IN PIERRE I WALK in a well-kept park, downstream from a bridge that carries 83 across the Missouri and out of town. It is past seven. A few people are idling with dogs and children. All of them raise a hand and say hello. A woman on a bike calls out, “Isn’t it a lovely evening?”
“Yes. Isn’t it?” I croak.
And it is: sunny and balmy. The river is deep blue beneath an almost clear sky and ripples softly in the wind as it bends and flows around a low tree-covered island.
Pierre is small, quiet, walkable—the second-smallest state capital in terms of population (after Montpelier, Vermont). I walk the streets and find an Italian restaurant called La Minestra where I sit in an airy room that was a speakeasy in the 1920s and eat luscious pasta—the chef’s special: rigatoni with homemade Italian sausage, sun-dried tomatoes, olives, and roasted red peppers. Perhaps I have been deprived of late—the carpet, the walls, even the cutlery, look good. A print that in England is so commonplace as to be almost invisible, Jack Vettriano’s painting of a couple dancing on a beach while a butler holds a tray of drinks, somehow seems right in this place where real jazz, Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, comes through speakers quietly, as if those geniuses are in the next room.
A family of immensely unslim people is sitting some distance away, at a table to my right—a mountainous couple and a child about twelve years old, a large hillock whom I guess to be a boy from his haircut. All of them are wearing shorts. I try not to stare, while wondering how they got in; the door from the street is of average size. They drink two Cokes each and then the parents tell their boy that he must drink water. He isn’t happy about that. The parents eat steaks; the boy has a burger—and they all have chips and bread on the side.
The waitress, who is dark and pretty and looks like one of my daughters’ best friends, tells me that there was once a mortuary downstairs—a mortuary below a speakeasy. I order poire belle Hélène.
After the boy has eaten tiramisu, which somehow I know is his favorite dessert, the mountainous couple and their hillock waddle away—and leave through the street door sideways.
There are fat people in England but—my impression is—there are not so many as in the U.S. and they are not, on the whole, as fat. However, although the Americans triggered the worldwide explosion of obesity, there are now seven countries where the proportion of overweight adults is higher than in the U.S.: Germany, Greece, Cyprus, Malta, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Finland. Several others, including the U.K., are catching up.
How did the Americans prompt the eruption of this growing global fat mountain? The quick answer is with the hamburgers, pizzas, tacos, doughnuts, french fries, sugary drinks, and finger-lickin’ slurp that have been sold in fast-food restaurants cheaply and in ever-larger individual portions since the 1950s. And what brought the fast-food chains into existence? In his iconoclastic book Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser writes: “The fast food industry took root alongside that interstate highway system, as a new form of restaurant sprang up beside the new off-ramps.” The conclusion has to be that if the Americans had stuck to the old national highways, most of them would be a lot thinner.
I WALKED THE streets again. The air was still warm. I passed smoked-glass windows lit by neon advertisements for beer. A sign above the windows read Longbranch Bar; perhaps this place was named after the famous Long Branch Saloon in Dodge City. I opened a smoked-glass door. A few steps led down to a darkened cavernous bar with myriad television screens and mirrors, more neon advertisements, pool tables, dart boards, low tables, armchairs, and sofas. And, at the bar, upholstered revolving bar stools with backs. I sat on one with a beer and watched baseball. Again I studied the curious actions of a pitcher, the foot and knee movement, the drawing back of the arm, and the throw. It seemed oddly camp, but then the skipping feet, whirling arms, and twisting wrists of a cricket spin bowler might seem camp to an American.
There were only twenty or so people in this vast space. I moved round the bar. One of the screens was showing CNN. On another a baseball player called Nick Swisher was giving an interview.
