The Ferrari in the Bedroom Read Free Page B

short stories, characters that were clearly recognized as make-believe.
    The New Breed has gone one important step farther. They use their own lives as a medium for fiction and their own persons as fictional characters. The New Breed can imagine himself to be anything, and believe it—Cowhand, Lumberjack, Negro, Itinerant Fruit-Picker, Bullfighter—any romantic figure that fits his fancy. So, at 19 or 20, a man can have lived a full, rich, dangerous life and feel that he is a worn-out, misery-scarred pilgrim. And what’s more, his followers believe him, because they work in the same medium.
    Denim Shirt’s china-blue eyes burned with the feverish light of the Creative Artist, believing himself to be a rough-hewn hunk who had traveled many roads, “rode freight trains for kicks and got beat up for laughs, cut grass for quarters and sang for dimes,” and now he was singing out all the pain of all those old wounds, a spent, scarred Singer for Truth who had been there and known it all. At 22.
    If I Had a Hammer
    Sang the pale, wispy lad.
    Up near the forward bulkhead two shaggy-browed 45-year-old tractor salesmen with the obvious tribal markings of retired paratroopers raised their snouts from the champagne trough. The port-side ex-sergeant glared backward down the aisle.
    “For God’s sake, sonny, will you keep it down?” With which the old battler went back to his jug.
    For a brief moment the plane became very aggressive. A classical—if you will excuse the expression—pregnant moment.
    And then, bravely, as he had always done, Young Fonda sang on….
    I looked at the bulging back of Old Sarge, and I wondered how many roads
that
old son of a gun had walked down. From Bizerte to Remagen, up the Po Valley and back; 7,000 miles, from Kiska to Iwo. And still on the Goddamn road.
    Beat up for laughs! The grizzled specimen next to Old Sarge had the chewed ears of a guy who had fist-fought his way through every Off Limits bar from Camp Kilmer to the Kit Kat Klub on the Potzdamer Platz, and all for laughs.
    The dark chick glowered up the cabin at the back of Old Sarge’s head. He and his buddy were boffing it up. She glanced meltingly at young Denim Shirt, her blue and white “Get Out of Vietnam” button gleaming like an angry shield above her tiny black-T-shirted bosom.
    Her glance spoke volumes: “Those clods! What do they know of Suffering, of fighting for Good, for Ideals? What do they know of the hard, flinty back alleys of Life, of Injustice? Only Youth
understands
and knows. Do not be afraid. I, an angry Girl-Type Lonesome Traveler, will protect you.”
    The lissome lad, taking heart, began again with renewed spirit and passion.
    She was right. What
did
Old Sarge know about true Suffering? His swarthy, grizzled neck bent defiantly forward, back to the trough, that neck which still bore a permanent mahogany stain of 10,000 suns, the Libyan Desert, Tinian, the Solomons, Burma Road, Corregidor…
    Chewed Ear glanced over his hunched shoulder for a brief instant at the button-wearer, the leer that had impaled broad-beamed, ripe-bosomed females from Dakar to Adelaide, a glance primeval and unmistakable. She flushed. She obviously was not used to heavy artillery.
    Blowin’ in the Wind
    The black-T-shirted White Dove fluttered, confused, in the sand for a few wing beats and then scurried out of range.
    The undergrad hootenanny swung into the chorus. Someone had produced a Kentucky mandolin, jangling high above the passionate Ovaltine voices…. The cabin was filled with the joyous sound. Old Sarge, after the last note died echoing in the soft light-blue carpeting, turned suddenly. “Hey kid, do any of you guys know ‘Dirty Gertie from Bizerte’?”
    He laughed obscenely, not realizing he was disrupting a Religious service. The congregation plunked, embarrassed.
    “How ’bout ‘Lili Marlene’?” Without any warning, Chewed Ear tuned up—
a cappella.
    I’ve been workin’ on the railroad,
all the Goddamned