Republican Party Reptile Part 9

Now, I had my favorite little personal-defense unit out of my briefcase and ready as soon as I hit the street. This is a Walther MPK 9mm submachine gun I had special-ordered with selective fire. It doesn't pack quite the punch that an Uzi does, but it's the most compact automatic-fire weapon made in the world, at least in 9mm. I'm a real bug on 9mm ammo. It's kind of my hobby.

By this time, the morning rush hour was in full swing and I couldn't even get a cab in my peep sights, so I had to take the subway. I hate taking the subway-all those kids that spray graffiti all over the place. The cops ought to tie them up and cut their noses off, which is exactly what the cops are doing except they don't catch enough of them for my money. Plus it was a regular s.h.i.+tty morning outside, raining and cold, and bombs were dropping in the next block. And I bet twenty snipers took a shot at me between my building and the subway station. I don't know why those people are allowed out on the streets-they can't hit a G.o.ddam thing. Although one did get a bag lady right by the newsstand and got brains all over my raincoat, which I had just got back from the cleaner's. And that wasn't easy either. In fact, it took a midnight raid on the manager's house in Rego Park, where I picked off all four of his guard dogs with the help of a starlight scope. So there I was with brains all over me and then I had to beat the s.h.i.+t out of the blind guy at the newsstand before he'd give me a paper.

I shot my way past a couple of transit cops at the token booth, jumped the turnstile, and got a train to stop by pus.h.i.+ng some lady out on the tracks. It's surprising, even a hundred-pound woman can derail those babies when they're going at full throttle, so they generally try to stop if they can. On the train a pack of a.s.shole teenagers was terrorizing everybody, ripping gold chains off women and taking wallets at knifepoint, so I joined them for a while and picked up a little, you know, cab fare. Then I forced everybody, including the conductor, to get in the last car, and I pulled the pin and left them back in the tunnel. Sometimes that's the only way you can get a seat. Almost got my b.u.t.t kicked for that, though-who would have thought one of those kids would be carrying a wire-guided ant.i.tank missile? Good thing it bounced off a signal light and ricocheted right back at the kid with the launcher or I would have been hurting. I mean it.

I was late for work for sure by now. The subway was running way behind schedule, and I had to help the engineer for a while when we ran across an armored train. It must have been from over on the IND line. Anyway, it was shooting up the 34th Street station. Fortunately I'd planted some radio-detonated Claymore mines under the litter baskets in that station just a week back. And I had the transmitter in my briefcase. It's great; it doubles as a digital travel clock. The mines killed all the people on the platform and brought a big section of the tunnel roof down on those guys from the IND too.

Well, by the time I blasted my way through the reception area and raped my secretary and piled up the desk and some chairs to barricade myself in my office, the "old man" was really fuming. He was over on the roof of the building across the street with about twenty guys from accounting, and all of them had M-16s and tear-gas-grenade launchers. He was giving me a real talking-to over the bullhorn, telling me to come out with my hands up or forget about that raise. I got my gas mask on and pulled the Browning automatic rifle out from behind the file cabinet and gave him a little argument. But I couldn't keep that up for long. I had to take some calls and dictate a bunch of letters and it was a real pain in the a.s.s giving dictation to a secretary who was coughing and gagging from the CS gas and threatening a s.e.xual-hara.s.sment suit.

Then I had the Peterson contract to straighten out. They manufacture designer jeans, and what a bunch of hard-nosed sons of b.i.t.c.hes they are. Their CEO had been on the horn to me all week threatening to nuke our Tarrytown office if he didn't see some action soon. Here was a client who was definitely hanging by a thread. And I knew if that Peterson thing fell through my a.s.s would be in deep s.h.i.+t.

I didn't have time to go out for lunch, so I just had a deli owner and his family killed and some sandwiches sent up. I was working like a bear and by 3:00 I was pretty sure I had all my ducks in a row, and then wouldn't you know it-fifteen megatons right in the parking lot of our suburban branch office. You probably read about it in the papers. It broke half the windows in Manhattan, and I'll bet it takes weeks to decontaminate all the radioactive fallout s.h.i.+t all over the place. And that wasn't the worst of it by any means. Right after Tarrytown goes up in a mushroom cloud and the Peterson account goes with it, the boss finally breaks through my office wall with a Bangalor torpedo and tells me he's promoted young Donovan over my head to group vice-president. That means I'll have to go all the way out to Donovan's house in Darien and poison his kids. Well, that did it. I decided to toss a Molotov c.o.c.ktail into the mailroom and knock off early.