I got talking to four men from Wisconsin. Or rather to three of them; the fourth was asleep on his bar stool, head back and mouth open. They had come for the weekend to shoot prairie dogs: sweet-looking, rat-like creatures that live in large groups and make a sound like the bark of a dog. I had seen some standing around on their hind legs near the Knife River. They were found close to the Missouri by Lewis and Clark, who, on September 7, 1804, recorded that they had “discovered a Village of an animal the French call the Prairie Dog.” Nowadays, farmers dislike them because they dig extensive burrows and thereby destroy crops and grassland. On the other hand conservationists feel that they are a threatened species and should be protected. Well, they are certainly threatened in this part of South Dakota. Anyone who has a gun license can shoot them—and the men I was speaking to had driven a few hundred miles to do just that, not for money—there is no payment—but for fun. I suppose this is similar to traveling from the south of England to Scotland to shoot grouse—except that in Scotland you have to be either classy or wealthy to gain admittance or pay your host. These men weren’t posh or rich. Two of them were retired; another worked for a bank. They were friendly, civilized, and apparently interested in my trip. One of them had read Jonathan Raban’s Old Glory and admired his writing.
I asked about their guns.
One man owned, “Ooh”—he looked at the ceiling, and back down at me—”thirty.” That wasn’t that many, he said. He had brought only four for his assault on the prairie dogs.
They left. The place had filled up. There were more people at the bar—a big three-sided bar with a pyramid of bottles in the middle. I watched the barman moving around, shoveling ice, upending bottles into glasses—sometimes four bottles at a time, two in each hand—poking straws into the ice. He limped a little, hauling his right foot behind him as if it were painful to walk on; I guessed he was in his late thirties. I remembered Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy, though Hoffman was younger then. And the barman spoke a little like Hoffman too: deep and nasal. Not that this barman was a hustler; he was smart, confident in what he was doing.
I asked for another beer and he asked where I was from and why I was there. I asked him about guns.
He said he had five or six, as if that were unexceptional; he did a little hunting; he’d shot prairie dogs. His guns were rifles. Handguns were different, almost a taboo, it seemed. “You can get a handgun only if you pass a lot of checks—no felonies, lots of stuff. I’d pass, but I don’t want one. No need for that.”
AT ABOUT ELEVEN o’clock, a young woman came in with two friends and sat along the bar from me. She wanted the barman to teach her bartending. “Let me practice with you because you’re the real bartender here. How do we... How do we do it? Give me a crash course in bartendering right now.” Her voice was young, her tone pleading: an innocent appealing for protection.
The barman was bending down, shoveling ice into glasses. He muttered, “Wait a little, Rachel,” and went off carrying four glasses.
I hadn’t spoken but she turned to me, as if somehow realizing that I would like an explanation. “I... Last summer... I’m used to bar waitressing, but never making the drinks. So this weekend she’s making me bartender and I’m ‘Oh my God!’”
The barman returned and let Rachel through to his side of the bar. He pointed at a large computer screen above the till. “All the drinks that we have, or 99 percent of them, are built into the system—touch the screen and you see the price. The rest of them—they don’t know exactly what’s in there—don’t even bother to make it unless they can show you the recipe. Then find out the prices. Charge the highest price first and then, for every additional drink that goes in, there’s a button on there that says, ‘Add twenty-five cents.’ So add twenty-five cents for every time you add anything.”
“OK.” Rachel’s voice was sharp, keen to show she understood.
“If it’s not a basic liquor—and most of them are top-shelf—start adding fifty cents.”
“OK. How do you do it though? How do you even make the drink?”
The barman grabbed a bottle. “When I pick up a bottle, the first thing is to shake it. When you turn it over”—he put his thumb over the top of the bottle and flicked his wrist—“make sure that you turn it completely over... to about the one-thirty position.”
Rachel took a bottle, shook it, and flipped it over.
“Yep. Good,” the barman said.
Rachel took a bottle in each hand, as the barman often did, clamped her thumbs over the ends, and tried to flip them both and aim them at a glass. The one in her left hand barely moved. She put the bottles down. “I can’t do this thing. I can’t do both at the same time.” She wiped her upper lip with the back of her hand. Her mouth hung open.
