to advertisements that blink and ripple and wave. It's like a storm on an electronic sea.
There are perhaps forty of these massive inducements to spend and consume, and all but two of them are for Japanese companies: Mita Copiers, Canon, Panasonic, Sony. My mighty homeland was represented by just Kodak and Pepsi-Cola. The war is over, Yankee dog, I thought bleakly.
The most riveting thing about New York is that anything can happen there. Only the week before a woman had been eaten by an escalator. Can you beat that? She had been on her way to work, minding her own business, when suddenly the stair beneath her gave way and she plummeted into the interior mechanisms, into all the whirring cogs and gears, with the sort of consequences you can well imagine. How would you like to be the cleaner in that building? ('Bernie, can you come in early tonight? And listen, you'd better bring along a wire brush and a lot of Ajax.') New York is always full of amazing and unpredictable things. A front-page story in the New York Post was about a pervert with AIDS who had been jailed that day for raping little boys. Can you believe that?
'What a city!' I thought. 'Such a madhouse!' For two days I walked and stared and mumbled in amazement. A large black man on Eighth Avenue reeled out of a doorway, looking seriously insane, and said to me, 'I been smoking ice! Big bowls of ice!' I gave him a quarter real fast, even though he hadn't asked for anything, and moved off quickly. On Fifth Avenue I went into the Trump Tower, a new skyscraper. A guy named Donald Trump, a developer, is slowly taking over New York, building skyscrapers all over town with his name on them, so I went in and had a look around. The building had the most tasteless lobby I had ever seen-all brass and chrome and blotchy red and white marble that looked like the sort of thing that if you saw it on the sidewalk you would walk around it.
Here it was everywhere-on the floors, up the walls, on the ceiling. It was like being inside somebody's stomach after he'd eaten pizza. 'Incredible,' I muttered and walked on. Next door a store sold pornographic videos, right there on Fifth Avenue. My favorite was Yiddish Erotica, Volume 2. What could this possibly consist of-rabbis with their trousers down, tarty women lying spreadeagled and saying, 'You wanna fuck already?' 'Superb, incredible,' I mumbled and plodded on.
In the evening, as I strolled back along Times Square, my eye was caught by a striptease club with a photograph of the strippers in the window. They were nice-looking girls. One of the photos was of f Samantha Fox. Since Ms. Fox was at this time being paid something like ?250,000 a year to show off her comely udders to readers of British newspapers such as the Sun, it seemed to me improbable, to say the least, that she would be peeling off for strangers in a smoky basement room on Times Square. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that there was a little fraud at work here. It's a mean trick to play on a horny person.
They always used to do this to you at the Iowa State Fair. The strippers' tents at the back of the midway would be covered with wildly erotic paintings of the most beautiful, silky-haired, full-breasted, lithe-bodied women you ever saw-women whose moist and pouty lips seemed to be saying, 'I want you-yes, you there, with the zits and glasses. Come and fulfill me, little man.' Aged fourteen and delirious with lust, you would believe these pictures with all your heart and many of the neighboring organs. You would hand over a crumpled dollar and go inside into a dusty tent that smelled of horse manure and rubbing alcohol and find onstage a weary stripper looking not unlike your own mother. It was the sort of disappointment from which you never really recover, and my heart went out now to the lonely sailors and Japanese photocopier salesmen who were down there drinking sweet, warm cocktails and having a night of overpriced disappointment. 'We learn from our mistakes,' I remarked sagely to myself with a rueful smile and told a panhandler to piss off.
I went back to my room, pleased not to have been mugged, more pleased not to have been murdered. On top of my television was a card saying that for $6.50 I could have an in-room movie.
There was, as I recall, a choice of four-Friday the Thirteenth, Part 19, in which a man with a personality disorder uses knives, hatchets, Cuisinarts and a snowblower to kill a succession of young women just as they are about to step into the shower; Death Wish 11, in which Charles Bronson tracks down and kills Michael Winner; Bimbo, in which Sylvester Stallone as Rambo has a sexchange operation and then blows up a lot of Oriental people; and, on the adult channel, My Panties Are Dripping, a sensitive study of interpersonal relationships and social conflict in postmodern Denmark, with a lot of vigorous bonking thrown in for good measure. I toyed for a moment with the idea of watching a bit of the last one-just t0 help me relax, as they say in evangelical circles-but I was too cheap to spend $6.50, and, anyway, I've always suspected that if I did punch the requisite button (which was worn to a nubbin, I can tell you), the next day a bellboy would confront me with a computer printout and tell me that if I didn't give him fifty dollars he would send a copy of the room receipt tp my mother with 'Miscellaneous charges: Deviant Porno Movie, $6.50' circled in red. So instead I lay on the bed and watched a rerun on normal television of 'Mr. Ed,' a 1960s comedy series about a talking horse. Judging by the quality of the jokes, I would guess that Mr. Ed wrote his own material. But at least there was nothing in it that would get me blackmailed.
And thus ended my day in New York, the most exciting and stimulating city in the world. I couldn't help but reflect that I had no reason to feel superior to my fellow lonely hearts in the strip tease club twenty floors below. I was just as lonesome as they were. Indeed, all over this big, heartless city there were n0 doubt tens 0f thousands 0f people just as solitary and friendless as me. What a melancholy thought.
'But I wonder how many of them can do this?' I remarked to myself and with my hands and feet reached out and touched all four walls at once.
CHAPTER 15
IT WAS THE Columbus Day weekend and the roads were busy. Columbus has always seemed t0
me an odd choice 0f hero for a country that celebrates success as America does because he was such a dismal failure. Consider the facts: he made four long voyages t0 the Americas, but never once realized that he wasn't in Asia and never found anything worthwhile. Every other explorer was coming back with exciting new products like potatoes and tobacco and nylon stockings, and all Columbus found t0 bring home were some puzzled-looking Indians-and he thought they were Japanese. ('Come 0n, you guys, let's see a little sumo.') But perhaps Columbus's most remarkable shortcoming was that he never actually saw the land that was t0 become the United States. This surprises a lot 0f people. They imagine him trampling over Florida, saying, 'You know, this would make a nice resort.' But in fact his voyages were all spent in the Caribbean and bouncing around the swampy, bug-infested coasts 0f Central America. If you ask me, the Vikings would make far more worthy heroes for America. For one thing, they did actually discover it. On top 0f that, the Vikings were manly and drank out 0f skulls and didn't take any crap from anybody. Now that's the American way.
When I lived in America Columbus Day was one Of those semibogus holidays that existed only for the benefit Of public workers with strong unions. There was no mail on Columbus Day and if you innocently drove all the way over to the east side of town to the Iowa State Vehicle Licensing Center to renew your driver's license you would find the door locked and a notice hanging in the window saying, CLOSED FOR COLUMBUS DAY HOLIDAY. So TOUCH SHIT TO You. But otherwise life was no different than on any other day. Now, however, it appeared that the Columbus Day holiday had spread. There were lots of cars and recreational vehicles on the highway and the radio announcers kept talking about things like the number of fatalities that were expected 'this Columbus Day weekend.' (How do they know these things anyway? Is there some kind of secret quota?) I had been looking forward to reaching New England because I wanted to see the autumn color. In addition, the states would be small and varied and there wouldn't be that awful rolling tedium that comes with all the other American states, even the attractive ones. But I was wrong. Of course, New England states are indubitably tiny-Connecticut is only eighty
