Tyson, beggars, the police, burgers, employment prospects for her in London (Stringfellows would snap her up) and Islam. During a pause, I checked, “You understand anything I’m saying?”
“Sometimes. But I gotta say, that is one hell of an accent,” and she called out to one of her friends to come over and have a listen too.
Later on, in between dances, she and I stood outside smoking a joint that I’d rolled in the toilet, and we had a short kiss before heading back inside where she bought me a shot of tequila and the DJ had to announce her name three times that she was next on stage before she languidly prised herself from the bar stool and strolled to work and I wiped away a tear of happiness inspired by her oh-so cute and cool charm.
Time flew, as it always does when fun is being had, and before I knew it the place was almost empty and the waitresses were cleaning up and the Pinacolada Song played as I made my way out.
We’d made a date to meet up in a restaurant (Reno never sleeps) in one of the casinos but I was fucked if I could find it and ended up in an El Dorado bar sitting with a DJ from Essex, England and a Filipino-American GI who had done three tours in Fallujah.
As I checked out later that morning and made my final walk across the casino floors, the Stones sang ‘Miss You’ and I thought, ‘Yeah, I’ll miss you too Reno’, and standing on the street I noticed a billboard advertising a Motown Disco - yet another event that I’d like to go to but never would - and so off I went, but I was called back by an elderly bell-hop who summoned a stretch limousine to take me to the airport. It was free but riding smoothly along I felt like a complete jerk and would have been way happier on the bus.
Because I had so much Reno weed left over, despite having given half of it to Maya, I had chuffed down about four joints that morning and as a result the flight was somewhat hazy, although I do remember sitting next to a woman who looked remarkably similar to an ex-girlfriend with a sexual predilection for dogs, and though I was sure I’d already gone through customs, a lady with a big friendly smile beckoned me over at Seattle airport. I was relieved to hear that she didn’t want to search my bags, more a search of my wallet, as she represented some charity or other and I listened patiently as she explained the plight of the people, whoever, wherever they were, and handed over a $10 bill.
“I just lurve your accent,” she told me, “Could listen to it all day.”
Back to the empty streets of Vancouver (No Idling!) and its dark and grimy bars; bars of despair that reeked of the 1970s and played the music to match; filled with people who had crossed half the earth and were now looking out at Asia and could only look back. It was still raining and the fires in the interior must have been well and truly out, then I was off on a long route via London to Dammam.
Things I’ve learned about America:-
1. Americans like to eat lettuce. Sometimes if you order a salad, all you get is a plate of lettuce.
2. Americans eat processed cheese with everything, except lettuce.
3. Burgers rule.
4. Cars are the be-all and end-all.
5. Obama has his back to the wall.
6. TV is more a vehicle for advertising than it is for shows.
7. Men are aggressive in manner and shout out questions expecting immediate response.
8. Men spit a lot, even on sides of swimming pools.
9. Money’s too tight to mention, because China’s got it.
10. There was always somebody asking for something for nothing – lack of welfare state, I guess. The US is all about the individual and anything remotely collective is seen as some form of socialism, even, God forbid, communism. You have to stand on your own two feet, screw the rest, or be trampled. Life is a competition, a survival of the fittest.
© Andrew Parker 20/10/2010
Vancouver has a peculiar relationship with smoking. By law all smokers have to stand on the street and be at least six metres from any doorway. Beaches and parks are completely cigarette free, but you can go into certain coffee shops and smoke marijuana to your heart’s content. I’d found one of these cafes quite easily by Googling ‘where to find ganja in Vancouver’ and printing off a map, on which a red line led me directly from the hotel on Alberni to the Amsterdam Cafe on Hastings Street.
It was far easier finding the cafe than it was finding some weed to put in the wide array of bongs and pipes and pothead paraphernalia on sale. In a part of Canada famed for its BC Bud, the actual sale of marijuana is illegal and therefore it is up to the user to track it down. This was my quandary as I shared a table with a likely looking character dressed up as a Hell’s Angel in a wheelchair.
“Motorbike accident?” I ventured, as an ice-breaker.
“Nope,” replied Grizzly Adams.
“Nice weather, huh?”
“Nope.”
“You from round here?”
“Nope.”
“Ahum,” I eyed the fat joint in his hand, “Any idea where I can get some of that?”
“Nope.”
“Well …. Erm … Would you mind if I had a go on your joint?”
“I don’t share!” he growled back, destroying any semblance of the communal hippy mantra in one short sentence; the whiff of Woodstock long gone.
So it was with some dejection that I sloped back outside and figured out that being a smoker, cast out onto the street, pretty much consigned to the gutter, immediately attracts the hobos, and, as if on cue, along came Gordy, a Bosnian Serb refugee from a village outside Sarajevo with a harmonica and an expression that suggested he’d spent the afternoon in a pub.
“Hey! Where you from, man?”
“England.”
“England!” he shouted, “Get a load of this, man!” and with that he launched into a rendition of a Beatles number, every now and then breaking off to bellow out, “Get back! Get back! Get back to where you once belonged!”
I hoped that wasn’t some sort of dark Balkan joke and when he took a breather, I posed the question, “You know where can I get some weed?”
“Weed? You mean bud?”
“Yep.”
“Give me the dough and I’ll sort you out, man. You trust me, don’t you?”
“Sure.”
“Hey man, I’m gonna give you my harmonica, just so’s you know I’ll be back, ok?”
“Just like the Beatles, eh?”
Nonplussed, he disappeared with my cash and I studied his mouth organ, which had ‘Gordy’ etched onto the wood paneling. Five minutes later he shuffled round the corner again, true to his word, and I disappeared into the café to roll up. But in doing so, and by using tobacco to mix with the green, I had committed the cardinal Canadian sin as a waiter with the nasal sense of a basset hound suddenly screamed, “Who’s smoking tobacco in here?!”
