Republican Party Reptile

  I remembered that Bill Baker, Ferrari’s director of public relations, had told me, “Be sure not to———or you’ll foul the plugs.” But what it was that I wasn’t supposed to———, I had no idea. So, finally, I just started it up and very tentatively, very nervously drove it out onto the Garden State Parkway, where the plugs immediately fouled. We coasted onto the berm. I got the car started again and out into traffic and it loaded up and stalled. I got it started another time and it began to misfire and choke, and I had to stick it in third and run it up over five grand just to keep the engine moving.

  “I thought you knew how to drive one of these,” said my boss. And I had to keep it in third all the way to Trenton before the plugs cleared. A solid wall of dirty traffic was pressing in from every side while I sat perspiring, not a fender in sight, waiting for some passing jackass in a Peterbilt to make a belly tank out of us. I got off the turnpike at Wilmington and headed down the Delmarva Peninsula. The car seemed to be running all right, but now Julian wanted to drive. I was afraid that if he didn’t keep the revs up, we’d stall again, and I couldn’t explain to him how to drive the car because I hadn’t the slightest idea myself, and, besides, I just didn’t feel like riding along at fifty-five with this lawyer type at the wheel telling me how foreign cars of this kind seemed “quite unusual in their method of operation” or some such. I mean, Julian’s a New Yorker, and New Yorkers think all cars are yellow and have lights on the roof. So I held him off down past Dover, but he was beginning to insist, and he’s my boss, and what could I do?

  We had just turned off onto Route 1 along Delaware Bay when I put him behind the wheel. Route 1 is a brand-new road, four lanes wide and butter-smooth, built to carry hordes of picnic-prone Wilmingtonians down to the ocean shore. But in December there’s nothing and nobody in sight. Julian settled into the driver’s seat and gave the Millennium Falcon- like controls a momentary glance. Then he stamped on the accelerator with an expensive loafer and redlined the 308 up through the gears to a hundred miles an hour through the potato fields and abandoned burger stands without time to even take his hand off the shift lever until he hit fifth, and when he did have time to take his hand off he used that hand to plop a Blondie cassette into the Blaupunkt and a quarter-ton of decibels came on with “Die Young Stay Pretty,” and the scenery exploded in the distance, bush and tree debris flying at us while my eyeballs pressed all the way back into the medulla, and that quadruple-throated three-quart V-8 wound up beyond the vocal range of Maria Callas, Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee, leaving, I’m sure, a trail of shattered stemware in the more prosperous of the farmhouses we passed along our way.

  And so it was Julian, my sobersided superior in the corporate hierarchy, who turned out to be the real leadfoot. He spent his half of the driving time doing a very credible imitation of Wolfgang von Trips, while I spent my half of the driving time nervously looking for cops. He turned out to be a pretty good guy, too, for a lawyer. (Although, to protect his marriage and business career, his views on drugs and teenaged girls will go unrecorded.) Anyway, it was that moment out on Delaware Route 1 that changed the entire complexion of the trip.

  I guess what we were supposed to be doing with the car was to see if it could perform the function for which it was built. That function is high-speed touring, and the answer is YES, carved in those monumental granite letters that once were used for the title frames in movies like El Cid. The Ferrari isn’t much to bop around town in. It’s necessarily stiff and uncompromising at low speeds. And you’d sooner dock a sailboat in a basement utility sink than try to parallel-park it. But turn the son of a bitch loose on the open road and it’s as though you’ve died and gone to hot-rod heaven. True, the 308 wasn’t designed, really, for American touring, where the speed limit is fifty-five and distances are measured in thousands of miles instead of hundreds of kilometers. There’s nary a gear in the box where the Ferrari will do fifty-five with pleasure, and the luggage space wouldn’t make a good ice bucket. But the answer to those complaints is, Who gives a good goddam? You drive this car for an hour, a hundred miles down the coast between the dunes, with the cattails waving in the tidal marshes and the winter surf crashing on the sea walls, through a blur of empty resort towns with the afternoon sun down low and Edward Hopper-bright across the landscape—you do that for an hour and you’ll kill for this car. You’ll murder people in their beds just to get back behind the wheel.

