The Ferrari in the Bedroom (11 page)

“See this, kid. Won it in a raffle in Muncie. Bought this ticket from a guy in a bowling alley and doggone if I didn’t win. Shows you never can tell.”

He could spin it on his finger like Gary Cooper, and once it flew off and busted the mirror on the cigarette machine, which made Calvin the cigarette man mad and Elmer had to buy a new mirror. He didn’t play with it after that, except he did show if off now and again. He never said whether it had shells in it or not, but knowing Elmer it must have had.

After Elmer left me with the key and nothing to do but wait for trouble to drive in and squirt Flit at the bluebottle flies and the hornets which kept coming in to the office to get out of the heat, I squatted down at Elmer’s desk, wearing my Esso cap square on my head, and tried to look official.

Elmer kept his library—for dull moments between grease jobs—in the bottom drawer, along with a couple of Salvation Army coffee mugs and a jar of mustard. He never changed the books as long as I was there, and he never got tired of reading them. There was the July issue of
Spicy Western,
which featured pornography on the range, where there is never a discouraging word, to say the least; three little blue books graphically detailing the sexual adventures of Maggie and Jiggs, Winnie Winkle and Tillie The Toiler, a Western
Auto catalog; and the National League Yearbook, which was referred to constantly during heated arguments on Saturday mornings with his friend Swifty and a guy named Leo who sold grease fittings.

Well, I sat there for a while reading
Spicy Western
and this story about a guy named Luke who had this pinto horse named “Paint,” and one day he and Paint got caught in this bad thunderstorm and they had to spend the night in a deserted cabin with this strange girl who came galloping in out of the rain, and Luke got to sweating and wondering about whether her mammoth bazooms were going to pop right through her leather jacket, when somebody started to honk out by the gas pumps.

I picked up a rag, which most pump jockeys carry around like Linus’ security blanket, and drifted out into the heat waves to go to work. It was a bile-green Oldsmobile. Back then, I was convinced that someone at the Olds plant was either color-blind or had a sneakily malevolent sense of humor in foisting those curiously depressing colors off on the public. This one was in that metallic bile color so favored by the same crew that loads up its lawns with concrete nymphs and plastic ducks. The Olds was piled high with luggage, topped by a green canoe with an Indian head on the bow.

“What’ll it be?” I said out of the corner of my mouth, aping Elmer who at that time was the model for my life style. Elmer had at least thirty-four variations of “What’ll it be?,” ranging all the way from mewling servility to an out-right challenge to a bloody fistfight. It was all in the tone of the voice and the way you wore the bill of your cap.

“Uh…do you have any Kentucky maps?” The driver, obviously Daddy, sweating as he struggled to open the door, his red plaid sport shirt rumpled and dripping, bunched up
around his neck like a soggy noose. His wife, a thin wiry lady in a pink-flowered housedress, swatted at a wrestling mob of greasy kids in the back seat with a tennis shoe.

“Now stop it!” she yelled. “I SAID STOP IT!” She slugged away at the moiling mass.

“Y’got a map of Kentucky?” The old man battled free from his screaming brood.

“Kentucky?” I asked, stalling for time since I knew what all grizzled pump jockeys know, that when a guy asks for a map
and
gets out of the car it’s nothing but trouble…and no sale. I started back toward the office to get him his Kentucky map when the back door of the Olds slammed open and three grubby kids wearing Popeye T-shirts and carrying rubber daggers poured out, yelling. The tar on the driveway was so hot I could feel my feet sinking in, and the smell of used oil made my eyes water as I grubbled through our supply of maps.

“How ’bout West Virginia?” I asked.

“We’re heading to Corbin. I gotta have a Kentucky map,” was all he said, mopping away at his sweating forehead.

“I got an Ohio map that shows part of Kentucky, but that’s all. We run out of Kentuckys.”

“Fer Chrissake, what kinda station is this? No Kentucky maps!”

“All I got’s Ohio.” Behind me I could hear the kids flushing the john over and over, and squirting water around the walls.

In the meantime a Pontiac convertible and a Chevy station wagon had pulled in and begun to honk.

“I’ll be right back!” I hollered at the Kentucky traveler. The girl in the Pontiac wanted to know what that squeak was up in the front…and if Elmer was going to be around.

“It’s probably your fan belt,” I yelled above the din of
Route 41 traffic and screaming kids. The guy behind her in the Chevy was putting out so much steam that it looked like any minute he’d blow his hood clean off.

“Hey, I’m heating up!” he bellowed.

The girl kept gunning her motor, trying to make it squeak. The guy who wanted the Kentucky map was now in the office, rummaging through Elmer’s desk where he kept his Winnie Winkle books. It was getting out of hand, going downhill fast. I ran back into the office and shoved an Ohio map at the bird in the plaid shirt.

“We only got Ohio maps!” I could see he was already halfway through Tillie The Toiler and couldn’t care less. Thank God, his wife started to toot.

“Your wife’s tooting.”

“Yeah, I know.” He sounded mad. He clutched the Ohio map and herded the kids back into the car. They were playing soccer with a wad of rolled-up paper towels. He finally cleared the driveway and headed for Corbin, Kentucky.

In the meantime the girl with the Pontiac had driven off in the direction of the Shell station, and good enough for ’em, I thought. The Chevy, in the meantime, had all but exploded.

“TURN IT OFF!” I hollered through the roar of escaping steam.

“What?” The driver, for some reason, kept racing the engine.

