“On the other hand, Balzac found it necessary to have heavy curtains hung over the windows and doors of his study. He wrote late at night, by the light of a candle. He said he had to do this to concentrate, to get away from the world.”
The Prof glanced frantically off to someone or something to his right, just out of camera range. Apparently, he was getting a cue. I leaned forward sleepily. It isn’t often I see “Morning Classics,” an educational college course–type program that comes on the screen either so late or so early–depending on your point of view–that hardly anybody ever sees it, except maybe the professor’s wife and a few video freaks who see everything, including the test patterns.
“Er …” he stammered in confusion.
“Er … that is, I’ll be back tomorrow with …”
He was abruptly cut off the screen and replaced with a sixty-second plug for Girl Scout cookies. Poor Prof, I thought, he just ain’t used to picking up his cues. So the whole point, if he had any, of his lecture went down the drain with the Girl Scout cookies and the morning news, which replaced him.
I fixed some instant coffee and as dawn was breaking somewhere out over the dark Atlantic I got to thinking of old Marcel Proust in his cork-lined room and Balzac scratching away with a quill pen with all those curtains hanging around him, at two in the morning. I sipped a bit of the lukewarm coffee and thought maybe I ought to build a cork-lined room, or hang black curtains over the window like those old-time writers did. I poured more coffee, and then it hit me–
Of course! I do have the equivalent of a cork-lined, black-curtain-draped concentration chamber, cut off from the rest of the world. My car!
I wonder how many guys there are in this world who actually find that the only time in the whole hectic day when they are away from phone calls, mysterious visitations, constant meetings, endless talks, are those few daily private times that they spend absolutely alone in their cars. A lone driver has no family, no job, no age–he is just an individual bit of human protoplasm humming through space. The mind drifts like some rudderless sailboat over the murky sea of consciousness. One part of you expertly, using some inbuilt secret mind-computer, steers the machine, calculating accurately all the changing vectors of speed, light, other traffic, road conditions, that go to make up fast driving. In fact, after you’ve put in enough hours behind the wheel under all kinds of conditions, you never even think about it any more. You just do it. All the while, that other part of your mind drifts around dreamily, dredging up wild thoughts, long-forgotten memories, and fragments of old disappointments. Proust had his cork-lined room; I have my vinyl-lined GT.
Take the other day. I’m battling it out with all the other sweating lonesome travelers on Jersey’s Route 22, which like all the Route 22s of America has a surreal landscape which makes anything by Salvador Dali look like Norman Rockwell: Dairy Queens, McDonald’s, instant seat cover palaces, a pizza joint that calls itself the Leaning Tower of Pizza that actually does lean, a gas station which for some reason has a forty-foot-high plastic North Woodsman swinging a motor-driven ax twenty-four hours a day, his face the color of an overripe watermelon, Gino’s, Colonel Sanders, the works, all laced together with an unbelievable spiderweb of high tension wires, phone wires, wire wires, and miles of neon tubing. My mind is just idling away at maybe one-tenth throttle, thinking of nothing, when I glance up and see in my rearview mirror that one of Jersey’s folk artists has zeroed in on me.
Jersey natives have made a fine creative art form of tailgating. I could see in the mirror that I was in the clutches of a real master. I speeded up. He clung to my rear deck like a shadow. I dodged around a bus, figuring I’d scrape him off like a barnacle. No way. I shifted lanes. He moved with me like Earl Campbell following a blocker. He edged closer and closer to my rear bumper. We were hurtling along Route 22 at the usual cruise speed of that 55 mph limit artery–75 plus. I slowed up, figuring that no true tailgater ever resists an opportunity to pass anything. There are guys who look upon all traffic as an endless obstacle to be passed. This is your average tailgater.
He wasn’t buying it. I slowed up; he slowed up. I quickly switched lanes and made a fast feint toward the asphalt parking lot of a Carvel ice cream joint, figuring he’d get mouse-trapped into thinking I was stopping by for a quick Banana Boat. He clung to my rear deck like a Band-Aid. He was good, in fact, one of the best I’d ever seen. He was so close now that his face filled my entire rearview mirror. I couldn’t even see the hood or the grille of his car. I noticed that he had nicked himself while shaving. There was a piece of toilet paper plastered on his steel-blue chin. He was also eating a Big Mac casually as we screamed along, locked in mortal combat.
