Authors: Jonathan Raban
Following the line of the riverbank, I took West Second Street as it trailed south away from the center of the city. There was no one else in sight. I jumped at shadows on the sidewalk, unnerved—not so much by the thought of muggers as by the simple nighttime emptiness of the place. The first leaves of fall cracked under my feet. A single car raced past me from a stoplight, its automatic transmission protesting as it lurched too fast from gear to gear. Two miles on, at the corner of Filmore, there were kerosene lanterns and white faces—company to keep. They were huddled in the shadow of what looked like a huge warehouse. On these deserted city outskirts, their voices carried across Myrtle and Taylor and Marquette.
They were strike pickets at the gates of the Oscar Mayer Packing Company. It was the first strike at the factory that anyone could remember, and it had been going on for three weeks. District Local 431 of the United Food and Commercial Workers was in a holiday mood in the lanternlight; they were just about to settle. “We’re in a win-win situation here,” said a picket on the main gate, and offered me a can of Bud to toast the restored fortunes of Oscar Mayer.
“What happened?” I asked.
“We used to have fun here,” a woman said. “Everybody had fun. It was a great place to work at. Then things got sour. Now it’s all cutthroat. Everybody’s in competition with everybody else. It’s not like it used to be. They introduced this bonus incentive scheme, and suddenly no one had time to talk, even, they was so busy cutting one another’s throats. Then there was the health regulations. They had to block in all the windows for health reasons. Look—” She pointed up at the hulk of the building behind us. “Can you imagine what it’s like to work in there?”
“I went around the packing company in Dubuque,” I said.
“In the winter, you never get to see the sun except on weekends. You don’t talk. You don’t make friends like you used to. You live under those fluorescent lights … sometimes I think it’s not
human
to work like that.”
The coffee run arrived: two men in a car with thermos flasks and paper cups. I was invited along for the ride, and we went from gate to gate, doling out coffee, hamburgers, crackers and cigarettes. Harvey Schwartz, the driver, was a grandfatherly figure with an outdoor face; he’d worked most of his life at the packing company, but he also kept a small farm out in the country. His few acres of corn and vegetables set him apart from the other workers. He had one foot, at least, in a different American tradition. His companion was much younger, in his mid-twenties; and he too was planning an escape from the packing factory and the stigma of belonging to the industrial working class of a country in which so much stress has been laid on the virtue of individualism that to be seen to be working for someone else is close to being categorized as a failure. Jim was getting himself an education; he was going to become a chiropractor.
At night he worked for Oscar Mayer; then, after breakfast, he took off for morning classes at a college of chiropractice.
“The way I look at it, if you’re going to
be
somebody, you got to be a
professional.
”
I had been struck before by the number of chiropractic centers and
schools I had seen on my journey. Almost every town had one. To be a chiropractor was to be almost—well, not quite, but very nearly—a doctor; and the word “doctor” was a magical one. At a stroke it conferred the glow of special expertise, self-reliance and gentility. Easing the aches and stresses of the nation with clicking bones and cold cream, the chiropractors of America nearly constituted a class in their own right: “professional men” who had worked their way up from dead ends and factory floors via morning and evening classes.
We made a slow, stopping circle around the plant.
“You know,” Harvey said, “this used to be a nice city here. Now … well, it’s just another little Chicago.”
He pointed out a side street where a man had been stripped to nudity at gunpoint a week or two before.
“They even took the guy’s undershorts,” Harvey said. “They cleaned up on
everything.
”
“Were they white or black?”
“Oh, they were white,” Jim said.
“Poor guy was running halfway through Davenport just like God made him.”
The official strike headquarters was in a meeting hall next door to the factory; the unofficial one was in Frick’s Bar across the street, where the union men were doubtfully chewing over the terms of the settlement. The air was gritty with talk of side deals and percentages. Frick’s was a natural location for such talk: it was a famous political bar, an old Democratic hangout where the party leaders of the city had come to fix and plot and bargain since 1888, when the place was built. The Frick family had always been yellow-dog Democrats, and their bar had become a kind of scaled-down, Davenport version of Tammany Hall. Three generations of Fricks had held important positions in the government of the city, and the walls of the bar were hung with old photographs of boss-Fricks in wing collars, framed citations and keys to the freedom of Davenport. When I’d started my walk up West Second Street, I had been looking for Frick’s, not for the packing plant and its pickets.