A couple of the guys and I took our secretaries down to Clark's for a few drinks, raped the girls again, and then gut-shot one of the waiters and bet on how long it would take him to die. I guess I had a few more than I meant to because I was really bushed. So I thought I'd just have a burger in the back room. I wanted to carve it right out of the cow myself but the f.u.c.ker wouldn't hold still. Finally I had to hit it with a tranq gun. Then the guys and I tried to take some det cord and wrap it around the cow's a.s.s and make chopped steak like that. But the det cord gave the whole thing a really rotten taste. After that I just said f.u.c.k dinner and had a couple more drinks and decided to go back to my place and spend a peaceful night at home for a change.

It was still raining outside and I had to call in an air strike to get a taxi. One of the A-IE Sky raiders finally spotted a Checker on Park Avenue and strafed the hack until he chased it over to me. I held the MPK on the driver all the way back to my place and shot up his gas tank for a tip. Then the doorman tried to kill me again and I had to toss a fragmentation grenade at this lady in the lobby to keep her dog from jumping up on me. So I ended up outside waiting around in the rain while one of the building porters cleaned her guts off the elevator door, and then what the f.u.c.k do you think I saw? A G.o.ddam parking ticket on my car! Jesus, I was p.i.s.sed. I mean I'm sure it was one of those Jewish holidays when the alternate-side-of-the-street parking regulations are supposed to be suspended. I mean I'm pretty sure all the Jews aren't killed yet. I would have complained to a cop if he hadn't shot first. And then when I finally did get inside, f.u.c.king Carson was on vacation again and that a.s.shole Letterman was hosting The Tonight Show. Man, it was just one of those days.

Man and

Transportation

Ferrari Refutes the

Decline of the

West

We made it from Atlanta to Dallas in twelve and a half hours. But that was because we were just cruising, you know, taking in the scenery and enjoying the local color. Besides, we got stuck in b.u.mper-to-b.u.mper camper traffic all the way to Birmingham. Some big collegiate sports event was under way-the University of South Carolina versus Alabama's Crimson Tide in a varsity dogfight, to judge by the fans. No, no, I won't make fun of those good old boys in their Winnebagos driving since dawn with their good old families all the way from Columbia and Charleston and Beaufort just to root for the team of their choice. No, I won't crack wise about the denizens of that fair corner of the free world, because I feel too good about western civilization. And the reason I feel too good about western civilization is that there I was a living, breathing part of it, in the best d.a.m.n car I've ever driven, smack in the middle of the best d.a.m.n country there's ever been on earth. And, also, because cutting in and out of those giant travel homes at a hundred miles an hour is more fun than a Ma.r.s.eilles sh.o.r.e leave, and hardly anybody riding in them threw beer cans at us either. Zoom, zoom, zip, zip, I couldn't have been happier if I'd had a sack full of Iranian radicals to drag behind me.

And they love cars down there. Love 'em. The men look, and the women look too. And they smile with honest pleasure just to see something that dangerous-looking doing something that dangerous. But best of all the looks we got were the looks we got from the ten-year-old boys. They'd be back there with their little faces pressed against the gla.s.s in the RV back windows, and they'd see this red rocket sled coming up behind them in the $50 lane. It couldn't help but touch your heart, how their eyes lit up and their mouths dropped down, as if Santa'd brought them an entire real railroad train. You could all but hear the pitter-patter of the sneakers on their feet as they ran up front and started jerking on their dads' Banlon s.h.i.+rt collars, jumping up and down and yelling and pointing out the winds.h.i.+eld, "Didja see it?! Didja see it, Dad?! Didja?! Didja?! Didja?! Didja?!"

We came by a 930 Turbo Porsche near the Talladega exit. He was going about ninety when we pa.s.sed him, and he gave us a little bit of a run, pa.s.sed us at about 110, and then we pa.s.sed him again. He was as game as anybody we came across and was hanging right on our tail at 120. Ah, but then-then we just walked away from him. Five seconds and he was nothing but a bathtub-shaped dot in the mirrors. I suppose he could have kept up, but driving one of those a.s.s-engined n.a.z.i slot cars must be a task at around 225 percent of the speed limit. But not for us. I've got more vibration here on my electric typewriter than we had blasting into Birmingham that beautiful morning in that beautiful car on a beautiful tour across this wonderful country from the towers of Manhattan to the bluffs of Topanga Canyon so fast we filled the appointment logs of optometrists' offices in thirty cities just from people getting their eyes checked for seeing streaks because they'd watched us go by.

Don't get me wrong; we weren't racing. This was strictly a pleasure drive. We had a leisurely lunch in Tuscaloosa, had long talks with every gas-station attendant we saw (and at about nine miles a gallon with a nineteen-gallon tank, we saw them all), and ran into some heavy rain in Louisiana too-had to slow down to practically a hundred, as it was a two-lane road. And then in Shreveport we had a big steak dinner with lots of c.o.c.ktails and coffee and dessert and Remy Martin. Why, really, we just strolled into Dallas on that third day of a week during which I had more fun than I have ever had doing anything that didn't involve young women. And this kind of fun lasted longer. And I never fell asleep on top of it.

