Day 7: Friday, October 6th 2017
The sun shone for us once again as we headed off to the Tennis Hall of Fame; the home of the first US Open and an historic building with a kind of charm not unlike Wimbledon but on a smaller scale. John said the main entrance might look intimidating but just walk in, you’ll be welcomed. Try that in SW19, you’d get cut off in your stride very quickly with a faux courteous, English greeting something along the lines of, “Can I help you sir?”. Meaning just the opposite of course. Being a big tennis fan Jane was fascinated and we strolled around the almost deserted grounds, soaking up the atmosphere and history. There’s something magical about empty sports stadiums; somehow the echoey sounds of bat and ball, and the crowds cheering and gasping are more noticeable by their absence. It feels as if we should speak quietly in case we wake the ghosts of times past. In case the screams, yells, tears and emotions of so many games, now soaked into the grandstands, will be released.
But the walls of this great venue have witnessed far greater sights, heard much more powerful sounds. To my mind anyway. For this is the home of the Newport Folk Festival and on this very stage in 1963 a young Bob Dylan performed to an adoring crowd. Well, not stage exactly, rather a kind of wooden rotunda that separates two of the grass show-courts. In the exhibition hall there’s a black and white photograph of him performing with Joan Baez, the two of them sitting side by side on the wooden floor of the rotunda. Another shows Dylan hemmed in on stage by journalists, fans and musicians, all sitting within touching distance; unthinkable today. But this day there is a man standing on the same wooden floor, sweeping up autumn leaves and I ask him if I’ve found the right spot. He points to the floor and I take a photo. My skin tingles with excitement. Two years later Dylan would return, and, on a whim apparently, angered by some of the festival organisers’ attitude to electric guitar bands, decided to play an electric set the next day. His performance was met with a mixture of boos and cheers and someone described it thus:
“….he electrified one half of his audience, and electrocuted the other”.
I tread with due reverence on the wooden boards, taking care not to disturb any of the magic dust and take myself back to that warm July evening. In about 1965 I bought all of my friend’s Dylan album collection for £2 as he needed the money at the time. I felt guilty as he was an absolute Dylan worshipper and, although I would have liked to say I was, in truth I was not. I eventually returned them, that’s how I remember it anyway; maybe that’s false memory syndrome constructed to salve my conscience. I don’t have them anywhere now so hopefully justice was served? There’s a clip on Vimeo of Dylan performing on this rotunda….
We spend the afternoon (it’s picnic day) on the ‘Mansion Walk’ around Newport bay, gawping up at the houses built by wealthy industrialists and entrepreneurs of the ‘Gilded Age’, when fortunes were made from newspapers, railroads, tobacco, mining and the like. Built as summer ‘cottages’ to escape the heat of the city they sit high above the coastal path, vying with each other to gain maximum superiority over the hoi polloi below straining their necks to catch a sniff of their overblown opulence, or to hear the imagined sound of extravagant parties echoing through the halls. Names like Cornelius Vanderbilt and Theresa Fair Oelrichs speak of American royalty, the upstart immigrants who came to make a buck or two and made good.
I was always fascinated by the old black and white American films I saw on TV as a very young child; I could smell the walnut-panelled offices (I assumed they were walnut for some reason), the view through the window signifying that the office was at least on the hundreth floor of a Manhattan skyscaper and the baggy trousers, shiny shoes and double-breasted jackets of the cigar-smoking, slick-haired men said something to me about money, fame, opportunity and glamour. And of another, far-off world that I think I unconsciously longed for. I’m not sure why a small boy living in a small seaside resort on the Lincolnshire coast should find that connection but I just know that I felt comfortable with what I imagined that life to be. This was reinforced by the visit one day to our humble, semi-detached home on Victoria Road, Mablethorpe of a dashing young American called Danny Weilermann and his elderly mother Olga. I had no idea who they were and the culture of my upbringing meant that words unspoken occupied far more space than those that were spoken. My hazy understanding was that they were perhaps something to do with the war, Germany, America, Dad; God knows what. But that was of little importance to me. Danny – and what an exotic name that seemed to be in the Lincolnshire of the 1950s – embodied everything that I felt about That Far Off Land. In my memory, which we call the truth, he was very handsome, tanned, healthy-looking, had the requisite wavy, brylcreemed hair, requisite suit, shoes and most impressive of all arrived in a gigantic American car with what I later learned was called a stick-shift; and bench seats that smelt of expensive leather. I actually felt quite queasy when I travelled in the car as the hot summer sun accentuated the smell of the leather, but my sense of belonging, of somehow feeling at home riding in that car, overrode the nausea; I was in that American movie.
