“Los Angeles... a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness.”
Raymond Chandler
A problem with the handbrake delayed us in Oakdale, a town so devoid of any interesting or attractive features that after a few minutes of wandering around completely at random every single member of the group ended up independently in the same diner drinking the warm brown liquid that they insisted on describing as coffee. The delay meant that we had to drive non-stop to San Francisco to make up for lost time. At San Francisco we hit a problem. It was full. We were arriving on a Friday and that weekend was a busy one for the city. Not only were half the country’s homosexual population in town for Gay Pride Weekend but some genius had decided that it was also a good time to stage the X-Games, a competition where teenagers from all over the nation do gladiatorial battle on mountain bikes and skateboards.
In theory the hotel had been booked. In practice what had been booked wasn’t what was required. Normally in America a double room means a room with two, usually very large, double beds. In our hotel it meant rooms with one really rather small double bed. Now quite apart from it being more or less universal that men won’t share beds with each other while women will the numbers wouldn’t have worked out anyway. There was a considerable amount of argument in reception and a lot of shuffling about room to room before a compromise was reached which left three of the girls sharing one room and me in a room on my own. I didn’t work out exactly how that happened until the last day of the trip when I discovered with no great surprise that of the four men on the truck only I had spent the whole trip without managing to pair off with one of the women. That was nothing new though.
Almost as soon as we had settled in we went out for a meal at the Kublai Khan Mongolian Buffet and Karaoke Bar which was a few blocks from the hotel. This was a bizarre place with no ambience or atmosphere and an unusual way of serving the food. All of the dishes, meat, vegetable or sauces are laid out uncooked in a series of bowls near the door. You help yourself, ladling whatever bizarre combination of ingredients and flavours takes your fancy into a bowl. Then a chef tips it all onto a very large, very hot hot-plate and whisks it around for a couple of minutes before tipping it back into your bowl. For a fixed price you can repeat this process as often as you like until your stomach can no longer stand any more of the weird concoctions.
When we had finished eating, the Karaoke started. Now if there is one thing in the world that I like less than dancing it’s Karaoke. While at dances and discos I can unobtrusively retire to the bar and just watch, a few minutes of the hideous caterwauling that most people manage when trying to sing along to a video is usually more than I can take. As for my singing voice it is so utterly hideous that it is forbidden in America as a cruel and unusual punishment. For politeness sake I did my best to sit there and look inconspicuous as a few people wobbled their way shakily through their performances. It was just looking as if I would have to, as they say, make my excuses and leave when the whole thing stopped because of a noisy distraction outside. We went to the window and looked down to the street where a large number of bearded men in dresses had gathered in some kind of practice Gay Pride March. Now I’m a great believer in live and let live but I’m firmly convinced that men with beards should think twice before adopting a transvestite lifestyle. David Bellamy playing Widow Twankey cannot by any stretch of the imagination be considered an attractive look. They sang, danced and minced their way along the street for about twenty minutes accompanied by half a dozen cops who looked bored with the whole thing. By the time they had gone so, thankfully, had all thoughts of the Karaoke.
San Francisco, apart from being so hilly that only people training for the triathlon should consider living there, is a pretty nice city. A quick side trip to the visitors centre provided me with a couple of self guided walking maps and I was set for the day. I headed off towards Union Square which I found to be filled to bursting with local artists whose work varied from chocolate box pictures of fluffy kittens through pedestrian still-lifes and landscapes to dark and disturbing abstracts that while not actually being of anything as such managed to dredge through the nastier corners of the psyche. Every imaginable style from cubism to pointillism was represented. I walked from one to another comparing them, surprised that regardless of the artistic style you can still find people working in it. One set in particular took my eye. As I walked around, a large canvas in predominantly red and orange hooked my attention. At first sight it seemed to be no more than complex swirls of colour but as I approached for a closer look indistinct figures, reminiscent of Indian Warriors loomed unexpectedly from the pattern of the background. For all their vague definition they looked as if they might burst from the canvas and step out onto the pavement at any moment. I looked at another work by the same artist. This was a dark brooding piece, full of sinister purples and blacks, but sure enough like ghosts in the fog there were figures there if you looked for them. The artist, a grey haired, moustached man in a cap sitting nearby, handed me a card when I said how much I liked them. He was, I discovered, Ed Handelman and although I wasn’t in the market to buy any he didn’t seem especially disappointed, just pleased that I had bothered to stop and admire his work. Looking around I realised that all over the market people were admiring the works of their choice without buying them. I wondered vaguely how anyone could make a living at it.