Actually, the trip didn't start out all that well. The idea was . . . well, I'm not quite sure what the idea was. But Ferrari North America, which is based in Montvale, New Jersey, had a 308GTS that needed to be delivered to Los Angeles by January 2, to be featured in a movie. Ferrari called Car and Driver and asked if they'd like to a.s.sign someone to drive it across the country. Car and Driver was good enough to ask me, and of course I said yes. But I had misgivings. Like anyone who loves cars, I'd been fantasizing about Ferraris since before I knew how to say the name. Fur-rareies, I thought they were. But in my imagination they still all looked like Testa Rossas. In recent years they'd gotten a bit beyond me; I didn't know what to make of these modern pasta-bender luxoboxes with price tags in the early ionosphere. They have their engines in sideways and backwards, and you sit down on the floor where you can't see your fenders, your feet, or the road. Or that's the way they seemed to me when I sat in one at the auto show, which was the only time I ever had sat in one. And because they were so funny-looking, I a.s.sumed they were hard to drive. Besides, I'm opposed on principle to things with wheels that cost more than $20,000 (and don't have "Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe" written down the side). Why, there are people starving in Italy. Or going hungry, anyway. Well, maybe not hungry, but I'll bet they don't have enough closet s.p.a.ce and the kids have to share a bedroom. And I had some other problems too. I have a daytime job where I'm editor of the National Lampoon and I had fallen grievously behind in potty jokes, racial slurs, and comments that demean women. Deadlines loomed, the art department was in a pet, and down at the printing plant they were snarling in their cages. I had no business taking off just then to go do something silly in a rolling red expense account. So I wasn't as enthusiastic about this project as I might have been, especially when I had to go tell my boss, the president of the National Lampoon's parent corporation, that I had chosen this extremely inconvenient week to go on a cross-country screw-around for the benefit of another magazine. Now this boss of mine, Julian Weber, is a cold, taciturn, hard-eyed Harvard Law School graduate, about fifty years old, always dressed in a suit, and a very square sort of fellow. And as I was standing in front of his desk, backing and filling and making up lies, he began to frown with great concentration. What I was saying was, "I know it doesn't seem like I've been here very much lately but I've . . . uh . . . been working at home a lot," but what I was thinking was where I could get the boxes I would need when I cleaned out my desk.

Then he blurted it out: "Can I go too?"

The next thing I knew, I was sitting in the parking lot at Ferrari, sitting way down on the floor of this $45,000 atomic doorstop, completely puzzled by the controls; and sitting rather stiffly in the bucket seat next to me was my G.o.ddam boss. At least he had a pair of blue jeans on, but his blue jeans had been pressed, with a perfect crease across each knee. I don't know if they sell blue jeans at Brooks Brothers, but if they do that's where he'd bought these. I couldn't figure out what it was going to be like, cooped up for a week in a car with somebody and unable to discuss drugs or teenaged girls. I also couldn't figure out how to work the car. Everyone at Ferrari was on Christmas vacation; the keys had been left with the receptionist. There wasn't even anyone there to look properly worried, let alone to show me how to start the thing. And the Ferrari manual was translated from Italian to English by someone who spoke only Chinese. "Well," said Mr. Weber, "I'm ready to go now."

I remembered that Bill Baker, Ferrari's director of public relations, had told me, "Be sure not to---or you'll foul the plugs." But what it was that I wasn't supposed to---, I had no idea. So, finally, I just started it up and very tentatively, very nervously drove it out onto the Garden State Parkway, where the plugs immediately fouled. We coasted onto the berm. I got the car started again and out into traffic and it loaded up and stalled. I got it started another time and it began to misfire and choke, and I had to stick it in third and run it up over five grand just to keep the engine moving.

"I thought you knew how to drive one of these," said my boss. And I had to keep it in third all the way to Trenton before the plugs cleared. A solid wall of dirty traffic was pressing in from every side while I sat perspiring, not a fender in sight, waiting for some pa.s.sing jacka.s.s in a Peterbilt to make a belly tank out of us. I got off the turnpike at Wilmington and headed down the Delmarva Peninsula. The car seemed to be running all right, but now Julian wanted to drive. I was afraid that if he didn't keep the revs up, we'd stall again, and I couldn't explain to him how to drive the car because I hadn't the slightest idea myself, and, besides, I just didn't feel like riding along at fifty-five with this lawyer type at the wheel telling me how foreign cars of this kind seemed "quite unusual in their method of operation" or some such. I mean, Julian's a New Yorker, and New Yorkers think all cars are yellow and have lights on the roof. So I held him off down past Dover, but he was beginning to insist, and he's my boss, and what could I do?

