The Ferrari in the Bedroom (29 page)

I leafed on, one small corner of my inner being carrying on its continual battle with the imps of hell which keep raging down there, begging me to get started on my true career as a firebomb terrorist or a graffiti-scrawler. Now I’m not the kind who spends much time looking over gurley-mags of the
Cosmo
stripe, although I find their banner headlines on the cover page more than slightly great:

Or:

Sensuality, I thought listlessly, that’s the new big
Cosmo
word. Last year the big word was “Fun.” The year before it was “wild.” Everything was “wild.” Too bad they don’t have good old sexy women any more. Sensuality is in; sexy is out. Or, a real chiller, from the same issue, blunt and to the point:

Holy Gloria Steinem, I breathed, hurrying faster through the steaming pages filled with quivering, Jello-y gurley-prose. I skimmed through
WHAT YOU CAN LEARN FROM FRENCH GIRLS,
which was a hell of a letdown since it yammered on about how to dress, when actually the best thing anyone can learn from French girls is how to
un
dress with style.
THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO ENCOUNTER GROUPS
held me for a second or two. Complete Guide, I thought, what the hell is a Complete Guide? Some of the best encounter groups I’ve ever known in my life happened like spontaneous combustion in the back seat of a Pontiac, and you sure as hell won’t find them listed in the Complete Guide. Oh well.

My mind takes these evil turns when I’m squatting nervously in my dentist’s waiting room, which is where I infrequently have my torrid encounters with the world of Rona Jaffe and Helen Gurley Brown. The dog-eared
National Geographics
had long since palled and I find
The Orthodontist Quarterly
curiously unrefreshing. In the next room, the arena, I heard muffled moans and occasional
subdued thumpings. Some other poor devil was on the rack and it soon would be my turn. My dentist is an odd duck, as most of them are. He paints water colors and smiles enigmatically as he scans the X rays. A man who has peered into the gaping maws of caries-ridden humanity has few illusions. The thin whistling whirr of the highspeed drill mingled with the soft tones of Muzak as I tried to concentrate on
FORTY-NINE NEW EXCITING ORGASMS.
I flipped another page.

Without warning it got me full between the eyes—ZONK!

The quivering copy undulated across a spectacular four-color double-page spread. It showed a bedroom displaying obvious signs of being inhabited by someone exceedingly well-heeled and spectacularly hedonistic. The decor was conventional, standard Department Store Mod except for that varoom-y exception. There in this haven of rest, in the spot where the bed used to be in the good old days, was what looked like, at first glance, a brilliant blood-red Ferrari roadster.

Mama Mia! I muttered as I so often do these days after being forever influenced by an Alka-Seltzer commercial. I convulsively crossed myself, which is somewhat surprising since I am not Catholic, but since I’ve seen plenty of ballplayers and wrestlers do it on the boob tube I figure what
the hell, you can’t lose anything by trying.
Mama Mia,
a Ferrari in the bedroom!

For a crazy instant I thought, what a great title for a Sophia Loren pizza-opera co-starring Marcello Mastroiani as the aging world-weary Italian architect who one day meets this girl on the train for Sorrento and…Cut it out! That gets you nowhere.

I examined the ad closely. Sure enough, there it was. It was not a vagrant hallucination. A bed shaped almost exactly like a Ferrari. It even had vinyl wheels with vinyl knockoff hubs; STP and CASTROL decals plastered all over it. I instantly knew what I was seeing. (I have this way of instantly knowing these things.) I was looking at a true masterwork of Slob Art, fully worthy to stand beside the concrete Mexicans, the Seven Dwarf lawn sprinklers and the Praying Hands day-glo reading lamp in the pantheon of true Slob Art.

I was interrupted by a sudden ringing shout of pain from the next room as my fellow victim became forcibly aware that he had a nervous system and it was sensitive as hell.

Jesus! We’ve got this thing about making stuff to look like other things. Second-rate restaurants disguised as derbies; radios disguised as Brunswick three-hole bowling balls, ball-point pens sneakily passing as cigars. Some psychologist could do a hell of a paper on this subtle undercurrent in American life. But-the Ferrari in the bedroom: Now
dat’sa
spicy meat-a-ball-a!

Immediately my monster intelligence, which was influenced in infancy by William Inge and Smoky Stover, conjured up a scene. The dentist’s waiting room with its forty-nine new exciting orgasms and its limp water colors faded and I found myself magically peering into an analyst’s inner sanctum of the Future:

A distraught citizen lies writhing on the couch. The analyst of the future, his hair hanging in great waves to the floor, wearing blue isinglass shades, squats like Buddha behind his mother-of-pearl desk.

The dialogue begins:

ANALYST:
(hereafter referred to as A) “Come, come, Witherspoon, you’ve been here every day at three for seven years and I, for one, am getting damn tired of it.”

DISTRAUGHT
PATIENT:
(hereafter referred to as DP) “I know, Doctor, but…but…but…” (He hurls himself to the floor where he lies kicking off his shoes in a muffled tantrum.)

A:
“Look, Witherspoon, I know it is unprofessional of me to tell you to get on the stick, but for God sakes, man, if I can use the expression, I didn’t spend fifteen years in training to listen to you snivel and whine. There must be some reason why you have a blind, insensate, totally destructive hate and fear of all Italian cars.”

DP:
“I know, Doctor, but…” (rising to his feet, his eyes hollow, staring.)

