The crowd was squeezed even thicker than it had been at Baclaran church. I was with Tony and Betsy West from ABC. When people saw we were reporters, they somehow made way, moved where there was no room to move. “Foreign press!” they yelled. “Make way! Foreign press!” We were handed through the mob, right to second row front on the center aisle.
The crowd chanted, “COR-EEE! COR-EEE!” in a fearful thunderous rumble that made your lungs and liver swing like bell clappers in the rib cage. Then they began to sing. To hear half a million people sing “Bayan Ko” is ... is like hearing half a million people sing anything. Even the theme song to The Jetsons would have been stirring.
Cory Aquino stepped to the microphones. The crowd was in the kind of frenzy, passion, rapture, transport, wild excitement, or enthusiasm that sends a man to the thesaurus.
But did Cory give a rousing speech, calling for the head of Ferdinand Marcos and telling her countrymen, “Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war”?
She did no such thing. In her calm, high-pitched voice and best head-librarian manner she outlined a program of tame dissent. There’d be a national day of prayer, when people should take off work and go to church, she said. She asked the audience to boycott seven banks and certain other “crony corporations,” including the San Miguel brewery. She asked them to delay paying their electric and water bills. And she requested a “noise barrage”—a traditional Philippine protest—each evening after she’d spoken to them over a church-owned AM station. “And you should experiment with other forms of nonviolent protest yourselves,” she said, “and let us know how they work.”
That was it. Keep your money in a sock. Don’t drink beer. And bang garbage-can lids together when you listen to the radio. Betsy, Tony, and I walked away scratching our heads. The crowd dispersed quietly.
Ten days later, they had the country.
Just One of Those
Days
The alarm went off about half an hour late, and I pulled out the old Smith & Wesson 9mm automatic I keep under my pillow and squeezed off a couple of rounds at the fucker. I didn’t even have my eyes open yet but I still managed to nick the snooze button. Kee-rist, I hate to get up in the morning, but I swear they’re going to kill me if I’m late to work again. They killed a couple of other executives just last week—hauled them into the freight elevator and shot them in the head. But I would have gone back to sleep anyway—really—if it hadn’t been for this old bitch in the apartment next door. She was putting her cat out for keeps. She must have taken six shots at the thing and the sucker just wouldn’t die. It was howling bloody murder. I threw a couple of slugs through the wall in her general direction and then hit the deck and bellycrawled to the kitchen while she returned fire. Using the dishwasher for cover, I made myself a cup of coffee and then I slipped out onto the fire escape and popped a white phosphorus grenade through the old bat’s window so I could shower and shave standing up.
Then I couldn’t find any clean shirts. And when I did find one it took me twenty minutes to disarm the plastique charge the fucking Chinaman had pressed behind the shirt cardboard. I finally had to set it off in the sink. It was a brand-new shirt too. And the explosion about wrecked the kitchen. The apartment was a mess anyway. Good thing the cleaning lady was coming and a double good thing I had the cleaning lady’s kid tied up and booby-trapped in the hall closet or she’d never do windows.
So I was all dressed and ready to go to work, but my date was still asleep, lying on her back with her mouth open, snoring. Even with all the sirens and the fire trucks and the commotion next door, she hadn’t stirred. I don’t know, somehow this really pissed me off, so I picked her up and threw her through the window. My place is only on the third floor so she probably lived. I’ll call her next week and apologize.
The mail hadn’t come yet either. The doorman said there was a company of Marines trying to get through with it, but they were pinned down in Murray Hill somewhere. The doorman was as surly as usual and would have slit my throat if I hadn’t judo-flipped him and kicked him in the solar plexus first.
I was going to drive to work but then I remembered the parking garage up by the office was still under siege. A dozen spook parking attendants were in there holding about thirty school kids from the suburbs. The kids had come in town for the circus. I don’t know why they bothered. Some Puerto Rican meat hunters had got all the elephants already. Anyway, I couldn’t get in to park even though I’ve got a monthly slot. Besides, day before yesterday, the spooks put some of the school kids in this one Cadillac, set it on fire, and drove it off the garage roof. I guess about ten pedestrians were killed when it landed.