Having been in Canada for all of three hours, I’d already broken the no-smoking-fags-inside law and was thrown out onto the street where I carried on puffing away and heard then caught sight of Gordy in his de rigeur ex-Yugoslav, knee-length, black leather jacket, entertaining a bemused couple at a bus stop with Hey Jude.
*
Nine mile long Gabriola Island, just off Vancouver Island, which is bigger than Scotland, was a breath of fresh air after the dust and sands and summer inferno of Saudi where I had spent the previous six months, and one late afternoon, in a kayak, bobbing about on the Pacific Ocean, I asked the instructor if she’d ever seen a whale, and in 300 metres of water she told me that just last year a pod of Orcas had swum beneath their tiny vessels, a jet black fin, a meter high, had swept past her kayak before being attracted by something way more tasty in the form of tubby seals basking on rocks, which the Orcas then circled repeatedly; slowly at first, then gathering speed; closing the noose; the seals going crazy, barking and yelping in abject fear; before the sleek black and white whales picked them off, one by one; playing with them, tossing them in the air and then gorging on their blubber for supper.
There were bears too, thousands of them in western Canada, swimming the gap to Gabriola, and so many in number that they turn up in the Whistler Mountain resort (which had just hosted the 2010 winter Olympics) and where I went to spend a few days with a couple of itinerant Czechs. The bears don’t come to ski, but to forage in the trash cans, and are so prevalent that official advice is handed out to visitors: Don’t run! Don’t look a bear in the eye! Don’t get between a bear and its cubs! Don’t climb trees – that’s what bears do!
*
“Sir! Sir! Excuse me, sir!”
I turned to see a stick-thin black lady arrowing towards me, pulling a plastic bag over her head against the rain that was teeming down onto the concourse of Vancouver’s Pacific Central Station, putting out the fires that had raged all summer long throughout the interior of British Columbia.
“Sir!” she screeched again, despite her nose now being six inches from mine. “Sir! You gotta smoke, sir?”
“Sure,” I smiled, enjoying the drawn out, rounded emphasis she was putting on the ‘o’ in smoke, and I got a shy, toothy grin in return.
Her tiny fingers looked like chickens’ feet from a Chinese street food stall and they trembled as I lit her cigarette. She was a crack-head or a smack-head, probably both, and while she inhaled her attention was suddenly seized by another guy hurrying to shelter against the downpour.
“Sir! Excuse me, sir! Got any change, sir?”
Canadian beggars, I was soon to learn, were way more polite than their counterparts south of the North American divide.
The border, marked by Zero Avenue, lining the 49th Parallel at Blaine, was cool and wet. The American guards were friendly and as one fingerprinted me, the other quizzed me gently about my trip to the US of A. I was vaguely concerned about the visa to Saudi Arabia occupying a full page in my passport but Officer Starsky seemed more concerned that I was travelling by Greyhound.
“You’re not gonna rent a car?” he asked, kind of worried for me.
“Oh no,” I said. “I like the bus.”
They laughed sympathetically and I was in to the US of A.
The bus dropped me off at Bellingham and I took a room at Motel 6 (happily not averse to smokers), deadbeat from a few nights on the Canadian tiles.
There was a pool and a sign next to it ordering: ‘No Horseplay!’ which I assumed was aimed at passing cowboys and somewhat more chipper than the signposts I'd seen in Vancouver with severe warnings of ‘No Idling’. So, after a dip in the water, steaming from the pouring rain, I sat in my room and checked out US TV, which transmits in a language that can only be termed ‘hyper-babble’.
This trip was the first in years where I’d been able to travel and use my native tongue. It came as a pleasant surprise and was a real novelty not having to pluck up the courage to ask something in a foreign language and no need for a phrasebook, although the speed of American English did take some getting used to and initially my brain was running in overdrive, struggling to keep up.
One TV channel was showing what I took to be homosexual pornography involving two men, going by the names of Crazy Horse and Dirty Dick Carson, writhing about in just skimpy underpants and kinky knee-high boots, cheered on by a frenzied, salivating male crowd dotted with one or two women who looked like men. After a few minutes, watching goggle-eyed, I realised that it was in fact a re-run of a 1970s all-in wrestling match.
David Letterman came up next with a heroically stoic Michael Douglas discussing his battle with cancer. Then CNN’s Wolf Blitzer bawled out at me, “Bin Laden could well be in the deep freeze!” Well, why the hell didn’t you tell us that nine years ago, Wolf? A whole lot of trouble could have been avoided! This groundbreaker was followed by a reporter putting a different spin on things with, “The truth is that Al-Qaeda is at war with Islam and we’re getting the spill-over.” I had the impression that in his keenness to get the words out at warp-speed, he was confusing religion with British Petroleum.
America’s Most Wanted came on and when each and every Dead or Alive fugitive turned out to be a Saudi I switched off and slept amid deep dreams, which somewhat worryingly featured Dirty Dick Carson, Mecca, Dick Cheney, Rin Tin Tin, Donald Duck (or, was it Trump?) and George Bush’s wife, whose name escapes me, although she only had a minor role.
The next morning, while a guy (who looked as though he could feature on the FBI’s most wanted list) cleaned my room, I was standing out on the balcony sipping a coffee when a car pulled into the parking lot below. All of a sudden it was dramatically penned in either end by two police cars, lights flashing, cops leaping out of each vehicle, guns drawn, and ordering the man to “Raise your hands above your head! Get out of the car real slow!” and I stood there thinking, ‘Wow, it really is like the movies over here.’ Once the felon had been handcuffed, read his rights and bundled into a back seat, one of the cops sauntered over, looked up at me and said, “Hi. Sorry to bother you, sir.”
“No problem,” I told him, reckoning that I could easily get a walk-on part in Chips.
Bellingham, just north of the Chuckanut Mountains, has a sea-faring history thanks to its easy passage into the Juan de Fuca Straits which lead through the Inside Passage, along the Canadian west coast to Alaska, and a ferry still plies the route today. The town is also home to the longest-running peace vigil in the United States, begun 48 years ago by Howard and Rosemary Harris, who continue to smoke the pipe of peace every Friday from 4 to 5 pm. Christ knows why.
