The Ferrari in the Bedroom (15 page)

(He is drowned out by maniacal squealing of brakes followed by a muffled thud and a tinkling of glass. The line goes dead.)

Chances are 30-1 that when the victim arrives at the garage the following Friday no one on the premises will remember his call or even his face, since he has only been in the clutches of the mob for three years and can’t expect recognition, and will be told to come back next Wednesday at the earliest. For this he antes up $90 a month and is expected never to mention the bashed-in doors, the flattened trunk, the smashed grille or the beer cans he finds in the front seat and the unmistakable evidence that at least three people and a dog have been camping out in his pride and joy while running down the battery listening to the Mets and striking kitchen matches on his knurled walnut instrument panel.

Everywhere else in the country, cars have distinct differences. Some are Jaguars; others are Pintos. There are Gremlins and Corvettes. They even have distinctive colors. There are blues, greens, Cardinal reds, and even eggshell whites. To a New Yorker this seems almost something out of the halcyon past, the days of simple pleasures like homemade bread and Fourth of July fireworks. By the third day of its life in New York City all these characteristics of the
automobile have all but disappeared. The Jersey crud which drifts down inexorably from what used to be the Heavens, bearing its deadly load of rare and subtle acids, its exotic poisons and mysterious gases, has obliterated all signs of distinctive coloration. The car becomes a curious mouldy dun color, which is distinctively Manhattan in character as it resembles the mole-like inhabitants’ complexions.

Repeated bashings, side-swipings, dinging and general hammerings have formed the machine into its basic non-identifiable lumpish form. The job is completed by the locust swarm of humanoid car levellers who systematically denude every vehicle of its hubcaps, nameplates, badges, antennas and whatever else might have made it vaguely distinctive from its fellows. It is now an urban car; tough, tenacious, and totally anonymous, a fitting companion for the New Yorker himself.

Only the cabdriver, like the ancient sea-faring man, commands the rolling seas of New York traffic. He has his own battle code and like most soldiers has a vast disdain for the civilian. Mayors come and mayors go; traffic engineers rise and fall. The New York hackie hates them all. It is a matter of record that
no
licensed New York cabdriver has uttered so much as a mildly civil remark about an incumbent mayor since the late unlamented James Walker, better known as Jimmy The Slick to his bootlegger friends, passed out in a Checker on 49th Street and upon awakening tipped the driver with a $20 bill. Legend has it that the hackie, in a clear voice, stated, “Now dere’s a good Mayor,” although this is in dispute.

The cabdrivers’ attitude toward civilian drivers goes like this: You’ve been seated in a cab with meter ticking away steadily for nineteen minutes at the corner of 33rd Street
and Sixth Avenue in a gigantic tangle of unmoving machines.

CABBIE:
(red neck glowing) “Y’know what they could do to clean up this whole mess? I’ll tell ya what they could do if Lindsay wasn’t such a crummy crook. I’ll tell ya what they could do.”

PASSENGER:
(rising to the bait) “What could they do?” (clouds of carbon monoxide swirling around his head and gradually dissolving his new wash-and-wear suit)

CABBIE:
“Ya know what they could do? I’ll tell ya what they could do if that Lindsay wasn’t such a crummy crook. Boy, them stupes what voted for him got what they deserved, an’ now the crummy crook wants ta be President!”

PASSENGER:
“What could they do?”

CABBIE:
“What could they do about what?” (He glances suspiciously into the rear view mirror.)

PASSENGER:
(his eyes beginning to pop slightly due to the fact that the temperature in the sagging Plymouth has risen to the near-200° mark) “You were telling me what they could do about the traffic.”

(Ahead, the driver of a giant tractor-trailer rig plastered with ancient
VOTE FOR GOLDWATER
stickers has commenced a listless fistfight with an unidentified male Caucasian, medium build.)

CABBIE:
“Oh yeah, well if they wasn’t so stupid they would ban alla civilian cars from d’roads. Kick ’em off. That’s what’s causin’ alla traffic jams. If that pansy Lindsay wasn’t such a stupid crook!”

(The Passenger, glancing around at the vast tangled traffic jam, noticing that there is not a single civilian car in sight, nothing but a sea of yellow cabs and red-necked
drivers, all demanding the immediate banishment of non-cabs from the road, settles into moody silence, attempting to while away the ticking-off metered hours by scrounging amid the rubble heap on the cab floor, looking for something to read. Noticing a furtive movement under an encrusted pile of cigar butts and bottle caps he suspects there might be some sort of lizard or maybe a rat sharing his ride. He gives up scrounging and sits patiently awaiting the time when the traffic moves again. He has been here before. Unlike J. Alfred Prufrock, his life is not measured out in coffee spoons but flag-drops and meter ticks. The little white numbers in the grimy glass window mount higher and higher as he squats amid the rubble, sharing with the cockroach the rare ability to adapt to totally alien environments, his lungs operating rhythmically in shallow gasps, extracting what tiny nourishment there is from the putrid atmosphere of his adopted environment. He awakens from his torpor momentarily to continue his listless conversation with the pilot ahead.)

PASSENGER:
“How come you got two plastic Christs on the dashboard?”

CABBIE:
(relighting the stub of his cigar—which has gone out due to lack of oxygen) “The one onna left belongs to the night man.”

It’s no wonder that the beautiful magazine ads extolling the glories of Fun City read like fantasy fiction to the average New Yorker.

