The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [60]
I determined that I would read up on Delaware so that the next time I met a girl from there I could say something droll and apposite and she might go to bed with me. But I could find almost nothing written about Delaware anywhere. Even the entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica was only about two paragraphs long and finished in the middle of a sentence, as I recall. And the funny thing was that as I drove across Delaware now I could feel it vanishing from my memory as I went, like those children’s drawing slates on which you erase the picture by lifting the transparent sheet. It was as if a giant sheet were being lifted up behind me as I drove, expunging the experience as it unfolded. Looking back now, I can just vaguely recall some semi-industrial landscape and some signs for Wilmington.
And then I was in the outskirts of Philadelphia, the city that gave the world Sylvester Stallone and Legionnaire’s disease, among other things, and was too preoccupied with the disturbing thoughts that this called up to give Delaware any further consideration.
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Chapter thirteen
WHEN I WAS a child, Philadephia was the third biggest city in America. What I remembered of it was driving through endless miles of ghettos, one battered block after another, on a hot July Sunday, with black children playing in the spray of fire hydrants and older people lounging around on the street corners or sitting on the front stoops. It was the poorest place I had ever seen. Trash lay in the gutters and doorways, and whole buildings were derelict. It was like a foreign country, like Haiti or Panama. My dad whistled tunelessly through his teeth the whole time, as he always did when he was uneasy, and told us to keep the windows rolled up even though it was boiling in the car. At stop lights people would stare stonily at us and Dad would whistle in double time and drum the steering wheel with his fingers and smile apologetically at anyone who looked at him, as if to say, ‘Sorry, we’re from out of state.’
Things have changed now, naturally. Philadelphia is no longer the third biggest city in America. Los Angeles pushed it into fourth place in the 1960s, and now there are freeways to whisk you into the heart of town without soiling your tyres in the ghettos. Even so, I managed a brief, inadvertent visit to one of the poorer neighbourhoods when I wandered off the freeway in search of a gas station. Before I could do anything about it, I found myself sucked into a vortex of one-way streets that carried me into the most squalid and dangerous-looking neighbourhood I had ever seen. It may have been, for all I know, the very ghetto we passed through all those years before – the brownstone buildings looked much the same but it was many times worse than the one I remembered. The ghetto of my childhood, for all its poorness, had the air of a street carnival. People wore colourful clothes and seemed to be having a good time. This place was just bleak and dangerous, like a war zone. Abandoned cars, old refrigerators, burnt-out sofas littered every vacant lot. Garbage cans looked as if they had been thrown to the street from the rooftops. There were no gas stations – I wouldn’t have stopped anyway, not in a place like this, not for a million dollars – and most of the storefronts were boarded with plywood. Every standing object had been spray-painted with graffiti. There were still a few young people on the stoops and corners, but they looked listless and cold – it was a chilly day – and they seemed not to notice me. Thank God. This was a neighbourhood where clearly you could be murdered for a pack of cigarettes – a fact that was not lost on me as I searched nervously for a way back onto the freeway. By the time I found it, I wasn’t whistling through my teeth so much as singing through my sphincter.
It really was the most uncomfortable experience I had had in many years. God, what it must be like to live there and to walk those streets