I’m not saying these are bad people. Just that they are fat
They say that Eskimos have 50 words for ‘snow’. Like a lot of the things they say, this isn’t true, but should be. Right now, I’m a good few thousand miles from both Eskimos and snow, on holiday down in the sun-drenched dogleg of Florida. I’m wondering, these Americans, can they really only have a handful of words for ‘fat’?
Forgive the predictable observation, but there are just so many different types. I can see many from the window of my hotel room, down there on the shore watching the startlingly noisy, don’t-book-a-room-next-door, annual Key West World Championship Power Boat race. Arse fat, neck fat, hip fat, thigh fat. There’s also the proper, terrifying Star Wars villain fat: arms unable to descend below an obtuse isosceles triangle sort of thing, but that’s actually fairly rare. I can only see two of them, rippling slightly as the boats roar past. Most common is what you’d have to call skinny fat: slender arms, slender legs, but with a bulge in the front of their polo-shirt, like they’ve been out shoplifting soft furnishings. My doctor tells me I’m a touch overweight, but I could be a whole different species. Side on, my wife is a little closer, but she is six months pregnant.
Ernest Hemingway wrote most of his books here, in a house now overrun with six-toed cats and tour guides who look like chubby versions of Ernest Hemingway. Now I think of it, there was actually a bunch of tautly skinny middle-aged men in the Green Parrot last night, whooping it up to the Janis Joplin covers. Locals, I’d say, all long hair, moustaches and oil-smeared baseball caps. Also, there’s the Key’s gay community. Gays and hillbillies, those guys look after themselves. Of everybody else, I’m easily in the skinniest 5 per cent. That’s no boast. So is the wife.
It’s also not meant to be an insult. Should I come face-to-face with a holidaying Sarah Palin, and should we get past early conversational pleasantries about me being from the island of Edinburgh in the South Pacific archipelago of Belarus and suchlike, I would not stand for being called anteye American. I like these people, a lot. They are polite and thoughtful, even here, in Key West, where they basically only come to binge-drink. There’s a touch too much whooping for my tastes, but I’m open to the pos sibility that maybe we Brits just don’t whoop enough. So please, do not misunderstand me. I am not saying they are bad people. I’m just saying they are fat people. I don’t mean to go on about it, but I had always assumed this was just another thing that people said, like the Eskimos and snow. It’s not. It’s really true. They’re really fat.
As to why they are so fat, well, that’s altogether more tricky. It could be because they spend so much time in their very big cars. Or perhaps they only spend so much time in their very big cars because they are so very fat. Who can say? We were desperate, the wife and I, not to have a very big car. We booked a small one, begged at the car hire place, and still drove away in an eight-seater minivan with a 3.5 litre engine. Back home, we drive a Mini. You could fit our Mini in our minivan, no problem. We made bets, the first time we pulled up at a garage, on how much it would cost to fill up. I thought $80, she thought $50. Glug-glug went the nozzle, for about 15 minutes. $34. We Europeans, we’re brainwashed good. It felt like stealing. It felt like abuse.
Oil is a religion here, but it’s a religion so universal that nobody even notices themselves praying. Back home, if a Harley roars down your high street, the instinct is to tut at the din. In America, the biker is a knight. Mothers point them out to children and beam. The Key West World Championship Power Boat Race, out there, making my windows rattle, making us wish we had planned this part of our holiday slightly better, feels like a festival of oil, an oily Christmas. Down on the nearest beach you can’t move for trailer vans, SUVs, pick-up trucks and motor homes that make our minivan look like a dodgem. Huge people have driven their huge, roaring vehicles for hundreds of miles, on the huge interstates that make this huge country work, in order to come here, hook up their own huge plasma screen to their own roaring generator, and watch other huge vehicles roar even more. Hardly anybody is black. Hardly anybody is Hispanic. Hardly anybody is thin.
The other week, 58 million people voted for John McCain. That’s about the population of Italy, and suddenly we’ve forgotten about all of them. I’m sure it would be wrong, or at least clumsy as hell, to assume that you must be a Republican just because you have a gut the size of a Space Hopper and a car the size of a fire engine. I’m sure that’s just another of those things that they say, again like the Eskimos, that ought to be true, but isn’t. Even so, it’s good to be reminded that these people still exist. America is still America. They don’t look like us, they don’t drive like us, and they don’t want the things that we want. They’re still here, they still eat, and they’re still loud as hell. Everything has not changed.
The other day, in another hotel room, I found myself watching Bad Boys II. Do you know it? Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, playing maverick cops. Lots of explosions. I’d seen it before and it’s fairly rubbish, but I kept it on because I’d suddenly realised it was set in Miami, and I was just outside Miami, and it is for precisely this sort of experience that one takes holidays in the US in the first place.
Anyway, for the finale, the plot took them over to Cuba. There was a drug lord, and a kidnapping, they blew up a house and then they were off, Will Smith and his friend, smashing through bits of pretend Cuba in an armoured car, to reach the safety of a nearby US military base. ‘Hurrah!’ said the two black men with automatic weapons, balaclavas and moustaches. ‘We must be safe now! For we are in Guantanamo Bay!’ And they were, and it wasn’t meant to be satire at all. Filmed in the summer of 2001, I believe. Nice little bit of movie history.
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