Another Fine Mess

by Tim Moore

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Tim Moore

  Dedication

  Title Page

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  Copyright

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  Lacking even the most basic mechanical knowhow, Tim Moore sets out to cross Trumpland USA in an original Model T Ford. Armed only with a fan belt made of cotton, wooden wheels and a trunkload of ‘wise-ass Limey liberal gumption’, his route takes him exclusively through Donald-voting counties, meeting the everyday folks who voted red along the way.

  He meets a people defined by extraordinary generosity, willing to shift heaven and earth to keep him on the road. And yet, this is clearly a nation in conflict with itself: citizens ‘tooling up’ in reaction to ever-increasing security fears; a healthcare system creaking to support sugar-loaded soda lovers; a disintegrating rust belt all but forgotten by the warring media and political classes.

  With his trademark blend of slapstick humour, affable insight and butt-clenching peril, Tim Moore invites us on an unforgettable road trip through Trump’s America. Buckle up!

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Tim Moore’s writing has appeared in the Daily Telegraph, the Observer, the Sunday Times and Esquire. He is the author of Gironimo!, French Revolutions, Do Not Pass Go, Spanish Steps, Nul Points, I Believe In Yesterday and You Are Awful (But I Like You). He lives in London.

  ALSO BY TIM MOORE

  The Cyclist Who Went Out in the Cold

  French Revolutions

  Do Not Pass Go

  Spanish Steps

  Nul Points

  I Believe in Yesterday

  You Are Awful (But I Like You)

  Gironimo!

  To M8 and P8

  CHAPTER 1

  ‘No blasphemy. Say piss and tits all you like, but no Jesus Christ or God Almighty. I’m serious.’

  Ross Lilleker’s pan-flat Derbyshire tones hung portentously in the bright blue Virginia morning. ‘Oh, and don’t use the C word. They’re not big fans of that one over here.’

  It was the first Sunday in July, and we were outside a big white house in the manicured woodlands of Charlottesville’s deepest suburbia. Behind us, on a driveway delicately strewn with pine needles, stood a tall, thin, black motor car of startling antiquity. It had been a while, though much too short a while, since Ross reversed this frail relic out of the 30-foot trailer he now walked back past, en route to the huge, squat pick-up that towed it.

  ‘Drink plenty of water, you get really dried out driving them old things.’ Ross paused by the pick-up’s door. Sixteen years in Texas had done nothing to blunt that Chesterfield accent. He climbed in and lowered the window. ‘Right, reckon you’re all good. I’ll be off, then.’ Then he winked with his good eye, the one that hadn’t been taken out some years back by a rivet gun, fired up a brutish diesel engine and eased the colossal rig away.

  I watched it disappear over a tree-topped brow, then listened as the roar faded, leaving me alone with birdsong and the distant drone of a lawnmower. That pick-up was the manliest vehicle I had ever been in, its crew-cab rear seat cluttered with greasy wrenches and boxes of rattling ironmongery, one of which I’d gamely attempted to employ as a pillow on our non-stop drive through the night. Fifteen hours earlier, Ross had picked me up outside an airport motel in Newark, New Jersey. By then he’d already driven almost 2,000 miles from Texas, having collected that tall, thin, black motor car from its previous keeper, just south of Houston. Bob Kirk was ninety-three years old, and so was the car he had owned for the last fifty-one of them. A 1924 Ford Model T Touring, now gazing warily at its new custodian through wide-set, chrome-lidded eyes. ‘It looks like it’s about to start talking,’ my wife had said when I’d shown her a photo Ross had emailed over some weeks before. Perhaps it might start right now: ‘Hey, Charlottesville! Thought I’d just let you all know how much I’m looking forward to this candy-ass Limey clownshoe trying to drive me six thousand miles across the whole damn country. Piss and tits, my friends, piss and tits.’

