Stephen Fry in America

Very fine – strong, adult, not too sweet, but there’s something missing … I rootle and scrabble, searching for the magic extra ingredient that will transform my mixture into a true flavour, my rough prototype into a working masterpiece. The clock is ticking, for a tour party is about to come in at any moment and I am to feed them and then stand with bowed head to receive their judgement.

Just as I am about to give up and offer my acceptable but now to my mind rather lame decoction my fingers curl around a bag of knobbly somethings. I have found it! It adds crunch, a hint of sophisticated bitterness and a rich musty, nutty centre around which the other flavours can play their unctuous, toffee-like, chocolaty games. Walnuts! I stir them in with my spatula and Sean helps me transfer the giant mixture into small tourist-sized tubs. This is done by squeezing a kind of piping bag. Within seconds I have lost all feeling in my hands.

‘It’s very cold,’ I observe.

‘Many are cold,’ says Sean, ‘but few are frozen.’

Before I have time to throw something at him, the tour party enters.

‘Welcome everybody,’ beams Sean. ‘This is a special occasion. You will be trying a new flavour, mixed by our Guest Flavourist, here. His invention is called …?’

‘Er … I … that is … um …’

‘… is called “Even Stephens”!’ extemporises Sean happily.

I stand meekly, submissively, hopefully while the tourists surge forward to begin the tasting. Despite my humble demeanour, I know, I really know that I have struck gold. There have not been many moments in my life when I have been quite so sure of success. But here, I am convinced, is a perfect blend of flavours.

The tourists agree. Once the filming stops and the camera crew have dived in too there is nothing left of Even Stephens but my memory of a solid-gold vanilla-based triumph.

Stephen, you created an ice-cream flavour. And it was good. Now you may rest.

Vermont seems even more beautiful on a full stomach. This is a state I will most certainly return to one day. It is the first land-locked state I have visited, but what it lacks in coastline it makes up for in mountains, valleys and lakes. I am leaving by ferry across Lake Champlain, through which runs Vermont’s northern border. At the prow of the boat my taxi points proudly towards the gigantic majesty of our next destination – New York State.

NEW YORK STATE

KEY FACTS

Abbreviation:

NY

Nickname:

The Empire State

Capital:

Albany

Flower:

Rose

Tree:

Sugar maple

(I know: same as Vermont – copycats, eh?)

Bird:

Eastern bluebird

Motto:

Excelsior!

Well-known residents and natives:

That would be unfair on the other states: there are thousands.

NEW YORK STATE

‘One of the most diverse adventure playgrounds on earth; where else can you meet deer-hunters and a man who raised money for the IRA?’

New York State is bigger than England. Despite this, it is only the twenty-seventh largest state in America, not even halfway up the list. The truth of how stupendously, absurdly large this country is has still failed properly to penetrate my brain. I have driven over a thousand miles and I have done no more than wander around an area on the map smaller than the nail of my little finger.

I cross Lake Champlain from Vermont into upstate New York. The lakes and wilderness here are all part of the Adirondack mountain chain. New York State also contains the Appalachians and the Catskills, with the Rivers Hudson, Allegheny, Susquehanna, Niagara and Delaware too. This is one of the most remarkable and diverse adventure playgrounds on earth. And that is before you even consider the delights of Broadway, Central Park, Greenwich Village and Long Island.

New York is nearly always called New York State, so as to distinguish it from New York City. This is true of Washington State too. Where I am now, Montreal, Canada is only eighty miles north, while Fifth Avenue, NYC is at least five and half hours away by fast car. The accents all around me are much closer to Canadian than to Brooklyn. The plaid shirts, the antlers, and the gun shops tell me that this is Hunting Country.

Somewhere along the line the American love affair with wilderness changed from the thoughtful, sensitive isolationism of Thoreau to the bully, manly, outdoorsman bravado of Teddy Roosevelt. It is not for me, as an outsider, either to bemoan or celebrate this fact, only to observe it. Deep in the male American psyche is a love affair with the backwoods, log-cabin, camping-out life.