*
Slowly, but surely, burgers came into view, appearing on every menu I perused. Heck! I saw Fat Burger, Burger Lounge, Burger Land, Bob’s Brew & Burger, Emporium Burger, Jack Burger, and Jack In The Box Burger, whilst, veering way off topic, I also read about a gay and lesbian alcoholics anonymous in the Bellingham Herald newspaper.
Only the Kyoto Steakhouse, where I'd gone to escape the latest downpour, seemed never to have heard of burgers. Here a smart-ass in a chef's hat did some sort of knife-wielding trick and chopped up the beef and cooked it in front of us on a hot-plate that had already set fire to my newspaper, much to the amusement of a mother and daughter combo to my left. When I told them where I came from they didn't speak to me again.
Thanks to the sixth sense of a dope-head I scored some weed from a guy optimistically selling twigs (Why? I’ll never know) outside the Horseshoe Diner, a timeless piece of Americana, and so I dexterously rolled one up in a bathroom cubicle. Job done, and puffing on the joint, I wandered downhill toward the docks, which were empty, not a boat in sight, and later I grinned sloppily as the white Jimi Hendrix (aka Randy Nelsen) thrashed out Voodoo Chile at the Wild Buffalo Bar, which was so much fun that I ended up in the same venue the following night and watched reggae meister Clinton Fearon groove the crowd, smoking outside in between sets with a lumberjack just out of jail, and watching the cop car K9 harass a drunkard trying to ride a monocycle.
The next day I headed out of town and took a walk through the back woods, fingers crossed that I wouldn’t meet any gun-toting psychos out there, finally stumbling across civilization again in the form of neat, wooden all-American homes, tidy gardens without fences, and as I mused that this must be a nice place to grow up in, I came across a bus stop and lay down on a soft grass verge before a bus surprisingly turned up with only a young black girl on it, driven by a black man, and when the girl got off she cooed a very sweet “thank you” to the driver.
School had just started after the summer break and I mused that it must be tough for kids in America going in every day with the thought nagging at the back of their mind that one of their classmates may gun them down with an automatic weapon; a thought compounded by an article in USA Today that very day: ‘Oklahoma: Bray – A 13 year old boy is in juvenile custody after being arrested with a loaded hand-gun at Bray Doyle Public School.’ And in fact that polite little girl probably hadn’t even been at school because the front page headline in the Bellingham Herald told me, ‘Ferndale Teachers’ Strike Drags On.’ And the new term was only a week old.
The driver swivelled round in his seat and asked, “Where the hell you from?” before giving me an entertaining and informative guided tour of suburbia and the green and leafy Washington State University campus, dropping me off in town and asking if I needed any help.
“I think I’m alright, thanks mate. I’m just wandering about.”
He nodded his head and said, “Cool.”
Yes, sir. Kool and the Gang, my man.
*
Moving on, chasing the Autumn sun, I spent $124 on a one-way Hound down to Sacramento, transferring in Seattle for what should have been a two hour break that turned into five hours, and so I moseyed down to the Pacific through an eerily deserted downtown in mid-week to watch the Rockies drop into the ocean, no Bill Gates in sight, but I did walk by the HQ of Real Player, passing coffee shop after coffee shop, finally succumbing to a latte on Alaskan Way where the begging really started.
“Hey!” One guy shouted from underneath a cowboy hat, not even bothering to get up from the bench he was sprawled on. “Hey! You! Gotta dollar? Got any change!” I ignored him, and, still seated, he bellowed, “Potatohead! I’m talking to you! Gotta dollar!”
Now that's what you call dossing.
In the line-up for the bus a dreadlocked, polite, older, black man bummed a smoke and as I handed it over he pulled out an ID card and held it up like a cop. I thought he was gonna bust me for either making charitable donations (any form of welfare state being the anti-thesis of American politicians) or for being a mere 5.97583 metres from a doorway, but he said, “You did a good thing there - I’m a vet” and his ID turned out to verify him as a US army veteran.
Watching this interchange, a guy sitting cross-legged at our feet, also in the queue, leaped up and asked if I had another smoke, and so we stood there like some sort of spontaneous vagrants’ convention and the cross-legged guy, John as it turned out, who was swilling something from a Coke bottle that wasn’t Coke, shouted, “I was in the Service too! A three star general once gave me a ride in his chopper!” which prompted the vet to move quickly on, a wink of thanks to me, and John squinted, his face all screwed up like a paper bag, and said, “Where the hell are you from?”
“England.”
“England! You like Iron Maiden? Judas Priest? Man, I love that music. Hey! You smoke bud?”
“Now and then.”
“We’re gonna smoke together, me and you, when we get to Portland. I’ve got some great bud with me, man. You ever been to Alaska … I mean Australia?”
That was something to look forward to and the Greyhound (more like a two-legged daschund) eventually got going, steering us past Tacoma as the sun set on Washington State, tingeing the glaciers pink on 14,441 foot, volcanic Mount Rainier to the west, rising simultaneously in Vladivostok, Tacoma’s twin city, 4,700 miles to the west.
Portland wasn’t far, only 140 miles south, with a two hour rest stop, so it wasn’t long before we were bounding off and John was rummaging through a garbage container on the station’s forecourt looking for something to make into a bong. He gave a shriek of delight when he found a beer can, and with his Swiss Army knife he bored a hole into the aluminum, pushed in a clump of weed and lit it. We were in full view of people going in and out of the station as well as any passing vehicles concerned with upholding law and order.
“Erm, John,” I ventured, “Don’t you reckon we should go somewhere less obvious?”
“Oh, you think so?”
“Yeah. We look like a couple of crackheads.”
“Ooh. Ok.”