“And so concludes Part Three of NBC’s five part salute to Pollution, an in-depth study of Environmental pollution starring Glen Campbell, Frank Sinatra, The Supremes, The Smothers Brothers, and MC’d by Red Skelton. Next week…”

I snapped off the set and yawned as a thought crossed my mind. My god, it sure gets you tired trying to keep up with each major crisis. I remembered the good old days of Ban The Bomb with a faint tinge of mauve nostalgia. Ah, the simple problems of yore. I wonder what the Ban The Bombers are doing now? Probably raising kids and fighting crabgrass. Oh well.

The current major crisis, the Environment, carried along with it the same old inevitable crowd of “experts” who predict, predictably, the imminent end of Mankind. For as long as I remember, some authority or another has stated irrevocably that the end was in sight. A few more years and it would all be over. Oh well.

I poured myself a little unpolluted bourbon and sipped thoughtfully. I wonder what happened to that guy at Harvard or some place who maintained stoutly that the astronauts would bring back deadly unknown bacilli from the Moon. Jesus, that one sure petered out. And then the gang of concerned experts who used to sit around on TV panels on Sunday afternoons, jabbering about bomb shelters. Now there was a great crew of doomsayers.

I flipped on the stereo and idly rifled the smudgy pages of
Copulation,
an underground journal of the sexual revolution edited by a defrocked Benedictine monk. Like all underground papers it was available at every news stand. My attention was caught briefly by an article describing the moving intellectual experiences of a seventeen year old female heroin addict at an orgy on 9th Street which somehow involved, among other creatures, a gelded chimpanzee. My mind just wasn’t on it. Maybe it was the turgid prose. I glanced over the Want Ads, noting that sado-masochist Lonely Hearts clubs had apparently become one of the major industries of Manhattan, along with underground homosexual film festivals.

I flung the miserable rag aside. If a paper could have acne, that one had it. I was restless. It was one of those milky Sunday afternoons that you get from time to time in New York in August: temperature in the 90s, heat rising in shimmering waves from the tops of dented, filthy yellow cabs. I usually try to get out of town on a weekend like this, but I had missed connections. Here I was, alone, pacing my apartment like Captain Ahab stumping around the quarterdeck of the
Pequod.

I tossed off another bourbon, which seemed to instantly produce an overwhelming sleepiness. My air conditioner was out, so the room was hot and muggy. I struggled with a
window trying to get a little air. A breath of New York atmosphere oozed in.

I sniffed. A familiar New York aroma filled my lungs, made dank by too much city living. God, how I hated that smell! Every summer it rose from the lush neighborhoods of New York’s East Side like a great cloud of swamp gas from the Dismal Swamp. It somehow was the other side of the coin of the lives of the Beautiful People. My breath came in shallow gasps as I tottered over to my zebra skin Castro convertible. I flung myself headlong among the ravaged pile of old
New Yorkers
and soon my fevered soul drifted off to sleep, greased on its way by Jack Daniels.

A few brief, fitful dreams of a chaotic nature and suddenly, without warning, I found myself in a sea of bright lights; cameras with blinking red eyes peered at me; Steve Allen, looking deeply concerned, was asking me a question. He was flanked by David Susskind, and Malcolm Boyd, the Showbiz priest.

“You say you represent S.P.L.A.T.? An organization devoted to combatting environmental pollution?” Allen’s brow furrowed as he turned on his best Involved Citizen look.

“That is correct,” I found myself saying.

“Well, Mr. Shepherd, and just what does S.P.L.A.T. stand for?” David Susskind asked this one, his fingertips pressing together making a tiny pyramid. He nodded knowingly in his best Liberal manner. Malcolm Boyd waved at the camera and pointed to the dust jacket of another book he had just written.

“I’d rather not say, if you don’t mind,” I answered, conscious of a murmur out in the darkness where the great studio audience had assembled.

“Come now, it must stand for something? After all, you have over twelve million members.”

“It certainly does,” I replied, my confidence rising as I noticed that Susskind had a bit of dried chicken soup on his lapel.

“It’s not that I want to hide anything, you understand. It’s just that there are probably women and children watching today.”

“Yes, Jesus said to me the other day, when we were out jogging together, ‘Blessed are the little children.’” Malcolm Boyd was off and running with the Lord again. “In fact, I just cut an LP on this very subject. It’s called…”

Allen raised his hand casually. “Easy, Malc. We’ll plug the record at the end of the show.” Boyd frantically held up the record jacket and looked disappointed that the camera had winked out and was now pointing at Susskind.

“It’s in Stereo!” he squeaked.

“We don’t expect to come up with all the answers today. After all, the Environmental Pollution crisis is very complex, but we Concerned people feel that the Liberal Establishment particularly, relating itself to the suppressed minorities, the first victims of smog, recognize that the certain amount of sacrifice and painful re-evaluation plus cooperation among the more favored elements of the Society…”

Susskind had the bit in his teeth and in his inimitable fashion was charging off into the wild blue yonder, spraying cliches recklessly in all directions. I found myself nodding as he droned on.

Luckily a commercial cut him off in mid-platitude. The commercial seemed to be about a lady who found blue water in her john, and a three-inch tall man in a rubber rowboat as well.

“C’mon, Shepherd, what do you mean you can’t tell us what S.P.L.A.T. stands for? This is an Adult panel. After all,
it’s Sunday afternoon, when the Serious shows are on. You can come right out and say it on this show, right boys?”