“Hey,” Harvey said, “you got to come to the pig roast I’m giving out on my farm Saturday.”
“Now, that’s an invitation you can’t refuse,” said Ross Frick, the elderly grandson of the founder of the bar. “Nobody
ever
says no to Harvey Schwartz when he asks them to one of his pig roasts.” Frick was wearing exactly the same stripy one-piece pajama suit I had seen on the old man at the Minnesota State Fair. He was small and limber,
a quick and dainty septuagenarian with boxer’s footwork as he sailed up and down the length of his bar. Harvey told me how, not long before, Ross Frick had missed being elected mayor of Davenport by a whisker. “He’d’ve made a damn good mayor, too; he tends a damn good bar.” Frick was dealing briskly with a drunk who was a third his age and many times his weight; the drunk disappeared into the street looking as if he couldn’t believe what was happening to him.
“He’s a good boy,” Frick said, returning. “Just a little wife trouble.”
Mr. Frick got out the gold and silver keys to the city he had been awarded during his political career. Together with the keys of his father and grandfather, they added up to a burglar’s incriminating collection. Mr. Frick, as one of Iowa’s senior Democrats, was, I thought, unusually well placed to tell me something new about the presidential election. I asked whether he was going to support Carter or Kennedy as the party’s nominee.
“Those sonofabitches! I’ll be voting for Ronald Reagan.”
“But I thought you were a Democrat,” I said, still holding a gilt-alloy key.
“Times change,” Mr. Frick said. “I
was
a Democrat. Then I got to see how those sonofabitches, our leaders, managed things.… Never again. The only guy I’ll vote for for President is Ronald Reagan. He’s a local boy, you know? From right across the river: Tampico, Illinois. Then I remember him when he got his first start, talking through the football games for WHO here in Davenport. I don’t trust any of those sonofabitches no more, but if I trust anyone, I’ll trust Ronald Reagan.”
“But what’s made you change?”
“I remember when America was a great country. Like, when I was a young man, it was To the Victor, the Spoils, you know? When I was a kid and I got someone down in a fair fight, I said, ‘Now you’re going to goddamn do what
I
say from now on …’ and they did it. Now look what happens! If you’re the victor now, you got to grovel, then you got to grovel some more. That’s all America does, nowadays. It’s down on its knees. War reparations! Look, who won goddamn World War Two? Once, I thought we did. But then I look at America now and I look at Germany now, and all I can see is we was taken for goddamn suckers. Same thing with Korea. Same thing with Vietnam. Look at these sonofabitch boat people! We’re on our knees to them! We’re groveling in front of every welfare sponger and refugee we can find. We’re eating dirt for them. That’s not the way America was supposed to be. You tell me: what’s the sense, what’s the right in it? Why are we kissing the asses of these jerks? America didn’t get to what it was by
kissing no one’s ass. So why we got to kiss ass now? That wasn’t the way I was raised. No one told me I had to go down on my knees to bums.…”
Ross Frick wasn’t an ordinary bar bigot. I’d heard this line, or one much like it, many times before; but I’d never heard it spoken with quite such bewilderment and quite such a charge of personal humiliation. If the rhetoric was commonplace, the pain was real; Ross Frick minded about America, and he simply couldn’t understand what had happened to the place he thought he loved. “Look …” he said, then shook his head sadly; what he was trying to tell me was beyond his capacity to communicate. Finally, he said, “You seen my backyard?”
“No,” I said.
“Come out back with me. I want to show it you.”
Puzzled at this shift of subject, I followed him behind the bar and into a scruffy little kitchen, where he switched on a raft of lights which flooded the yard beyond.
“Look,” said Mr. Frick, showing me out through the door.
Even now, his garden was still an embroidered quilt of summer colors. Plants in pots were arranged in steep pyramids, in banks of deep green ferns, in white wrought-iron pagodas and hanging baskets. He had squashed what looked to me like a complete Chelsea flower show into the space of a living room: slender garden daisies, livid begonias, fuchsias, chrysanthemums, primulas, geraniums … Tiny graveled walks trailed in and out among the beds of flowers. The centerpiece was a miniature waterfall. Mr. Frick switched it on, and a little river came bubbling through the ferns over rocks of colored crystal and splashed into a lily-padded pool. In the corner of the yard was a rose bower, the blooms of pink and crimson looking bloody in the floodlight. A signboard with carved rustic lettering was suspended over the top of the bower on silver chains; it said:
I NEVER PROMISED YOU A ROSE GARDEN
.
