The Ferrari in the Bedroom (17 page)

Unfortunately, the small news item does not list the rest of his selections; merely the Winton, the Hudson Six, the Whippet and the Chevy. There is a unifying theme here, and any truly serious student of automotive trivia can spot it instantly. What is it? As the rains battered against what was left of my shredded pliofilm Edwardian raincoat (naturally it was shredded, since I had already worn it for better than forty minutes and it was nearing the end of its life) it hit me like an illuminating flash, the same thing that used to happen to guys in the comics when that 60 watt Mazda switched on over Andy Gump’s noggin. Of course! Now I saw it!

Leopold Brown’s collection,
en toto,
was his legacy, his statement to the world. Think about it. A Whippet, a Hudson
Six, a Winton, AND—a master stroke—a 1951 Chevrolet (Power Glide)! These cars have one characteristic in common. Each one was a stupefying Nothing of its day. The reason no Win-tons exist is because the 1905 Winton was a colossal dud of that year. It had all the endearing qualities of a covered wagon powered by a rubber band, steerable only by heavily-muscled stevedores on the rare occasions when it actually ran. Leopold Brown obviously realized that the Winton (1905) represented more than a car for its day. The 1919 Hudson Six was another thudder, not anywhere near its contemporaries such as the Stutzes and the Lincolns of the day but yet not a total bomb. Somewhere in that great grey misty area of anonymous mediocrity, the Whippet 1927 vintage speaks for itself and of course it would take someone like a Leopold Brown to see (at
the time!
) that a 1951 Chevrolet (Power Glide) belongs among the classics of the Lumpen Proletariat.

Try it yourself. Try to pick a showroom model of today that you would preserve to speak for our time. Keep in mind Brown’s Law: “Neither the superb nor the ridiculous, but the unobtrusively mediocre speaketh for the men of the time.” Don’t rush to say: “Yeah! How ’bout one of them great Datsun 240s or one of them Vegas?” No, my friend, you betray the usual narrowness of mind of the museum curator who believes that the best Art of a time speaks for that time. It’s a great game to play when you’re waiting in line at the cleaners or seeing your life go up in smoke sitting in some reception room waiting for the blonde at the desk to tell you that Mr. Bullard will see you now. Just what car really does say it for our time, this year?

It’s not as easy as you think. In the end it takes men of the stature of Leopold Brown to make such brilliant, incisive
selections as he did. Like all men of genius, Brown must have had his troubles from the lesser men who surrounded him. I can see the scene now:

Characters:

LEOPOLD BROWN,
a slight, somewhat paunchy man of late
middle years, wearing rimless glasses and a perpetual

slight frown.

CHEVROLET SALESMAN,
a beefy, florid, hearty gentleman
who resembles somewhat Lee J. Cobb. He has a rich voice and an Elk’s tooth on a gold chain on his vest.

Scene:

A Chevrolet showroom 43 miles from Rossie, Iowa.

L
EOPOLD
B
ROWN
enters through the swinging doors. Huge
signs hang from the ceiling: “1951 THE year for Chevy!”
and “The 1951 Chevy means Fun!”
   
(We see scattered around the walls pictures of Dinah
Shore and the slogan “See the USA in a Chevrolet,” with
musical notes encircling her face.)

SALESMAN:
“Yessiree, nice day, it sure is. Seen the new
Chevy? Boy, they really did it in Detroit this year. Yessiree,
that new …”

BROWN:
(interrupting him) “Yep.” (His voice is low and pur-
poseful.)

SALESMAN:
“Uh…yep? Yep what?”

BROWN:
“Yep. I seen it. That’s why I’m here.”

SALESMAN:
“Beautiful, isn’t it? Magnificent car. Let me tell
you, the beauty of the new Chevy just doesn’t…”

BROWN:
“Nope.”

SALESMAN:
(stunned) “Excuse me. Did you say Nope?”

BROWN:
“Yep, I said Nope. It ain’t beautiful. That’s why I
want one.”