Now, I had my favorite little personal-defense unit out of my briefcase and ready as soon as I hit the street. This is a Walther MPK 9mm submachine gun I had special-ordered with selective fire. It doesn’t pack quite the punch that an Uzi does, but it’s the most compact automatic-fire weapon made in the world, at least in 9mm. I’m a real bug on 9mm ammo. It’s kind of my hobby.
By this time, the morning rush hour was in full swing and I couldn’t even get a cab in my peep sights, so I had to take the subway. I hate taking the subway—all those kids that spray graffiti all over the place. The cops ought to tie them up and cut their noses off, which is exactly what the cops are doing except they don’t catch enough of them for my money. Plus it was a regular shitty morning outside, raining and cold, and bombs were dropping in the next block. And I bet twenty snipers took a shot at me between my building and the subway station. I don’t know why those people are allowed out on the streets—they can’t hit a goddam thing. Although one did get a bag lady right by the newsstand and got brains all over my raincoat, which I had just got back from the cleaner’s. And that wasn’t easy either. In fact, it took a midnight raid on the manager’s house in Rego Park, where I picked off all four of his guard dogs with the help of a starlight scope. So there I was with brains all over me and then I had to beat the shit out of the blind guy at the newsstand before he’d give me a paper.
I shot my way past a couple of transit cops at the token booth, jumped the turnstile, and got a train to stop by pushing some lady out on the tracks. It’s surprising, even a hundred-pound woman can derail those babies when they’re going at full throttle, so they generally try to stop if they can. On the train a pack of asshole teenagers was terrorizing everybody, ripping gold chains off women and taking wallets at knifepoint, so I joined them for a while and picked up a little, you know, cab fare. Then I forced everybody, including the conductor, to get in the last car, and I pulled the pin and left them back in the tunnel. Sometimes that’s the only way you can get a seat. Almost got my butt kicked for that, though-who would have thought one of those kids would be carrying a wire-guided antitank missile? Good thing it bounced off a signal light and ricocheted right back at the kid with the launcher or I would have been hurting. I mean it.
I was late for work for sure by now. The subway was running way behind schedule, and I had to help the engineer for a while when we ran across an armored train. It must have been from over on the IND line. Anyway, it was shooting up the 34th Street station. Fortunately I’d planted some radio-detonated Claymore mines under the litter baskets in that station just a week back. And I had the transmitter in my briefcase. It’s great; it doubles as a digital travel clock. The mines killed all the people on the platform and brought a big section of the tunnel roof down on those guys from the IND too.
Well, by the time I blasted my way through the reception area and raped my secretary and piled up the desk and some chairs to barricade myself in my office, the “old man” was really fuming. He was over on the roof of the building across the street with about twenty guys from accounting, and all of them had M-16s and tear-gas-grenade launchers. He was giving me a real talking-to over the bullhorn, telling me to come out with my hands up or forget about that raise. I got my gas mask on and pulled the Browning automatic rifle out from behind the file cabinet and gave him a little argument. But
I couldn’t keep that up for long. I had to take some calls and dictate a bunch of letters and it was a real pain in the ass giving dictation to a secretary who was coughing and gagging from the CS gas and threatening a sexual-harassment suit.
Then I had the Peterson contract to straighten out. They manufacture designer jeans, and what a bunch of hard-nosed sons of bitches they are. Their CEO had been on the horn to me all week threatening to nuke our Tarrytown office if he didn’t see some action soon. Here was a client who was definitely hanging by a thread. And I knew if that Peterson thing fell through my ass would be in deep shit.
I didn’t have time to go out for lunch, so I just had a deli owner and his family killed and some sandwiches sent up. I was working like a bear and by 3:00 I was pretty sure I had all my ducks in a row, and then wouldn’t you know it—fifteen megatons right in the parking lot of our suburban branch office. You probably read about it in the papers. It broke half the windows in Manhattan, and I’ll bet it takes weeks to decontaminate all the radioactive fallout shit all over the place. And that wasn’t the worst of it by any means. Right after Tarrytown goes up in a mushroom cloud and the Peterson account goes with it, the boss finally breaks through my office wall with a Bangalor torpedo and tells me he’s promoted young Donovan over my head to group vice-president. That means I’ll have to go all the way out to Donovan’s house in Darien and poison his kids. Well, that did it. I decided to toss a Molotov cocktail into the mailroom and knock off early.
