The Ferrari in the Bedroom (25 page)

BUTCH:
“Groovy, can I play my Harry James records at the next session?”

GROOVY:
“Great, man! That’ll really bug me.”

BUTCH
opens door and departs. We hear him from offstage.

BUTCH:
“See you next week, same time, and if you really get jumpy give me a call and we’ll fight over the phone.”

GROOVY:
“Hang it all out, babe. I feel together again”

BUTCH
leaves. Rock booms out. G
ROOVY
squats on floor, a lonely aging figure, fumbling for a match. He lights his roach and coughs a wheezy, rasping phlemy hack as

THE
CURTAIN
FALLS

—ANONYMOUS 20TH CENTURY DRIVER

God knows how many motels have swallowed up nights of my life, from Florida to Maine, from Pennsylvania to Oregon, down to Juarez. My god, what motels, what highways. Sometimes I think there are a few of us who love highways and motels more than the places they go to or the momentary stopovers they are. The other night I’m sitting in the bar at Downey’s, a saloon on 8th Avenue, a couple of hundred feet west of Broadway in mid-town, gazing around at the old photographs on the walls of actors peering out of dressing
rooms, wearing make-up of long forgotten characters. Marilyn Monroe kissing Eli Wallach, Geraldine Page looking tense. Somehow they all seemed on the road, at least at that moment, since I was on my second Tanqueray martini. The guy I was with, a shoddy slippery Producer of borderline pornographic off-Broadway “artistic triumphs” was in a vaguely maudlin mood. The maudlin is not to be confused with true sentiment, certainly not in the vicinity of the Lunt Fontaine, anyway.

   
SHODDY
PRODUCER:
(touch of sob in the voice) “Sometimes I wonder what it’s all about. Guy does his best and in the end you don’t come up with nothin’. Look at poor Marilyn there. Jesus!”

ME:
“Yeah, you’re right, Jay. Sometimes you wonder what it’s all about.” (This last said with great solemnity, as though intoning a newly discovered Universal Truth.)

SHODDY
PRODUCER:
“You know, ever since
Princess Lesbia Meets Superman
closed in New Haven I’ve been feeling rotten. I gotta get out on the road again. I don’t feel right unless I’m in some hotel room dialing Room Service.”

ME:
“I know how you feel. Some guys are Hotel guys, and then there’s Us.”

SHODDY
PRODUCER:
“Us? What do you mean?”

ME:
(signalling for a third martini) “Motel men. We ain’t the same, Jay, deep down. You ain’t living unless you’re in a hotel, and me, hotels make me nervous. It’s Motels I love. Man, some nights when you’re booming along out there under the stars and you see that Howard Johnson coming up out of the blackness, well…”

SHODDY
PRODUCER:
“Motels? You mean those tourist cabins?”

ME:
“Tourist cabins? Where the hell you been living for
the past hundred years? You mean you don’t know what Truman Capote said about motels?”

SHODDY
PRODUCER:
“Truman Capote? Wasn’t he the guy who wrote
Grass Harp?
A bomb. The B’nai Brith hated it. What the hell does
he
know?”

ME:
(my voice assuming a low philosophical narrative tone) “Jay, let me tell you about motels. Bartender, bring my slippery friend here another Tia Maria, or whatever the hell that slop is he’s drinking, and I will tell you something about motels.”

SHODDY
PRODUCER:
“It’s getting late, and…”

ME:
(interrupting) “I have listened to you for many a night, telling me of the disasters of your life. Allow me a few precious moments of your time. And anyway, I’m buying.”

SHODDY
PRODUCER:
“Okay. I got nothin’ to lose, I guess.”

ME:
“How truly spoken. We, all of us, come into this world with nothing and we leave it in the same state. Hairless at the beginning; hairless at the end. A great cycle of futility that stretches…”

SHODDY
PRODUCER:
“I thought you were gonna tell me something about Motels.”

ME:
(carefully twisting lemon into gin) “Motels, ah yes, they are part of it. There is nothing more American than a motel. I have traveled the world over and I find few places anywhere on this globe remotely like a good motel, and I for one love them. Motels, Jay, are like green oases on the trackless desert, snug ports nestled on the shores of endless alien seas.”

SHODDY
PRODUCER:
“No kidding?”

ME:
“No kidding. No, I kid you not, as Captain Queeg often said. Some nights when I’m cooped up in my pad on 10th Street I feel the urge to revisit some of those great motels I have seen in my time. You know, there’s nothing that makes
you feel as free, as on-the-move, as a motel and there’s nothing I like better than being free and on-the-move.”

SHODDY
PRODUCER:
“You can’t tell me nothin’ about being on the road. Did I tell you about the time I was traveling with the third road company of
Pajama Tops’?
We was stayin’ in this tank town outside of…”

ME:
(raising my hand imperiously) “Hold! Avaunt, as the Bard so nicely put it. I have the floor. Have you ever heard of the name ‘Camino Real’?”

SHODDY
PRODUCER:
“Are you kidding? Maureen Stapleton. For Chrissake, what kind of a dumb ox do you think I am? Have I heard of ‘Camino Real.’ Tennessee Williams. Why, I remember the night the…”

ME:
“I mean the
real
Camino Real. Not some wispy melodrama about ladies with roses in their teeth. The real Camino Real.”

