The Ferrari in the Bedroom (14 page)

I tried to play it cool. “Ah…what’s the roscoe for?”

“The what?” Steve mumbled as he pulled his bright yellow elf hat down over his ears.

“The forty-five. The cannon, you dope. What the hell’s it for?”

He wiped the sweat off the inside of the windshield with a dripping rag.

“Bears,” he said, as matter-of-factly as you would say “cheeseburger” or “Johnny Carson.”

“It won’t stop ’em, but it might scare ’em.” Naturally, being a totally hip City type I thought I was being put on. It wasn’t until later that night that I found I wasn’t, and that Steve did not kid.

We drove out to Fish Creek, a magnificent tumbling stream, crystal clear and ice-cold that wound between towering hills and through great forest. Using a red and white spoon, within ten minutes I had savage strikes which broke the line twice, losing lure and all, and finally hooked a salmon that fought for a good fifteen minutes before I beached him. He went about eight pounds, not large by local standards, but great eating later that night when the hotel baked him for me. I landed another at least twice that size and released him. By that time the mosquitoes were really getting mean and the rain was coming down harder. Even the magnificent bald eagle which had been circling above us, watching us suspiciously, his talons at the ready, decided to pack it in for the night. So we decided to take the hint and drove back to town. The fishing in Alaska is incredible!

On the way back, Steve and I talked cars. He is a fanatic
Grand Prix nut, but like most other aficionados in Alaska is starved for information. Car magazines are almost impossible to get. The demand far exceeds the supply. The only information they get is from Jeff Scott’s network radio shows, and that’s about it.

“Hey Steve, I hereby officially propose the creation of the Grand Prix d’Juneau,” I barked in my best Robert Service manner as we scudded past a float plane base in the drifting rain. He laughed bitterly.

“Yeah, I can just see it now. Jackie Stewart roaring up the Perseverance Trail, a two thousand foot sheer drop six inches from his spinning wheels. To his left, the sharp-rising precipice of Mount Juneau, and in the undergrowth ten-foot bears waiting to play ping-pong with his Formula One mount. Three seconds behind him, his nemesis Graham Hill making up lost time after a nasty mauling by a female bear and her three fun-loving cubs at the Mendenhall River S-turn, his teeth clenched with determination….”

“Stop! I can’t stand it.” Steve rocked with laughter as the torrents of rain roared down our windshield, the wipers hardly making a dent in the downpour.

“That would sure be some race,” he said, “the Grand Prix d’Juneau. Oh boy! It would be the greatest race in the world….”

He trailed off with a note of hopelessness in his voice. Both of us said nothing as we drove back to his house, with the Colt .45 between us and the dead salmon on the back seat. It
would
be the greatest race in the world, the most spectacular, the most grueling and without a doubt the most beautiful. Yep, I hereby officially propose the Grand Prix d’Juneau, to stand alongside Monaco and Le Mans: a supreme test of car, driver, and bear.

Later that night Steve’s mother bawled him out for taking the .45 along on a fishing trip.

“If I hear of you taking that .45 out to Fish Creek again you’re really going to be in trouble. Don’t ever let me hear of you going out again with less than a 30-06. That .45 is nothing. You hear me?”

Steve sulked. I gulped.

“You know what happened to Jimmy,” she said.

“Yeah,” was all Steve answered. I decided I didn’t want to know what had happened to Jimmy. Alaska is that kind of country.

There is no question about it. Good old mankind, an exotic branch of the animal world of which I am indubitably a part, is one of the most adaptable organisms known to science. He ranges freely from the fetid jungles at the equator to the very poles, perpetually icebound and forbidding to all but the most hardy of species. He even manages to knock out a few golf balls on the Moon. Let hooded cobras or flying squirrels try that one.

He also—and this is one of the major differences that exist between the lesser primates and the notorious Upright Ape That Thinks—creates, often, his own environment, both good and bad. There is some suspicion in certain theological quarters that for centuries we have misinterpreted a key passage in the Scriptures, the one that goes: “And the Meek shall inherit the earth.” It is now felt that the Meek referred to were not the Walter Mittys or the Peace advocates, or even Ralph Nader, but instead the lowly cockroaches. Lowly? It all depends on how you interpret “lowly.” Like man, the cockroach makes it damn near everywhere he goes, and
more than that, makes it big. He has been found in deserted trappers’ cabins at 70° below zero, living off, apparently, icicles and polar bear dung, and proliferating at that. Anyone who has spent any time in the tropics knows how well he does there. A lone cockroach was discovered aboard one of the Apollo capsules on a flight to the Moon. He disappeared shortly after discovery, and there is suspicion that now, for the first time, there
is
life on the Moon.

The chief difference between mankind and the cockroach is that the one continually bitches over his fate while the other stoically plods on, uncomplaining, with never a glance backward nor a sigh for what might have been.

Thoughts like this are the kind that come easily to me as I struggle my way uptown through the heavy miasma of hydrocarbons and obscenities that hangs thickly like a shifting yellow curtain of doom over Sixth Avenue in Fun City. For those of you who are not familiar with this classic urban thoroughfare—known officially as The Avenue Of The Americas; better known to more literate cab drivers as The Armpit Of Manhattan—it runs due North, theoretically oneway, from somewhere south of Greenwich Village right up the gut of Manhattan, past such cultural centers as Macy’s and Gimbel’s, encompassing the Porny belt around 42nd Street, and then finally ending in an ungodly traffic snarl at the south end of Central Park.