The guide leaflet was, I soon discovered, a fairly perfunctory affair which really failed to do the city any justice at all. Looking at what it said about Union Square I discovered a list of famous stores that surround it and the information that it is ‘among the top four shopping sectors in the nation’ which of course misses the point completely. Union square is a wonderfully colourful and vibrant place and while the surrounding buildings all have a blocky twentieth century style about them they nevertheless seem to suit it perfectly with their ground level facades in a variety of styles from mock classical to art-deco. The whole square seems to have been designed as a piece of art in its own right although the central column of the Dewey Monument with its small winged victory statue is comically dwarfed by its surroundings.
I moved on to the second of the guides, the one provided for Chinatown. Now Chinatown is one of the most interesting districts of San Francisco. The mix of cultural styles is endlessly fascinating. From the moment you step through the dragon crested gate at Grant and Bush everything changes. The shop fronts have the highly ornate styles of pagodas and palaces. The signs are in dual English and Mandarin lettering. Buildings like the elaborate but tiny Bank of Canton draw the eye at ground level, sandwiched between two plain brick walls completely dwarfed by the white tower block that stands behind it. Meanwhile glancing up reveals a maze of red, green and yellow ironwork balconies. Shops have names like ‘The Wonder Food Co.’, ‘Twan Kee’ and ‘The Great China Art Company’. This is a real place filled with real people going about their daily lives though, not just a phoney excuse for souvenir and antique shops. On Stockton Avenue, parallel to the main tourist trap of Grant, there are markets where the smells of herbs and spices and pigs and ducks cooking all mingle with the sharper more acrid smells from the Chinese apothecaries. It’s difficult to tell the stalls selling medicinal preparations from the ones selling culinary ones. I consulted my map and discovered that apart from a loop back on itself to finish a block away from where it started it suggested a straight walk through the middle of the twenty four blocks. I could have worked that out for myself. I read through the notes. They were scarcely more enlightening than the previous set had been. Certainly it named a few of the buildings and pointed out a couple that I might have otherwise missed but, like most places in America, San Francisco’s Chinatown is laid out on the kind of grid system that makes getting lost a near impossibility. I put the guide away and zigzagged down, just enjoying the atmosphere of the place.
Actually I had a destination in mind. For the afternoon I was visiting Alcatraz along with all those in the group who preferred sight seeing to shopping. I had all the tickets in my pocket so I couldn’t afford to be late. I arrived at pier 41, where the boat for the island departs, and waited. It was more brightly coloured than Ed’s paintings had been. There was a street full of buskers pretending to be statues with varying degrees of ability but roughly equivalent degrees of indifference from their audiences. Everyone who passed by looked as if they had stepped from the pages of one magazine or another - some from Vogue, others from Circus Monthly. My jeans and T-shirt were distinctly downbeat by comparison to the San Francisco norm. One by one the others arrived and when we had all finally gathered we took the boat out across the bay.
Alcatraz, originally a military fortress, became a prison almost by accident when Fort Point and Presidio started sending any deserters and thieves to be imprisoned in its more secure guardhouse. More and more prisoners arrived until it was officially changed into a military prison in 1861. So it remained until 1933 - housing only army prisoners and an occasional Native American who had in some way offended the Government. During this period there were plenty of escapees. After all, as one of the guides on my visit put it,
‘It’s not hard to escape when you’re being guarded by someone who was your best friend last week.’
From 1933 it was a segregation facility, where some of the United States nastiest and most violent criminals were imprisoned, although only a very small number of them have gone on to lasting notoriety - Robert Stroud - the Birdman of Alcatraz - and Al Capone being perhaps the two most famous. Once the military had left officially no-one escaped. However among the published statistics - seven shot and killed, two drowned, twenty two recaptured there are five unaccounted for. Nevertheless considering that more than one and a half thousand prisoners were incarcerated in Alcatraz between 1933 and 1964 its formidable reputation was clearly well deserved.
It still looks grim when it is full of tourists instead of felons. There is a cold atmosphere about the plain functional buildings that the change from prison to historic site cannot disguise. The mess hall and cell blocks are now, by and large, empty of all furnishings but it takes little effort to visualise it full of convicts and guards, separated from each other by the heavily barred grills alonf the balconies. I took the excellent audio tour and then wandered around for an hour trying to imagine it as it was instead of as it is today with the legions of camera wielding visitors. There is such a feeling of oppression about it that it’s easy to do. From the plain grim grey walls to the angular silhouette of the water tower it all looks stark and functional. The most oppressive thing of all for the prisoners must have been that from the dining room the lights and sounds of the city just out of reach across the bay tormented them with a vision of an impossible freedom.
