Billy Connolly’s Route 66 Page 3

  I’ll repeat that. I thought, Wear a helmet. My wife said, ‘Wear a helmet.’ So I did.

  Actually, that’s a complete lie. I didn’t even consult Pamela about it this time. But she’d always thought I should wear a helmet, even on my own trike in Scotland. So I decided all by myself: Cut out the crap, Billy. Get a helmet.

  Then I thought of two more good reasons for wearing a helmet.

  Gary. And Busey.

  In 1978, Gary Busey was nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal of Buddy Holly in The Buddy Holly Story. He also appeared in A Star is Born, Top Gun and Lethal Weapon. But in December 1988 he had a bike accident. He fractured his skull and suffered permanent brain damage because he was not wearing a helmet. In time, he recovered, but life was never the same for Gary.

  So, I found myself in a Chicago motorbike store, looking for a helmet. The choice was overwhelming. First up was a whole-face helmet, like the ones that assassins wear. It was easy to decide against one of those because the camera crew and viewers needed to see my face when I was riding my bike. But that still left hundreds of open-face helmets. I asked someone in the store for advice.

  ‘Does this look okay to you?’ I said. ‘Is it the right fit?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said the guy.

  Then I realised he was carrying a bag of groceries and didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. He’d just wandered in on his way back from the supermarket.

  Eventually I found someone who actually worked there and was instantly reminded that most Americans are brilliant salesmen. Not only did this guy sell us a helmet; he ran out and bought cheeseburgers and soft drinks for all the crew, told jokes, had a laugh and made us all feel absolutely welcome. A great representative of an extraordinary country.

  I’m one of those guys who looks slightly odd in a helmet, so I had to be careful about exactly which model I chose. I tried on one that was very popular with American bikers – it looked a bit like a Third Reich helmet. I was relieved when it didn’t fit, because I thought the Nazi look was much better left under the bed. In the end I settled on a black open-faced number with a visor. And to my surprise, having bought it, I didn’t feel any less cool. I was even looking forward to wearing it. It was fitted up electronically so I could hear music on the trike, which was brilliant, like having a jukebox wrapped around my head. And it was rather comfortable, as long as I didn’t put the visor up. If I did that, it caught the wind, so I decided that I’d either have to remove the visor or keep it down at all times. No visor, I suspected, was going to win, and I’d wear the helmet with my fishing glasses. ‘Wait till you see them,’ I told the crew as I tried them on with the helmet. ‘They will blow you away. They’re yellow, kind of amber, polarised lenses with silver sides.’

  I checked myself in the mirror to see how the helmet looked with the glasses. Pretty groovy, I thought. Windswept, interesting and much better than I’d expected. The salesman tried to sell me a pair of motorcycle gloves, but I’d already decided I’d go to a cowboy shop. Cowboys do much better gloves than motorcyclists. The problem with most motorcycle gloves is they do this thing, the go-fast look. Well, I don’t like it. I prefer it more casual, because a trike’s different from a bike. Bikes are for going fast, making a lot of noise and all that. A trike’s kind of laid back. As I’ve said, it’s a posing machine. And I knew exactly what I wanted to wear on my hands while I posed: tan-coloured, deer-hide cowboy gloves. Oh yes.

  Sorted with helmet and gloves, it was time to christen the trike. I’d been looking forward to this moment, but taking the beast out for its virgin ride was a nightmare. It had a different gear-box from mine back home, so I couldn’t find the gears instinctively. But once I’d studied a diagram and learned how to go through the gears, it became a joy; although, for some reason, I still needed to know Serbo-Croat yoga to get it into reverse. I liked to think the soul of the bike didn’t want to have a reverse gear. It just wasn’t right – bikes shouldn’t go backwards. So I thought the bike was fighting it all the way. But once I’d worked it out, I was as happy as a clam. And, as you know, clams are very happy things.

  With the camera crew ahead of me in a car, we did a big tour around the outskirts of Chicago so that I could get used to the trike. It was fantastic to see the city looming up all around me, like in a science-fiction movie. Then I rode into town and it was just great. The trike ran like a cuckoo clock.