“TURN IT OFF!” I yelled. He cut the switch, and that damn Chevy was so hot she kept running for five minutes on self-combustion alone. I saw the guy behind the wheel was some kind of minister or something. He had one of those reverse collars and a black suit, and again I knew from experience that this was bad news. Preachers hardly ever buy more than three gallons of regular and tend to
sponge a lot, figuring the Lord, and Jersey Standard, will provide. I finally got the hood open, and sheets of searing heat curled my eyelashes.

“It’s empty. How come you didn’t put no water in it?” I asked, peering into the radiator, which was coughing and panting faintly, and seemed to be crying.

“Water?” the preacher asked, as if he were above such mundane, earthly considerations as water in the radiator.

“Yeah, it’s empty, fer Chrissake.” The words got out before I could stop it.

“Excuse me, son?”

“It needs water. We’d better let it cool off, cause if I put water in it now she’ll crack a block or something.”

“Very interesting.” The preacher gazed around the premises with the serenity of the man who habitually leaves the scut of life to the others.

A kid on a Harley boomed down to the end pump. I sold him 1.3 gallons of High Test and a half pint of upperlube, a total sale of a buck thirty-seven and I’d been toiling, totin’ barges and liftin’ bales for over three hours and the day was just starting. I got back to the minister, who somehow didn’t seem to sweat. He asked me what church I went to and before I could answer a guy in a Chrysler Imperial steamed in and asked if I knew where he could get a used generator. I said I didn’t know, but I’d keep it in mind, which was a lie, and he drove out, leaving a trail of oil on the driveway. The minister gave me a tract entitled “Are You Prepared To Meet Thy Maker?” which he said was very interesting and could change my life forever. I filled the Chevy up with water, screwed the cap back on and he said, “Thank you, my son,” got in and drove off.

After that it was quiet for a while. I went back and started to read about Luke and old Paint when the Coke man drove
in and asked how come Elmer hadn’t left the money for him and why were we short eight empties in one of the cases? I said I didn’t know, but I’d ask Elmer, so he said he wasn’t gonna leave no Coke unless he got his money, unplugged the machine and drove off.

I figured it was no skin off my nose, so I sat down again, waiting for more action. A Scoutmaster drove in with an open-bodied vegetable truck loaded with Cub Scouts wearing baseball suits.

“How do I get to Black Oak?” he asked.

“You mean over by Griffith?” I asked. He said yeah. I told him and off they went. Another big deal. All the while it was getting hotter. My stomach was growling even more. When the Good Humor man came in to use the john I bought a Raspberry Swirl fudgesickle from him and he drove out, ringing his bell.

The phone rang. It was Elmer.

“How’s everything goin’, kid?”

“Okay,” I answered.

“Keepin’ them drunks outa the crapper?” I could hear a juke box or something behind him, and a lot of laughing.

“It’s okay, Elmer.”

“Just hang in. I’m almost on my way.”

A couple of crummy-looking dogs must have heard Elmer and had decided to couple right next to the High Test pump. I ran out and kicked them in the butts, figuring it didn’t look so good for the customers, especially when the Cub Scouts came in.

And so the long hot summer went in Elmer’s Esso Station, the motorists’ haven on US 41, and late at night when Merle Haggard’s keening wail battles the heavyside layer and Oral Roberts, sings about that Great Super Service In The Sky, and about changin’ plugs on Moses’ magic carpet, and that guy comes toolin’ in and says:
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
^*
…my back begins to ache way down low, from all that bending in the grease pit, and I know that Elmer is out there somewhere in the American night giving service to those blondes and holding off the Coke man, and keeping those drunks out of the crapper.

______

^*
“Harold’s Super Service” (Bobby Wayne), Shade Tree Music Central Songs, BMI.

“TRAGEDIES OF THE WHITE SLAVES—TAKEN FROM ACTUAL LIFE! FOR GOD SAKE, DO SOMETHING!”

Countless red-necked raw-boned farm boys licked their lips in lustful righteousness as they addressed an envelope, using a chewed, stubby penny pencil, to Johnson Smith & Co., Racine, Wisconsin. They were ordering #1375 from the Big Book or The Catalog. In a few weeks they would have in their horny hands 200 pages of some of the ripest outhouse reading this side of
The Police Gazette.

Johnson Smith & Co. is and was as totally American as apple pie, far more so in fact, since they do make apple pie most places in the civilized world. Only America could have produced Johnson Smith. There is nothing else in the world like it. Johnson Smith is to Man’s darker side what Sears Roebuck represents to the clean-limbed soil-tilling righteous side, a rich compost heap of exploding cigars, celluloid teeth, Anarchist (Stink) Bombs [#6256 “More fun than a Limburger cheese”]. The Johnson Smith catalog is a magnificent smudgy thumbprint of a totally lusty, vibrant, alive,
crude Post Frontier society, a society that was, and in some ways still remains, an exotic mixture of moralistic piety and violent primitive humor. It is impossible to find a single dull page, primarily because life in America in the early days of the twentieth century might have been hard, a constant struggle, and almost completely lacking in creature comfort but it certainly was never dull. The simplest activity was, to use a popular phrase of the day,
“fraught with danger.”
For example, #R9007, the “Young America” Safety Hammer Revolver, is described as
“very popular with cyclists.”
Apparently, to the reader of the day, no explanation was necessary. The mind boggles at the unknown horrors that a “cyclist” daily faced by merely pedalling around the park. The same item is also described as
“excellent for ladies’ use.”
It is just this sort of thing that makes the Johnson Smith catalog zippier reading than any James Bond fiction. It is hard to believe at this date that the writers of the catalog were dealing with real life of the time. I don’t recall ever meeting a “lady” who carried a .32 caliber automatic in her handbag
for immediate use.