The Ferrari in the Bedroom (10 page)

SHEP:
“Now there, John, is an elegant fish. Notice the subtle
coloring. Inch for inch this is the most fighting fish found in the fresh waters of America.” (S
HEP
drips superiority, holding fish in palm of hand for camera.)

JOHN:
“Yep.” (Playing Simple Goodguy role to the hilt.) “It
shor is. Let me tell you, though, I’m really cold. It was a struggle getting up here. I could use something hot….”

SHEP:
“Ah yes. It shouldn’t be too long now.”
(SHEP
glances at
watch mysteriously.)

JOHN:
(in astonishment) “What do you mean, shouldn’t be
too long?”

SHEP:
“Just be patient.” (He looks over John’s shoulder into
distance.)

SHEP:
“Ah, yes. Here they come now!”
(JOHN
turns head to
look in direction
SHEP
indicates. Jaw drops in astonishment.)

END OF SCENE

Amazingly, it went off like clockwork. Even the crew laughed at our frigid buffoonery.

“WRAP IT UP. PUT IT AWAY!” Fenton shouted in delight.
In quick succession we shot two “reaction” shots, close-ups, of my face listening to John and his face listening to me. These would be intercut in the final version. The now frozen fish lay at our feet forgotten, their job done, forever immortalized on film.

Two Bunnies had been brought from the hotel by SnoHorse and they clung together in the tent. They were central to the next scene. Bunny Bonnie and Bunny Moe, looking almost identical in their coats and boots, their black velvet bunny ears flapping in the Arctic wind. Incidentally, Bunnies never have last names and, in fact, many of the Bunnies have aggressively masculine first names: Bunny Sam, Bunny Lenny, even Bunny Irving. I will leave this manifestation to psychologists to ponder.

I stuck my head in the tent and introduced myself. The two Bunnies grinned in spite of their chattering teeth. Bunnies are creatures of the Indoor life.

“What are you guys supposed to be doing?” Bunny Moe asked.

“Fishing through the ice,” I answered as I crept into the tent with them. John’s head appeared through the flap, blowing steam.

“I gotta get in! I’m freezing!” He crawled in. There were now four of us in a tent designed for two small Cub Scouts (vertical).

“Gee, are you guys on TV?” Bunny Bonnie, who looked a little like old Lauren Bacall stills, said with what I was sure was a put-on.

“Yeah,” John answered, fishing out a cigarette from among his sweaters. This sparkling conversation continued for several minutes. Bunnies are meant to be seen, not heard. They were cute, though, like kittens or something. They radiate a strange aura of perpetual Senior Prom-ishness even in the
snow. The snowmobile roared outside the tent. Lee’s head shoved its way into our tightly knit group.

“Let’s go, girls. I want to shoot you in the snowmobile.” For the next fifteen minutes the girls roared back and forth in front of the camera, Bunny Bonnie expertly piloting the snowmobile while Bunny Moe waved from behind.

The time had arrived for our next big scene. It began where the last scene had ended, with John’s amazed look.

“Okay, let’s slate it.” Lee clapped his trusty clapper. A fresh, warm film magazine began to turn. For an instant a thought flashed through my mind:
What the hell is this all about, anyway? We’re grown-up people!

The Bunnies, wearing fur boots, their velvet ears outlined sharply against the white hills, ambled into camera range, carrying silver trays with prop pewter mugs and dishes of mixed nuts, napkins and silverware.

BUNNY MOE:
(to me, placing mug before me) “I’m your
Bunny, Bunny Moe.”

ME:
(grinning foolishly) “Yessiree. Hello, Bunny Moe.”

BUNNY BONNIE:
(to
JOHN,
placing mug before him) “I’m your
Bunny, Bunny Bonnie.”

JOHN:
(picking up mug) “Thank you, Bunny Bonnie.”
(JOHN
looks at me in amazement, unaccustomed to such elegance while ice fishing.)

ME:
“This is the way to fish. This is the way a gentleman ice
fishes.”

JOHN:
“You’re right! This is more like it!” (We clank mugs.)

ME:
“Say, how do you like this hat?”