  Our journey was to begin here by bureaucratic misadventure. Some states allow foreigners to register cars, some to insure them, but none permit both. In desperation I’d contacted Miles, who lived in the big white house behind me. The partner of my American cousin Patricia, Miles had made two critical mistakes. His first was to mention an interest in classic motoring during our first and only encounter, in London the previous summer. His second was to live in Virginia, extremely close to the east coast, which was my intended starting point. In any event, Miles’s consequent feats of trusting generosity had sent him to the brink of reckless blind faith. I’d bought the Model T (for $14,000), but in the eyes of the law and the GEICO insurance company, it was his. Learning to drive a T in confident safety was a process that by general consensus demanded a full year or a thousand miles, whichever came first. Any mishap during my protracted apprenticeship would have profound negative consequences for Miles’s future insurance prospects. Even for his future liberty, in the worst-case scenarios that now luridly suggested themselves: a steaming tangle of old black metal wrapped around a bus stop, with a dozen elderly legs twitching beneath it; a tall, thin hole in a schoolhouse wall.

  Anyway, Miles and Patricia were on holiday in the Bahamas. I’d been let into their house by a teenage nephew, and walked out of it with an insurance certificate and a set of licence plates: 286GQ in an angular vintage font, with ‘ANTIQUE VEHICLE VA’ alongside in smaller letters. With dry lips and a fluttering stomach I now bent down and screwed them on over Bob Kirk’s battered tin plates. ‘24FORD TX’ on the rear, just beneath the spare wheel bolted to the car’s upright back end. On the front, behind the starting crank that drooped from the radiator like a thermometer from a patient’s mouth, his poignant novelty plate: ‘Too old to work, too young to die, so here we sit, just Mom and I.’

  The dewy grass sparkled, more unseen mowers joined the symphony and a pair of ponytailed women in lilac vests and shorts jogged smoothly past. This Pleasant Valley Sunday was the calm before the storm, and I spun it out with a detailed appraisal of my aged charge. Old man Kirk was clearly a bit of a showman. The spindly wire wheels had been painted dark purple, girdled in flashy whitewall tyres that lent the little car an unlikely touch of the Ant Hill Mobs. Curlicued red coach lines embellished the doors and those leaping front fenders. The black paintwork had been buffed to a gaudy shine, and the outboard chrome headlamps winked in the morning sun. So too did the scripted Ford logo, making a jaunty tombstone of the radiator.

  My personal effects were packed in two holdalls. I heaved one on to the rear seat, and wedged the other into the iron storage trellis that sat on one of the running-boards, its latticed sides recalling the concertina gate of an antique elevator. Then I walked slowly around the car, struggling to recall key points – any points – from the brisk tutorial Ross had delivered before he left. As a global authority on Model Ts, and the veteran of several mammoth tours in them, Ross was the best-qualified tutor I could have wished for. But the forces of exhaustion and jabbering panic had been fighting it out in my head as he spoke, and very little had been retained. Something under there had to be oiled daily, something over here grease
d weekly. I pulled aloft the left-hand half of the hinged bonnet and frowned intently at the cast-iron, red-rubber innards. There wasn’t a lot in there at least. The most conspicuous component, a big metal carafe bolted on top of the engine, was the horn. This let forth a tremendous ahooga, an evocative nostalgia-klaxon that I already knew would bring me succour in difficult times. Disconnected snatches of Ross’s lecture spooled uselessly through my mind, like some lost verse from ‘I Am the Walrus’. Carb’s off a lawnmower, get into the hogshead, bolting on a Bendix.

  There is no driver’s door on a Model T, owing to the obstructive presence of a lofty floor lever, whose many functions I soon hoped to explore. On a Touring model, as this was and most were, there are also no sides. Mine was a three-door convertible without too much to convert: by way of demonstration, Ross had hauled back the iron-framed black canvas top, in the process releasing a dusty pair of clip-on sunglasses and an earring from some ancient fold in the fabric. ‘Don’t look like Bob had it down much. Can’t blame him, at this time of year you’ll be burned alive in a couple of hours.’ We hauled it back aloft and I thereafter left it up.

