The Ferrari in the Bedroom (23 page)

“Yeah,” he said, “we see ’em every winter in the cold weather mostly. One day one come out, stood next to that pump over there, shakin’ the snow off his back. I like to have wet my pants. He looked mean as hell. One time one of them busts out of the woods back of Gardner and slammed into this VW with a lady in it. Just kept hammerin’ at it till he flipped it over. That damn moose musta thought that old VW had come out to the woods to mate with one of them cow moose, and he wasn’t havin’ none of it. Lemme tell you this, every year or so some guy driving along the Turnpike here hits a moose and it’s good-bye Charlie. Hardly ever hurts the moose, but it sure as hell wrecks the Detroit iron. No, buddy, as far as I’m concerned you can have them moose.” He went back to chewing on his Harris Deluxe squash doughnut, which is another high-calorie Maine specialty that has padded the hips of many a Maine wench.

When I got back out on the Pike under a brilliant white Northern moon that gets so bright sometimes you can actually read a newspaper by it, booming along through the night, tensed for the charge of a bull moose, it was damned hard to believe that a little over four hundred miles straight south two junkies were probably trying to break into my apartment, deep in the yeasty compost heap of the Village. Ahead of me the inevitable faded maroon Saab with its battered Maine license plate
(VACATIONLAND)
buzzed like an angry turnip. It was covered with a thick film of cafe-au-lait colored dust, the sort of dust that anybody who has driven in the back roads of Maine lives with and breathes constantly. I hit a patch of mosquitos suddenly, spotting my windshield like a thin rain of black soot. Occasionally something larger made a juicy “splat” and squirted up and out into the windstream like yellow icing on a birthday cake. Together the two of us, me in my City car, an effete Fiat 124
Sport coupe, he in his dumpy Maine Saab, bored into the blackness through Moose Country.

I flipped on the radio. Up there your All-Transistor Motorola can be used almost as an aircraft ADF. As you boom through the darkness you can tell where you are by what station is getting louder and which one is fading. Portland fades and Augusta grows stronger. Soon Augusta drops down into the birdies and static and Bangor gets stronger and stronger. In between Bangor and Augusta dozens of French Canadians come rolling in; Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia. Through it all the cool voice of somebody named Ken keeps saying, “Yaz is two for three tonight as he steps into the box in the last half of the eighth….” Yaz is always two for three and stepping into the box late in the game up there in lonely, rolling, beautiful, waterwashed, poverty-stricken Maine.

I finally swing off the Pike at the Waterville-Oakland exit, go past Al’s Lobster Pound. There isn’t much traffic. There never is by modern standards. I run down the window so I can get a lungful of that sharp, fragrant Maine air. You can just sense big deep lakes all around you in the blackness. It hits me again, that feeling that it’s always Fall in Maine. Their summer seems to go by in a couple of weeks, and even in midsummer it feels like fall in the air. No wonder guys like Jesse have a fatalistic bitter humor. In Maine you can almost hear time rushing by while the rocks remain forever. Ahead of me I see the Saab, running high and springy on his home turf, has ducked into a Shell station, probably the second time he’s gotten gas in a month. I drive in behind him to top off my tank. In Maine it isn’t a good idea to let that needle get down around E, since running out of gas at midnight four miles out of China Lake can be a real bitch. Two rubbery, open-faced little Maine girls wearing
hot-pants swarm over the Saab, squirting Super Shell into it and scraping off the bugs. One of them comes back to me.

“What’ll you have?” she squeaked, trying to sound like a hardbitten pump jockey.

“Fill ’er up,” I clipped, trying to sound like Humphrey Bogart on the bridge of a mine sweeper on the Murmansk Run.

“You know how the gas cap works?” I asked.

“Yeah!” the little round girl hollered from somewhere behind my car. “Guy comes in here with a green Fiat just like yours, only it’s green.”