All that was left after San Francisco of this first section of my journey was the trip down the coast first through Monterey then Santa Barbara and finally on to Los Angeles. This is the rich tourist part of the US coast. Monterey, which was once a centre of fishing and the sardine canning industry is the best example. Nowadays Cannery Row, once home to all the fish processing plants, is a maze of high class high price hotels and upmarket restaurants and gift shops. The town is one of those where every factory and warehouse, every spare or vacant building has been restored on the outside and converted on the inside so that their ersatz frontages hide warrens of shopping malls each trying to outdo the others in style, chic and expensiveness. It’s the kind of place that doesn’t have shops it has boutiques and salons. They sell things like die-cast models of vintage cars for a hundred dollars or hand painted glass lampshades for five hundred. The harbour front had been decorated with a long line of murals representing the history of the town, ranging from some which look as if they were done by five year olds, or perhaps Rolf Harris, to elaborate and detailed paintings that could hang in any gallery. There was a savage irony in the way that they all depicted the Monterey of years gone by, contrasting sharply with the modern yuppie heaven reality on the opposite side of the street. I assumed they were the works of more local artists. Just as in San Francisco there seemed a fair number of them about. It must be something about the West Coast temperament, everywhere there are artists and buskers and street performers, possibly the highest per capita density of them anywhere in the World.
From Monterey the drive to Santa Barbara along the coast has stunning ocean views and a dramatic drop off to the right of the road, or so I’m told. Our drive was slow and careful and the views ended in a swirling grey fog about six feet beyond the bus windows. Sometimes the green and brown hillside on the left of the vehicle loomed close enough to suddenly appear from the fog and very occasionally the random motions of the wind would give us a tantalising view out to sea but for the most part we drove through the grey tunnel of the fog without seeing a thing. At our overnight camp at a beach at Santa Barbara we ran into one of the other Trek America trucks starting out on the reverse run. If I’d thought the gender balance on our truck a little lopsided that one was unbelievable.
“It’s the au-pair run,” Dave told us as we witnessed the rather intimidated driver explaining how to put up the tents on his first day out to fifteen nubile female teenagers. It didn’t seem so bad to me though. I began to see the merits of the job of a tour leader.
Finally though, on the morning of 29th June we came into Los Angeles which is my least favourite city in America. (World-wide it comes second to Athens - a city where the only buildings that don’t look as if they should be torn down immediately are the ones that have been standing for two thousand years.) I’ve spent time in Los Angeles before, walking around the streets of Hollywood which is sleazier than you can possibly imagine, and riding the crowded local buses out to the coastal resort of Santa Monica where there are fewer dropouts and cleaner streets but an even higher probability of random collisions with would be actors walking along the pavement with script in hand pretending they have lines to learn. I had no burning desire to revisit any of the places I’d seen last time round so I took another option.
Los Angeles has its good points but unfortunately they are all things like ‘Universal Studios’ and ‘Disneyland’. They are enclaves within the city where you can get away from the reality and pretend that you are somewhere else, somewhere that has not even the most tenuous connection to reality. I’d been to Disney before, albeit the cloned version in Florida - visiting its unlikely future, its imaginary past and its cartoon present on a day when in the real world everything I owned had just been stolen from a bus and I didn’t know where my next meal or my flight home would be coming from. Even in those circumstances it had been fun, not just a suspension of disbelief but a suspension of reality. This time I opted for pretending to be ten years old at Universal studios which was as good a place as any to get away from the noise, dirt and general tackiness that is the genuine West Coast Experience. So I spent the day travelling through time in Back to the Future, being kidnapped by rogue cyborgs in Terminator II, alternately soaked and roasted by the battles of Waterworld and attacked by dinosaurs at Jurassic Park. Nobody in the park apart from me appeared to see anything at all ironic in this last attraction. It was a film studio theme park ride based on the theme park in a film made by that studio. Or something. It struck me as ironic anyway.
Next morning outside the hotel I said ‘Goodbye’ to everyone, killed the day sitting around at LAX and flew out to Alaska without bothering to visit any of L.A. It's the best way.