SHODDY
PRODUCER:
“You mean there’s another one? I wonder if the rights are still…”

ME:
“Jay, some day I think you’re going to try to buy the rights to the world, including serial, recording and book club sales. The Camino Real, the
real
Camino Real, is a magnificent motel that once enfolded me with its loving arms like a passionate mistress on the dark desert sands.”

S.P.:
“Holy Christ! No kidding?”

ME:
“Yes, Jay, the Camino Real is a fantastic motel across the bridge from El Paso, just outside that decadent, exciting fleshpot of the Western world—Juarez. You come up on it all of a sudden, like some movie set rising out of the red and yellow baked clay. It’s made of adobe, and has high, swinging balconies and long cool open-air hallways with cactus, and you can smell the chili beans and hear some guy playing the guitar someplace down by the pool.

“And what a pool, with that Mexican sun slanting down,
making the water dance and shimmer until it looks like cool liquid blue ice. And the girls just lay stretched out like lizards in the sun. The rooms have low ceilings with that square, heavy Spanish furniture made out of some kind of hard, dark wood and I lay flat out on that big bed the first night I signed in, picking up Mexican music from some tin-pot radio station, with all those cornets and bugles and maracas.

“Why, Jay, they’ve got a nightclub in that motel that looks like it’s right out of a set of some old Merle Oberon movie, with all these elegant ladies in slinky gowns and these guys dressed up in black, formal suits going up winding staircases, with chandeliers made out of cut crystal and a band wearing those Mexican shirts with the puffy sleeves and their hair slicked down like patent leather. Out in the lobby they have a little cart that they push around, ladling out free
ice-cold lemonade, with that hot desert air puffing in once in a while to remind you that there are mountains somewhere around.”

SHODDY PRODUCER:
“Aw, come on, you’re not talking about a
motel.”

ME:
“The hell I’m not! You have known me as a car cuckoo for a long time, Jay. Well, any good car nut is also a motel nut. Cars and motels go together. In fact, they are almost one and the same. I figure it couldn’t have been more than 20 minutes after the first car ever built set off across country than some smart guy figured that the guy driving it would have to eventually look for some place to light, empty his bladder and rest his weary head, so he put up a sign on the side of a shack reading:
HONEYMOON ACRES TOURIST CABIN
and that’s where it started. I’ve been in motels all over the country, all kinds, and sometimes me and other Motel cuckoos get together and swap stories about great motels we have known.

“I remember one outside of Jacksonville, Florida, just over the Georgia line, made out of old faded warped wood with blistered paint. A couple of kitchen chairs in the room; linoleum on the floor, and a light bulb hanging down from the ceiling. There was an old geezer on a rocking chair sitting out in front of the office, which was about half the size of a Manhattan phone booth, swatting flies and chewing tobacco. I drove in my drophead Morgan Plus 4, hot and tired after making 700 miles that day heading South toward the Keys. Cost me six dollars that night, and as I lay on that mattress, which felt like it was filled with corn shucks, I could hear the crickets and those Florida frogs quackin’ outside in the warm dark. I went out around the side and got me a Coke out of the machine, came back and lay in the dark drinking Coke and listening to frogs and Tammy Wynette
singing
D-I-V-O-R-C-E
on the radio, and I want to tell you, that night I knew I was in the South as much as I’d ever be, and I could hear those big diesel rigs rumbling on past, carrying those oranges up North. Now, I don’t think of that motel much, but when I do I can just smell that blistered paint and hear those crickets chirpin’ away.”

SHODDY
PRODUCER:
“Stop, you’re making me cry! It’s like that speech in
Orpheus Descending
about them night birds that are born without feet and they keep flying around…”

ME:
“Horsefeathers, Jay. I ain’t talking about Tennessee Williams country, I’m talking about the
real
South. Where US 41 goes snaking down through the swamps all the way from Chicago through Georgia, past all those beautiful motels with their NO VACANCY signs and…”

SHODDY
PRODUCER:
“US 41? Never heard of it. Is that over by the Lincoln Tunnel, in Jersey?”

ME:
“US 41 in Jersey! My god, you really are an innocent. You mean you don’t know the feel and smell and look of the really great roads of America? Forty-one! Just saying it makes shivers go up my spine. US 30. US 66. US 80. You name ’em, Jay, I been over ’em all. The great Turnpikes: Maine, Florida, Indiana, Ohio. They’re like the great rivers of the world—the Nile, the Amazon.”

SHODDY
PRODUCER:
(stirring his drink listlessly) “Jeez, I never would have known. Where’s US 80?”

ME:
“Ah, I hoped you’d ask. On US 80, my Showbiz scoundrel, lies one of the greatest motels of them all. Have you ever heard of Little America?”

SHODDY
PRODUCER:
“Yeah. Isn’t that that place where that Admiral Byrd or whatever his name was had all those penguins and polar bears? I saw a documentary once on NB….”

ME:
“No, Jay. One of the great moments of my driving life,
which has been most of my life and I wish I had a dollar for every mile I’ve driven, came one bad day on US 80. I was heading East out of Salt Lake City in a rented Cougar. She was in good shape, with a set of good rubber, and I crossed the Wyoming line about seven o’clock at night. It was in October and all day the sun had been hard and bright and crystal sharp, and you could see for a million miles to the low hills that lay on either side of US 80, which is a fast divided four-lane masterpiece that runs as straight as a die East and West along the lower part of Wyoming, my absolute favorite state. I was trying to make Cheyenne when all of a sudden, with no warning at all, it started to snow, that wind cutting 90 degrees out of the North, right across the highway.