So he un-crossed his legs and we found a spot, vaguely hidden behind a couple of empty barrels of oil, and took turns at blasts on the can. Then a ginger hippy showed up out of nowhere, looking like he’d walked off the Walton’s set, and asked for a hit and we stood around nicely stoned, chit-chatting about this and that when John said, “You gotta a dollar I could have?”
“No,” the redheaded guy replied despondently, “Geez, I was gonna ask if you had one.”
Back outside the station I guzzled on a water fountain and straightening up a figure loomed over me, right in my face, demanding rather than asking, “Gotta smoke?” Feeling zippy and benevolent, despite the lack of a polite please, I gave him one.
“Gotta dollar?” was the inevitable follow-up.
“Nope.”
“Fuck you!”
John’s chuckles came out of the shadows where he sat, back against a wall, cross-legged.
“Welcome to America! Where you headin’ anyways?”
“Lake Tahoe.”
“Oh yeah? I’ve heard there’s good money to be made there.”
“How’s that?”
“On the street.”
“What, begging?”
He flinched a little, “You could put it that way” before perking up again, “15 to $20 an hour, I heard!”
And it was then that I realised that America’s 100% capitalist credo was based on greed from the bottom up.
*
I woke in the dark in Medford, Oregon with a sense of disappointment because I’d missed the unmissable crossroads of Wanker’s Corner (no shit) at about midnight and the intriguing town of Weed at about 3am where a friend had asked me to steal him a road sign.
Medford was home to the Ginger Rogers’ Theatre - she was born here, as was the high jumper Dick ‘Flop’ Fosbury, wrestler Les Gutches and Bill Bowerman who would go on to co-found Nike - and this was also where John disembarked, bear-hugging me in the town through which Bear Creek flowed.
Pretty certain that my new-found buddy had barely two dimes to rub together, his bottle of hooch had run dry, and we’d smoked his supply of bud in Portland, I was surprised by his answer to my question about what he was going to do in Medford.
“I’m here to party, man! Hey, you got any change, you know, for the smoke?”
Redding was next up, as the sun rose, and the driver only gave us a 15 minute break after 8 hours on board.
“You’ve got to give us longer than that,” I protested. “And surely by law you have to rest for longer?”
“15 minutes is all you’re getting! And don’t none of yous go over to Jack in the Box, ’cause I ain’t waitin’!”
Even at this early hour, he clearly recognised his passengers need for a burger fix and so in Jack's place we filed into the gas station to buy sandwiches filled with processed cheese: the second most important item in the American diet.
Back on the bus I found a black girl, about 14 years old, as my new companion in the adjacent seat. Her big white eyes peered at me while her head pointed straight ahead, twisting away when I looked at her, darting down to her feet when I said 'hi', a smile creeping onto her mouth and a whispered 'hi' in return. Once I’d finished my breakfast of processed cheese sandwich, jumbo pack of potato chips and three salami sticks at a speed that would have left even post-steroids Ben Johnson in the starting blocks (early morning manic munchy attack) I ripped open a pack of Reese’s peanut butter cups and offered her one, which she took very carefully, said thank you and nibbled on like a bird (she got half way through it before putting the rest in her pocket, I noticed), whereas mine were devoured in a couple of mouthfuls.
"What's your name?" I asked with difficulty as the peanut butter had all-but cemented my teeth together.
"Dina."
“Where are you going?”
“California.”
“Aren’t we in California?”
"Oh, yes," she giggled.
Clearly, I’d have to drag it out of her, and it took a fair few miles. Bless her.
“Bin stayin’ with my Grandma while school’s out … Goin’ back to Momma in San Francisco.”
I didn’t ask what had happened to her Dad, and at the revelation that I was from England, her eyes grew as big as saucers, and she sniggered, “Oh, that’s why you talk so funny.”
"Can you understand me?"
"Sometimes."
"What do you know about England?"
"You gotta Queen ... and I seen the big clock on TV."
With that she nodded off to sleep with a soft smile on her face.
That famously blue Californian sky appeared, leaving the Oregon rain behind, and the highway crossed enormous olive groves and fields of wheat; the state’s Central Valley and agricultural heartland, yellow and dry, stretching up to a mountain range on our right that we’d been following all morning - the Western Cascades, which include Mounts St Helens, Hood, Baker, Shasta, Rainier. This is the range that runs north to south out of Canada and accounts for the high levels of rain and snowfall in the Pacific North West.
From my seat at the window I began to notice that the size of an average American vehicle is truly staggering. Michael Moore attributes this to Bill Clinton, who, when President and faced by a belligerent Green lobby, passed laws punishing small cars for their polluting emissions, but let off scot-free the huge, monstrous sports utility vehicles and pick-ups you see today.
There was acre after acre of lots selling hundreds, if not thousands, of motor homes, just one of which could have housed five Hong Kong families; and other places with row after row of jeep type things waiting to get out onto that highway and blast oxygen into history.
In Vancouver I’d seen the same brutally over-sized vehicles, with meter high wheels, used as run-arounds, which I find ironic when California enacts similarly draconian anti-smoking laws to British Columbia, where the same self-righteous pillocks will persecute those smoking a cigarette and then climb into a vehicle causing infinitely more damage to the environment. The average car dumps five tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually and will pollute more in a day than a smoker will in a lifetime.
At noon we finally pulled into Sacramento’s Greyhound bus station, located slap-bang in the middle of the Californian state capital, within spitting distance of the Governor’s own miniature White House. After an afternoon there I had discovered that more than a few citizens would like nothing better than to spit on the incumbent.
“Gotta dollar?” Mr Inyerface demanded as soon as I stepped outside into brilliant sunshine.
“No, but I bet he has,” I replied, pointing to Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger’s mansion.
Apparently Arnie – a self-proclaimed eco-warrior - doesn’t enjoy living in Sacramento and commutes daily, by private jet, from his home in Los Angeles. In fact, Ronald Reagan, in the 1960s, was the last Governor to actually live in the state capital.
