He’s wearing a dark grey suit, a light blue shirt and a darker blue tie. The creases on his longish legs are immaculate, and on his feet are brown Timberlands. He carries a canvas book bag slung over one shoulder, which I later learn contains dress shoes, for he’s on his way to a memorial service for one of his former colleagues, Gerald Boyd, who until two years previously was the Managing Editor of the New York Times, and who has died of lung cancer, aged fifty-six.
Boyd, perhaps the most senior African-American journalist in the States, took the fall over the case of Jayson Blair, a young protégé of his — also black — who, it transpired, was making up as much copy as he was reporting. For some racists this was all the news that it was fit to print concerning affirmative action. This, I feel certain, is the antithesis of my new companion’s attitude. And as for his commitment to the actualité, even at 9.00 a.m., Charles ‘Chip’ McGrath, ‘Writer-at-Large’ for the New York Times, has his spiral-bound reporter’s pad to the ready. I didn’t know exactly what to expect of McGrath — who I’ve been corresponding with by email, in order to set up this rendezvous — but I’ve got it roughly right. He’s softly spoken, reserved, urbane. With his greying temples, reticent eyes behind oval glasses and uncertain, grizzled mouth, he looks like a Muppet Show sock puppet that also happens to be a Yale alumnus. Statler, Waldorf and McGrath.
As it transpires, Chip is indeed a Yale alumnus, class of ’68, the same one as the current Leader of the Free World. Later, when we’re trudging past the triumphal arch at Grand Army Plaza, he recounts an anecdote about his classmate with the war-making powers. An extremely disturbing anecdote that he urges me not to repeat; and which I won’t, having given my word. Chip has what my mother would’ve called ‘built in orphan power’: one wants, instinctively, to cuddle him, not betray his confidence.
He reminds me of my brother Nick’s circle: patrician, East Coast intellectuals, more English than the English. At Nick’s recent wedding (his second, to a fellow historian), there must have been forty-odd people gathered in the reception rooms of his and Laurie’s eighteenth-century clapboard house; yet such was the muted burr of their conversation that you could’ve heard a bluebottle bat against one of the slow-flowing antique windowpanes. I wondered at the time: are these the vulgarians the European Left seek to immolate? Are these ‘the Yanks’ that are coming?
Chip is to accompany me some of the way into New York, and write the walk up for a piece in the New York Times. I’m divided over this: it certainly compromises my plans; it’s difficult to see how a stranger — especially one with his own agenda — is going to help me to either achieve ambulatory sartori, or any deeper absorption into the urban landscape. On the other hand, I’ve come here for a number of reasons, and one of them is to try and publicise my latest novel to be published in the USA; a novel that has received a kicking in the review pages of Chip’s own newspaper. Not that this is unexpected, although if any single notice can do for a novel in this country it’s a bad one in the New York Times. If walking with Chip can somehow redress the negative coverage, then this can only be a good thing. In a world in which a new book is published every forty seconds, what else can a journeyman writer do? I am, it occurs to me, exactly like my great-grandfather Isaac, dressed in black and hawking my skills from literary community to literary community.
After some remarks on unsuitable footwear — Chip contends that, as a golfer, he knows what he’s doing — we set off. He’s brought a snapper with him, a freelance called Casey Kelbaugh, who has a regulation goatee and a mountain bike. Moving through Baisley Pond Park, and then along North Conduit, Casey circles and recircles us, as if herding our odd couplet.
Initially a little shy, Chip and I soon establish mutual acquaintances then plot out the territory between these landmarks. There’s this discourse, and there’s also my need to get across to him my quest; to have him take seriously the Gestalt — compounded of place, progress and Weltanschauung — which informs my every tread through this dun and unprepossessing ’burb. It’s a little uneasy, for me, skipping round him and quoting myself: all interviews are dangerous and destabilising, presenting the opportunity to ape one’s own ideal, an opening that must be refused.
North Conduit rumbles with trucks, and the sky is yet low and grey. America announces itself to be parched and desiccated: all seems flatter, lower and wider than Europe. A coil of polythene on the sidewalk recalls Laura Palmer’s shrink-wrapped corpse in Lynch’s Twin Peaks. The signs hanging from the spans of flyovers direct the traffic back towards the airport. My calf muscles tell me that I am walking for the second day, and this bodily mediation of space is far more powerful than any jet engine. Moreover, Jamaica is believably coextensive with Feltham — it has the same feel of the metropolitan periphery, an interzone, underimagined and seldom depicted. So, to me, it feels as if I have continued to bore, like a worm, through the same urban tree ring.
Chip estimates the prices of these detached white clapboard houses at $400,000, and pronounces South Ozone Park to be ‘ethnic’. Here are some of the subjects we discuss as we walk: the Chinese Communist regime — Chip believes they’ve cut a deal with their citizens: things for democracy. Golf, and in particular Chinese golf — according to Chip the regime is building some interesting, ecologically sound courses. The shootings in Jamaica: nobody would wish to prejudice the enquiry into how it was that the NYPD fired thirty-one shots at the stag party leaving the bar, but Chip has a friend on the force who told him that undercover cops working in such places are allowed one alcoholic drink in the course of their duties, so as to avoid arousing suspicion. Chip thinks it conceivable that some of these officers ‘may’ve abused the privilege’.
Meanwhile, we pass by house after home bedecked with decorations. The balustrades and staircases are hung with leafy wreaths twined with red ribbon. The yards are crowded with Yule entities: snowmen, elves, angels and reindeer, all of them twisted out of fibre-optic cabling. On the front stoops of many of these $400,000 grottoes lie puddles of red and white fabric; slack Santas, who, when evening falls, will be inflated by concealed blowers, so as to wobble there, bulbous heralds of the coming bloat-fest. On a normally brusque November evening, illuminated, these Xmas tableaux might seem a little over the top, examples of peasant atavism, lurid obeah in Ozone Park, but in daylight, with the temperature twenty degrees higher than average, they are altogether absurd: seasonal solecisms.
By the Aqueduct Race Track we ask an elderly man for directions, and inadvertently voice our ultimate destination. It isn’t fair, really, for he’s painfully disoriented by the very fact of our enquiry. Walking to New York? With his cap crammed down on his round head and his hound’s-tooth check jacket he looks at us, annoyed: it’s we who must be in the wrong, for on this scrap of waste ground, the Race Track looming in the mist, he knows where he is.