There is no living creature here that cannot, in its right season, be hunted or trapped. Deer, moose, bear, squirrel, partridge, beaver, otter, possum, raccoon, you name it, there’s someone killing one right now. When I say hunted, I mean of course, shot at with a high-velocity rifle. I have no particular brief for killing animals with dogs or falcons, but when I hear the word ‘hunt’ I think of something more than a man in a forage cap and tartan shirt armed with a powerful carbine. In America it is different. Hunting means ‘man bonding with man, man bonding with son, man bonding with pick-up truck, man bonding with wood cabin, man bonding with rifle, man bonding – above all – with plaid’.

Into the Woods

I am to be the guest of a group of friends who have built themselves a cabin deep in the woods some ten or twenty miles from the town of Saranac, NY. Bill and Tom are nice guys, ordinary guys. Hunting for white-tail deer, which is the game they are mostly after, is like fishing for bass, a mostly blue-collar pastime in America. Think of that Michael Cimino film The Deer Hunter and you will get the idea. Bill and Tom are not, I am relieved to discover, machismo alpha-male show-offs, bullies or bigots. They are working men (sheet metal, transport, warehousing, that kind of thing) who pour all of their spare time into maintaining and enjoying their life in the woods.

‘Welcome to camp,’ says Tom.

The cabin is surprisingly warm and snug when I arrive at six o’clock on a bitterly cold morning. The taxi has never had to negotiate such rough tracks before and I am terribly afraid that I will suffer the humiliation of being towed by one of the enormous pick-up trucks that usually roam these pathways. One of the group’s number, Craig, has cooked just about the most fabulous breakfast I have ever, ever eaten. Bacon, sausage, French toast and lots and lots of home-tapped and home-refined maple syrup. All around the cabin are maple trees with pipework stuck into them, like hospital tubes and drips. Round the back is the machinery needed to transform the liquor from the tree into breakfast syrup.

‘Now, let’s get you kitted up …’ Tom holds up a plaid jacket and an enormous pair of woollen trousers.

Naturally. Of course. It wouldn’t do for me to look dignified or sensible.

‘This hat is rather a sudden orange, isn’t it?’ I complain, dropping a day-glo foraging cap on the table.

‘Hunting orange, they call it. Other huntsmen know not to shoot you.’

‘Mm. Yes.’ I pick the cap up again. ‘I like it. Goes with my complexion.’

I make it very plain as we head for the trails that I would rather not hold a rifle and certainly prefer not to watch anything being killed. My sentimental Bambi-loving self is not keen on the idea of seeing a deer felled. The antlers on the wall of the cabin tell me that these guys, charming as they are, have done a good deal of killing in their time. They are perfectly okay about my reluctance to kill; I think they had sized me up for a cissy the moment I stepped out of the cab.

My role then is to skip along with them prattling about life and nature.

‘The American relationship with the outdoors,’ I say, ‘the Thoreau ideal. It’s deep in the American psyche isn’t it? Man and nature. The great paradox of a nation that invades and degrades the wilderness and yet treasures it above all else.’

‘Guess so.’

‘New York State contains this, the great outdoors, the American dream of the woods and wilderness but also the industry, the suburbs, the great urban sprawl and of course Manhattan. Maybe New York State is symbolic of all America, embodying both the call of the wild and the call of the street.’

‘Maybe.’

‘You’re right. I’m talking drivel. I’ll shut up now.’

I am happy to say that no deer were killed in the making of our scene. In fact we didn’t even see a deer, which suited me. Instead I enjoyed wonderful hospitality, warm companionship and a good walk in beautiful woodland. I berated myself for having been so afraid.

But, after a cup of coffee, it was time for a three-hundred-and-thirty-mile drive: I was due to meet another group of potentially terrifying men.

Italian Americans.

Taps side of nose.

Wise guys.

Winks conspiratorially.

GoodFellas.

Bad-a-bing!