I don’t feel particularly intimidated in the company of the wealthy, the famous or the privileged. Or feel the opposite when in the company of those lower down the pecking order. I’ve been lucky in my life to have met and worked with some of those at the very top of their world as well as those at the bottom, sometimes on the same day; and I’ve concluded that whatever group, class or tribe we belong to, we all just comprise the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Or more often than not, a combination of all three.
In my small boy’s suspended disbelief I sidestepped the obvious contradiction that for Danny and his mother to have arrived from America by car would necessitate crossing the Atlantic ocean in it, but my brain computed that they probably travelled on the Queen Mary and it had been specially shipped over at great, but inconsequential, expense. Some memories don’t bear deep scrutiny.
Anyway, back to earth. Plebian sandwiches eaten on the other side of the tracks today.
Day 8: Saturday, October 7th 2017
Before leaving Newport we looked in on JFK again. He and Jacquie were married in St Mary’s Church just a block away from John’s house.
Then it’s goodbye to John and Kylee in her conical neck collar and set the dial for……. NOO YOYK!
We stop off along the way at Mystic Creek; not the mist-laden, atmospheric fork in the river you might expect, but a cutesy shopping village of fake streams, log cabins and retail opportunities. Coffee and a rest by the fake duck pond then the final 100 miles to NY.
How the hell on earth we ever drove anywhere unfamiliar without satnav is anyone’s guess. I think we could survive without even the internet but attempting to find an apartment building in central Manhattan at rush hour without ending up trapped in a groundhog day of missed turnings, one-way streets and angry motorists, using only a map read by your directionally challenged ‘navigator’, just doesn’t bear thinking about.
I imagined that as we approached the city we would drive through suburbs, gradually increasing in density until we hit manic downtown. But as it turned out Manhattan Island hove into view in all of its widecreen splendour in a deceptively straightforward manner. And whatever was playing on the radio at the time: a commercial for a washing machine, yet another country music song or the rhetoric of some barnstorming preacher, would provide a perfect soundtrack to the movie playing through our car window.
It’s always best not to get too cocky though.
As it is, we make a wrong turn near our AirBnB location, but New York’s sensible grid-system means we just need to make a few left turns and we’re back on track. So much easier than trying to follow the direction of travel in an English city decided upon in the middle ages by some wandering livestock trying to avoid marshy ground and with little concern for town planning.
As the satnav tells us we have arrived at our destination we pass an alarming number of police cars all parked in a row. More would be revealed later. We pull up outside our apartment block. Are we really here? Really in New York? So good they named it…oh shut up.
Yes we are. We trundle our cases into the lobby. The concierge has no record of our name or our host and just for a moment the AirBnB horror stories come back to my mind. But we just picked the wrong apartment block. Take two. We take the elevator (you have to use the vernacular) to our floor, (the aroma of which is a surprisingly pleasant mixture of cleaning materials and marijuana), and locate our room. 4C.
Our host Baruch is away and has texted the code to unlock the keysafe containing the key to the door, which only adds to the drama; will it work, will the key be inside, will it fit the door, will there be anyone inside? Of course it will. Of course it is. Of course it does. Of course there isn’t. We’re not in a crime drama for God’s sake. It’s just that being in the US somehow always feels like you’re in a movie of some kind. They’ve sold it well to us over the years.
The apartment is split into two by a curtain, which screens off our living area and has a bed, sofa, big telly and bookcase. No-one around at the moment but Baruch is scheduled to arrive home tonight so we have time to nosy around and speculate on our version of who he is from his photos, books and fridge; always one of the perks of an AirBnB stay. But I am itching to get out into the mean streets.
It’s starting to get dark but we take a quick look around the neighbourhood, west Central Park. Cool! Is that really Central Park? Can I just make out the Empire State Building in the gloom? Are we really in New Yor…yes we are!! I hope I never get so jaded by travel that I become too cool to feel the child-like excitement I experience at pretty much every aspect of being a foreigner in a foreign land.
We grab some food and take it back to the apartment for a slap-up, low-budget supper. Tomorrow we dine out!
Cut.