There was an elderly and portly lady selling hot dogs in front of the Capitol building, so I stopped and bought one and she led forth about the chronic economic crisis Schwarzenegger has presided over since taking office back in 2003. Despite the state being the 10th largest economy in the world, the budget deficit now stands at $26.3 billion and Arnie’s answer is that big American no-no: higher tax. When that wasn’t enough to reduce the debt, he began laying off state employees and cutting salaries by 5% (against rising inflation) for those still in work. The fifth day of the week was to be unpaid and (from the Governor’s very own website) a saving of $1.0444 billion was made by eliminating the California Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids programs. Yet, even these anti-social measures would only save $4.6 billion, so he’s still got a way to go.
“But there’s plenty of money here,” the hot dog lady summed up, “They just don’t share it out.”
‘Good luck Arnie,’ I thought as I made my down to the river, ‘And by the way, your movies suck.’
There was some sort of Civil War re-enactment going on in the old part of town, with Confederate soldiers riding in a wide line on sweating bay horses up a dusty street with two statuesque Daisy Duke type chicks following in a horse and cart. Hot damn, now I know how the west was won! A Pony Express office had been rebuilt, the forerunner to today’s US Postal Service, and gunshots (I prayed they were blanks) were let off.
A woman, who wasn’t part of the act, came flying out of a doorway screaming, “Yeah! That’s you, you slut! You fucking slut! I’m gonna getcha one of these days; just you fucking wait and see!” Maybe she was auditioning for The Wire but had turned up on the wrong set.
The queue for the bus was snaking out of the door when I got back, so I stood in a 'safe smoking zone' and watched a cop on a bicycle ride by then point at a young black guy holding a skateboard to my right. The cop shouted something incoherent at him.
“Motherfucker,” the black man muttered and I asked what the problem was.
“Nuttin’,” he answered, “He don’t like me, that’s all.”
“Oh, life can be like that, huh? Anyway … ahum … you know where I can get some weed,” I asked hopefully.
“You mean herb?” he squinted, suspicion in the slits of his eyes.
“Herb, yeah.”
“How much you want? It’s ten bucks a bag.”
“I’ll take two bags.”
“Follow me.”
We went into the toilets, me in one cubicle, and him in the next. American public toilets are surprisingly open to the outside world. The walls aren’t more than five foot high, there’s a huge gap at floor and ceiling level, and a wide crack between the door and the jamb.
“Let’s see your money,” he said, with his nose peeking over the partition.
“Let’s see the herb,” I countered, on tiptoe, wise in the ways of dealers making a fast buck.
We did a little swap of necessities. With both parties satisfied, he then wrapped the merchandise in a newspaper and as we walked back out into the bus station he said by means of a cover story, “And I want you to carefully read that article there.”
The queue still wasn’t going anywhere and the Greyhound customer service centre was completely devoid of any staff to answer my query about the chances of any chance of service that week, so I scooted round to the park area opposite Schwarzenegger’s white house, laid down on the grass, with half an eye on the street where the bus might arrive, rolled a joint and browsed through the newspaper thinking, ‘Hmm ... good herb, bruv.’
‘California state authorities estimate marijuana could bring in nearly $1.5bn a year in much needed tax revenue if it were legalised. This has led to increased support among the state’s voters for the full legalisation of the drug.’
Now that is something we can agree on, Arnie.
Eventually the bus came in, four hours late, and thanks to the warm weather I couldn’t help but notice the tattoos (later, I heard them described as ‘tramp stamps’) liberally embellishing the necks, ankles, thighs, feet, arms and boobs of the female forms waiting in line. It was an awful sight.
*
As dusk fell we pulled into Truckee, my destination for the night, and I trudged doggedly up the road with my bag on my shoulder to find a bed that would be the first in 36 hours. Set back in some woodland, I spied a likely looking place, did a quick check for gun-toting psychos – an image of Jack Nicholson in my mind - spotted none, so went in.
“Do you have any rooms free?” I asked the receptionist.
“No,” the wretched hag squeaked, “we don’t. You have to pay for them!”
After I’d coughed up $150, the hotel turned out to be no-smoking and then, after I’d wrestled the fly trap off the window, pretty much breaking it as I did so, intent on defying regulations and smoking with my head stuck outside, I noticed a sign on the back of the room door stating that any evidence of smoking would result in a $500 fine. I wondered what the cost of a new fly trap would be.
Intrigued by the name, I discovered that the town of Truckee was so-called after a native Indian, the father of Chief Winnemucca, by all accounts a friendly fella who greeted the growing hordes of newcomers looking to ransack his tribe’s land for personal gain, no doubt raping a few squaws in the process, with the greeting ‘trokay!’ meaning ‘everything is OK’. Judging by the greeting I’d got at hotel reception, the modern-day natives hadn’t progressed far from their ancestors.
In 1886, the USA as a whole was conducting a virulent anti-Chinese campaign - pretty rich after Chinese labor gangs had built the railroads across the nation - and Truckee duly kicked out all of its 1,400 Orientals who were becoming successful businesspeople in their own right, which is satirical in comparison to the present day when the Chinese have almost single-handedly undermined the American economy and are now baling it out.
The morning brought another bus and I got chatting to a fellow passenger whose mother had been nanny to Mick Jagger’s kids and he pointed out the lakeshore house where Godfather II had been filmed. At our first change we went into a small store, packed with holidaymakers on Labor Day weekend and stocking up on the commodity that I’d read about in so many American novels and is essential to every driver in the USA – beer. Henry Chinaski never drove without one. Nor, it seemed, did this lot.
In the end it took three different buses to cover 40 miles to the resort town of South Lake Tahoe, and the last bus, an open-topped and gaudy red antique with wooden seats, had obviously been retired from Disneyland. We pulled over to pick up a man who took an age to attach his bicycle to a grille at the front. Finally he got on and puffed, “Geez, there sure are a lot of squirrels squashed on them roads”, as if that was the reason he’d decided to take the bus. Five minutes later he got off and forgot his bike and when a few miles down the road this was pointed out to the driver, he took his hands off the wheel, with a precipice to his left plummeting into Emerald Bay, threw them up in the air, and shouted, “Well, what the hell can I do about it!”