We had just turned off onto Route 1 along Delaware Bay when I put him behind the wheel. Route 1 is a brand-new road, four lanes wide and b.u.t.ter-smooth, built to carry hordes of picnic-p.r.o.ne Wilmingtonians down to the ocean sh.o.r.e. But in December there's nothing and n.o.body in sight. Julian settled into the driver's seat and gave the Millennium Falcon- like controls a momentary glance. Then he stamped on the accelerator with an expensive loafer and redlined the 308 up through the gears to a hundred miles an hour through the potato fields and abandoned burger stands without time to even take his hand off the s.h.i.+ft lever until he hit fifth, and when he did have time to take his hand off he used that hand to plop a Blondie ca.s.sette into the Blaupunkt and a quarter-ton of decibels came on with "Die Young Stay Pretty," and the scenery exploded in the distance, bush and tree debris flying at us while my eyeb.a.l.l.s pressed all the way back into the medulla, and that quadruple-throated three-quart V-8 wound up beyond the vocal range of Maria Callas, Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee, leaving, I'm sure, a trail of shattered stemware in the more prosperous of the farmhouses we pa.s.sed along our way.

And so it was Julian, my sobersided superior in the corporate hierarchy, who turned out to be the real leadfoot. He spent his half of the driving time doing a very credible imitation of Wolfgang von Trips, while I spent my half of the driving time nervously looking for cops. He turned out to be a pretty good guy, too, for a lawyer. (Although, to protect his marriage and business career, his views on drugs and teenaged girls will go unrecorded.) Anyway, it was that moment out on Delaware Route 1 that changed the entire complexion of the trip.

I guess what we were supposed to be doing with the car was to see if it could perform the function for which it was built. That function is high-speed touring, and the answer is YES, carved in those monumental granite letters that once were used for the t.i.tle frames in movies like El Cid. The Ferrari isn't much to bop around town in. It's necessarily stiff and uncompromising at low speeds. And you'd sooner dock a sailboat in a bas.e.m.e.nt utility sink than try to parallel-park it. But turn the son of a b.i.t.c.h loose on the open road and it's as though you've died and gone to hot-rod heaven. True, the 308 wasn't designed, really, for American touring, where the speed limit is fifty-five and distances are measured in thousands of miles instead of hundreds of kilometers. There's nary a gear in the box where the Ferrari will do fifty-five with pleasure, and the luggage s.p.a.ce wouldn't make a good ice bucket. But the answer to those complaints is, Who gives a good G.o.ddam? You drive this car for an hour, a hundred miles down the coast between the dunes, with the cattails waving in the tidal marshes and the winter surf cras.h.i.+ng on the sea walls, through a blur of empty resort towns with the afternoon sun down low and Edward Hopper-bright across the landscape-you do that for an hour and you'll kill for this car. You'll murder people in their beds just to get back behind the wheel.

We slipped down the eastern sh.o.r.e of Maryland, on into that tag end of Virginia below a.s.sateague Island and out onto the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. This eighteen-mile ocean transit is nearly as awesome a piece of engineering as what we were driving and a sight of heart-aching beauty in the moonlight. We launched ourselves down the trestle causeway, flying low above the water, then plunging into the sea like a depth charge and up onto the high-level bridges like an epiphany in a New Yorker short story. At Norfolk we pitched into the narrow, twisting roads along the North Carolina border and went, just wreathed in s.h.i.+t-eating grins, all the way to Greensboro.

We chose Greensboro for the night because there's a Ferrari dealer there. And the car, joy that it was, was not running right. We kept loosing power, especially when Julian was driving-a seat-of-the-pants problem, as it turned out. Under the 308's driver seat there's a cutoff switch that kills the engine after five seconds without weight on the seat cus.h.i.+on. This is in case you turn turtle and are lying on your head with gasoline running down your leg. The kill switch keeps the car from becoming a Molotov c.o.c.ktail. Julian is a boss, but he's not a big boss, and he just didn't generate enough down-force to keep the switch from unswitching. This thingamabob is an admirable safety device, no doubt, but we had the Greensboro dealer yank it. Then we had him tune up the car and send the bill to Ferrari North America.

Julian and I set out to try for the nighttime fast-driving-and-scotch-drinking-with-a-large-dinner record time to Atlanta. The car was even faster, even smoother than before and absolutely bulletproof now. We would put nearly three thousand more miles on it, most of them at over a hundred miles an hour, and the solitary mechanical problem we would have between Greensboro and L.A. would be the electric antenna's bezel vibrating itself off somewhere in east Texas, so that when I put the antenna up it shot six feet out of the right rear fender, trailing its line like a harpoon into the middle of the LBJ Hilton parking lot.

