The Ferrari in the Bedroom (22 page)

Kids, on the other hand, are forever being told that they, being Teenagers, are magical beings closely related to elves, if not outright nymphs and fairies, destined forever to run along endless uncluttered beaches, golden hair streaming in the breeze, with the cry “SURF’S UP!” mingling with the Pepsi-Cola jingle. Instead, they often find themselves short, noticeably fat, near-sighted and with bad molars. Naturally, they feel someone has goofed up on their guarantee.

Whole nations are now in the thrall of this remarkable hangup. For fifty years they’ve been trying to make the Workers’ Paradise paradisical. And still the suits are baggy, the underwear binds, mothers-in-law weep, guitar strings break, and the women are fat. The cry then goes up:

“Who screwed us!? It must be—!” Fill in the blanks. It’s always somebody else. No one ever seems to question the concept of the guarantee itself.

Equality today is equated with happiness. We’ll see.

The uproar will go on forever and ever. In fact, some are even going so far in pursuit of the Double Your Money Back golden fleece as to arrive at that eventual poor old dead end and Scapegoat of all eternity—God. Already, in the last few months, there have been more and more editorials ranting and raving against a God everyone claims they don’t believe in for doing such rotten stuff to Us, and using that argument to prove that’s why they don’t believe in Him, a classic example of the man who, six months after purchase, finds that Life itself is burning oil and getting lousy gas mileage.

Remember, gang, if you want to get ahead, just offer the mob a guaranteed, gold-plated, ribbon-bedecked Parchment, Scroll, White Paper, Manifesto, Constitution or what-have-you ensuring that if the instructions are carefully followed, Happiness, Satisfaction and the golden attainment of Peace of Mind will inevitably result. Whether you peddle creeds, dogmas or drugs, the mob will flock. It’s only later that they will turn on you, but by then, we hope, you’ll be living comfortably in Switzerland.

If you’re a Saab cuckoo and you feel vaguely alone, shunned, disdained by your peers, I would suggest that, for the benefit of your troubled soul, you knock off a couple of weeks and travel up to America’s Great Unknown State—Maine. If ever an alien car had a natural home in the New World, it is the Saab putting and buzzing through the black forests of the Pine Tree State. Once you get inland from the tourist belt you get the vague impression that every third car is a Saab, and if it isn’t, it’s trying to be.

I’ve often thought that cars, particularly the European breeds, have specific geographical homelands that are clearly defined and in which they are at their best. England, for example, turns out cars that seem to be designed specifically to be worked on in garages on bland milky Sunday afternoons. I’ve owned several English marques in my time and have come to the conclusion that they’re not really built to drive, they’re more to
have
and to worry over. The English are by nature putterers. Their houses tend to be fussy, doily-laden, with an aspidistra in every window, and their cars
reflect this facet of English character. An Englishman is never happier than when he is spending dreamy endless hours under his Austin A90, a family heirloom, surrounded by spanners and parts manuals.

On the other hand, Italian machines are designed mainly for running down peasantry, scattering chickens,
paisanos
and
Mafiosi
to the winds like confetti, which is also an Italian word, significantly enough—tiny gears screaming, overhead cam motors wailing in defiance. Italian cars, like Italian movie stars, live short, flamboyant, dangerous lives, ruled by the stringent demands of maintaining a public image of
machismo.
No wonder their predominant color is blood red.

The Germans, who appreciate well-oiled efficiency, are at their best creating equipment that has a certain silver grey chrome-steel functionality. When they attempt racy, gay frivolity they invariably produce laborious curiosities. A case in point is the Porsche Speedsters, which always reminded me of an overweight Deutsch hausfrau wearing a miniskirt, trying to pass as Sophia Loren. Then of course, there’s the Targa. “Targa” is no German word that I know of, so perhaps unconsciously they’re hip to the masquerade. Fritz figures if he changes his name to “Luigi” he might make it in the Pasta league.

There has been enough written about American cars reflecting American mores that I won’t bore you with a repetition. And like American mores, which today are in a state of total confusion, so is Detroit. But back to the Saab—the toad-like ugliness of this little beast clearly reflects the outlook of a people who spend most of their lives in Winter darkness, up to their behinds in six-month-old snowdrifts, and are somewhat suicidal in nature. A well-to-do middle class Swede thinks nothing of indulging in maniacal
head-on games of Chicken on the frozen lakes of his homeland. The Swedes are not a smiling, merry lot. Naturally, the Saab fits the Maine mystique like a glove. The Maine Yankee has never been noted for his spontaneous joy, his
elan,
his animation. To illustrate:

I do a lot of flying in my spare time, and one of my old friends is a superb flight instructor, an ex-crop duster from up in Fort Kent, Maine, about as Maine as you can get. He fits the pattern: silent, tough, sardonic. One day a student was flailing around out in the pattern when Jesse, who was toying with a paper cup of Rat coffee, the kind they always have in aiport pilots’ rooms, suddenly and without a word got up and ambled out the door. I hollered, “Where are you going, Jesse?” As the door swung shut I caught his twanged answer: “Just thought I’d go out and watch the flames.”