A:
“No buts. Let’s can the crap. What’s bugging you, Jack?” (It is obvious that A is a practicing representative of the emerging school of Guts Psychiatry which has recently discovered that a kick in the ass is worth ten thousand logged hours on the soft down of the couch.)

DP:
“All right, dammit! I’ve got to get it out sometime!” (He screams incoherently, beating his fists on the wall.)

A:
“Watch it, Witherspoon.” (A squirts DP with a plastic fire-extinguisher.) “You’ve been seeing too many Jules Feiffer movies, Jack. Now cool it.”

DP:
(his voice low, tremulous, breast heaving) “All right. I’ll tell you what’s eating at my very soul.”

A:
“It’s about time, Witherspoon. You can’t go around forever chopping up Fiats and Maseratis on the streets with a fire axe and escape the booby hatch.”

DP:
“I know, I know! I try to control myself, but just the sight of one of those red devils with all them STP stickers all over ’em drives me out of my mind. Everything goes black and I…I…”

A:
“You don’t have to tell me what you do. I had to bail you out three times last month alone. And those guys from Allstate Insurance are starting to get nasty.”

DP:
“Doc, do you remember Clara?”

A:
(caught off guard) “Clara? What’s she got to do with Maseratis?”

DP:
“Plenty!”

A:
(affably lighting up a joint) “Aha! So, just as I thought. I knew sex was behind it somewhere. Go on. Spill it.”

DP:
“You remember me telling you about how much I loved her, how from the first time I saw her that afternoon in the rain at the Orange Julius stand eating a brownie, that I had to have her? You remember me telling you about that? Do you?”

A:
“Of course. I have it in my notes. You never did tell me how that all came out.”

DP:
(stifling a sob) “That’s just it, Doctor. I haven’t been able to face it till now. Clara is the only girl I’ve ever loved. Her eyes! Her skin! The way she smiled in that mysterious way, like the girl in the Unscented Arid commercial on TV. My God, she’s a goddess, a real goddess! I plotted night and day to get near her, to caress her, to fondle her, to whisper sweet nothings into her alabaster ear, to lay my life down for her,…to…” (He breaks off, choked with emotion.)

A:
“There, there, Witherspoon. Here, have a drag on my joint.”

DP:
(unhearing, lost in his own world) “Six months vent by and then it finally happened. All my dreams were about to come true. I had wined her and dined her, taken her to every rotten musical for miles around, and then, one night with the moon shining in her eyes I asked her to come up to my pad. She had never been there before. I was afraid to ask her. She said in that beautiful deep voice, like Candy Bergen’s: ‘Why, yes, Virgil.’”

A:
(leaning forward, savoring the story) “That must have made you feel good, eh, Witherspoon? What happened then?”

DP:
“I bought wine, flowers; burned incense. Got the pre-amp on my stereo fixed. And then, that night after dinner—which I had prepared from my
Julia Child TV Cookbook—I
swept her off her feet in the candle-light and carried her into my bedroom. I could feel her lithe pulsing body underneath the shimmering gossamer she wore that night.”

A:
“Yes, yes. Go on, man!”

DP:
“I slipped out of my H.I.S. bells. I saw a brief flash of alabaster flesh in the faint shimmering moonlight, and then, and then everything blew up in my face. All that I had hoped for, dreamed for exploded before me.”

A:
(breathing heavily in excitement) “What happened?”

DP:
“She laughed….
Laughed!!
My God, it was terrible. Have you ever had a girl laugh at you in your own bedroom? It was terrible. At first I couldn’t believe my ears. That insane laughter in the dark. I asked her ‘What’s wrong? Why are you laughing?’ and then…then…she said it!” (His voice trails off in sobs.)

A:
“Said what?”

DP:
“She said, ‘What the hell’s that cockamamie thing?’ I answered, ‘It’s my Varrooommmm Ferrari Bed. It adds new zest and exhilaration to beddy-by time.’ And…
she
said, ‘A plastic Ferrari? With pillows? And STP stickers? Jeez! I seen some nutty scenes in my time… I been with plenty of kooky johns that go for bullwhips and track shoes. But lemme out of here! I don’t want nothin’ to do with any plastic kiddy-cars. What kinda freak do you think I am?’ And then, Doctor, she hit me in the mouth with my Yogi Bear FM radio and ran out. I never saw her again. And ever since that night I have this uncontrollable urge, every time I see an Italian car, to…”

A:
“That’s enough, Witherspoon. I’ve heard enough! I’ve listened to sick stories in my time myself, and you’re damn lucky I don’t have you tied up right here and carted off. Don’t bother to come back. We don’t need your sort around here.”

DP:
“I understand, Doctor. Please forgive me.”

A:
“Get out of here, you bum! If there’s anything I can’t stand it’s your kind of sickies. And anyway, your 55 minutes are up.” (The scene ends with DP skulking out into the night, carrying an axe, hunting for a helpless Fiat 850 fastback.)

   For a long moment I sat watching in the fetid, chewing-gum-laden theater of my mind the scurrying departure of DP as A took a final drag on his roach and prepared to greet his next patient.

“You’re next. And how’s that little old wisdom tooth this week?”

“Varroommm!” I blurted out involuntarily.

“What was that?” My dentist, a hardened customer thickly calloused by the tartar of Life, eyed me narrowly.

“Uh… bruummmf! I was just clearing my throat.”

“I thought you said ‘Varroom.’”

“Why no, Doctor, that’s silly. Why would I say varoom?”

“Search me, pal. Now, let’s get down to that wisdom tooth.” I bravely marched into the torture chamber, ready to take the worst he could give me.