“You like it?”
“It’s lovely,” I said.
“I built it for my wife. But you ought to see it in the spring. It’s getting to be late for roses now.”
I understood why, lost for words, Mr. Frick had wanted me to see his garden. It was a small, embattled American Eden. I looked up at the high walls: they were spiked with broken glass and barbed wire. Mr. Frick had had trouble with vandals; and beyond the walls lay the faceless ones who were out to destroy this pocket-handkerchief paradise—the muggers, welfare spongers, boat people … all the jerks and
sonofabitches who would happily tear Mr. Frick’s geraniums out by their roots and smash the delicate trelliswork of his rose bower. In his garden he had preserved an idyllic version of America against all odds, and the marauders and despoilers were gathering in the street outside.
The raked gravel crunched under our shoes.
“I’m going to have to start taking the plants inside on the weekend,” Mr. Frick said. “There’s a frost coming. I can feel it in the air.”
T
he Iowa shore
was flat and ragged: an unlovely sprawl of coal chutes, cement factories and black barge fleets, with towboats busying about the river in the sun. The wind, blowing out of the west-northwest, should have been coming from the safest quarter; here, though, the Mississippi ran almost due west for twenty-five miles to Muscatine, and the waves were steep and foamy. I’d caught the river people’s habit of thinking of the river as
he
or
she
(the genders were interchangeable—they simply asserted that the Mississippi was never an
it)
. Despite myself, I had taken to the practice of a superstitious natural magic: each day now I would question the river. Did he mean to kill me or be kind? Today I could feel his irritation. He wanted me off his back. There was an obscure intimation of bad luck written into the grubby landscape and the too-bright glitter of the breakers.
Warned, I scraped ashore on a button-clam beach at Buffalo, ten miles on from Davenport. The Buffalo Club Bar had a corral of motorcycles parked outside it, and inside it the local chapter of Hell’s Angels was at home. In knee boots, jeans, leather jackets and cowboy hats, the chapter was making a noisy job of killing the morning.
“Why’d the Mexican tie his wife to the railroad tracks?”
The question was followed by a smirking, snuffling pause.
“Tequila.”
The whoops that met this bit of angelic wit sounded like the bloodcurdling gurgles Chinese martial-arts experts make when they come in for the final chop.
Yock-hoi-whee! Ya-hoo!
Another angel told the story of how he’d found a rattlesnake in a
creek. He chawed and twisted his syllables as if they were pieces of gum in his mouth. “… ayund thayun Ah bayusted the goddayumn sonofa-bayitch’s hayead off with a rock.”
“Shit,” said someone, in a tone of entirely innocent admiration.
I went to the men’s room. When I came back I saw that my hat, which I’d left on the bar by my beer glass, was gone. I had become fond of that hat. It had lost its Boy Scout air. Bleached, creased, pockmarked by the rain, it was nicely registering my own steady accretion of experience. The angels watched me as I sat down. I studied the space on the bar where my hat ought to be. I should have played this game more circumspectly, but the river had made me jumpy, and I just demanded, angrily, that whoever had stolen my hat give it back.
“Guy’s lorst his hayut,” said the rattlesnake killer, rolling his eyes back in badly hammed astonishment.
“Well,” said my immediate neighbor, “Ah still got mine,” and he raised the fingers of both hands to touch his brim. “That’s what Buffalo’s famous for. Hat-napping.” Whoops and whistles.
Rattlesnake said, “Are you trayin’ to tell us something, fella? You ain’t, by any chayunce, trayin’ to say as one of us-guys has committed some kinda mister-die-meaner?”
I didn’t like the thought of my own head being busted off with a rock. The bartender was conspicuously attending to matters elsewhere. There was going to be no help from him. I said that I was sorry to have lost my hat. It was my only one, and I’d grown to like it. If anyone saw it anywhere, I’d be grateful for its return. I left the bar and stood outside, hoping that it would be chucked at me through the open window. It wasn’t. I felt sour and resentful as I left Buffalo, Iowa (pop. 1,513). The United States is internationally notorious for its thuggishness, but in ten years of visits and temporary residences I had never once had anything stolen from me or been met with even the most indirect threat of violence. It seemed infuriating and absurd that the record should be broken here of all places, and broken over something as trifling as a battered twelve-dollar hat.