Suddenly I became aware that something was blotting out the gray Jersey sky inches from my own grille. I had fallen for the oldest tailgater trick in the book. He had maneuvered me behind a giant flatbed truck, and there was no escape. I darted tentatively to my left, hoping to pass. The tailgater hemmed me in. I tried the right. No way. A Greyhound bus was in that lane. Inches separating us, we whistled along. My mind, operating full-bore, like Proust’s or Balzac’s, flashed visions of shattering glass, screaming metal, and I wondered briefly whether there was anything to this heaven and hell business.
The flatbed was now four or five feet ahead of my front bumper. Its load towered above me for what looked like two or three stories. I began to enjoy the scene. I could see the truck driver’s face, pale and harassed, looking at me in his rearview mirror. He was muttering. A row of discount shoe stores flashed by us in a blur. I was so close to the flatbed that I began to examine its load minutely. My God, I thought, Proust never came up with a neater bit of irony in his life.
The load, stacked twenty-deep, consisted of a giant pile of flattened automobiles, each one maybe eight inches thick, crushed like so many sardine cans under a cosmic steam roller. I had a brief image of me and my car joining them and looking exactly like all the rest. The tailgater behind me was now impassively sucking at what looked like a sixty-four-ounce family-size bottle of Pepsi.
It was then that my mind really took off. Here we were, sealed in our own little noisy, smelly projectiles, hurtling over the landscape toward … what? I could see the crushed cars ahead of me creaking and groaning as if in mortal fear of the fiery fate that lay ahead for them in some distant foreign blast furnace. My God, I thought, they still have their paint on.
I began to recognize the makes. There was a seven-inch-high ’57 Mercury, robin’s egg blue. Above it, a ’61 Plymouth Fury, thinner than a blueberry pancake at a cut-rate diner. It was sand beige. Then came a sad, peeling, forest green Nash Ambassador of indeterminate year. My mind flashed a brief headline on its beaded screen: Unknown Driver Killed By ’51 Studebaker. Like a news story flashed in light bulbs that march around the tops of Times Square buildings, the story went on:
Driver annihilated when a ‘51 Studebaker that had been in a junk yard for twelve years and hadn’t been driven since 1959 leaped off a flatbed truck to engage itself in its final fiery traffic crash.
The news item disappeared from my mind as the three of us howled through an overpass that echoed and boomed to the roar of the traffic. I peered ahead at the crushed cars. Tattered bumper stickers still clung to the hulks, a veritable cross section of ancient causes: LBJ–ALL THE WAY, I LIKE IKE, IMPEACH EARL WARREN, BAN THE BOMB, FREE THE PUEBLO.
My God, I thought, “Free The Pueblo.” I could hardly even remember what that was all about, but that smashed Buick Skylark remembered.
Way up near the top was a twisted, battered bumper from what looked like what was left of a moribund Dodge Charger. A torn sticker read WARNING–I BRAKE FOR ANIMALS. I thought dreamily, Poor bastard, after all that braking for chipmunks and box turtles somebody didn’t brake for HIM. My mind thinks like that when I’m locked in my Proustian vinyl-lined GT, away from the cares and hubbub of everyday life with its phone calls and its feckless excursions and alarms.
I glanced in my rearview
mirror. Blue Jowls, steady as a rock, was dogging me even closer. He seemed to have his front wheels up on my rear deck and was riding piggyback. He was also picking his teeth with what looked like a Boy Scout knife. I could clearly see the Scout insignia on its black bone handle. I continued reading the sad signs and pennants on the departed cars ahead of me.
Halfway up the pile, a canary-yellow Coronet had what looked like crude letters taped to its rusted bumper. They were made of faded red Day-Glo tape. I peered into the haze of blue diesel exhaust that was roaring over me from the truck. The letters spelled two names: WALT on the driver’s side of the bumper, EMILY on the passenger side. Between them was a jagged, half-obliterated heart, pierced by a childish Day-Glo arrow.