We drove up and down Squaw Valley, location of the 1960 winter Olympics back in the day when skis were made of wood. Nobody got on and nobody got off, but 150 years ago the valley would have been awash with prospectors, horses, covered wagons, saloons and loose women because this was where one of the first significant gold deposits had been unearthed, sparking gold fever and the foundation for America’s wealth and future power; and also where Charlie Chaplin had come in 1923 to make his movie Gold Rush, lodging himself and crew in Truckee, no doubt paying for the rooms too. In the end, for reasons not apparent, he abandoned everything shot in Truckee bar the opening scenes and filmed the rest (the story was supposed to be taking place in Alaska) in his studio back in sunny Los Angeles. The movie, released in the 1920s, went on to become a worldwide smash hit and made $4.25 million.
*
Lake Tahoe is pretty much split down the middle: half in California (no smoking) and half in Nevada (smoking), so I knew exactly which 50% I was going to stay in. On arrival in South Lake I eyed a map at the bus stop and decided to walk the two miles down to the lakeshore and the state line that would get me into good old lung-busting Nevada.
It was a pine-lined route, interspersed with diners – taco, burger, burrito, burger, sushi, burger, pizza, burger, fried chicken, burger and another burger – then from behind a tree a guy appeared and said, “Gotta dollar?” and when I laughed and said no, he added, “I haven’t eaten for 2 days.”
“Do you smoke weed?” I asked.
“Yeah,” his eyes lit up in anticipation of a joint.
“Do you sell it?”
“No.”
“Why not? If you provide a useful service then I am more than willing to part with some of my hard earned cash to help you out. If not, then you’ll get nothing because you are offering me jack shit. This, after all, is the land of business.”
He stood, slack-jawed, watching me walk away and didn’t even give me so much as a “fuck you!” Hell, I was trying to stimulate the stagnant economy, not encourage loafers!
Once I hit the state of Nevada, spotted a likely establishment and walked through the doors, it took a further 20 minutes to locate the reception desk of the Horizon Casino and Hotel, a monolithic structure surrounded by about five other identical ventures. I worked my way across acre upon acre of slot machines, roulette and poker tables.
The large and friendly lady who gave me a room said, “I just lurve that accent. Keep on talkin’”, finally handing over a key that opened a door into a bedroom that looked like almost every other hotel room in the world, fragrantly perfumed with the aroma of fags.
After a day spent by the pool reading USA Today (Washington, Seattle – Police have recaptured a burglary suspect who escaped an arrest by driving off in a patrol car… Police found the man near his house) and peeping over the pages at the chicks readjusting their plastic boobs, I found an advert for improvised comedy at 9pm in my casino. When I turned up at the appointed time I walked into an empty theatre, not a comedian or audience member in sight, so I sat down and waited ten minutes before realising that the show doesn’t go on, told myself a joke and left.
The next day, hung-over from the free whisky every gambler is plied with, I took a walk down to the lake and got annoyed by the plethora of motor boats and jet skis spewing petrol out into its waters. This was just another form of driving where the lake replaces tarmac.
Although it was picturesque, I wasn’t particularly enamored by Tahoe. There was something in the air, a bad vibe that turned me off it. America was angry, the economy sliding down the pan. After the euphoric optimism of Obama’s election, when he was expected to wave a magic wand and fix everything over night, the Americans were discovering that life ain’t like the movies, and Barrack, even though he had two cute daughters, a stunning wife and a dog called Bo, wasn’t going to do it single-handedly in a matter of weeks. The legacy of eight years of gun-toting, dead or alive, George Bush mark II - surely the most cretinous individual to hold office anywhere and more inept dog-catcher than leader of the free world - was far-reaching and deeply entrenched, and this was kind of confirmed by a chat with a Philipino waiter in a bar of the Mont Bleu casino.
“The police were called here 14 times last night.”
“Oh yeah, why was that?”
“Fighting.”
As I looked around at the throngs of Labor Dayers feeding their salaries into slot machines, which are even embedded in the bar counter, I noticed that this was an almost exclusively all-white environment, doused in drugs, booze and losers; the non-whites were represented by Asians and Hispanics working in the service industry. I finished my drink, took in a bar owned by Van Halen's Sammy Hagar, where I slung back a final whisky with a couple of hot but empty headed chicks called Candy and Crystal, and called it a night.
In an attempt to find the hotel lobby, a runty guy deliberately bumped into me. I carried on but he didn’t, and instead he came after me and grabbed my shoulder, “Don’t bump me motherfucker!” This made a change from “Gotta dollar?” but I was grumpy and now annoyed and so we eyeballed each other for a few seconds and then his girlfriend came up and lashed out at my face with pink talons. I looked behind them where a group of their friends stood, more than willing to help him out, so I shrugged, held up fingers in Churchill’s V and walked away.
The South Tahoe Express minibus took us through the rocky brown Sierra Nevada Mountains into a 1,400 metre high valley known as the Great Basin filled with grazing cattle and memories of the cowboy films that had held my attention so firmly as a youth. Nevada state capital Carson City went by and soon we were deposited at Reno airport where hippies were saying extravagant goodbyes more reminiscent of al fresco sex following the Burning Man festival: an annual gathering of 50,000 people in the Nevada desert, run on solar energy and a gift economy, ie. you buy a ticket and everything inside is inclusive. Apparently there are a lot of drugs plus a lot of naked liberalism, great bands and ... damn, I'd just missed it!