SALESMAN:
“Er… heheheheheheh.” (He laughs a forced
laugh at what he thinks is Brown’s little joke.) “You want
one. Well, we have a beautiful new Golden Sunset Bronze,
and the convertible like Dinah Shore rides has just come
in. Now, I can show you our brochures, and…”

LEOPOLD BROWN:
“I want a plain two-door Chevy with Power
Glide. I want that one over there. With the bad color. And
the plastic seat covers.”

SALESMAN:
“Yes sir, it just so happens I can make immediate
delivery.”

BROWN:
“How much?”

SALESMAN:
“That’ll be one thousand nine-hundred and
seventy-nine dollars and eighty-eight cents. And that in-
cludes, of course, the Power Glide. And you are really
gonna enjoy driving this car. Let me tell you…”

BROWN:
(interrupting, peeling off the exact amount in worn
bills from his large wad. He puts eighty-eight cents down
on the counter) “Nope. Ain’t gonna drive it.”

SALESMAN:
“By George, that’s a good one.” (He slaps his
knee.) “I’ll have to tell the boys at the Rotary Club that

one. That’s a hot one. ‘Ain’t gonna drive it.’ Yessir, Mr.

Brown, probably buying it for the wife, eh? Or your
daughter? By George, that’s a goodie.”

BROWN:
“Nope. Buyin’ it for myself. Gimme the keys.”

SALESMAN:
(speaking slowly, as though to a small child) “Of
course, Mr. Brown. Here are your keys. And since you’re
not going to drive it, I suggest…”

BROWN:
“I know my business, son. Don’t need no advice.
Been buyin’ cars for years. As long as she can make it to

Rossie, that’s all I need. It’s forty-three miles on the dot,
and I want to get back before dark.”

SALESMAN:
(handing Brown the keys) “Yessir, and er…
ah…drive happy!”
   
(Without a word Brown drives car out of showroom
and disappears into the dusk.)

SALESMAN:
“Boy oh boy. We sure can grow ’em here in Iowa!”

It never changes. The man of vision and foresight is always alone. Leopold Brown, hail and farewell. There have been few like you.

—MILITANT WOMEN’S LIB SPOKESMAN,

“DAVID SUSSKIND SHOW.”

I squatted in front of my 118-inch (total area) color TV set, half dozing amid the endless barrage of panel verbiage that passes for relevant entertainment these days when the remark about not being able to understand how it feels to be a woman came winging out like a silver bullet from the Lone Ranger’s .44, clean and true. By god, that’s true, I thought, yes, by George, hits the mark exactly. No way I’ll ever understand how it feels to be Jane Fonda or Raquel Welch, or even Minnie Pearl.

I sipped a little of my Jim Beam and allowed the endless blather from the tube to flow over me in warm engulfing waves. It occurred to me briefly that the Bullshit Session, which used to be confined mostly to bars, and kitchens after the pinochle game, has now become a major art form,
being packaged by William Morris and applauded by countless millions of my fellow knuckleheads who log thousands of hours in front of the tube yearly, just watching an endless stream of BS artists parade before us, all blatting on into the night, punctuated by Right Guard commercials and an occasional pitch for Purina Dog Chow. Nobody ever settles anything or convinces anyone but it goes on and on like the mighty Mississippi who don’t do nuffin’, jes’ keeps rollin’ along. I keep hoping that one day one of these interminable wrangles will finally go all the way. The way I see it it goes like this:

CAVITT:
“And what do you say about that, Mr. Cranshaw? Do you agree with Mr. Toadley?”

CRANSHAW:
(a heavily-jawed craggy-browed Professor of some sort) “What’d you say?”

CAVITT:
“Do you agree with Mr. Toadley on what he…?”

CRANSHAW:
“Agree with that son of a bitch! Why, that bastard…”
   
(TOADLEY,
a short balding man wearing bifocals, leaps to his feet, knocking over Cavitt’s coffee table in his headlong rush to get at Cranshaw, swinging wildly. He mutters an incoherent oath as Cranshaw, nimbly catching Toadley in the groin with his knee, ducks as the studio audience cheers wildly.)

CAVITT:
(shouting over the hubbub) “AND NOW A WORD FROM BUGLEMASTER BEER.”
   