Across the street in the gloom I could see Sears Roebuck, a low building not far from Cottle’s supermarket where everybody locally stocks up with squash doughnuts and B&M baked beans and diet Moxie. Two more elderly Saabs driven by gimlet-eyed Maine farmers buzz past on their way home from the Baked Bean Supper at the Grange hall in Winslow. Somehow those gutsy little Saabs seem as at home in that country as a beagle rolling in sheep manure. Inland Maine, where the thermometer stands at 30 below most of the winter, with the snow five feet deep and the ice so thick on the lakes that it doesn’t break up until late April and then goes out with a roar. It’s the way Jesse put it:

“You see, farmin’ in Maine ain’t really farmin’, it’s rearranging rocks.” He laughed his short mirthless Maine laugh as he said it, and I knew he wasn’t kidding.

(With thanks to Harold Pinter, or was it Charles Dickens?)

Cast of Characters

The time is someplace in the fairly near future, damn nearer than you think. At Curtain Rise we see what is by today’s standards a totally hip pad. It is crowded with culture symbols of our time: a large inflatable vinyl Campbell Soup can, numerous Peace symbols; doves, clenched fists, a black and white poster depicting rhinos fornicating, Lyndon Johnson playing Clyde while Lady Bird, also holding a machine gun, plays Bonnie, “Make Love Not War”—a fresco done with Pepsi-Cola bottletops on a background of a tattered American flag drenched with fake mercurochrome blood. The floor is littered with at least 7,000 copies of
Screw, Rat, The East Village Other, The Realist,
et al. A somewhat dusty
paper fake Tiffany lamp advertising Heinz’s 57 Varieties of Pot dimly illumines the scene.

Naturally, we are deafened by an enormous wave of Acid Rock. Joe Cocker is screaming incoherently
“with a little help from my friends.”

At Curtain Rise the stage is empty. We dimly perceive this between red white and blue flashes of a revolving psychedelic strobe generator, which seems on the verge of blowing a fuse since it hums a lot and occasionally throws sparks onto the burlap-covered floor. We, the audience, observe this scene for thirty seconds or so and then, entering from Stage Right to the sound of an offstage john flushing, we see
GROOVY
, as he is known among various other pseudonyms. His actual name is Herbert L. Mergenweist, a onetime student in the far distant past at the Bronx High School of Science and several other institutions of doubtful learning. His hair hangs nearly to his waist and seems to be a cross between the Joan Baez Cascade and a ratty Afro. It is streaked with grey. He has a noticeable bald spot. He wears an ancient tie-dyed T-shirt bearing in faded blue letters the legend:
WBAI UBER ALLES,
worn, hacked-off jeans and an elderly pair of Victor Mature type Roman sandals festooned with bits of corroding chain and brass studs. He is sniffing, and seems to be having a slight nasal problem as his nose runs noticeably. He notices that the stereo is hung up on a groove.
COCKER
keeps yelling
“wit de help wit de help wit de help wit de help wit de help…
”

A look of pained irritation crosses
GROOVY’S
face as though this has happened to him a million times before.

COCKER:
(continuing)
“wit de help wit de help wit de help wit de…
”

GROOVY
speaks, or rather mutters: “Fuck!”

COCKER:
(continues)
“wit de help wit de help wit de
help…”
(He seems to be getting louder and more hysterical, if possible.)

G
ROOVY
rushes across stage, coughing brokenly, and kicks his battered old stereo amplifier, which is on the floor next to a crate of paperbacks. The stereo squawks and
COCKER
begins to shout:
“friends friends friends friends
…”

Meanwhile, G
ROOVY
has crumpled to the floor, has removed one sandal and is rubbing his foot and weeping silent tears. G
ROOVY
replaces sandal painfully and crawls on all fours across the stage, looking for something. Without warning the stereo begins working again and C
OCKER
goes into the bridge, blaring loudly.
GROOVY,
scuffling among worn faded copies of
Screw Rat
et al. finally finds what he’s been looking for, a book of matches. He sits slumped against his wall at Stage Right, under a large poster of Peter Fonda astride a motorcycle. He searches in his jeans and produces a minute roach which he proceeds to light, eyes shut, inhaling deeply. He sits for a second holding the smoke in, and then suddenly bursts out in a loud, uncontrollable paroxysm of wheezy coughing. His is an air of infinite weariness; dogged tenacity. He sucks again at the roach, sending sparks into the air. Again he coughs loudly.