Here is a classical example of New England “wit” at its finest, based on somebody else’s imminent disaster, laced with a distinct relish for Doom. Jesse Baker, in one sentence, said everything that Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish film-maker, has been trying to say in endless murky breast-beating epics of futility. Jesse once confided to me as we droned along at four thousand feet, practicing Lazy Eights: “It don’t pay to take Muskie too serious. He’s like all of my Maine relatives. He’s got the rest of the country thinking he’s smart ’cause he don’t say nothing. Maine’s been getting away with that for years. They call it Yankee wisdom.” He snorted evilly and went back to banging on the Cherokee 180’s panel to get the omni working again.

Yankee wisdom is no less a myth than Swedish sexuality. If you believe that Swedes are sexy you also probably believe that blacks have rhythm, that Frenchmen are unbelievable lovers and that all Italians continually say “Mama mia, dat’s a spicy meat-a-ball-a.” Oh well. Anyway, the grim, dogged
unsexy little Saab is a far more accurate reflection of the Swedish character than any number of Nordic skin flicks, which after all are admittedly part of the dream world. The Saab is real; the Saab is earnest.

I took to escaping to Maine a few years ago when I discovered that within less than four hundred miles of the Triboro Bridge was a state that was literally progressing backward, flaunting all the cherished liberal traditions of twentieth century statisto-mania. That’s a nice phrase, by the way, meaning roughly a total hangup on statistics, chiefly those that agree with your already established biases. (Incidentally, I just made it up. If you want to quote it, you’ll have to quote me.) But Maine, in the usual tradition of Maine truculence, is simply not going along with the rest of us. While we are having a population explosion they are in the midst of a population
im
plosion. You can drive through dozens of inland Maine towns that give you the spooky feeling of being abandoned movie sets which were used in some ancient remake of
Our Town.
Hamlets with names like Albion, Freedom, Old Testament, China, Ghost Lake, Old Town. Almost all of them have a dark, rushing river that slices right through the main stem. Maine has some of the greatest rivers this side of the Amazon basin, with rolling sensual Indian names: Kennebec, Allagash, Piscatauqua, Penobscot. Next to each one is a tall, gaunt red brick building out of the mid nineteenth century crumbling into ruins, usually with a faded gold leaf sign:
DOWN EAST WOOLEN MILLS.
You can hear the echoes of Thornton Wilder people under the two-hundred-year-old shade trees.

Personally, I find inland Maine a lot more what I’m looking for than the Coast with its countless “art colonies” and cutie-pie shoppes; its hordes of tweedy ladies who make their own Mexican jewelry and swacky rich kids hanging
around Bar Harbor for a couple of weeks before getting back to Choate for the winter. Drive along Route
23
through the Belgrade Lake chain past some of the most beautiful bodies of water in the country; Great Pond, Salmon Lake, Snow Pond, past weatherbeaten mobile homes squatting amid the dark pines. One thing that gets me every time is that almost every Maine farmhouse or shack is surrounded by the hulks of the last six generations of family cars. Apparently the true Yankee never throws anything away; he doesn’t even trade it in. He just keeps it in the back yard, in the weeds, slowly sinking deeper and deeper into the subsoil,
’63
Galaxies,
’56
Bel Airs,
’46
Plymouths,
’39
Dodge trucks all gradually getting to look like the surrounding rocks; timeless, indestructible, inorganic.

Ralph Nader, obviously a City type who has never
needed
an automobile in order to sustain a semblance of Life, should spend a typical Thursday night on Main Street in
Waterville. Huddled next to the Maine Turnpike, about the only action in town is a guy’s car. I drove into Rummel’s one night to see what was happening. Rummel’s is a place worth driving
200
miles for. Let’s face it, if New York is the natural home of majestic pastrami, and it is, then Maine is where ice cream really
happens.
If you’re an ice cream cuckoo and haven’t dealt with Rummel’s licorice, topped off with a ball of Rummel’s peanut butter swirl, then you haven’t really traveled the ultimate road of ecstasy. I got to talking with this taciturn native who drove an orange-flake GTO, about Life and all the rest of it as we waited in line for our Rummel’s double dippers.

“Well, what I do is drive down to Gino’s for a while, knock down a cheeseburger, and if nothing’s happening I stop off at Mr. Do-Nut. They got this waitress named Barbie who I kid around with for a while. Then I make it over here—Rummel’s. I’ll probably finish off tonight by making it to Tony’s for a Syrian Dagwood. That is, in between draggin’ up Main Street four or five times with Ernie in his 427 ’69 ’Vette hardtop. A real pig.”

“Yeah,” I answered, trying to sound excited over the full life lived by the swinging youth of inland Maine.

If you get on the Turnpike at Waterville and drive South maybe twenty miles there is a great sign, the only place in the country I’ve ever seen one like it: MOOSE AREA NEXT 18 MILES. In the Moose Area on either side of the Pike as you drive along you can spot flashes of water through the Norwegian pine and birches and you just know you aren’t far from a bull moose that stands seven feet at the shoulders and carries a spread of antlers six feet or so across. I stopped at the Citgo station one night, at the Gardner exit right in the middle of the moose area. I asked the pump jockey: “What about those moose?”