JOHN:
“Hat?”

ME:
(assuming superior air) “This hat is the escutcheon of
the most exclusive fly-tying club in the Scottish Highlands.”
(JOHN
snorts in disgust, glances at my bobber.)

JOHN:
“Yeah? Well, put another worm on; you’re cleaned.” (I
do a take, first at him, then down at my cleaned hook.)

The crew laughed in appreciation. Only one thing was wrong. During the shooting some kids on the distant toboggan slope began shouting, at just the wrong moment.

We played the scene over, the Bunnies’ noses a little redder than before. This time it worked.

“Great! Wrap it up! It’s in the can.” Fenton clapped his mittens together. The great ice fishing scene was over. It was all up to the cutting room now.

Bunny Bonnie appeared at my right. “My tail is gone,” she said mournfully, with a touch of fear in her voice. Even though I was half frozen I was still capable of faint surprise.

“My tail blew away.” Sure enough, her big fluffy white cottontail had blown off and was now rolling down the ice a quarter of a mile away.

“Never fear, Bunny Bonnie, I’ll rescue your tail.” Gallantly I slipped and slid over the rough pond ice, chasing Bunny Bonnie’s tail. I thought:
Too bad they couldn’t film this scene. Now this is what I call Hunting!

Twenty minutes later we were all back up in the hotel. John was upstairs in his room, on the phone to Chicago, and left almost immediately for a rehearsal of his big Sportsman show that was opening the next week. The tight-knit camaraderie of our little unit was rapidly dissolving. We were beginning to be strangers again who would probably never see each other until professional chance might throw us together. Jack was busy in the tailor shop buying a Swiss knit suit. Lee had disappeared with his clipboard. I never saw him again.

I sat in the Cartoon Room drinking hot chocolate with Bunny Moe and Bunny Bonnie, making small talk. They got
up and left. I went upstairs and packed. Dinner that night was somewhat strained and hurried. We were all anxious to be on our separate ways. Fenton drove me to O’Hare through the beautiful Wisconsin countryside. We talked about a feature he was planning and decided to meet in New York two weeks hence and discuss it further. O’Hare is a cold airport with a keening wind sweeping out of the prairies with a steady monotonous beat. Luckily I got a plane earlier than I’d planned.

Back in good old First Class, among the sleek, well-fed Expense Account people. I wondered for a moment whether Slim even suspected they existed, or whether any of them could have imagined the Aquarium Lounge that Slim did business with. He had said:

“Yep, I seine my minnows out of the Fox River.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but how do you get along in the winter? There aren’t many fishermen.”

“Well, I do all right,” he answered solemnly. “I supply the Aquarium Lounge with minnows.”

“You do?” I was surprised. “What do they do with minnows at the Aquarium Lounge?”

“They got an aquarium on the bar. And these guys come in and scoop up shiner minnows with their hand and swallow ’em. They wash ’em down with beer.”

“They swallow ’em? Live?” I was astounded.

“Yep,” Slim answered matter-of-factly. “And other people come in and sit in the booths and watch ’em.”

I could imagine the scene! Again my mind boggled, for the second time in two days.

“Is that the biggest show in town, Slim?”

Slim detected my sarcasm.

“Well, you ain’t never seen ’em.”

As the tray of Martinis and the inevitable macadamia
nuts were passed before me in the warm, comfortable glow of First Class, I reconsidered. Yep, that probably would make a good act on the Dick Cavett Show, the boys swallowing mud minnows Coast to Coast and washing them down with the sponsor’s beer. The crowd would love it. Probably up Cavett’s rating, too. At least in the Midwest. I wonder how our little act will go over? Maybe next time I’ll draw Bimini. Who knows?

There are nights when I’m driving my Fiat 124 along the turnpike and I’ve got the radio set way down near the end of the dial where the Cuban and the Puerto Rican stations come fading in and I’ll pick up WWVA in Wheeling. I’ll be driving along in the dark, along the pike, and there, drifting through the birdies and harmonics of the ghetto end of the radio dial, the sad, mournful wail of Merle Haggard sings about that good ol’ boy pumping gas at Harold’s Super Service. Sometimes Merle barely makes it through the hellfire and damnation barrage being laid down by Oral Roberts on a station riding right in under WWVA.