There is a knock at the door. G
ROOVY
staggers to his feet, grinding the roach out in the palm of his hand and carefully replacing it in the watch pocket of his elderly jeans. Another knock. G
ROOVY
goes to the door, opens it.

GROOVY:
(listlessly) “Yeah?”

Enter
BUTCH,
as he is known to a dwindling few intimates. He is, in actuality, Dwight L. Dingleman. He is somewhat older than
GROOVY.
He wears a worn-thin pair of narrow-bottomed chinos, an ancient blue basketweave button-down shirt, a thin black knit tie with a large Windsor knot, and decrepit bucks, shoes that have seen many
seasons. His hair, what there is of it, is resolutely crew-cut, and he is far beyond mere greying. He wears a madras sport coat, single-button, which is so old you can almost see his shirt through it. He carries a bundle.

GROOVY:
“Come on in, Butch.” (He speaks casually, comfortably, as though they have done this many times.)

BUTCH:
“How’s it going, pal?”
(GROOVY
ignores this, allowing his shoulders to droop in disdain. His whole being exudes put-down.)

BUTCH:
“Gee, it’s good to see you…uh… Groovy.” (He says the word “Groovy” awkwardly.)

GROOVY:
“You’re late. I thought I was gonna flip! It was gettin’ at me.”

BUTCH:
“I’m sorry. I know how you feel. I got held up down at Medicare. I was getting jumpy too. It’s been three days.”

GROOVY:
(slumping into inflatable vinyl chair which has been patched many times with rubber cement and vulcanizing patches) “Three days! Shit! It seems like a month. Let’s get right at it, before I really blow.” (He coughs brokenly and rubs his injured foot.)

BUTCH
carefully seats himself on the Campbell Soup can, placing his package beside him.

BUTCH:
“Where do you want to begin today?”

GROOVY:
(thoughtfully) “Well, we did the Drug Scene number last week. Uh…” (He trails off in thought.)

BUTCH:
“And the week before that we did the Acid Rock bit. How ’bout Lack Of Communication? We haven’t done that in a long time.”

GROOVY:
(brightening) “Heavy, man! It’s been a couple of months. My head’s getting together already. Okay. You start.”

GROOVY
stands up and begins to pace nervously, as though he wishes that
BUTCH
would leave, radiating truculent impatience.
BUTCH
watches him for a long moment.

BUTCH:
(finally speaking, with great deliberation) “Why don’t you get a haircut? For the life of me I can’t understand why you let your hair grow like that. You look like a girl! Why, when I was a boy…”

GROOVY
whirls on him in fury.

GROOVY:
“Look, now you see, it’s just things like that!…”

(He lapses into silence after shouting.)

BUTCH
watches him, a look of beseeching groping on his face, as though trying to understand yet pained by what he sees.

GROOVY:
“All the kids wear their hair like this! It’s different than when you were a kid! Everything is different, don’t you understand that? The Bomb!”

BUTCH:
(quietly) “And those ridiculous clothes. If your mother were ali—”

GROOVY:
(rising to crescendo) “That bitch! She never loved me! All she ever wanted to do was watch television all day long, and…”

BUTCH:
“Don’t talk like that about your mother!”

GROOVY:
“Hah! Just because she got knocked up and…” (He slumps suddenly into his chair, his voice drops back to normal.) “Dammit, Butch, I can’t get started today. It’s not coming.”