It was on our way to Atlanta that Julian and I began to feel really at home in the Ferrari, began to feel sharp with its stiff little clutch and slim s.h.i.+ft gates and with the frightening immediacy of its steering-straight from your left brain to the road. We even began to feel comfortable half-rec.u.mbent in that mousehole c.o.c.kpit filled with levers and toggles and with hardly enough room for candy bars and tape ca.s.settes. Maps, flashlights, and sungla.s.ses bulged out of the leather pockets on the doors. The radar detector was clipped on the right sun visor with its controls in the pa.s.senger's face and its patch cord to the cigarette lighter tangling his every move. But we felt we could stay in there for a whole Apollo mission if only we had relief tubes.

We screamed along in the night with a tape of Bruce Springsteen's street-racing songs for a score in a car that had ceased to seem strange or exotic or even pretty. Now it just seemed like the apotheosis of perfect speed from perfect function through perfection of design to the perfection of our mood. And there we were in something that could outhandle anything it couldn't outrun, and there wasn't anything it couldn't outrun.

When we got to Atlanta, the band in the hotel bar was the worst thing we'd ever heard. But it didn't matter. Nothing could cloud our outlook. Ralph Nader himself would have been welcome at our table, so infected were we with the spirit of superiority to the humdrum concerns of daily life. I mean this car does one thing. It makes you happy.

And the car did one more thing for me. It reaffirmed my belief in America. It may sound strange to say that a $45,000 Italian sports car reaffirmed my belief in America, but, as I said, it's all part of western civilization and here we were in America, the apogee of that fine trend in human affairs. And, after all, what have we been getting civilized for, all these centuries? Why did we fight all those wars, conquer all those nations, kidnap all those Africans, and kill all the Indians in the western hemisphere? Why, for this! For this perfection of knowledge and craft. For this conquest of the physical elements. For this sense of mastery of man over nature. To be in control of our destinies-and there is no more profound feeling of control over one's destiny that I have ever experienced than to drive a Ferrari down a public road at 130 miles an hour. Only G.o.d can make a tree, but only man can drive by one that fast. And if the lowly Italians, the lamest, silliest, least stable of our NATO allies, can build a machine like this, just think what it is that we can do. We can smash the atom. We can cure polio. We can fly to the moon if we like. There is nothing we can't do. Maybe we don't happen to build Ferraris, but that's not because there's anything wrong with America. We just haven't turned the full light of our intelligence and ability in that direction. We were, you know, busy elsewhere. We may not have Ferraris but just think what our Polaris-missile submarines are like. And if it feels like this in a Ferrari at 130, my G.o.d, what can it possibly feel like at Mach 2.5 in an F-15? Ferrari 308s and F-15s-these are the conveyances of free men. What do the Bolshevik automatons know of destiny and its control? What have we to fear from the barbarous Red hordes?

Actually, at the time when this thought occurred to me we were out in west Texas, half a thousand miles from any population center or major military base, so Julian and I probably had nothing at all to fear from the barbarous Red hordes. The highway patrol, however, was another matter. You may wonder how we kept ourselves from being fined into starvation or, anyway, thrown into jail during this transmigration. The credit for that goes all to the radar detector. After a couple of days we learned to read the machine so that we could tell even at what angle the radar gun was pointed and whether it was in a moving patrol car or a stationary one. In fact, our biggest legal danger lay not in getting apprehended by the police but in apprehending them, coming up over some rise at 110 or 120 and rocketing up the tailpipe of an unsuspecting smokey. We spent a lot of time peering down the road trying to figure out what we were about to overtake, and every time we crossed a state line we had to spend about an hour figuring out what that state's patrol cars looked like. But, as it was, we only got one ticket all week. It was on the last night, right after the New Year's weekend, in jammed-solid, rush-hour-like traffic from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. We were in California, where the highway patrol doesn't even have radar, and all we were trying to do was get around one carload of vacationers to get stuck behind the next when we were pulled over. Officer Huyenga (as best I can make out his signature on the ticket) was politeness itself and should be promoted to governor. "It's a shame," he said, "to have a car like this and only be able to go fifty-five." We suppressed a chuckle, and I believe he did too, and so we got our only ticket-for going ten miles an hour over the limit.

From Atlanta to Dallas we'd stayed on the Interstates, but once past Fort Worth we took the empty, two-laned U.S. 180 across the astonis.h.i.+ng west-Texas landscape and then, in the twilight, through the big mesas that make up the southeast corner of New Mexico. There we got into our only other real race of the trip, with a pickup truck full of drunk bauxite miners or some such, and those boys could really drive a pickup truck. They held their own up through a hundred miles an hour on the curves and bends into Carlsbad, and then we left them and went back into Texas down switchbacks and hairpins skirting the edges of Guadalupe Peak. This was where I first discovered why you wear driving gloves. I'd always thought they make you look like a golf pro, but somebody had given me a pair as a going-away present and I found that you wear them because of how much your palms sweat when you're scared. But the Ferrari was just as solid at ninety and a hundred in the mountains as it had been at 130 in the straights. Nothing that either of us ever did so much as made one tire blush with the thought of wavering from its appointed course. In fact, the only thing that made the mountains exciting was that although the Ferrari wasn't going to put us over the side, there was every chance that Julian or I might. But we didn't, and we drove into El Paso for the evening.

