NEW YORK: Will Self's new novel, "The Book of Dave," is about a London cabdriver who inadvertently founds a religion when a ranting diatribe he buries in the garden of his former wife is dug up five centuries later, in a now post-apocalyptic world, and becomes a sacred text. Self's own text is immensely learned in cabbie lore and even creates a cab-based "Clockwork Orange"- like language, in which the sun is the "foglamp," for example, and the moon an "edlite."
When Self recently traveled to New York, however, he did not take a taxi from his house in South London to Heathrow. He walked the whole 26 miles, or 40 kilometers. On arriving in New York, he walked from John F. Kennedy Airport to the nearby Crowne Plaza Hotel, a journey more perilous than he expected, because it involved a nighttime traverse of expressways with no curbs.
The next morning Self, who is unusually tall and very thin and has a long, melancholy face that he once described as looking "like a bag full of genitals," packed his knapsack, rolled a cigarette and, puffing from a cigarette holder, set off on foot for Manhattan.
Smoking is Self's only remaining vice. He used to be a prodigious drinker and drug-taker, famous for late-night altercations, not always coherent public appearances and marathon hours at trendy spots like the Groucho Club. During Britain's general election of 1997, he set a new standard for journalistic infamy by getting himself bounced off John Major's campaign plane for snorting heroin in the bathroom.
But Self has been clean for eight years or so, and some of the energy he used to expend on carousing now goes into epic hikes, sometimes as long as 100 miles - from London, say, into the Lea Valley and through the Epping Forest to north Essex.
"Alcohol and drugs tend to keep you from taking walks," he said while in New York. "Or at least walks of the right kind," and he added that walking made him feel better than drugs ever had. "But I'm not addicted," he said. "I don't need to score a walk."
By Self's usual standards, the walk from Kennedy to Manhattan, about 20 miles, is a mere stroll. What recommended it was that it would take him through parts of the city that most people never notice while driving in a car: an experience that Self, a student of psycho-geography, believes has imposed a "windscreen-based virtuality" on travel, cutting us off from experiencing our own topography.
"People don't know where they are anymore, " he said, adding: "In the post-industrial age, this is the only form of real exploration left. Anyone can go and see the Ituri pygmy, but how many people have walked all the way from the airport to the city?"
Self's route, which had been suggested by his friend the American novelist Rick Moody, first took him along Conduit Avenue, under the Van Wyck Expressway and through the middle-class neighborhood of South Ozone Park, where at the corner of 127th Street he paused to admire a particularly elaborate Christmas display.
"It's a work of beauty and a joy to behold," he told the homeowner. A few blocks later, he announced: "We're only a fraction of the way there, but in terms of my longer walk, starting in London, I'm already halfway, and I can say that I am ludicrously happy. I am in a state of almost absurd satori."
A little farther along, when Conduit Avenue ran temporarily out of sidewalk, he paused to consult with a passerby, who at first seemed to be insisting that the only way to Manhattan was to join the traffic whizzing past. "It wasn't that he didn't know where we are," Self said. "It's that he couldn't conceptually grasp the idea of walking to New York. I love that."
Not long after negotiating the Cross Bay Parkway overpass, Self decided to go "off piste." He ignored Moody's instructions and headed straight west on Glenmore Avenue, through East New York and Brownsville. Glenmore at this point slices through a long, grim stretch of low-rise apartments, pocket-size auto-body shops, razor-wired vacant lots harboring high-strung dogs, and a surprising number of churches.
|
||||||||||
|