Harold’s Super Service is a country-western song about a guy pumpin’ gas at a place that specializes in “service all the way.” But there’s one thing that bugs him; this guy that shows up in a “stripped-down Model A” who demands: “Gimme fifty cents worth a’reg’lar, check the oil too, if you
don’t mind, put some air in my tires would ya mister?… and wash my windows too when you get time.” Well, it seems that when this pump jockey dreams he died, he was quite happy in the great bye-and-bye. His pump was right near the Pearly Gates, where he could see the new arrivals check in every day. He was happy pumping gas throughout all Eternity, when one day, as he was changing the plugs on Moses’ magic carpet, who shows up chuggin’ through the clouds but that big old boy in his stripped-down Model A. “Gimme fifty cents worth a’reg’lar….”

I don’t know whether Haggard ever pumped gas in his life, but as a guy who once, in his fifteenth year, spent four hellish weeks pumping Esso in a sun-baked pit stop on US 41 in the shimmering heat of an Indiana summer, I know well what the poor son-of-a-bitch in Harold’s means.

An afternoon in the grease pit, draining scalding oil out of the guts of GMC tractors while the rest of the world sings and dances all about you, is enough to put the good old iron in anyone’s soul. Sometimes I watch those Amoco or Shell commercials on TV with that legion of square-jawed, trimly-uniformed, sparkling-eyed attendants briskly shining windows and polishing headlights on an endless succession of what appear to be showroom models, and think about the times I was alone at that station. Elmer Lightfoot, who owned the station, was off making it with the blonde. And there I’d be, left with those goddamn pumps, and the ultimate cross: the grease rack.

Elmer, on those days when the blonde was in season and he was coming into rut, and her old man was in Logansport trying to peddle pianos or bugles or whatever the hell it was he sold, would say to me about 10:30 in the morning: “Well, she’s all yours, kid.”

He’d toss me the keys to the register and take off in
his bored-out, chopped-down, high-assed Hudson Hornet which he raced at Crown Point on the weekends. That Hornet was so mean that it’d sit out there in the back, with the key off, burnin’ rubber standing still. In fact, that Hornet was a lot like Elmer himself. You know the old crap about how people who own dogs get to resemble their mutts. Well, I think cars are even more so. Square-looking chunky guys who wear white-on-white ties always buy square-looking chunky Chryslers, and Elmer was a lot like his Hudson Hornet; ugly, hard to handle, and at times as mean as cat dung. And as he rocketed off to his tryst, Elmer would scream out the window, “Keep an eye on it, kid, and WATCH THEM CRAPPERS! I don’t want no winos from Cal City boozin’ it up in there, y’hear?”

“Yeah, Elmer,” was all I could say, because he was right. The first time I had been left in charge, this guy had come in driving a Studebaker Champ with the back stove in and the windows held together with white adhesive tape. He fell out of the car while I was trying to fish out the rag he had been using as a gas cap. I gave him the keys to the john, and three hours later we had to call the Sheriff to bust down the door and drag him out, drunk as a skunk. For the rest of the day I mopped up vomit and tried to get the plumbing working again.

“Okay, Elmer, I’ll watch it.”

There was one day in particular that sticks in my memory as exactly what old Merle means. As usual, the Hudson had left me standing there in the heat amid clouds of blue exhaust and burnt rubber. I hadn’t had anything to eat since six that morning and my stomach was growling like a flat head Ford about to lose its main bearings, so the first thing I did was look for something to eat. All I could come up with was a Butterfinger which was under the counter where
Elmer had his leather-covered jack handle, in case of trouble. He had covered the thing in cowhide himself, with neat stitching and his name burned on it in fancy lettering. Elmer said he learned leathercraft in the Scouts, and “it come in handy when you’re makin’ a blackjack.” He also kept a .38 Police Special stuck in the back of the shelf, under some rags, but I never saw him do anything with it except to take it out once in a while and show it to friends of his from the softball team. He mentioned it to me once.