No matter how many times you've seen it, it's incredible the way the cities of the Southwest pop up from nowhere at night-vast, glowing fairylands. Although in this particular fairyland we took a wrong turn and wound up with an accidental ten-minute tour of Ciudad Juarez. The Ferrari startled the Mexican customs official into a ballet of Senor-you-may-pa.s.s-through-with-pleasure-with-honor-with-grat.i.tude pantomimes. I'm sure it made his night. The Mexican customs official startled us, too, because that was when we discovered we were in Mexico; with horrible visions of Ferrari confiscations, I got turned around and headed back to America. The American customs officials were also extremely courteous. I guess they figured that whatever it was we were smuggling we'd already smuggled it and were happily living off the proceeds, so it was too late now. Juarez, incidentally, greatly testifies to the value of western civilization by exhibiting no sign of it anywhere.

The next day we drove to Las Vegas. Oh, the pure joy of the thing-knowing that out there, down that road, there's a fellow doing sixty-five or seventy, a little nervous, watching for cops, maybe his wife's telling him to slow down, and then screaming out of nowhere comes something not half his height, an eardrumpopping Doppler whizz just beneath the very bone point of his left elbow resting on the window frame. Whaizzat??!!! What was that??!! We could see his b.u.mper wiggle behind us as he'd give the wheel a startled jerk, and we'd be in the next county before that fellow'd regain his composure.

Julian hit the record high speed of our trip-140, on 1-10 going into Deming, New Mexico. And at Lordsburg we turned off onto U.S. 70 up into the mountains and Indian reservations east of Phoenix and from there across the desert all the way to Lake Mead. And we didn't meet a single dislikable person. Not that day or any other, from the puzzled receptionist at Ferrari North America to Officer Huyenga of the California Highway Patrol. Fine, upstanding, friendly, outgoing Americans who wanted to know how fast it would go, every one. It was truly heartening. The nicest bunch of people you'd ever care to meet. It made me wish I didn't belong to the Republican Party and the NRA just so I could go out and join both to defend it all. And rolling through the desert thus, I worked myself into a great patriotic frenzy, which culminated on the parapets of Hoover Dam (even if that was kind of a socialistic project and built by the Roosevelt in the wheelchair and not by the good one who killed bears). With the Ferrari parked up atop that o.r.g.a.s.mic arc of cement, doors flung open and Donna Summer's "Bad Girls" blasting into the night above the rush of a man-crafted Niagara and the crackle and the hum of mighty dynamos, I was uplifted, transported, ecstatic. A black man in a big, solid Eldorado pulled up next to us and got out to shake our hands. "You pa.s.sed me this morning down in New Mexico," he said. "And that sure is a beautiful car. And you sure must have been moving because I've been going ninety on the turnpike all day and haven't stopped for anything but gas and I just caught up with you now." But we hadn't been on the turnpike, we told him. We'd been all through the mountains and had stopped for lunch and had been caught in Phoenix traffic half the afternoon. "G.o.ddam!" he said. "That's beautiful!" Now where on the face of G.o.d's green earth are you going to find a country with people like that in it? Answer me that and tell me anyplace but here and I'll strangle you for a communist spy.

That was New Year's Eve, and we celebrated that night in the MGM Grand. I'm sorry to say that the Ferrari does not confer great good fortune at the blackjack table. But we were paid a fine compliment the next day at Caesar's Palace. Instead of making us wait for valet parking, the lot jockey rushed up to us where we were fifth or sixth in line. "No receipt necessary for you, sir," he said, and swept the car around in a tight U-turn and parked it right in front.

And that evening we headed up the Barstow incline to Los Angeles and got our ticket and I dropped Julian off so he could return to the staid world of business ac.u.men, if he can. I kept the Ferrari for as long as I could the next day, roving around Beverly Hills and driving up and down Mulholland Drive, but it had to be delivered to Ferrari's West Coast headquarters in Compton by five o'clock. It was a terrible thing to give it back, but I headed down the Harbor Freeway feeling every bit as good as I had for every moment since we first hit a hundred back in Delaware. It was a glow that wouldn't fade. And I still felt good when I flipped the keys onto the receptionist's desk. And I still felt good when I hopped into the limousine I'd thoughtfully charged to Car and Driver to ease the pain of transition. And, in fact, I still feel good today.