  So now, with a girding clap of the hands and a puffing out of cheeks, I unlatched the little metal flap that served as the passenger door, stepped up on the running-board and clambered across that tramp’s Chesterfield of a front seat. A soon familiar chorus played out as I took my station behind the upright, split-paned windshield, dimpling my back and buttocks on Bob Kirk’s minicab-style beaded seat cover. The stately creak of leather and leaf springs; the gentle slosh of petrol from the 10-gallon tank directly beneath me. Canvas brushed my scalp and the wooden steering wheel grazed the tops of my thighs. The Model T stood seven feet tall with its roof up, but half of that lay under my feet, ground clearance for the rutted rural tracks the car had been designed to tackle. The wheel was hard up to my chest, and holding it demanded splayed, bent elbows. Down on the floorboards, my shoes struggled to negotiate a thicket of pedals and levers. I sat there a while, knees to chin, back hunched, a stance I had last adopted on an infant’s chair at a primary-school parents’ evening. It didn’t seem like the optimal driving position for a transcontinental journey.

  A final stocktake of my Model T’s information systems did not detain me for long. Pooh-poohing the traditional emphasis on speed and covered distance, the dashboard was home to a single, tremulous gauge that revealed if the battery was being charged or not. To its left, the ignition keyhole and headlamp switch. To its right, one of Bob Kirk’s after-market additions: a jaunty little thermometer, featuring a cactus, a rattlesnake rampant and the word TEXAS, alongside a thin column of red alcohol which told me the cabin temperature was already 85 degrees Fahrenheit. Further accessories of variable period authenticity were strewn about. A single round rear-view mirror clamped to the outside upper edge of the windshield. An indicator set-up removed from an old truck, comprising a little chrome stick clamped to the steering column through a box that emitted a strident buzz in operation. A (cough) USB charging socket under the dash, fitted by Ross on his own initiative, into which I now inserted my telephone’s power lead. Stuck to a bracket on the inside of the windscreen, this would display navigational advice and current speed, at the cost of universal derision. Ross had flipped down the final two dashboard add-ons with a flourish: ‘And here’s yer cupholders.’ Actually, there was just one more, a silver bell-push down by my left knee. How grateful I was that by 1924, most Model Ts came fitted with an electric starter, demoting the hand crank to emergency use. I turned the little brass key, adjusted all the controls to the best of my ability, and eased a moist, unsteady index finger towards the silver button.

  My journey didn’t really start in Charlottesville. It had begun the previous November, with a wintry dawn fringing the curtains, when my wife and I were awoken by a commotion down in the street. Our son, who had invited a couple of friends over for a presidential-election all-nighter, was outside. We recognised him by his iron-throated baritone, an instrument that was now treating us and our neighbours to a deafening rendition of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. Its tone of deranged sarcasm made us instantly and horribly aware that the unexpected, the unthinkable, had unfolded. ‘Bollocking shit-gibbons,’ I muttered, and we lay there in the half-light, hands clasped under the duvet.

  Only five months had passed since that previous long, dark dawn of the soul, when 48 per cent of us woke up in Brexit Britain and stared in harrowed disbelief at our bedroom ceilings. Those 52 per cent – who were they? What had they been thinking of? And why are they right now brusquely slamming this volume back on the bookshop shelf?

  At least, and at last, an upside to Brexit now presented itself: the incredulous dismay my household had endured since the referendum offered a useful inoculation against the full-blown horror of President Donald Trump. But Brexit was just our own private calamity, an idiotic shot in the foot. Electing Trump felt like shooting Earth in the face. Shit just got global. As a citizen of the free world, I dearly wished to understand why its self-styled electorate had just installed this needy, groping narcissist, this infantile bullshitter, this ridiculous, orange phony as my leader.