A couple of the guys and I took our secretaries down to Clark’s for a few drinks, raped the girls again, and then gut-shot one of the waiters and bet on how long it would take him to die. I guess I had a few more than I meant to because I was really bushed. So I thought I’d just have a burger in the back room. I wanted to carve it right out of the cow myself but the fucker wouldn’t hold still. Finally I had to hit it with a tranq gun. Then the guys and I tried to take some det cord and wrap it around the cow’s ass and make chopped steak like that. But the det cord gave the whole thing a really rotten taste. After that I just said fuck dinner and had a couple more drinks and decided to go back to my place and spend a peaceful night at home for a change.
It was still raining outside and I had to call in an air strike to get a taxi. One of the A-IE Sky raiders finally spotted a Checker on Park Avenue and strafed the hack until he chased it over to me. I held the MPK on the driver all the way back to my place and shot up his gas tank for a tip. Then the doorman tried to kill me again and I had to toss a fragmentation grenade at this lady in the lobby to keep her dog from jumping up on me. So I ended up outside waiting around in the rain while one of the building porters cleaned her guts off the elevator door, and then what the fuck do you think I saw? A goddam parking ticket on my car! Jesus, I was pissed. I mean I’m sure it was one of those Jewish holidays when the alternate-side-of-the-street parking regulations are supposed to be suspended. I mean I’m pretty sure all the Jews aren’t killed yet. I would have complained to a cop if he hadn’t shot first. And then when I finally did get inside, fucking Carson was on vacation again and that asshole Letterman was hosting The Tonight Show. Man, it was just one of those days.
Man and
Transportation
Ferrari Refutes the
Decline of the
West
We made it from Atlanta to Dallas in twelve and a half hours. But that was because we were just cruising, you know, taking in the scenery and enjoying the local color. Besides, we got stuck in bumper-to-bumper camper traffic all the way to Birmingham. Some big collegiate sports event was under way—the University of South Carolina versus Alabama’s Crimson Tide in a varsity dogfight, to judge by the fans. No, no, I won’t make fun of those good old boys in their Winnebagos driving since dawn with their good old families all the way from Columbia and Charleston and Beaufort just to root for the team of their choice. No, I won’t crack wise about the denizens of that fair corner of the free world, because I feel too good about western civilization. And the reason I feel too good about western civilization is that there I was a living, breathing part of it, in the best damn car I’ve ever driven, smack in the middle of the best damn country there’s ever been on earth. And, also, because cutting in and out of those giant travel homes at a hundred miles an hour is more fun than a Marseilles shore leave, and hardly anybody riding in them threw beer cans at us either. Zoom, zoom, zip, zip, I couldn’t have been happier if I’d had a sack full of Iranian radicals to drag behind me.
And they love cars down there. Love ’em. The men look, and the women look too. And they smile with honest pleasure just to see something that dangerous-looking doing something that dangerous. But best of all the looks we got were the looks we got from the ten-year-old boys. They’d be back there with their little faces pressed against the glass in the RV back windows, and they’d see this red rocket sled coming up behind them in the $50 lane. It couldn’t help but touch your heart, how their eyes lit up and their mouths dropped down, as if Santa’d brought them an entire real railroad train. You could all but hear the pitter-patter of the sneakers on their feet as they ran up front and started jerking on their dads’ Banlon shirt collars, jumping up and down and yelling and pointing out the windshield, “Didja see it?! Didja see it, Dad?! Didja?! Didja?! Didja?! Didja?!”
We came by a 930 Turbo Porsche near the Talladega exit. He was going about ninety when we passed him, and he gave us a little bit of a run, passed us at about 110, and then we passed him again. He was as game as anybody we came across and was hanging right on our tail at 120. Ah, but then—then we just walked away from him. Five seconds and he was nothing but a bathtub-shaped dot in the mirrors. I suppose he could have kept up, but driving one of those ass-engined Nazi slot cars must be a task at around 225 percent of the speed limit. But not for us. I’ve got more vibration here on my electric typewriter than we had blasting into Birmingham that beautiful morning in that beautiful car on a beautiful tour across this wonderful country from the towers of Manhattan to the bluffs of Topanga Canyon so fast we filled the appointment logs of optometrists’ offices in thirty cities just from people getting their eyes checked for seeing streaks because they’d watched us go by.