  The only downside was the weather. It was a dodgy-looking day, with the weather neither one thing or the other. One of those greyish, yellowy, funky, funny days. Every time I phoned someone in Scotland, they told me they were in the middle of a searing heatwave and I seethed with envy. That morning, I’d seen a weather report from Britain. It was mid-April and seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit, and everyone was running around in their underwear. I love the British fervour for throwing off our clothes. And the first people to disrobe are always the ones with the grubbiest underwear, like the guys I knew in the shipyards who put on long johns in September and took them off in May. Meanwhile, we were freezing our balls off in Chicago.

  As I rode through downtown Chicago, past the famous water tower, I tried out the communication link with the director, Mike. It worked like a dream, and it was great to show him that I could talk straight to the camera from the bike. It meant that I didn’t need to stop at a location before explaining it to viewers. I was dead against television that spoon-fed information to people. If I said, ‘There’s a water tower over there,’ as I drove past, I could then talk about it later, knowing that the viewers would remember it. I didn’t have to stop, lean against it, point and labour the point that I was talking about a water tower. We shot a piece about the city from the bike as we drove along with all the other traffic flying around us, before eventually arriving at the shiny black monolith that dominates the Chicago skyline.

  For twenty-five years, the Sears Tower in Chicago was the tallest building in the world. But it was overtaken in 1998 by those cheeky upstarts in Malaysia with their twin skyscrapers, the Petronas Towers. So these days it was just the tallest building in America, but that was more than good enough for me when I visited it. Built as the headquarters of Sears Roebuck and Co., the tower used nine exterior frame tubes of different lengths, from 50 to 110 storeys, bundled together to provide strength and flexibility, avoiding the need for interior supports. It was said that the architect conceived this technologically innovative building when he watched someone shake cigarettes out of a packet.

  Officially, the building was rechristened the Willis Tower in 2009, but it would always be the Sears Tower to me. Willis, a London-based insurance broker, leased three of the tower’s 110 floors and gained the naming rights to the whole shebang until 2024. The name-change was not a popular move. Time magazine said it was one of the top ten worst corporate rebrandings, while CNN reported that many Chicagoans were refusing to acknowledge the new title.

  Whatever its name, though, the tower was a beauty and I loved it. Riding up in the lift – or, more appropriately, the elevator – a recorded message reeled off some very impressive statistics about this 1,450-foot ‘modern marvel’. In just seventy seconds we shot past the height of the Great Pyramid, the Seattle Space Needle, the Gateway Arch in St Louis, Moscow State University, the Eiffel Tower and so on until we emerged 103 floors above ground level. There were still another five storeys above me, but this was the viewing floor, which has the most spectacular views, if you like that kind of thing. All of Chicago, a large chunk of Lake Michigan and a fair bit of the State of Illinois were spread out around the tower. It was stunning.

  Much of what made the view so spectacular was there because of the events of four days in 1871, when Chicago was devastated by a massive fire. At that time, the entire city centre, stretching over four square miles, was built of wood. Eighteen thousand properties were destroyed, 300 people died and 90,000 were made homeless. Only the water tower that I’d ridden past earlier in the day was left standing. It was remarkable to think that all of central
Chicago was rebuilt around that tower. Nowadays, it served as a monument to the Great Fire of Chicago. (Incidentally, on the same day that the fire broke out, not far from Chicago, a forest fire killed even more people, but few people ever mentioned or remembered it.)

  Once the fire had burned itself out, Chicago’s mayor, a guy called Roswell Mason, sent out an all-points bulletin. He said: ‘Tomorrow, one hundred thousand people will be without food and shelter. Can you help?’ It worked like magic. People responded unbelievably well. Millions of dollars flooded in, and the cash enabled the city authorities to rebuild Chicago from scratch, something that had never been done on such a large scale. Architects, builders and anyone else with a good idea flooded in from all over the world. There was no rule book in 1871, no health and safety officers or building regulation inspectors, so the rebuilding of Chicago was fast and furious.