“Then you’ll just have to go, ‘Asshole, I can’t do it that fast.’ So you pour one in, pour the full shot, and then add your mixer.”
“OK. Maybe on Saturday I’ll get good, but not Friday. Oh my God!”
“Are you left-handed or right-handed?”
“Right-handed.”
“OK. Use this one to pour with.”
“OK. Pour first... Got it!”
The barman had a crowd of customers to serve. When he returned, the lesson resumed. “Notice every quirk,” the barman told Rachel. “If your customer drinks through a straw, or if they’re a stirrer. Or whether they don’t use the straw at all. If your person doesn’t really stir it and drinks straight from the straw—have your whiskey. Start that first. Do it good. Then start adding your mix. Because what happens when they drink right through the straw without stirring it, then all that booze is on the bottom. “Wow!” they go. “No! No!” Because they just think you burned their fucking tongue. For them that’s a good drink—and you get the tips.”
“OK,” said Rachel.
“If they don’t drink through the straw and they don’t stir it, or if they do a little bit, then just bend that straw over and make sure you finish with all your whiskey on top. And they take that first drink, it burns!”
“OK,” said Rachel.
Next the barman showed Rachel how to make a drink called a Jim Beam cloudy. I said that I would order one. Rachel could make it. I was ready for another drink anyway.
“Did you want a bourbon cloudy?” the barman said. “It’s bourbon with water and a splash of Coke.”
“Sure. I’ll try it.”
“Jim Beam? Creek is another good bourbon.”
“OK. Let’s try that. Whatever you recommend. Is your name Johnny?” I thought I’d heard someone call him that.
“John,” he said, firmly.
“John?”
“Marso. Used to be French.” He spelled it out, “M-a-r-s-e-a-u-x.”
“You changed the spelling?”
“My great-grandfather changed it ’cos he had arthritis too bad, and he changed it from M-a-r-s-e-a-u-x to M-a-r-s-o. Sounds the same. Just easier for him to write with arthritis.”
Rachel began to make the drink. John told her what to do. It took a while. Eventually Rachel handed me the glass with a straw poking out of it.
“That’s three fifty,” John said.
“OK? Is that good?” Rachel said.
“That’s fine.” There was a strong taste of bourbon. “How did you know what I do with my straws?” I pulled the straw out and laid it on the paper napkin. “I’m really impressed.”
LATER I HEARD Rachel say, “How do you do it when it’s like—there’s no pourer?” The pourer, I realized, is the glass bubble stuck in the neck of the bottle that, when filled, measures a shot. The bottles of spirits had pourers; the mixers didn’t.
John said, “Just, basically go one, one thousand, two. That’s about half a shot. Between half and three-quarters.”
“One, one thousand, two? OK. That’s good to know. Thanks for teaching me, because I’m going in blind tomorrow. I don’t even know what’s going to happen tomorrow.”
A man leaning on the bar said, “I’m going to come in and order some strange shit.”
“No-ooooo!” yelled Rachel. “Don’t you do that!”
RACHEL LEFT. MANY people left. I was going to leave. It was after midnight. There were only four or five customers.
Then a man came up to me and asked me to buy him a beer.
John intervened. “If you don’t have the money to buy a beer, I’ve gotta ask you to leave because we don’t like people trying to bum drinks from people.”
A black man—a rare black man—wearing a suit appeared from somewhere and ushered the man to the door.
“He was a Native American,” John said. I wouldn’t have known. “There are these younger ones that haven’t been off their hometown reservations for very long. He bought a drink earlier. Thought he was going to get drunk on a Shirley Temple.” He explained. “A Shirley Temple is what you serve to your kids around here. It’s nothing but pop and cherry sugar water.” He laughed.