The Middle Village Social Club

Middle Village is an area of Queens, New York mostly inhabited by Irish and Italian Americans, two ethnic groups which traditionally get along with each other pretty well.

I have been invited to say hello to the boys of a particular social club. I have seen these places before, in gangster pictures like Donnie Brasco, GoodFellas and Casino. Not to mention in real footage of FBI stings and wiretappings on the Gambino family clubs of John Gotti and Sammy ‘the Bull’ Gravano. Am I really going to hang out with organised crime hoods, with mobsters? Is that an ethical thing to do? To contribute to the glamour and status of violent criminals?

Well, this social club is largely different. It is – how can I put it nicely? – a home for failed gangsters. For guys who didn’t quite make it. Possibly because they were too nice. The old ones are really very old indeed and the young ones, like Mikey who wears a Godfather t-shirt under the obligatory leather jacket, have earned more money from doing bit-parts in The Sopranos than from anything illegal.

At least so I am led to believe.

I am welcomed inside this little two-room house by Mikey and the boys. The back room is given over to card games; the front room has a big screen TV, sofa, a bar and walls that are covered with sporting photographs and posters. Betting seems to play a large part in the life of this club.

I am not surprised Mikey has found work in TV and movies, he has a central-casting low hairline and a ‘you talking to me?’ posture and gait. He cannot stop smiling. He cannot stop telling stories. He cannot stop talking. I have not been in there half an hour before he tells me a story he has already told. The others all meet my confused gaze and roll their eyes. ‘Good old Mikey, he don’t know when to shut up,’ an old boy whispers to me. I suppose that is why he has failed to make it as a button man or whatever the phrase is. That and the fact that he just seems too, well, too good-natured, too lacking in guile. He is like a great puppy. He tells twice a story about chasing a thief through the neighbourhood, tackling him and punching his lights out before the police arrived, so perhaps I am being a little naïve. He is anxious for me to know that he would only ever show violence to someone ‘nasty’. The thief had stolen a child’s bicycle. ‘And dat,’ he says, ‘youse do not do.’ You will think ‘youse’ is a bit old hat, a bit Damon Runyon, but I promise you that is how he said it.

I sit down on the sofa with Dave, who tells me tales about ‘da old days’. An immensely complex story about cocking up a horse-nobbling takes ten minutes and is filled with the kind of colour and splendour that fiction cannot match. Some time back in the forties, when Dave was young, he had ‘a sure ting’, he had inside knowledge of a horse which would win a race ‘on account of how he had dis drug, dis whatchercallit’.

I am stared at through Dave’s one good eye and nudged quite violently to provide the name of this drug, as if I am an expert. This puzzles me. I had no idea that there was a drug which could guarantee a horse winning a race. ‘Um, a stimulant of some kind maybe …’

‘Dat’s it! Stimu- like you said.’

I get an even sharper dig in the ribs for having solved the mystery of what the drug might have been. I am beginning to revise my opinion of the non-violent nature of these people. Anecdotal Assault may not carry a heavy sentence, may not even be recognised in law as a crime against the person, but by the time I rise from the sofa I am more or less black and blue. Dave told me tales of his days running numbers, laying bets and serving time in prison (only on-track betting, OTB, is legal in America, so all street bookies are liable to arrest). ‘We always ordered dinner from Giovanni’s restaurant to be delivered to our cell. The sergeant would let us make the call so long as we included a linguini for him. It was a good arrangement. Worked well for twenty years till they rebuilt the station house and moved the sergeant to another precinct. What are you gonna do?’ All his stories seemed to feature him in a disastrous situation where, as a small-time bookie’s runner, he lost money for someone, forgot to lay off a bet, got in trouble, ended up in prison. The speed with which he can still shade odds and rattle through the 13–5, 11–4-type ratios made my head spin. He may have liked to present himself as one of nature’s losers, but he was clearly not a fool.

Whenever I press these old boys and use words like ‘Mafia’ or ‘cosa nostra’, they smile and raise their hands in innocent bewilderment. I am beginning to think they are simply charming senior citizens who just happen to have the same accents and ethnicity as Mafiosi.