  We slipped down the eastern shore of Maryland, on into that tag end of Virginia below Assateague Island and out onto the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. This eighteen-mile ocean transit is nearly as awesome a piece of engineering as what we were driving and a sight of heart-aching beauty in the moonlight. We launched ourselves down the trestle causeway, flying low above the water, then plunging into the sea like a depth charge and up onto the high-level bridges like an epiphany in a New Yorker short story. At Norfolk we pitched into the narrow, twisting roads along the North Carolina border and went, just wreathed in shit-eating grins, all the way to Greensboro.

  We chose Greensboro for the night because there’s a Ferrari dealer there. And the car, joy that it was, was not running right. We kept loosing power, especially when Julian was driving—a seat-of-the-pants problem, as it turned out. Under the 308’s driver seat there’s a cutoff switch that kills the engine after five seconds without weight on the seat cushion. This is in case you turn turtle and are lying on your head with gasoline running down your leg. The kill switch keeps the car from becoming a Molotov cocktail. Julian is a boss, but he’s not a big boss, and he just didn’t generate enough down-force to keep the switch from unswitching. This thingamabob is an admirable safety device, no doubt, but we had the Greensboro dealer yank it. Then we had him tune up the car and send the bill to Ferrari North America.

  Julian and I set out to try for the nighttime fast-driving-and-scotch-drinking-with-a-large-dinner record time to Atlanta. The car was even faster, even smoother than before and absolutely bulletproof now. We would put nearly three thousand more miles on it, most of them at over a hundred miles an hour, and the solitary mechanical problem we would have between Greensboro and L.A. would be the electric antenna’s bezel vibrating itself off somewhere in east Texas, so that when I put the antenna up it shot six feet out of the right rear fender, trailing its line like a harpoon into the middle of the LBJ Hilton parking lot.

  It was on our way to Atlanta that Julian and I began to feel really at home in the Ferrari, began to feel sharp with its stiff little clutch and slim shift gates and with the frightening immediacy of its steering—straight from your left brain to the road. We even began to feel comfortable half-recumbent in that mousehole cockpit filled with levers and toggles and with hardly enough room for candy bars and tape cassettes. Maps, flashlights, and sunglasses bulged out of the leather pockets on the doors. The radar detector was clipped on the right sun visor with its controls in the passenger’s face and its patch cord to the cigarette lighter tangling his every move. But we felt we could stay in there for a whole Apollo mission if only we had relief tubes.

  We screamed along in the night with a tape of Bruce Springsteen’s street-racing songs for a score in a car that had ceased to seem strange or exotic or even pretty. Now it just seemed like the apotheosis of perfect speed from perfect function through perfection of design to the perfection of our mood. And there we were in something that could outhandle anything it couldn’t outrun, and there wasn’t anything it couldn’t outrun.

  When we got to Atlanta, the band in the hotel bar was the worst thing we’d ever heard. But it didn’t matter. Nothing could cloud our outlook. Ralph Nader himself would have been welcome at our table, so infected were we with the spirit of superiority to the humdrum concerns of daily life. I mean this car does one thing. It makes you happy.

  And the car did one more thing for me. It reaffirmed my belief in America. It may sound strange to say that a $45,000 Italian sports car reaffirmed my belief in America,
but, as I said, it’s all part of western civilization and here we were in America, the apogee of that fine trend in human affairs. And, after all, what have we been getting civilized for, all these centuries? Why did we fight all those wars, conquer all those nations, kidnap all those Africans, and kill all the Indians in the western hemisphere? Why, for this! For this perfection of knowledge and craft. For this conquest of the physical elements. For this sense of mastery of man over nature. To be in control of our destinies—and there is no more profound feeling of control over one’s destiny that I have ever experienced than to drive a Ferrari down a public road at 130 miles an hour. Only God can make a tree, but only man can drive by one that fast. And if the lowly Italians, the lamest, silliest, least stable of our NATO allies, can build a machine like this, just think what it is that we can do. We can smash the atom. We can cure polio. We can fly to the moon if we like. There is nothing we can’t do. Maybe we don’t happen to build Ferraris, but that’s not because there’s anything wrong with America. We just haven’t turned the full light of our intelligence and ability in that direction. We were, you know, busy elsewhere. We may not have Ferraris but just think what our Polaris-missile submarines are like. And if it feels like this in a Ferrari at 130, my God, what can it possibly feel like at Mach 2.5 in an F-15? Ferrari 308s and F-15s—these are the conveyances of free men. What do the Bolshevik automatons know of destiny and its control? What have we to fear from the barbarous Red hordes?