(The screen goes to black.)

Oh well. It’ll never happen, since practically everybody on TV is a talker and not a do-er. It hit me, on second thought as the Women Libbers rattled on, that the crack about not being able to understand how it feels to be a woman was the first sensible thing I’d heard on television
since Chet Huntley announced his retirement. There ain’t no way to know how it feels to be a woman if you’re a man, and conversely there just ain’t no way for a woman to know how it feels to be male.

Take the Great Chicken-Clawed Chooser, for example. There is hardly a man alive today who has not felt the sting, the humiliation visited upon the male by that evil bird. Why, hardly a female even knows what the term “Chicken Claws” means.
Chicken Claws!
Even now that mystic, cabalistic sinister phrase sends faint shivers of fear and apprehension running up and down the spines of millions of males who were never chosen.

From the time they begin to walk, males just naturally get involved in competitive games of all types and varieties, ranging from kicking a tin can around the street to throwing little sticks up in the air to seeing who can pee the highest up a garage wall. Now you can yell all you want about “they are taught by an evil, competitive, rotten, decadent Society, blah blah blah, bullshit bullshit bullshit,” the usual claptrap that you hear around PTA meetings and Ad Hoc committees to stamp out capguns and catchers’ mitts, but the fact is no matter where you go on the face of the earth, under whatever system or culture you can find, males try to see who can throw the dingdong the furthest, catch the kangaroo the quickest, stay under water the longest, harpoon the most seals or dry and shrink the most Baptist heads. Like Walter Cronkite says so endearingly: “Don’t get mad. I don’t make the news; I just report it.”

Over it all hangs the evil spectre of that gigantic gnarled age-old yellowed talon of that great Chicken-Clawed Chooser. As I heard that Women’s Lib spokesman (although I guess the word spokesman is another example of creeping chauvinism but unfortunately “spokeswoman” rolls heavily
off the tongue and has no beat to it, so spokesman will have to do), the brief image of one subtle aspect of how it feels to be a man came into what’s left of my mind. Could I explain to her how many raggletaggle male kids have stood knee-deep in the weeds back of a dusty First Base made out of an old beaten-up flour sack filled with sand as the Chicken-Clawed Chooser went about its inexorable work, cleanly and with deadly truth and efficiency. It is a hard fact, girls, but in every group of males larger than three, there are two who are just naturally the ones who do the choosing in any games and then there are the others, the motley band of those who hope to
be
chosen. It is hard to explain how a chooser becomes a chooser. He is not necessarily the largest or even the swiftest. It is something in the eye; a way of being, a steely, smoky gaze and natural talent, that most accursed of undemocratic human qualities that singles the chooser out from the shuffling pack. They almost always are named Mike or Al; short, clean, hairy names, to the point, no horsing around. Few Clarences are ever choosers. I, personally, have never known a Delbert who was ever allowed to choose anything. Maybe God, or the Life Force or whatever the hell it is knows even before birth that the genes have come together to create another chooser, and his parents—guided by a power over which they have no control—invariably name that tiny blob of human protoplasm correctly: Al. He’s a born Al. And little Al, peering out of his crib with an embryonic smoky gaze of disdain, is launched into the world fully prepared to deal with the lesser fry.

Let’s face it, when a school of fish, simple dim-witted carp, swim by aimlessly, there are one or two carp who are always in the van. How are they chosen? Is it an evil, decadent system that brought them there? Is it poor toilet training?
Is it Chapter Ten in Doctor Spock? No. It is the Chicken-Clawed Chooser.

How does it work in actual combat, the nuts and bolts, or the mechanics of separating the sheep from the goats; the choosers from the rest? Our scene is laid on a Saturday morning. A crude ball diamond sprawls over a vacant lot. Gathered for the purpose of engaging in the sport of Round-ball (“Bowls” it is sometimes called, more commonly termed “American baseball”) eleven males have assembled, all around the age of twelve. To the untrained observer they look almost identical, as to all but the most discerning eye a band of Polynesians in a puberty rite tend to be indistinguishable one from the other. But believe me, if you are or ever were one of them you know there are vast differences.