  But possibly the most significant factor in the whole process was that seventeen years earlier, a bedstead maker in New York – Elisha Otis – had designed a hoist for lifting heavy equipment around his factory. Otis’s device had ratchets fitted to the sides of the hoist. These ratchets, which allowed a platform to move up and down smoothly, also snapped into action at any sudden downward movement, preventing a lethal plunge. Otis immediately realised that he had something special on his hands, so he urged the bed company to market his invention. At an impressive public display at New York’s Crystal Palace in 1854, Otis ascended on his hoist to the height of a house, then ordered someone to cut the rope with an axe. The audience gasped as the ratchets sprang into action and Otis remained suspended in mid-air. Everyone was very impressed.

  Three years later, Otis turned his invention into the first ‘safety elevator’, which was installed for passenger use in a New York department store. Of course, it was more than just a gimmick. By transporting people rapidly and effortlessly upwards, it made multi-storey buildings practical and safe for the first time. Thanks to Otis, no one needed to fear the vertical abyss opening up beneath their feet as they ascended a skyscraper like the Sears Tower in a high-speed lift. If the steel cables hoisting up the cart snapped, they’d feel nothing more than a slight wobble as the ratchets sprang into action. The lift would stay put, suspended in mid-air until help arrived.

  So, when Chicago’s leaders started rebuilding the city centre after the devastating fire, they had the opportunity to build bigger, better and especially higher. Land was expensive and scarce, so developers went upwards not outwards. The Home Insurance Company Building, a ten-storey office block completed in Chicago in 1885, was regarded as the first true modern skyscraper. It was the first to use steel girders, which were stronger than iron, and the first to hang an outer masonry curtain wall on the load-bearing steel skeleton. Sadly, it doesn’t exist any more, but there is a wee plaque commemorating it on Route 66. Of course, at only ten storeys high, it would be considered a dwarf in comparison with today’s skyscrapers, but after it was built it was clear that the only way the city could go was up. In Chicago, the sky was the limit.

  Standing in the Sears Tower, there was a real sense of where Mr Otis’s invention had taken us, particularly when I stepped into the wee glass cubicle that jutted out of the side of the building, more than a thousand feet above the ground. It was like a high version of the Pope-mobile, and stepping into it was a real nerve-tickler, the creepiest feeling I’d ever experienced. Looking between my feet straight down to the street, something inside me insisted I shouldn’t be standing there. I felt my heart pumping, my nerves tingling and my body shouting, ‘Don’t do this. Please don’t do this. This is wrong. This does not compute. Go back. Go back.’ I didn’t know what anyone hoped to achieve by offering visitors the chance to walk into that glass box, except for a celebration that they weren’t dead.

  Like anyone who had ever stepped into that wee glass box, I really had to fight the urge not to do it. And that fitted with something that had always amused and amazed me about human beings. If you go up to a baby and roar at it, the baby will show signs of being frightened and will close its eyes. But then it’ll open its eyes and want you to do it again. Well, it was the same thing with the glass box. The floor was going ‘roar’ and I was going, ‘Again, again!’ for the same reason that people freefall parachute. So, even though something kept nagging at me to get out of the wee glass box right away, I stuck at it, not least because the view was so remarkable.

  Far beneath me, I spotted a line of yellow taxis turning into Adams Street. Although it was just a regular Chicago street, it was also the start of Route 66, from where I’d soon be heading out west. But before I turned my trike towards California, I had to visit a few places in the Windy City. Incidentally, the Windy City nickname is believed to have come either from the propensity of Chicago’s politicians to make long-winded speeches or from a New York newspaper editor’s accusation that Chicagoans tended to boast about their hometown. It was apparently not a comment on the notoriously nippy winds that blasted from the plains and Lake Michigan through Chicago’s concrete canyons. Chicago was not significantly windier than any other American city, such as New York or Boston, although when the Arctic wind came off the lake and blew down Michigan Avenue, it could cut you in half.

  Before leaving the Sears Tower, I made it up the final five floors from the glass bubble to the roof. Standing on the very top of the building, I stood like a dooley while a helicopter swooped from a great distance and filmed me pointing to the west. Easy enough, but the highlight of the roof visit was the story I was told of a guy who was painting the antenna and was microwaved. It’s said that he cooked himself, losing the use of his legs because of the sheer power of the transmitter. It had the ring of an urban legend about it, but it still amused me.