  Actually, at the time when this thought occurred to me we were out in west Texas, half a thousand miles from any population center or major military base, so Julian and I probably had nothing at all to fear from the barbarous Red hordes. The highway patrol, however, was another matter. You may wonder how we kept ourselves from being fined into starvation or, anyway, thrown into jail during this transmigration. The credit for that goes all to the radar detector. After a couple of days we learned to read the machine so that we could tell even at what angle the radar gun was pointed and whether it was in a moving patrol car or a stationary one. In fact, our biggest legal danger lay not in getting apprehended by the police but in apprehending them, coming up over some rise at 110 or 120 and rocketing up the tailpipe of an unsuspecting smokey. We spent a lot of time peering down the road trying to figure out what we were about to overtake, and every time we crossed a state line we had to spend about an hour figuring out what that state’s patrol cars looked like. But, as it was, we only got one ticket all week. It was on the last night, right after the New Year’s weekend, in jammed-solid, rush-hour-like traffic from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. We were in California, where the highway patrol doesn’t even have radar, and all we were trying to do was get around one carload of vacationers to get stuck behind the next when we were pulled over. Officer Huyenga (as best I can make out his signature on the ticket) was politeness itself and should be promoted to governor. “It’s a shame,” he said, “to have a car like this and only be able to go fifty-five.” We suppressed a chuckle, and I believe he did too, and so we got our only ticket—for going ten miles an hour over the limit.

  From Atlanta to Dallas we’d stayed on the Interstates, but once past Fort Worth we took the empty, two-laned U.S. 180 across the astonishing west-Texas landscape and then, in the twilight, through the big mesas that make up the southeast corner of New Mexico. There we got into our only other real race of the trip, with a pickup truck full of drunk bauxite miners or some such, and those boys could really drive a pickup truck. They held their own up through a hundred miles an hour on the curves and bends into Carlsbad, and then we left them and went back into Texas down switchbacks and hairpins skirting the edges of Guadalupe Peak. This was where I first discovered why you wear driving gloves. I’d always thought they make you look like a golf pro, but somebody had given me a pair as a going-away present and I found that you wear them because of how much your palms sweat when you’re scared. But the Ferrari was just as solid at ninety and a hundred in the mountains as it had been at 130 in the straights. Nothing that either of us ever did so much as made one tire blush with the thought of wavering from its appointed course. In fact, the only thing that made the mountains exciting was that although the Ferrari wasn’t going to put us over the side, there was every chance that Julian or I might. But we didn’t, and we drove into El Paso for the evening.

  No matter how many times you’ve seen it, it’s incredible the way the cities of the Southwest pop up from nowhere at night—vast, glowing fairylands. Although in this particular fairyland we took a wrong turn and wound up with an accidental ten-minute tour of Ciudad Juárez. The Ferrari startled the Mexican customs official into a ballet of Señor-you-may-pass-through-with-pleasure-with-honor-with-gratitude pantomimes. I’m sure it made his night. The Mexican customs official startled us, too, because that was when we discovered we were in Mexico; with horrible visions of Ferrari confiscations, I got turned around and headed back to America. The American customs officials were also extremely courteous. I guess they figured that whatever it was we were smuggling we’d already smuggled it and were happily living off the proceeds, so it was too late now. Juárez, incidentally, greatly testifies to the value of western civilization by exhibiting no sign of it anywhere.