Driving in midtown New York is a specialty as highly difficult and rarified as, say, lion taming or Japanese Sumo wrestling. It requires a high degree of pugnacity, total selfishness and a complete careless disregard for what is called in other quarters and more civilized sections of our country, the Rights Of Others. The true Manhattan driver never concedes that the “others” deserve any rights whatsoever, and in fact he rarely admits that there
are
“others.” He combines
incredible, almost inhuman qualities of stoicism with the ferocity usually associated with the male rhinoceros in rutting season.

For you fortunates who live out there in the Great Outside beyond the Hudson, who believe that magnificent driving is what you see under the auspices of NASCAR or at Indy, I can only say that a mid-day session with a Manhattan hackie through the garment district is well worth the exorbitant price, if for sheer instructionary and thrill content alone. I have studied the breed for years, and a considerable portion of my life’s fortune has been spent keeping their rapacious meters ticking over merrily, each tick moving me closer and closer to the Poor House while often taking me away from my destination.

Manhattan cabs are born old. As you struggle into the back seat at, say 8th Street and 6th Avenue, of the yawing, sagging, stinking hulk which has lurched curbward in your direction, its glaring toadlike pilot hunched over his greasy steering wheel, a seven-cent cigar clamped in his teeth, you are startled to find that the cab itself often has less than 3,000 miles on the speedometer. Four days out of the showroom and already a grizzled veteran of combat. Crashing from pothole to pothole, knee-deep in a rich compost of cigarette butts, candy wrappers and drying urine, you hurtle northward toward your lunch date. Around you are thousands of other yellow, barnacle-encrusted wrecks, each driver being a total professional. In all my years of New York cab riding I have yet to find the colorful, philosophical cab-driver that keeps popping up on the late movies. There are no William Bendixes or Lloyd Nolans or Jimmy Cagneys pushing hacks in the big town. If there are, I sure as hell haven’t found them.

The nature of the car in the big city itself is something
that requires a little explanation. Month after month magnificent, gleaming color ads leap out at you from the pages of
Car and Driver.
To a New Yorker these fantasy images of sparkling sculptured masterpieces are as remote from our daily lives as, say, Oz or Samarkand. It is common for a man to take possession of a new, sleek Firebird on Tuesday and by late Thursday afternoon it has been pounded and battered into a Fiat 850. By the following Wednesday he is driving an ancient Morgan three-wheeler and then, magically, maybe mercifully, the roving mobs of car snatchers have relieved him of what’s left and he’s back to hailing cabs.

A daily sight along the expressways is the superb team precision of the vultures who can be seen hourly stripping anything that slows down under 10 mph, from a Mark XI heavy tank to a Honda 305. There is some talk in local circles that Car Stripping will eventually become an Olympic team event, at last giving the underprivileged the chance to show their true skills on TV, with Keith Jackson doing the commentary, produced by Roone Arledge for the “Wide Wide World of Sports.” It has been said, although perhaps apocryphally, that there are certain operators in Brooklyn who can remove a full set of mag wheels from a Corvette proceeding on the Long Island Expressway at 60 mph, or the legal limit, with the driver totally unaware of his loss until he hits Hempstead where the potholes start to peter out. Naturally, this gives rise to a certain jumpiness among us irrational dreamers who persist in attempting to own a car in New York.

Garage space alone is a can of worms that’s beyond the comprehension of anyone who has never really lived in Manhattan. It is not uncommon for a car owner to shell out more for a tiny slot of dirty, greasy, rat-infested space grudgingly allotted him by snarling, rapacious thugs than he does
for his apartment housing his beloved and his two precious goldfish. He must contact his “garage,” actually a sagging red-brick 200-year-old firetrap manned by venomous dacoits, fully ten days or more before he wishes to use his battered vehicle.

Contacted at last by telephone they answer with a surly grunt, that is if the local AT&T mob, which currently seems to be in the hands of Doctor No bent on world destruction for his own mad design, allows him to get through at all, after taking upwards of ten gratuitous dimes from the sufferer. The exchange of pleasantries goes roughly like this:

“YEH?” (accompanied by heavy breathing and a brief period of phlegmy hawking and the sound of copious spitting, probably on someone’s Aston Martin).

“Uh…excuse me, but I’d like to have my car, sir, if…”

“FER CRISSAKE, we’re BUSY! What the Hell!” (The sound of muffled crashings drowns out conversation momentarily.)

“I have that blue Fiat, the one…”

“Fer Crissake that Fiat’s inna damn BASEMENT! Whaddaya expect me to do, godammit, it’s Tuesday!!”

“I know, I’m sorry, sir, but there’s nothing I can do about it. I got a call that my mother had a stroke and I have to…”

(The beseecher is interrupted at this point by unintelligible shouting in the phone. A fight has broken out at the garage. Apparently another car owner has arrived unexpectedly, demanding his machine. Naturally, immediate disciplinary action is being taken by the “attendants,” who must maintain the upper hand else mob rule would take over. Amid the hullabaloo he hears the familiar voice of his telephone friend.)

“HEY HEINIE, THAT FAT NUT WIT’ DA FIAT WANTS HIS TIN CAN. WHEN CANYA GIVE IT TA HIM?” (There is
a burst of offstage laughter accompanied by a smattering of obscenity too ripe for family reading.)

“When d’y wannit?”

“Well, I thought…”

“We can’t get it outa the basement before Friday. Crissake, you guys call up an’ want yer car widout no notice or nothin!”

“I’m sorry, sir. I’ll be over Friday, sir, I hate to bother you, but…”