  Brexit reminded me how close I’d grown to Europe; Trump’s shocking election proved just how far I’d drifted from America. Forget that special relationship and our shared language. In terms of values, culture, lifestyle and outlook – let’s call it the entire human experience – I seemed to have so much more in common with our continental cousins. Even the Finns. Even the French. Yanks were the strangers now. Most of them, anyway. Or not quite most of them, because despite Donald’s ongoing bleats, he’d lost the popular vote by three million. Nearly every American I’d ever met lived near one coast or other, and I’d got on splendidly with nearly all of them. But as the election maps that scrolled up the screens next morning plainly emphasised, they hadn’t voted Trump. America lay cleaved in three, two slivers of Democrat blue astride a yawning swathe of Republican red that spanned the nation’s entire central bulk. The largely rural ‘flyover states’ had thrown a brick through the window of the coast-dwelling urbanites, those disdainful liberals who knew them only as a greeny-brown nothingness viewed through an aeroplane window.

  With a start I remembered reading a New York Times editor’s account of his 3,000-mile motorcycle road trip across America’s provincial north, a few months before the election. As most of the states he passed through traditionally leaned Republican, he didn’t at first pay much attention to the Trump yard signs along the roadside. But there really were an awful lot of them – he started counting, but gave up after a hundred – and many were monumental labours of love: 10-foot hand-painted billboards, bed-sheet flags. A man with a 20-foot Trump banner flying from the extended ladder of an old fire-truck outside his boom-repair shop proudly revealed it had cost him $500. In Thorntown, Indiana, after 2,500 miles on the road, he finally encountered his first Hillary Clinton poster, a standard one-foot-by-two-foot campaign job stuck in a front lawn. ‘And I had to drive 60 miles to pick that up,’ grumbled the elderly Democrat who answered the door.

  The small towns, the plains and prairies, the over-looked, over-flown US heartlands: here was where Trump won, and won bigly. If I wanted to know why – and I really, really did – this was the America I needed to visit.

  Nobody, not even the Donald himself, had seen it coming; nobody, him least of all, knew what it meant. As the dumbfounding reality sank painfully in, commentators tried to take stock. The advent of Trump, by almost unanimous agreement, marked the end of an era. In 1941, Time magazine heralded ‘The American Century’, in an editorial beseeching its nation to enter the Second World War in the defence of democracy. Time heralded the United States as a forward-looking, outward-looking, initiative-seizing force for global good, the dynamic leader of world trade, an international Samaritan that would set an example to all nations on how to behave. Those rousing words may not have always translated into matching deeds in the decades that followed, but the t
hought was there. It wasn’t now, though. Trump was vowing to pull up America’s drawbridge, and turn the nation’s gaze from the future to the past. ‘Most important of all,’ Time had declaimed with a stirring flourish, ‘we have that indefinable, unmistakable sign of leadership: prestige.’ Well, that was that, then. The American Century had finished, twenty-five years short.

  There was a more poignant, and more poetic, casualty in the headlines that tolled out around the Fox-free world.

  ‘Is choosing Trump the end of the American Dream?’

  ‘With Trump in the White House, the American Dream is Dead.’

  I began to wonder precisely what these melodramatic obituaries were mourning. Many defined the American Dream as a simple economic progression: the expectation that you would live better than your parents had. Generational American betterment – a dependable reality for a hundred years or more – had faltered. Ninety-four per cent of Americans born in 1940 out-earned their parents; of those born in 1980, just 50 per cent were managing to. At lower income levels, the bottom tenth of earners, the decline was more profound still: from 88 per cent for the class of 1940 to 33 per cent amongst the 1980 cohort. Average household income in the US peaked back in 1999. But much as I’d love to, you could hardly pin any of that on Trump: he wasn’t its cause, but its consequence.

  No, the Trumpdunnit trail led back to the American Dream’s core principle, the proud egalitarianism spliced deep into the land of opportunity’s DNA. ‘That dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone,’ wrote James Truslow Adams in The Epic of America, the 1931 treatise that spawned this emblematic coinage, ‘with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement … This is the American Dream that has lured tens of millions of all nations to our shores.’ At the divided, divisive, wall-building dawn of Donald you couldn’t read all that without a hollow laugh, though I plumped for a demented yodel. Trump had even called it himself, at the end of the infamous speech that dismissed Mexican immigrants as drug-dealers and rapists: ‘Sadly, the American Dream is dead.’