Don’t get me wrong; we weren’t racing. This was strictly a pleasure drive. We had a leisurely lunch in Tuscaloosa, had long talks with every gas-station attendant we saw (and at about nine miles a gallon with a nineteen-gallon tank, we saw them all), and ran into some heavy rain in Louisiana too—had to slow down to practically a hundred, as it was a two-lane road. And then in Shreveport we had a big steak dinner with lots of cocktails and coffee and dessert and Rémy Martin. Why, really, we just strolled into Dallas on that third day of a week during which I had more fun than I have ever had doing anything that didn’t involve young women. And this kind of fun lasted longer. And I never fell asleep on top of it.
Actually, the trip didn’t start out all that well. The idea was . . . well, I’m not quite sure what the idea was. But Ferrari North America, which is based in Montvale, New Jersey, had a 308GTS that needed to be delivered to Los Angeles by January 2, to be featured in a movie. Ferrari called Car and Driver and asked if they’d like to assign someone to drive it across the country. Car and Driver was good enough to ask me, and of course I said yes. But I had misgivings. Like anyone who loves cars, I’d been fantasizing about Ferraris since before I knew how to say the name. Fur-rareies, I thought they were. But in my imagination they still all looked like Testa Rossas. In recent years they’d gotten a bit beyond me; I didn’t know what to make of these modern pasta-bender luxoboxes with price tags in the early ionosphere. They have their engines in sideways and backwards, and you sit down on the floor where you can’t see your fenders, your feet, or the road. Or that’s the way they seemed to me when I sat in one at the auto show, which was the only time I ever had sat in one. And because they were so funny-looking, I assumed they were hard to drive. Besides, I’m opposed on principle to things with wheels that cost more than $20,000 (and
don’t have “Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe” written down the side). Why, there are people starving in Italy. Or going hungry, anyway. Well, maybe not hungry, but I’ll bet they don’t have enough closet space and the kids have to share a bedroom. And I had some other problems too. I have a daytime job where I’m editor of the National Lampoon and I had fallen grievously behind in potty jokes, racial slurs, and comments that demean women. Deadlines loomed, the art department was in a pet, and down at the printing plant they were snarling in their cages. I had no business taking off just then to go do something silly in a rolling red expense account. So I wasn’t as enthusiastic about this project as I might have been, especially when I had to go tell my boss, the president of the National Lampoon’s parent corporation, that I had chosen this extremely inconvenient week to go on a cross-country screw-around for the benefit of another magazine. Now this boss of mine, Julian Weber, is a cold, taciturn, hard-eyed Harvard Law School graduate, about fifty years old, always dressed in a suit, and a very square sort of fellow. And as I was standing in front of his desk, backing and filling and making up lies, he began to frown with great concentration. What I was saying was, “I know it doesn’t seem like I’ve been here very much lately but I’ve . . . uh . . . been working at home a lot,” but what I was thinking was where I could get the boxes I would need when I cleaned out my desk.
Then he blurted it out: “Can I go too?”
The next thing I knew, I was sitting in the parking lot at Ferrari, sitting way down on the floor of this $45,000 atomic doorstop, completely puzzled by the controls; and sitting rather stiffly in the bucket seat next to me was my goddam boss. At least he had a pair of blue jeans on, but his blue jeans had been pressed, with a perfect crease across each knee. I don’t know if they sell blue jeans at Brooks Brothers, but if they do that’s where he’d bought these. I couldn’t figure out what it was going to be like, cooped up for a week in a car with somebody and unable to discuss drugs or teenaged girls. I also couldn’t figure out how to work the car. Everyone at Ferrari was on Christmas vacation; the keys had been left with the receptionist. There wasn’t even anyone there to look properly worried, let alone to show me how to start the thing. And the Ferrari manual was translated from Italian to English by someone who spoke only Chinese. “Well,” said Mr. Weber, “I’m ready to go now.”