  One of the best things about the Sears Tower was that whenever I saw the building again, I’d know I’d been on top of it. Having already stood on top of lots of things, it added to the collection, which included Sydney’s Opera House and Harbour Bridge. Both of them reminded me of my daughter, who once said the nicest thing. She was on the back of my Harley trike as we were coming over the Harbour Bridge, driving towards the Opera House, where I was performing a gig.

  ‘God I love it here,’ she said. ‘I love being here.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said.

  ‘When you’re here, you know exactly where you are on the planet.’

  I thought, Oh my goodness, so you do. It was absolutely true. Since then, I’ve become more and more aware of how iconic landmarks could do that to you – let you know exactly where you were on earth. The Taj Mahal did it. The Empire State Building did it. The Houses of Parliament and the Eiffel Tower did it. And so did the Sears Tower. Most of the time we didn’t know precisely where we were, but those buildings made us totally aware of our place in the world. It was no big deal, just a wee jolly, but it pleased me no end.

  Before leaving the tower, I looked out one last time from the roof and gazed southwest. Seeing my journey laid out in front of me got me thinking of what lay further along the road – Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California, then the Pacific. Far below, I could see the thick artery of eight lanes of Interstate 55 snaking through the conurbation – the most popular way out of Chicago. Since the mid-1960s, it had been the official replacement for Route 66. As I mused about starting the journey, I heard the whine of a train horn in the distance. The loneliest sound in the world, but also one of the most romantic, it beckoned me to venture out into the vast plains of America and explore what lay along the mythical highway. But first I wanted to go on another quick spin around central Chicago, one of my favourite cities.

  Whenever I’m in Chicago, I make a point of visiting Fort Dearborn. Nowadays it’s just some brass plates on the road and pavement outside Fanny Mae’s sweet shop on the corner of two city centre streets. I always stop in the shop to buy a few sweeties. They do a lovely plain chocolate caramel. If I could force one through the pages of this book, I’d give you one
. Those brass plates mark the point where Fort Dearborn used to be located. For some unfathomable reason, I’ve always had a romantic image of the fort, which I used to think was the site of the last Indian battle on American soil. But I recently discovered that it was actually the site of a massacre of French pioneers conducted by Native Americans, supported by the British.

  In the 1670s, French pioneers were the first Europeans to travel along the Chicago River. They settled near its mouth and claimed a large surrounding territory for France. About thirty years later, they were driven out by Fox Indians during the Fox Wars, which continued until the 1730s. At the end of the French and Indian War (the North American portion of the Seven Years War between Britain and France) in 1763, the area was ceded to Britain, which in turn lost it to the United States at the end of the American War of Independence. As a result, in 1776 the mouth of the Chicago River was resettled by a new wave of pioneers. Among them was Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, a Haitian farmer and trader who, as the first permanent resident of Chicago, is regarded as the founder of the city. (In case you were wondering, the city takes its name from shikaakwa, the Miami–Illinois Indian word for the stinky, leek-like vegetables that can still be found rotting along the banks of the Chicago River.)

  In 1804 US troops constructed a log fort at the mouth of the river. They named it after Henry Dearborn, the Secretary of War, and a small settlement grew around it. The village didn’t last long, though. In 1812 war broke out again between the United States and the British Empire, including Canada. General William Hull, the Governor of Michigan, ordered the evacuation of Fort Dearborn, but Potawatomi Indians ambushed the evacuees, killing eighty-six and capturing sixty-two soldiers, women and children, among them the commandant and his wife, who were ransomed to the British. A posse of five hundred Indians was sent to do the gig, so it was not a small skirmish. Those troops and pioneers got wellied, and their fort was burned to the ground. It was rebuilt in 1816, but it must have been a tough place to live, as various wars with Winnebago and Black Hawk Indians continued to rage. Most of the fort was again destroyed by fire in 1857, and what remained was razed to the ground in the Great Fire of 1871.