Walt, I thought, poor Walt, where are you today? Somehow I felt a deep, sorrowful compassion for Walt, and Emily too. I saw that bright sunny day; that long-awaited day when they stood in the showroom taking the keys to their beautiful new Coronet. My mind conjured Walt up as being rather short, a bit beefy, but with a friendly sort of dumb face. His dark hair was cut in a bristly crew cut, the height of fashion for the day. His head looked a little like a furry bowling ball. Emily was thin and wore sagging blue shorts of the Montgomery Ward type, and she wore her hair in a Debbie Reynolds ponytail. I saw them together, polishing the Dodge on long summer weekends, Walt industriously working the Simoniz rag while Emily did the chrome. I had a brief vision of Walt making one of the endless payments on the Coronet at some sort of grilled window like they have in loan offices. He had lost a little hair and had gotten a little fatter, but you could tell it was still Walt all right. Through the window of the loan office I caught a glimpse of Emily waiting patiently in the car. There were now two kids jumping up and down on the back seat of the car. They both appeared to be boys, but it was hard to tell in all that diesel smoke coming back at me from the truck ahead. Emily looked even thinner, and her hair was put up in a pile of pink plastic curlers. The Coronet had lost two of its hubcaps, the chrome was rusting, and there wasn’t much left of that bright canary-yellow paint.
I glanced again in my rearview mirror. My tailgater was now jogging up and down, his eyes glazed, his mouth hanging slackly in the manner of tailgating rock fiends.
Walt, I thought, where are you today, Walt? Are you and Emily still together? Has one of the kids been busted for Possession? Walt, do you know that your Coronet, after all these years, is still roaring along Route 22? It will be tonight in the hold of a tramp freighter sailing out of the port of Newark, Walt, a ship called, maybe, the Funky Maru, manned by a polyglot crew of cutthroats. Walt, your Coronet may come back to you someday in the form of a 105 mm shell.
My mind dreamily moved on. Suddenly my tailgater whistled off 22 onto the Garden State Parkway exit. He was still sucking at his Pepsi bottle. I saw him fasten himself to the back of a Mustang II.
I shifted to the left and passed the flatbed and its load of memory-laden carcasses. The mind does great things in our vinyl-lined GTs. Proust would have understood. Maybe even Balzac, for that matter.
God, I love cars. Now, I know that this is something that you’re just not supposed to say these days, but there it is. We all have our faults. Sometimes I lie in the sack and run through my mind the images of all the cars I’ve owned in my life. I wish I could say that I thought about all the beautiful women I’ve known, but they tend to blend together. Not the cars.
The women, though … There was Daphne. And Wanda. I had a brief, fleeting image of her gleaming glasses and hint of malocclusion. Women, the whipped cream on the cake. Maybe they’re the cake itself.
I fiddled nervously with the air-intake vent. I wonder if women have any idea what they do to men? I glanced at the grimy tiled tunnel wall next to me, hazy images of women I have known drifting in and out of my mind, forever the same age, never changing. Where are they now? PTA members? Library patrons? Shopping cart pushers? No, not Daphne, never!
Without warning, a mysterious white pinched face appeared out of my Mammoth Cave of a subconscious. She seemed to be at a distance, moving. She waved nervously, and disappeared back into the blackness. Who was she? I didn’t recognize her, yet I remembered her. My mind groped for a clue.
Another face appeared, a young man; thin, big Adam’s-apple. I grunted to myself. “Yes, of course, yes.”
That girl. The pickup truck. And poor lost Ernie.
The Marathon Run of Lonesome Ernie, the Arkansas Traveler
The troop train had been underway for about three hours when the saga of Ernie began. You don’t use a word like “saga” lightly, if you have any sense, but what happened to me and Gasser and Ernie is sure as hell a saga. At least, certainly, what happened to Ernie.
Without warning, Company K, our little band of nearsighted, solder-burned Radar “experts,” had been rousted out of the sack at three o’clock in the morning, two full hours before reveille, given a quick short-arm, issued new carbines and combat field equipment, and had been told to fall out into the company street when Sergeant Kowalski blew his goddamn whistle. Stunned, we milled about under the yellow light bulbs of our icy barracks. Some laughed hysterically; others wept silently. A few hunched over their footlockers, using stubby pencils to make last-minute finishing touches to their wills.
Me, I just slumped half-asleep on the bunk, full field pack on my back, tin hat squashing my head down to my shoulder blades, and waited for the worst.