But the story ends on a sad note. The movie that this incredible car traveled all that way to be in will be called Don't Eat the Yellow Snow in Hawaii, so maybe western civilization hasn't quite been perfected yet.

High-Speed

Performance

Characteristics of

Pickup Trucks

I'm an experienced pickup truck driver. I was driving my pickup the other Sat.u.r.day night after having-as I made very clear to the police-hardly anything to drink and while going-honest, officer-about thirty miles an hour when, I swear, a deer ran into the road, and I was forced to pull off the highway with such abruptness that it took the wrecker crew six hours to get my truck out of the woods.

An experienced pickup truck driver is a person who's wrecked one. An inexperienced pickup truck driver is a person who's about to wreck one. A very inexperienced pickup truck driver doesn't even own a pickup but will probably be mistaken for a wild antelope by people jack-lighting p.r.o.nghorns in somebody else's pickup truck. The foremost high-speed-handling characteristic of pickup trucks is the remarkably high speed with which they head from wherever you are directly into trouble. This has to do with beer. The minute you get in a pickup you want a beer. I'm not exactly sure why this is, but personally I blame it on Jimmy Carter having been President.

You see, everyone in America has always wanted to be a redneck. That's why all those wig-and-knicker colonial guys moved to Kentucky with Davy Crockett even before he got his TV show. And witness aristocratic young Theodore Roosevelt's attempt to be a "rough rider." Even Henry James used the same last name as his p.e.c.k.e.rwood cousin Jesse. And as Henry James would tell you, if anyone read him anymore and also if he were still alive, the single most prominent distinguis.h.i.+ng feature of the redneck is that he drives a pickup truck. This explains why all of us are muscling these things around downtown Minneapolis and Cincinnati.

You may be wondering where Jimmy Carter comes in. Well, Jimmy Carter was a redneck just like we're all trying to be, but he was a sober redneck. Most of us had never seen a sober redneck, and we have the Reagan landslide to testify that none of us ever want to see one again. It was a horrifying apparition. And ever since Jimmy Carter all of us rednecks have had to be very careful to be drunk rednecks lest we turn into some kind of awful creature with big buck teeth and a State Department full of human-rights yahoos.

Thus the pickup truck has become the world's only beerguided motor vehicle. Let's examine one unit of this guidance system. Let's examine another. Let's examine the whole six-pack. Now let's drive over and see if any ducks have come in on Hodge Pond. Whoops! Cras.h.!.+ Forgot the camper back wasn't bolted down.

THE PICKUP: DESIGN AND.

ENGINEERING.

A pickup truck is basically a back porch with an engine attached. Both a pickup and a back porch are good places to drink beer because you can take a leak standing up from either. Pickup trucks are generally a little faster downhill than back porches, with the exception of certain California back porches during mudslide season. But back porches get better gas mileage.

Another important difference between back porches and pickup trucks is the suspension systems. Back porches are most often seated firmly on the ground by means of cement-block foundations. Nothing nearly that sophisticated is used in pickup trucks. The front suspension of a modern pickup truck is fully independent. Each wheel is independently bolted right to the frame. The rear suspension is a live axle usually attached by a rope to someone else's b.u.mper while he tries to pull you out of the woods.

This suspension design is ideal for use in conjunction with the pickup's 100 percent front/0 percent rear weight distribution. This weight distribution is achieved through engine placement. The engine is placed just where you'd place it on a back porch-hanging off one end so you can get under it and take a look at the giant dent in the oil pan you got when you ran over the patio furniture last night.

Theoretically such forward-weight bias should cause gross understeer. But everyone involved with pickup trucks is whooping it up too much to have any grasp of theory, so the forward-weight bias causes oversteer instead. What happens to an unloaded pickup truck in a curve is that the rear end has nothing to do-is unemployed, metaphorically speaking-so it comes around to ask you for work, up there in the front of the truck where all the weight is. And the result is exactly like one of those revolving restaurants that they have on hotels except it's on four bald snow tires instead of a hotel, and it's in the middle of the highway, and it tips over.

In order to correct this handling problem, the pickup's load bed is filled with leaf mulch, garden loam, hundred-pound bags of dog food, two snowmobiles, half a cord of birch logs, your son's Cub Scout pack, and a used refrigerator to put beer in out on the back porch. The result is an adjusted weight bias of 0 percent front/100 percent rear that causes a handling problem different from either understeer or oversteer, which is no steering at all because the front wheels aren't touching the ground.

