The Ferrari in the Bedroom Read Free Page A

Everything before that was some kind of bad TV show starring Rip Torn as the company commander who chickened out.
    I started in on the mousse. Not bad. Ladyfingers soaked in Virgin Islands rum. The big blonde grinned at me over her copy of
The Realist.
Yes, by God, I was surrounded by Realists.
    Another phrase from Eur. His. II jiggled into form:
    “One school of thought holds that what happened in France can happen in any society at a certain point in that society’s existence, when life becomes so unreal, abstract, to so many people that they begin to long hungrily for the life that they
imagine
is ‘Real,’ usually the life of men who are tilling the soil or suffering social injustices at the hands of the imaginers themselves.”
    Hmmmm. Seven or eight pilgrims had joined in the singing, led by a thin, sharp-faced, dark-haired, high-cheek-boned girl in a burlap skirt from Jax. A nice bottom. I wondered if she knew what a tumbrel was.
    This crowd was as much at home in a jet plane as they were in a taxicab. Belting it out:
    I’m a lonesome, lonesome traveler
along the hard, rocky road of life…
    Sitting in the back seat of a Yellow Cab, the meter ticking away.
    I’m a lonesome, lonesome Yellow Cab
Rider a-travelin’ on the old man’s
Diners’ Club card.
    One thing I’ve noticed about jet flying is that once you’re at cross-country altitude, you rarely feel the slightest bump of a transient air pocket or rough crosswind. At 600 miles per hour plus, you just hang there, suspended. And it is easy to lose all sense of time, space, and reality. The old DC-3s and 4s and even the 6s bumped and banged along, and you knew damn well that something was out there battering at that fuselage, trying to get in. I guess the place to have a fantasy, if you don’t want Reality to come creeping in on gnarled vulture claws, is in a jet, just hanging there.
    I felt vaguely drunk. Every junkie and pothead I’ve ever known, as well as drinkers of all variety, somehow always use the word “high.” By God, we really
were
high! Half a snootful at 37,500 feet is
high,
baby! Just look out of the misty, ovoid window and there it is, big, fat, and luscious—that fat old earth. I knew one guy who said every time he smoked a joint or two he felt as though he were slowly volplaning around, doing an easy Immelmann, looking down at everybody. He could see it
all.
Of course, the truth is he was five feet six and a very nervous cat. In real life he didn’t look down at much, except maybe a gopher or two, and it all scared him. Maybe that’s part of the key, too. I don’t know.
    The hostess began serving brandies and liqueurs. Our little First Class section was now a tightly knit, jet-propelled hootenanny. Bagged to the gills and feeling the rich, heady hot blood of Social Protest coursing through our veins. Solidarity! Love! Ah, it was good to be alive. And not only alive, but a vibrant, sensitive, Aware person who knew where injustice and human misery were. And we knew what to do about it.
Sing
about it.
    I could no longer fight back the urge to join in with my fellow men. Yes, we had been through hell together. Together we had seen it.

    A thin, pale young man stood in the aisle. His crystal-clear boy soprano quivering with exultation, he led us on to further glories. True, he reminded me a little of Jane Fonda, who never was exactly my type. His little-boy bangs carelessly brushed down over his forehead, his clearly symbolic denim-blue workshirt open, nay,
ripped
open, à la fist-fightin’ Millhand, he was the very image of a Master Sufferer Singer of our time. In the overheated air of our First Class cabin you could almost see his head starkly outlined in a grainy black and white photograph—towering above the rubble of an American street—a perfect Album Cover head. One of the New Breed—the New Breed of fiction artists edging out the old crowd who had used writing as a medium to create fictional characters in novels and plays and