“Well, gentlemen, as my father always said, it’s wise to get a good early start on a trip. That way you avoid traffic and …”
“Zynzmeister, will you fuck the hell off!” Gasser yelled from his upper bunk where he was busily stuffing his legendary store of candy bars, especially Milky Ways and Powerhouses, into his gas mask.
“Gasser,” Zynzmeister said in his cool way, “a good brisk spin in the open air will do wonders for you. Take you out of your rut. New sights, new scenes, new people, new …”
“Zynzmeister, will you please, just this once, blow it out your goddamn manure chute.” Gasser went back to stuffing candy bars.
“Ah, it is always thus. Coarse language is eternally the last refuge of the barren and infertile mind.” Zynzmeister, our resident George Bernard Shaw, hefted his barracks bags with casual elegance amid the barracks uproar.
Corporal Elkins, our company driver and disappointed ex-air cadet, peered at me from under his tin hat.
“I told you that staff sergeant I met at Headquarters Company was not bullshitting. All you guys laughed, god dammit. Now look who’s laughing.”
“Elkins, I do not recall laughing at any rumors around here recently,” I answered, “except the one that Edwards came up with that Kowalski has only one ball.”
“Yeah, lemme tell you, we’re liable to all get our asses shot off.”
Several heads encased in tin helmets raised up at this. Elkins had come out with what we all secretly were thinking.
“The first goddamn guys they go for are the poor fuckin’ Radar slobs.” Elkins spit nervously into a butt can.
“Ironically, that is true, Elkins. In spite of the fact that our SCR 585 rarely works and when it does continually gives us false and misleading information. For that reason, gentlemen, I believe that Company K is merely a decoy to draw out enemy fire, much in the manner that a wooden duck decoy, while looking like a duck, is a clever device used to …”
Whistles blew in the frigid dark streets of the company, cutting off Zynzmeister in mid smart-ass crack. Clinking and clanking with damn near a hundred pounds of lethal equipment apiece, we jostled sullenly out the door of our barracks forever.
First Sergeant Kowalski, wearing his Signal Corps mackinaw, tin hat, gas mask, and, in spite of the pitch-dark night, his green air corps sunglasses, stalked back and forth restlessly in the company street.
“All right, you mens, get your asses in gear. Let’s move it.”
He carried, of course, his damn clipboard. He was trailed by Corporal Scroggins, a red-faced lout from Hazard, Kentu
cky, who had been imported from the Infantry in order to help Kowalski impose a little military discipline on our effete rabble of Signal Corps intelligentsia. Lieutenant Cherry, our company commander, sat quietly in his jeep in front of the Orderly Room. Off to the west, in the direction of the Motor Pool, the low angry rumble of an approaching truck convoy meant to each one of us only one thing. Scroggins blew his whistle. We lined up automatically in our usual four ragged lines: Gasser to my right, Edwards to my left, Zynzmeister behind me.
“At ease.”
Kowalski himself sounded a bit subdued. We fell silent except for the faint clank and creak of equipment.
“You guys probably have noticed the fact you been issued new carbines. And also you been issued new field gear. And also it is three ayem, which is two hours before reveille. Now, many of you are probably askin’ what is this all about? Am I correct?”
All around me in the blackness there was a restless rattle of carbines and a faint shuffling of feet. Kowalski was always a great one for the rhetorical question. He also had a notable talent for belaboring the obvious.
“Lieutenant Cherry will now give you the dope on what’s gonna happen. You mens listen good. I don’t wanna have no dumbhead comin’ up to me after this formation and askin’ no stupid questions. I got enough on my hands now without answerin’ no stupid questions.”
Kowalski paused for a long significant moment in order to let his broadside sink in.
“Atten-HUT!”
All around me were the familiar sounds of the company coming to what it liked to call “Attention,” which meant a slight shifting of the feet, a look of fierce concentration in the eye, and a faint pulling in of the stomach muscles.
“At ease.”
We relaxed. “At ease” in the Army does not mean what it means in civilian life. It means primarily “Shut up and listen.” Lieutenant Cherry casually eased himself out of the company jeep and languidly took his position in front of Kowalski, who stared stonily ahead of him.
A Fistful of Fig Newtons Page 10