Then I spot the bullet holes.

You can see one in the group photograph, in the metal door upright, just next to the Star-Spangled Banner. There are more inside.

‘Yeah, that was a drive-by. We was playing cards. A bullet just missed Don’s head. So much.’ Mikey brings his forefinger and thumb very close together.

‘But why?’ I ask.

‘Sheeesh. What are you gonna do?’

Which is no kind of answer.

The guy who really owns and runs the club turns up. A barrel-chested fellow about five foot tall. There is something in his eye which compels me to stop asking questions. He too is friendly, but it is impossible not to notice when the mere presence of someone in a room shuts everyone else up.

He has the extraordinary ability to silence Mikey. I smell power.

John the Cabbie

My guide in New York City has been a cabbie called John. He lives round the corner from the Italian social club and he is the one who effected my introduction. John is of Irish stock; indeed he quite proudly tells me how he had worked hard for Noraid, the ‘charity’ that funded the IRA, back in the days of the Troubles.

As we drive to his yellow-cab garage, which is like a scene out of the seventies sitcom Taxi, I ask him how he feels about the new accord in Northern Irish politics.

‘I fought for thirty years to let Ian Paisley rule?’ he says. ‘How do you think I feel?’

Mm. In a short while I have met deer-hunters, Mafia criminals and a man who raised money for the IRA. And I liked them all. I saw their points of view.

What is happening to me?

NEW JERSEY

KEY FACTS

Abbreviation:

NJ

Nickname:

The Garden State

Capital:

Trenton

Flower:

Common meadow violet

Tree:

Northern red oak

Bird:

American goldfinch

Shell:

Knobbed whelk (honest)

Motto:

Liberty and Prosperity

Well-known residents and natives:

Grover Cleveland (22nd and 24th President), Thomas Alva Edison, Alfred Kinsey, William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Roth, Andrea Dworkin, Martha Stewart, Abbott and Costello, Jerry Lewis, Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep, Danny DeVito, Joe Pesci, John Travolta, Ray Liotta, Bruce Willis, Kevin Spacey, David Cassidy, James Gandolfini, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra, Bruce Springsteen, Jon Bon Jovi, Whitney Houston, Shaquille O’Neal.

NEW JERSEY

‘And so I find myself driving into hell.’

New Jersey is, let’s be honest, the Essex of America. Jersey girls and Jersey boys will forever be mocked in jokes and songs for their dumbness, illiteracy, vulgarity and sexual availability. The industrial ugliness of much of the state where it borders the Hudson and looks across the river to Manhattan is hard to deny: Jersey City, Newark, Brunswick, Elizabeth and the chemical factories and choking pollution they bring have conferred great prosperity, but also a damningly negative image. It can call itself ‘The Garden State’ as much as it likes but it makes no difference; for all the beauties of Princeton and much of the coastline, Jersey will always, it seems, suffer from being looked on as something of a dump. About as far from Newport, RI as you can get, culturally and demographically.

My taxi and I are on our way to a place that has hammered its own nails into the coffin of Jersey’s reputation for refinement. Atlantic City.

Best known in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for its boardwalk, all seven miles of it, Atlantic City on the south Jersey shore was one of the most prosperous and successful resort towns in America. After the Second World War it freefell into what seemed irreversible decline, until, as a last-ditch effort in 1976, the citizens voted to allow gambling. Two years later the first casino in the eastern United States opened and ever since Atlantic City has been second only to Las Vegas as a plughole into which high and low rollers from all over the world are irresistibly drained.

And so I find myself driving into hell.

Trumpery

The weather does not help; heavy bruised skies brood over grey Atlantic rollers and on the beach the tide leaves a line of scummy frothing mousse and soggy litter. The signs advertising ‘Fun’ and ‘Family Rides’ on the vile seaside piers tinkle and clang in the sharp wind, a forlorn and spindly Ferris wheel squeaks and groans. Styrofoam coffee cups and flappy burger containers are rolled and tossed along the deserted boardwalk – New Jersey’s urban, eastern reinterpretation of the mythic tumbleweed and sagebrush of the West. Above tower the hotels, the ‘resort casinos’, blank façades in whose appearance and architectural qualities the developers have taken a precisely double-zero interest.

