Mythology competes with reality in a land of contrasts
When you visit the United States of America for the first time in your 52nd year, certain expectations are unavoidable.
The pervasiveness of popular culture means any visitor sees the place through a prism of music, movies and television, the mythology of America competing with a reality that is much more nuanced and complex.
My wife and I were coming toward the end of our time in San Francisco, the first leg of a threeweek holiday, when I caught a glimpse of him. The view afforded from the back seat of the Uber car might have been thought cinematic, the equivalent of a slow tracking shot in an independent film or a gritty, small-screen drama like The Wire. In fact, the gentleman in question bore a surface similarity to the Bubbles character in that TV show.
It required a conscious effort to remind myself that this was not a scene staged for amusement or even edification, but an unfortunate life, observed all too briefly in passing.
He could have been anywhere between 45 and 65, an Africanamerican, white of beard, pushing a supermarket trolley laden with dirty clothing and assorted junk. In the middle of this pile, sticking up on a diagonal, was a large, framed poster of James Dean. The juxtaposition of this presumably homeless individual with the manufactured, Hollywood image of white boy, middle-class rebellion was almost comedic.
Had the poster been salvaged from a kerbside dumping or trash can? Did the gentleman retrieve it for his personal collection, however unlikely that might seem, or was he, like the fictitious Bubbles, a street-level entrepreneur, 21stcentury America’s answer to a tinker, flogging off secondhand goods and acquired wares? Either way, there was resilience and, dare I say, a touch of dignity about the man. He had a plan.
The homeless are almost everywhere you care to look. Not just in the poorer streets or suburbs but camping out in the middle of business districts, and in the immense public parks, erecting tents and makeshift shanty towns. A constant commentary on the darker recesses of the American dream, the flip side to the beauty and the culture seen all over the west coast.
America’s homeless problem, like the drug and mental health issues that contribute to it and the extremes of wealth and poverty of which it is an expression, have an equivalent in this country.
The most surprising thing about travelling through San Francisco, Vancouver and Seattle was how consistent the social and political debates are with our own.
Very rich people co-existing with the excessively impoverished, and a middle class squeezed out of the property market, unable to afford to live where they work, forced into ludicrous commutes, a life lived in a motor vehicle, with all the environmental consequences that entails.
Large-scale Chinese investment in real estate, much of it concerned more with market speculation than a desire to house real people, causing resentment and fuelling prejudice.
Capitalism is broken. You could be fooled into thinking a reckoning is coming.
Mostly, people were aware of the issues and thoughtful in their responses. Jesse, our guide on our personalised tour of locations that featured in the film Vertigo ,wasa font of knowledge on all things San Francisco, from botany to architecture to history. His was an unforced eloquence, not least when discussing homelessness.
Jesse’s great-grandmother was a slave. His mother was a judge. He knew about injustice, and he knew about the value of education.
Equally memorable was the bus driver who took us across the Golden Gate Bridge. Dispensing with the official tourist script, he offered personal testimony. An excon, who had served 15 years behind bars and faced another 25 before turning his life around, freedom was far from an abused word in this man’s mouth.
Few Americans earn the tips they often ungraciously demand, but here was an exception, straightforward and inspiring. I wanted to retrieve all the money squandered on haughty wait staff and give it to this guy.
There’s a temptation to reduce the US to its extremes. Is it the Disneyland that so uncannily lived up to expectations, the simple pleasure of riding the Alice in
Wonderland-inspired teacups, a childhood dream come true? Or is it the junkie brazenly injecting heroin on the streets, within sight of passersby, as indifferent to any police present as they are indifferent to him? It’s all that and more besides.
There’s a temptation to reduce the US to its extremes.