A Fistful of Fig Newtons

ALSO BY JEAN SHEPHERD

A Christmas Story

In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash

Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories, and Other Disasters

The Ferrari in the Bedroom

This book is a work of the imagination. However, some essays are observation and conclusion. The characters depicted in the short stories are fictional. They do not represent any actual individuals, living or dead
.

JEAN SHEPHERD

To Leigh and Daphne–
Who share my bed, my board
,
and walks along the sea
.
May they never regret it
.

I banged on the steering wheel as Peggy Lee belted it out in her mean, silky, snotty, “get me some money” voice
.

“YEAH, YEAH!” I hollered stupidly as Billy Butterfield’s trumpet rasped out the bridge
.

Stuck in rush-hour traffic, the maniac in you takes over. The mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel was four blocks and two thousand cars away
.

My radio was tuned to WNEW, the only station that the bastard can get in midtown Manhattan. In a way, that curious misfortune might have been one cause of what was to follow. WNEW is an instant time warp leap into the past. A flick of the knob and you’re magically back in the 1940s and ’50s of Peggy Lee, Dinah Shore, Ella Fitzgerald, and a lot of singers who haven’t made a record since Eisenhower retired to Gettysburg
.

My mind ticked over idly. I hummed, I whistled, I spit out the window
.

You sit there won’drin’ what it’s all about …

The radio buzzed obscenely, a rank, juicy Bronx cheer of a buzz, and quit. God dammit! I thumped my fist on the plastic dashboard, sending up motes of cigarette ashes from the ashtray, but the radio remained as silent as a dime-store Buddha incense-burner. If there is ever a time when you need a car radio to keep you company, it’s in a long line of creeping traffic
.

I thumped the dash. No luck. All the while my eyes were darting back and forth over the traffic; left, right, rear mirror, right, left, rear mirror, clickety-click-click, in the style of the true urban driver. There’s always a yellow cab or a Puerto Rican in a battered van, marked ACE PLUMBING SUPPLIES, ready to beat you out for every precious inch. Nerves is what it takes, nerves of steel; cobalt steel. Fighting your way to the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel at rush hour is no place for lady drivers with blue hair or frail stockbrokers with rimless bifocals
.

An airport bus sent a blast of diesel fumes that caught me fair and square, a clean shot
.

“Braak, braaak”—my city cough rattled my ribs. “BORK!”

Suddenly there was a brief opening ahead. I shot forward, skittered through the line like an NFL halfback and gained a full car length on a cursing Connecticut driver who got caught lighting his cigar. I cackled. I could see him in my rear mirror mouthing evil words. I threw him a quick finger and whipped up next to a looming tractor-trailer. I was grateful for a moment or two of shade. I was actually within striking distance of the tunnel mouth itself, at last
.

The streams of traffic, in five or six lines, edged into the evil black mouth. Theoretically, there is supposed to be a system for alternate cars to go forward into the tunnel, each in his turn, but like everything else in the urban jungle of today, that system is an outmoded joke, like taking off your hat in an elevator or opening doors for women
.

I had a brief image of a hulking giant trying to put toothpaste
back into a Colgate tube as I hunched over my wheel, deep in battle. I saw my chance. A tiny opening between a big, blue clunker of a Buick Riviera and a puttering Valiant. I slammed the transmission into LOW-LOW, floored the accelerator
.

ZZZzziiiiPP! I made it, I made it! Whoopee! I was in the tunnel!

Two snakelike lines of traffic inched through this gloomy tile-and-concrete alimentary canal, the lower colon of the city of New York spewing its waste out into New Jersey
.

The tunnel jogged slightly to the left. The entrance behind me disappeared. I was now far below the sinister, sludgy waters of the mighty Hudson. God only knows what indescribable obscenities lay above me, protected only by a thin shield of rusting steel and crumbling concrete. Hardly a soul alive today remembers when the ancient tunnel was built. Dimly lit by yellow bulbs, the tunnel lives in a perpetual basement gloom. No dawn, no sunset, no spring or summer, fall or winter; only Man and the rats inhabit this man-made wonder of nature
.

It affects people in many ways. I once knew a man who was in every way a civilized creature, the product of centuries of Western culture–Yale, Skull & Bones, a reader of John Updike, a subscriber to the opera–who had one fatal flaw. The instant he entered the tunnel he reverted to his ancient Paleolithic forebears. Deep fears gripped him. He saw lurking carnivores with yellow eyes in the shadows. Perspiration gushed from his every pore. Each minute in the tunnel was sheer hell. It finally got so bad that he sold his elegant ancestral home in Princeton, moved to a cockroach-infested, furnished flat in Manhattan, where he remains today, a prisoner of the Island
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