Would it not have been better to let this seedy resort town, the home of Monopoly and remnant of another way of holidaying, simply fall into the sea? Instead we are given this obscene Gehenna, a place of such tawdry, tacky, tinselly, tasteless and trumpery tat that the desire to run away clutching my hand to my mouth is overwhelming. But no, I must brave the interior of the most tawdry and literally trumpery tower of them all … The Trump Taj Mahal. For taking the name of the priceless mausoleum of Agra, one of the beauties and wonders of the world, for that alone Donald Trump should be stripped naked and whipped with scorpions along the boardwalk. It is as if a giant toad has raped a butterfly. I am not an enemy of developers, per se; I know that people must make money from construction and development projects, I know that there is a demand and that casinos will be built. I can pardon Trump all his vanities and shady junk-bonded dealings and financial brinkmanship, I would even forgive him his hair, were it not that everything he does is done with such poisonously atrocious taste, such false glamour, such shallow grandeur, such cynical vulgarity. At least Las Vegas developments, preposterous as they are have a kind of joy and wit to them … oh well, it is no good putting off the moment, Stephen. In you go.

The automatic doors of the black smoked-glass entrance hiss open and I am inside. I see at once that the exterior, boardwalk side of Atlantic City is deliberately kept as unappealing as possible, just to make sure people stay inside. All you need is within, mini-streets complete with Starbucks and burger outlets, there is even a shop devoted entirely to the personality of Donald Trump himself, with quotes from the great man all over the walls: ‘You’ve got to think anyway, so why not think big?’ and similar comforting and illuminating insights that enrich and nourish the hungry human soul. Everything sold here is in the ‘executive’ style, like bad eighties Pierre Cardin: slimy thin belts of glossy leather, notepads, cufflinks, unspeakable objects made of brass and mahogany. There is nothing here that I would not be ashamed to be seen owning. Not a thing. Oh, must we stay here one minute longer?

Perhaps I am just in a bad mood. At the top of the main staircase that leads to the gambling hall I meet up with the PR lady who has arranged for me to be trained as a blackjack dealer. She is perky and charming and seems to love her work.

‘You’re so very welcome indeed to this facility,’ she breathes. ‘If there is anything I can do to make your visit with us more pleasurable …?’

It would be churlish to suggest a flame-thrower and bazooka, so I grin toothily and follow her to the servants’ quarters, the backstage area.

Trainee Dealer Fry

Down we travel, by service elevator and stairway, through numberless corridors until we reach the zone where the staff uniforms are kept. Thousands and thousands of tunics are held on rails which, at the touch of a button leap to life. Great circulating loops of human-shaped shirtings process around like flapping zombies in a spooky dumb show reproduction of the gamblers above, the same robotic gestures – animated but with all the flesh sucked out.

I am given a ‘butter’-coloured chemise (a new colour line which has just come in to replace the ‘garnet’ still widely in use) and a strange black thing edged in gold that goes around my waist. Where a purse would be if I were an Austrian café waiter. A name tag tells the world that I am ‘Stephen Fry: Trainee’.

Blackjack is universally referred to as BJ without a trace of humour or even any apparent awareness that those initials have another common application. A girl called Kelly has been deputed to initiate me into the mysteries of BJ and she is fierce. Really fierce. I am familiar with blackjack as a player and think myself reasonably competent with a pack of cards. But Kelly’s impatience and contemptuous astonishment at my inability to work out the 3–2 insurance coverage on aces dealt to the dealer, my use of the right hand instead of the left hand to collect money from the left-hand side of the table, my slowness in payout calculation … all these conspire to make me feel more than usually clumsy and behave more than usually ham-fistedly.