  The next day we drove to Las Vegas. Oh, the pure joy of the thing—knowing that out there, down that road, there’s a fellow doing sixty-five or seventy, a little nervous, watching for cops, maybe his wife’s telling him to slow down, and then screaming out of nowhere comes something not half his height, an eardrumpopping Doppler whizz just beneath the very bone point of his left elbow resting on the window frame. Whaizzat??!!! What was that??!! We could see his bumper wiggle behind us as he’d give the wheel a startled jerk, and we’d be in the next county before that fellow’d regain his composure.

  Julian hit the record high speed of our trip—140, on 1-10 going into Deming, New Mexico. And at Lordsburg we turned off onto U.S. 70 up into the mountains and Indian reservations east of Phoenix and from there across the desert all the way to Lake Mead. And we didn’t meet a single dislikable person. Not that day or any other, from the puzzled receptionist at Ferrari North America to Officer Huyenga of the California Highway Patrol. Fine, upstanding, friendly, outgoing Americans who wanted to know how fast it would go, every one. It was truly heartening. The nicest bunch of people you’d ever care to meet. It made me wish I didn’t belong to the Republican Party and the NRA just so I could go out and join both to defend it all. And rolling through the desert thus, I worked myself into a great patriotic frenzy, which culminated on the parapets of Hoover Dam (even if that was kind of a socialistic project and built by the Roosevelt in the wheelchair and not by the good one who killed bears). With the Ferrari parked up atop that orgasmic arc of cement, doors flung open and Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls” blasting into the night above the rush of a man-crafted Niagara and the crackle and the hum of mighty dynamos, I was uplifted, transported, ecstatic. A black man in a big, solid Eldorado pulled up next to us and got out to shake our hands. “You passed me this morning down in New Mexico,” he said. “And that sure is a beautiful car. And you sure must have been moving because I’ve been going ninety on the turnpike all day and haven’t stopped for anything but gas and I just caught up with you now.” But we hadn’t been on the turnpike, we told him. We’d been all through the mountains and had stopped for lunch and had been caught in Phoenix traffic half the afternoon. “Goddam!” he said. “That’s beautiful!” Now where on the face of God’s green earth are you going to find a country with people like that in it? Answer me that and tell me anyplace but here and I’ll strangle you for a communist spy.

  That was New Year’s Eve, and we celebrated that night in the MGM Grand. I’m sorry to say that the Ferrari does not confer great good fortune at the blackjack table. But we were paid a fine compliment the next day at Caesar’s Palace. Instead of making us wait for valet parking, the lot jockey rushed up to us where we were fifth or sixth in line. “No receipt necessary for you, sir,” he said, a
nd swept the car around in a tight U-turn and parked it right in front.

  And that evening we headed up the Barstow incline to Los Angeles and got our ticket and I dropped Julian off so he could return to the staid world of business acumen, if he can. I kept the Ferrari for as long as I could the next day, roving around Beverly Hills and driving up and down Mulholland Drive, but it had to be delivered to Ferrari’s West Coast headquarters in Compton by five o’clock. It was a terrible thing to give it back, but I headed down the Harbor Freeway feeling every bit as good as I had for every moment since we first hit a hundred back in Delaware. It was a glow that wouldn’t fade. And I still felt good when I flipped the keys onto the receptionist’s desk. And I still felt good when I hopped into the limousine I’d thoughtfully charged to Car and Driver to ease the pain of transition. And, in fact, I still feel good today.

  But the story ends on a sad note. The movie that this incredible car traveled all that way to be in will be called Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow in Hawaii, so maybe western civilization hasn’t quite been perfected yet.

  High-Speed

  Performance

  Characteristics of

  Pickup Trucks

  I’m an experienced pickup truck driver. I was driving my pickup the other Saturday night after having—as I made very clear to the police—hardly anything to drink and while going—honest, officer—about thirty miles an hour when, I swear, a deer ran into the road, and I was forced to pull off the highway with such abruptness that it took the wrecker crew six hours to get my truck out of the woods.