The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [70]
What I particularly remember was the sense of menace whenever we left the building. Groups of leather-jacketed teenagers with no place to go would sit on the walls around the complex watching anyone who passed. I always expected them to fall in behind us as we went by and to take our money and stick us with knives they had made in the prison workshop, but they never bothered us. They just stared. Even so it was frightening because we were just skinny kids from Iowa.
New York still frightened me. I felt the same sense of menace now as I walked down to Times Square. I had read so much for so long about murders and street crime that I felt a personal gratitude to everyone who left me alone. I wanted to hand out cards that said ‘Thank you for not killing me’.
But the only people who assaulted me were panhandlers. There are 36,000 vagrants in New York and in two days of walking around every one of them asked me for money. Some of them asked twice. People in New York go to Calcutta to get some relief from begging. I began to regret that I didn’t live in an age when a gentleman could hit such people with his cane. One guy, my favourite, came up and asked if he could borrow a dollar. That knocked me out. I wanted to say, ‘Borrow a dollar? Certainly. Shall we say interest at one per cent above prime and we’ll meet back here on Thursday to settle?’ I wouldn’t give him a dollar, of course – I wouldn’t give my closest friend a dollar – but I pressed a dime into his grubby mitt and gave him a wink for his guile.
Times Square is incredible. You’ve never seen such lights, such hustle. Whole sides of buildings are given over to advertisements that blink and ripple and wave. It’s like a storm on an electronic sea. There are perhaps forty of these massive inducements to spend and consume, and all but two of them were 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 was plummeted into the interior mechanism, 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 dangerously disordered, 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 you would walk around if you saw it on the sidewalk. 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 favourite was Yiddish Erotica, Volume 2. What could this possibly consist of – rabbis with their trousers down, tarty women lying spread-eagled