The same kind of thinking that went into pickup truck suspension design has also been applied to the pickup engine, which is basically the same device Jim Watt was using to pump water out of coal mines in 1810 except that, in accordance with recent EPA rulings, a hanky soaked in Pinsol has been stuffed into each cylinder to cut down on exhaust emissions. There are three types of pickup truck engines: the six-cylinder engine, which does not have enough cylinders; the eight-cylinder engine, which has too many; and the four-cylinder engine, which is found in "mini pickups" driven by people who think John Denver is the right kind of redneck to be and believe they can talk to whales. The less said about four-cylinder engines the better. But all these engines have a common fault in that they continue to run after the ignition has been switched off, a phenomenon known as "dieseling." Engines that actually are diesels have been introduced for pickup trucks and they rectify this problem by not starting in the first place.

It doesn't matter. The real power for pickup trucks is generated inside the gearbox, or at least it seems to be because it's so noisy in there. And if it isn't, it soon will be after you get blotto and start s.h.i.+fting without the clutch.

There are usually five gears in a pickup. One is a mystery gear which is ill.u.s.trated on the s.h.i.+ft k.n.o.b but cannot be found. Then there is first gear, which is good for getting stuck in the woods. When you aren't stuck in the woods it's good for yanking your b.u.mper off while trying to help a friend who owns a pickup when he's stuck in the woods. First gear has a top speed of three. Third gear has a slightly higher top speed but you can't climb a speed b.u.mp without downs.h.i.+fting and the truck still only gets eight mpg. It is not known exactly what third gear is for. All normal pickup truck driving is done in second. Pickups also have a reverse gear, which is good for getting more completely stuck in the woods than first gear can do alone.

Because pickup trucks get stuck in the woods so often, four-wheel drive has become a popular option. The four-wheel-drive feature is either operated by a lever which fails to put the truck in 4WD or by a lever which fails to take it out. Four-wheel drive allows you to mire four wheels axle-deep in the woods instead of just two.

Perhaps the most novel aspect to pickup truck engineering is that pickups have no brakes. True, there is a parking brake which, if you set it, allows you to let your driverless pickup roll downhill into a busy intersection with a clear conscience. And there is a brake pedal, but stepping on it only produces a poignant desire for one more beer before you crash into the woods. There are, however, a number of methods of bringing a pickup truck to a stop, most of them involving trees in those woods, but sometimes the spare tire, which hangs down behind the b.u.mper in the back, will fall partly out of its mounting and produce drag force. And very often a pickup will run out of gas and coast to a stop. And right in front of a bar, too-according to what you told your wife.

That just goes to show how thoroughgoing the relations.h.i.+p is between pickups and drinking. I mean it sure looks like these things were designed by people who'd been drinking. And the level of finish indicates they were built by people who'd been drinking. It only stands to reason they should be driven by people like us who are half in the bag. As a result, the most popular pickup truck performance modification is-you guessed it-having a drink. For instance, at sixty miles an hour take a tight turn and notice that if you hadn't been tight you never would have taken that turn in the first place. Now you call a wrecker and I'll go get some tall ones.

DRIVING TECHNIQUE.

Driving a pickup at high speed is a difficult skill to master. The first step is to a.s.sume the proper driving position: Use one hand to firmly grasp the drip rail on the roof. This takes the place of shoulder harness, lap belt, and air bag and lets you give the finger to people with anti-handgun b.u.mper stickers on their cars. Then place your other hand on the gears.h.i.+ft k.n.o.b so you'll always know what gear you're in (which is second, as I pointed out before). Now take your third hand . . . Perhaps some picture of the difficulty is beginning to emerge. Anyway, be sure to balance your beer can carefully in your lap.

The second step is to drive over to the 7-Eleven and get more beer. Use your down vest to mop up the one you spilled all over your crotch as you backed out the driveway.

The third step is cornering technique. There are three ways to take a high-speed curve in a pickup. The first way is to use the traditional racecar driver's "late apex": Go deep into the curve at full speed doing all your downs.h.i.+fting and useless brake-pedal pumping in a straight line. Then, in one smooth motion, turn the wheel to the full extent necessary for the curve. Aim for an apex slightly past the geometrical apex of the inside edge of the curve and slowly bring the steering wheel back to straight ahead as you reapply the throttle. This will put your truck into the woods. The second way to take a fast curve is to come into the curve slightly slower, dial in a greater amount of steering, and stay on the throttle so as to propel the truck into a "power slide." This will put your truck in the woods too. The third method is to come to a full stop before entering the curve and have a beer. While you're doing that someone else will come along in another pickup truck and knock you into the woods anyway.

Now that you've wrecked a pickup and are an experienced pickup truck driver, it's important to know what to tell the police. Tell them a deer ran into the road. This happens very frequently in the places where we rednecks live, especially when we've been drinking. For example, below are the five most common explanations made to the North Carolina Highway Patrol by drivers who have put their pickup trucks into the woods: 1. A deer ran into the road.