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Chase: "Er, excuse me..er…Sir…can you tell me the way to the Expressway?"

Too much unfamiliar information for the pimp: station wagon, the full WASP family, including (if I remember correctly) family dog, roof rack of luggage, politeness; he draws himself up, pauses for some time to respond at last as he knows best:

"Go fuck yo' momma!"

The yuppy nightmare genre is all about the adjacency of the squalid and the threatening to the safe lives of the well-to-do; it is a dramatisation of Galbraith's old phrase: 'private affluence public squalor'. A parallel city ghosts us, threatens to pull us through. There has always been a binary feel to great city art; Franco Moretti in his Atlas of the European Novel shows us how simplified this became in the Victorian novel, a simple matter of the West End and the East End; Booth's famous colour-coded socio-economic map of London showed a much more complicated story. Rich and poor (in Booth's terms Wealthy and Semi-criminal) lived in astonishing proximity all over the city. This fact (Moretti says surprisingly, but it is true) Dickens largely neglected, along with and the dramatic possibilities it offered. Balzac, (as we would expect given his finer sociological distinctions), chose a more complex narrative geography.

I am in Chicago and take a bus to see a house by Lloyd Wright. I keep thinking: hey the neighbourhood's bound to look up soon! It gets worse; I have long been the only white face on a busful of teens with attitude. I get a sinking feeling that this was a bad idea. It all looked so clear; a short ride, a brief walk across a park, (a cute, verdant little rectangle on my map); what could be more agreeable? At about seventieth street I get off; there's my park; but why is it about a mile across and why is it all worn down? And who are those guys hanging around in knots in the growing dusk and why oh why have I got all my money and my air ticket and my passport on me? Bad idea. (And come to think of it, it wasn't er… one of Wright's major houses.) Back downtown again on a timely bus that hissed to a halt on the other side of the road, back downtown, feeling craven, yes; but I knew that I'd be a goner if I walked across that park. ("Whaaat, says my friend, that evening…you went on a bus south of fortieth street!!" which helps me feel less craven.)

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