Reno, population 220,000 (home to Sharon Stone, Creedence Clearwater Revival drummer Doug Clifford, and good old Randy Messenger, a baseball player) is a mini version of Las Vegas, the big brother that lies 335 miles further south, and a whole different ball game to Tahoe. It became known in the 1930s as an easy place to get a quick divorce in an age when the puritanical whiff of the Pilgrim Fathers still hung heavy, but nowadays down at heel came immediately to mind as the taxi took me to the El Dorado Hotel & Casino (by now I’d worked out that casinos were the best and cheapest places to stay). Boarded up storefronts, fenced off derelict motels, dark bars with silhouettes of drinkers, vagrants, ne’er-do-gooders and streets all-but empty of vehicles, a trickle of people wandering through them. The Amtrak station looked as though it hadn’t seen a train since Cary Grant was last here.
‘My kind of town,’ I thought as I went in search of a cigarette shop. ‘Smoking permitted, anywhere.’
“Where are you from, mate?” I asked the guy who was tucking hungrily into a bowl of yellow rice behind the counter of his grocery store.
“India,” he munched.
“Oh yeah? You like cricket?”
“Cricket? Oh yes, sir.”
“I bet you don’t get much cricket on American TV, eh?”
“Cricket on American TV?” this puzzled him at first, but then he got it and let out a roar of laughter so loud that a pack of drunk hyenas couldn’t have matched, rice grains flying in all directions, especially towards my face and clean clothes.
“Hoooowahahahahahaha! Cricket … on …. American TV! Hoooo … wahahahahahahaha!”
It was the funniest joke he’d ever heard, even though it wasn’t a joke, and I could still hear him howling as I strolled up the road and under the arch that announced ‘Reno the Biggest Little City in the World’, and came across a busker standing there with a hang-dog expression, one tooth in his mouth and a battered guitar in his hands.
“Got any change?” he pleaded, as if on the verge of tears.
“Business bad?”
“Sucks man. Barely made a dollar all day.”
“Give us a tune then and I’ll cough up some cash.”
“Ooh, ok,” he seemed to be struggling with this concept and sought further help by adding, “Got any songs in mind?”
“How about a bit of Elvis?”
“Cool, I know some of that,” and as he set about Hound Dog, twanging away on an out of tune, three-stringed instrument, I realized exactly why business was so bad but chucked a dollar into his cardboard box anyway.
“Ain’t nothin’ but a …. Hey! Couldn’t you spare more than that!” He broke off strumming as I walked away with “Godamned jerk” ringing in my ears. He certainly did rudeness better than music.
An attack of the manic munchies came upon me and I grasped that the streets were probably deserted because you didn’t even have to leave the casinos as they were all inter-connected by a series of walkways. So, in search of steak, mashed potatoes and ice, I chose a random door and roamed through five different, albeit identically titanic gambling establishments, loving the music that blared from hidden speakers: Boogie Wonderland, Disco Inferno, Stayin’ Alive, Another One Bites the Dust, Stand By Me, and when I heard Gimme Shelter I thought, ‘Forget Mick and Keef, the Stones are all about Lisa Fisher.’
The restaurant I chose offered Surf ’n Turf with a lobster tail, the first time I’d ever eaten this crustacean (on consumption it tasted like a massive great shrimp), and it was served up by a retirement-approaching man who clearly didn’t enjoy his job. Along with the coffee, the atmosphere was dire and gloomy and tables were littered with overweight white retirees with nothing to say.
I’d begun to notice a lot of white males, perhaps recently made redundant from socially acceptable cubicle careers in insurance, banking and accountancy, now forced to work as ihop waiters or, if they put their backs into it, assistant managers, bus drivers and bartenders, resenting every second they were spending in the service industry. If the economy dives further – as Reno’s almost empty casinos seemed to indicate - they may even find themselves back in the turnip fields, getting their necks red.
*
In the US you go round in squares and rectangles, so it’s not easy to get lost, even after a long, post-lunch session in your room smoking the last of Tahoe’s finest bud. I found myself engaged in a sociological reccy through the Reno suburbs, thoroughly enjoying the leg stretch. I came across Herbie, the white beetle, parked up in a side street; a house that Hitchcock undoubtedly based one or two movies on, dead trees in the yard flinging ghoulish shadows onto the peeling clapboard; many houses with the stars and stripes fluttering from a flagpole out front; a man at a window with binoculars following my path down a street; an adult services store the size of a Wal-Mart; and a section of railroad on a grass verge where I sat to smoke and read that Chinese chain gangs had put down this track in 1871, connecting Reno to Virginia City, from where huge silver deposits were extracted that would fund the foundation of San Francisco. For sure, those Chinese were booted out of town as soon as the white man learned how to drive a train.
With the sun setting I wandered back into town, crossing the Truckee River that is more like a stream; the gambling dens 30 storey monoliths - Reno’s sole industry - rising up, layer after layer, like a stack of poker chips; a few people winning, the rest on a never-ending losing streak; the London Times reporting at the same time I was visiting that one in seven Americans now live in poverty; and when I got back onto the main drag I saw a long line of people, mostly punky-trendy youngsters trailing round a corner of the block and, going over to see what that was all about, a tough black guy sporting a large medallion started making his way towards me with a big smile on his face.
“Wanna ticket?”
“What for?”
“Smashing Pumpkins.”
I’d heard of them but couldn’t identify one of their songs, so when he said entry would set me back $100 I said I’d think about it and went back to the hotel for a shower and some food.
‘Hell,’ I thought, under the jet of hot water, ‘why not go? You never know, you might get lucky with a chick who has a Mohican and tattoos on her tits.’
An hour or so later I walked up the road and found the same guy, only to be told that he’d sold out. So I asked him the next question that was playing on my mind.
“Here, mate. Any idea where I can find some weed?”
“’Erb? Sure, just ask any of the brothers.”
With that I went off to look for a few brothers and found a sister who said it’d be a taxi ride, and not really wanting to end up in the gutter in the ghetto I thanked her kindly and wandered back to the concert venue where I was sure some of those punks would come up with something.