Then he leaned his hands on the bar, looked down at his feet, sighed—and looked up. “A few times I’ve had to ask people to leave, or get them physically removed. One guy—we had to break up some fighting in here—had actually taken a pool cue and cracked one kid over the head. One of our security guys went in, wrapping him up in a wrestling hold. He still had part of the pool cue. He’s trying to hit the security guy. I go running in there and, just mistiming, get cracked across the bridge of the nose, the eye socket. I got eye surgery, lens replacement, on it.”
“Oh God! Who was the guy?” I said. “Was this a Native American?” I was hoping it wasn’t.
“Yep. Yes. He had enough problems in situations around town, and his name had come up in here way too often.” He brought his hand down on the bar with a loud slap. “Ten years!” he almost shouted the words. “Aggravated assault with a weapon.”
“Ten years is a lot. Anyway... ”
“She gave him that... Do you want another drink? We don’t actually close till one forty. There’s still time, if you want, for another drink.”
It wasn’t quite one o’clock. “OK. If you don’t mind. Yeah.”
The bourbon with Coke had been too sweet. I asked for Scotch.
“Dewars, Chivas, Johnnie Walker, J&B, Cutty, Glenlivet... ” I chose Glenlivet, and John warned that it was their top-shelf Scotch, the most expensive. “That’s four seventy-five. That’s for a shot with water. If you want Glenlivet on the rocks, which would be two and a half shots, that’s seven and a quarter. Second shot is normally half the price.”
It sounded like a lot of dollars for one drink, but I paid up and enjoyed it—and John told me another story. A man who was well known in the city came into the bar with a gun, and threatened to kill everyone because he thought they knew that his wife was being unfaithful. All the customers disappeared, as did the security man who was on duty. This left John and another barman to cope, “to talk him down.” The irony was that no one had known about his wife’s infidelity.
Then John told me about his limp. A spur, an extra piece of bone, had grown in his calf; it caused pain and unbalanced him. There was nothing to be done; surgery wouldn’t help. Working as a bartender wasn’t ideal—standing up and walking about all the time—but “I’m a career bartender. I’ve been doing it for twenty years. It’s what I know.”
He didn’t want to be a manager. “I’ve had several dozen people over the years ask me to come and run their bar, and it’s like, ‘No, because, if you want me on that side, you’re not even going to be able to pay me the money I can make on this side.’” As it was, he was paid by the hour and made a lot extra from tips. I’d watched him picking up bills left on the bar and tucking them into a glass at the back; there was a good wad in there. On one of his best nights ever, the night before the previous Easter, he had made $425 including tips.
I liked John very much: a straightforward man, open-minded as far as I could see, expert at his job, happy to give what he had learned over twenty years to an ingenue. It had helped that Rachel was bright and switched-on—that, for her, to learn was imperative. I wondered if the unseen boss had noticed her potential and said to her: “You’ll be all right. Have a word with John. He’ll teach you. He knows it all.”
A group of six people came in. The Longbranch Bar certainly wasn’t closing. John went off to serve them. I sipped at the Glenlivet and crunched on shards of ice. I wouldn’t usually dilute a single malt with ice. But this was America.
When John came back, somehow we got talking about age. He would be forty-five next birthday.
I told him truthfully that I would have guessed he was younger. “You’re looking OK,” I said.
“Yeah? Well, surprisingly for a high-stress job. It’s a stressful job.”
“But you’re very good at it. Well, I would say.”
“I appreciate that.”
“It must give you some satisfaction. Not me saying that—but in your own mind. To be good at one thing is the key—one of the keys, anyway—to being content and not kind of screwed up. You know what I mean?”
“Oh yeah.” It was an “Oh yeah” of agreement.
I swallowed the rest of my drink. The other customers had left. I had to go. John wanted me to take a taxi. “Our local police officers, they don’t have a lot to do at night. They have a murder about once every ten years. They watch for people who have been drinking.”
He was concerned about me driving. When I told him I was walking, he said that the police also picked up people who were walking, but he wasn’t worried about that in my case. “They would probably find you as entertaining as I have and offer you a ride! Not to their place of employment, but to your room.”
Good bloke, John Marso.