The audience had already been let in for the show and so I chatted with the scalper who was now asking every passer-by if they had any spares to sell him. Nobody did, so when I flagged down a likely looking hippy chap who said he could sort us out, the black market dealer, William, tagged along too and we took a pleasant walk by the river to where the local Herberts were hanging out, and, typical to stonedom throughout the world, it was a long and drawn out affair just to get hold of the dealer. In the end, three of us trooped off and Carlos the hippy finally got a connection on his cell phone to place the order.
“Who wants some?” he asked for the seventh time.
“I do,” said William, “And England here wants some too.”
Off we went and after 30 minutes walking round the Reno suburbs for the second time that day I said, “We’re gonna be fit after this, William.”
“No shit!” and he shouted out to Carlos, “Hey, if you don’t come up with the goods soon, I’m gonna kick your skinny white ass into your godamn Truckee river.”
“No sweat, man, we’re almost there.”
Twenty minutes later we sat down on the steps outside a condominium next to the bus station.
“Godamn, that’s the bus station! We’ve been going round in circles!” William shouted.
Needless to say, the dealer wasn’t at home, he’d be back in 10 minutes, a passage of time that in the world of whacky baccy means at least 30, which it turned out to be, and so while we waited I entertained them with a detailed account of how the Saudis execute criminals with a three foot sword, often in public, and the executioner (a full-time professional job) has to take more than one slice out of the neck because the spine prevents him getting a clean chop in one go, and every now and then William interjected with a wide-eyed “No shit, man!”
The dealer finally arrived with his girlfriend and a Big Kahuna burger and did the deal. So we rolled one up, said goodbye to Carlos and sat by the godamn Truckee River talking about this, that and the other, laughing our asses off, the neon of the city aglow in front of us. Round about midnight, William, a black marketeer of 30 years standing, had to scoot back to Berkeley on the Hound, not for a seminar, but in time for a concert the following day, and so we said our farewells and I summed up my options for the rest of my time in Reno; a flight to Seattle looming the following afternoon.
So where does any self-respecting, single, straight, non-gambling kind of guy go of an evening? To the Men’s Club, of course, and even Chinese President Jiang Zemin was there, sitting alone in the corner with his hands folded suspiciously over his groin area like a naughty schoolboy in the darkened lounge bar with its mini-skirted waitresses and strippers galore, from dusk til dawn.
When not shedding clothes on stage, the women work the floor, sitting on laps, gyrating on laps and attempting to lure us men into a “private booth” for what one pneumatic blonde described as “A trip to paradise and back.” Eyeballs soldered to her jugs, I could believe that, and when Maya, an ebony beauty from San Francisco, tried the same trick, I told her, “When I’m completely stoned, women aren’t my number one priority.” She liked that and settled back on my lap with a cigarette, and whispered, “I wanna smoke some dope an’ chill wit chu.”
With the aid of THC enhanced conversational powers, I started rabbitting on about Mike Tyson, beggars, the police, burgers, employment prospects for her in London (Stringfellows would snap her up) and Islam. During a pause, I checked, “You understand anything I’m saying?”
“Sometimes. But I gotta say, that is one hell of an accent,” and she called out to one of her friends to come over and have a listen too.
Later on, in between dances, she and I stood outside smoking a joint that I’d rolled in the toilet, and we had a short kiss before heading back inside where she bought me a shot of tequila and the DJ had to announce her name three times that she was next on stage before she languidly prised herself from the bar stool and strolled to work and I wiped away a tear of happiness inspired by her oh-so cute and cool charm.
Time flew, as it always does when fun is being had, and before I knew it the place was almost empty and the waitresses were cleaning up and the Pinacolada Song played as I made my way out.
We’d made a date to meet up in a restaurant (Reno never sleeps) in one of the casinos but I was fucked if I could find it and ended up in an El Dorado bar sitting with a DJ from Essex, England and a Filipino-American GI who had done three tours in Fallujah.
As I checked out later that morning and made my final walk across the casino floors, the Stones sang ‘Miss You’ and I thought, ‘Yeah, I’ll miss you too Reno’, and standing on the street I noticed a billboard advertising a Motown Disco - yet another event that I’d like to go to but never would - and so off I went, but I was called back by an elderly bell-hop who summoned a stretch limousine to take me to the airport. It was free but riding smoothly along I felt like a complete jerk and would have been way happier on the bus.
Because I had so much Reno weed left over, despite having given half of it to Maya, I had chuffed down about four joints that morning and as a result the flight was somewhat hazy, although I do remember sitting next to a woman who looked remarkably similar to an ex-girlfriend with a sexual predilection for dogs, and though I was sure I’d already gone through customs, a lady with a big friendly smile beckoned me over at Seattle airport. I was relieved to hear that she didn’t want to search my bags, more a search of my wallet, as she represented some charity or other and I listened patiently as she explained the plight of the people, whoever, wherever they were, and handed over a $10 bill.
“I just lurve your accent,” she told me, “Could listen to it all day.”
Back to the empty streets of Vancouver (No Idling!) and its dark and grimy bars; bars of despair that reeked of the 1970s and played the music to match; filled with people who had crossed half the earth and were now looking out at Asia and could only look back. It was still raining and the fires in the interior must have been well and truly out, then I was off on a long route via London to Dammam.
Things I’ve learned about America:-
1. Americans like to eat lettuce. Sometimes if you order a salad, all you get is a plate of lettuce.
2. Americans eat processed cheese with everything, except lettuce.
3. Burgers rule.
4. Cars are the be-all and end-all.
5. Obama has his back to the wall.
6. TV is more a vehicle for advertising than it is for shows.
7. Men are aggressive in manner and shout out questions expecting immediate response.
8. Men spit a lot, even on sides of swimming pools.
9. Money’s too tight to mention, because China’s got it.
10. There was always somebody asking for something for nothing – lack of welfare state, I guess. The US is all about the individual and anything remotely collective is seen as some form of socialism, even, God forbid, communism. You have to stand on your own two feet, screw the rest, or be trampled. Life is a competition, a survival of the fittest.
© Andrew Parker 20/10/2010