different from my own, proved knowledgeable, and learnedly discussed with Timothy the relative merits of the gratin de ris de veau; the rognons de veau a la Borde-laise, the caneton aux cerises, the supremes de volaille aux champignons. (The summer he was sixteen, he explained afterward, he had served as catamite to a distinguished Southampton gourmet.) It was ultimately impossible for me to cope with the menu, and Ned selected a dinner for me, Timothy doing the same for Oliver. I remember oysters, turtle soup, white wine followed by red, a marvelous something of lamb, potatoes made mostly of air, broccoli in a thick yellow sauce. Snifters of cognac for everyone afterward. Legions of waiters hovered over us as solicitously as though we were four bankers out on a binge, not four shabbily dressed college boys. I caught a glimpse of the check and it stunned me: $112, exclusive of tip. With a grand nourish Timothy produced his credit card. I felt feverish, dizzy, overstuffed; I thought I might vomit at the table, there amid the crystal chandeliers, the red plush wallpaper, the elegant linens. The spasm passed without disgrace and once outside I felt better, though still queasy. I made a mental note to spend forty or fifty years of my immortality in a serious study of the culinary arts. Timothy spoke of forging onward to groovy coffeehouses farther to the north, but the rest of us were tired and we voted him down. Back to the hotel, a long walk, perhaps an hour through the cutting cold.
We had taken a suite, two bedrooms, Ned and I in one, Timothy and Oliver in the other. I dumped my clothes and collapsed quickly into bed. Not enough sleep, too much food: ghastly, ghastly. Exhausted though I was, I remained awake, more or less, dozing, stupefied. The rich dinner lay like stones in my gut. A good puking, I decided some hours later, would be best for me. Purge-bound, I staggered naked toward the bathroom separating the two bedrooms. And encountered a terrifying apparition in the dark corridor. A naked girl, taller than I, with long heavy breasts, startlingly flaring hips, a corona of short curling brown hair. A succubus of the night! A phantom spawned by my overheated imagination! “Hi, handsome,” she said, and winked, and passed me in a miasma of perfume and lust-smells, leaving me to stare in astonishment at her opulent retreating buttocks until the bathroom door closed behind them. I shivered with fright and horniness. Not even on acid had I experienced such tangible hallucinations; could Escoffier achieve what LSD could not? How beautiful, how meaty, how elegant she was. I heard water running in the John. Peered into the far bedroom, my eyes fully adjusted to the darkness now. Frilly feminine clothes scattered everywhere. Timothy snoring in one bed; in the other, Oliver, and on Oliver’s pillow, a second head, female. No hallucinations, then. Where had they found these girls? The room next door? No. I understood. Call girls supplied by room service. The trusty credit card strikes again. Timothy comprehends the American way as I, poor cramped studious ghetto lad, never could hope to do. Want a woman? You have but to lift the phone and ask. My throat was dry; my mast was raised; I felt thunder in my chest. Timothy sleeps; very well, since she’s been hired for the night, I’ll borrow her awhile. When she comes out of the john I’ll swagger up to her, one hand on her tits, one to the rump, feel the silky satiny smoothness of her, give her the Bogart rumble deep down in the throat, invite her to my bed. Indeed. And the bathroom door opened. She glided forth, breasts swaying, ding-dong-ding-dong. Another wink. And past me, gone. I groped air. Her long, lean back, swelling into two astounding globular cheeks; the scent of cheap musky fragrance; the fluid, hip-wiggling stride; the bedroom door closing in my face. She is hired, but not for me. She is Timothy’s. I went into the john, knelt before the throne, spent eons upchucking. Then to my lonely bed for cold bad-trip dreams. In the morning, no girls visible. We were on the road before nine, Oliver at the wheel, St. Louis our next port of call. I sank into apocalyptic gloom. I would have shattered empires that morning, if my thumb had been on the right button. I would have unleashed Strangelove. I would have set free the Fenris wolf. I would have zapped the universe, had the chance been mine.
chapter twelve
Oliver
I drove for five hours without a break. It was beautiful. They wanted to stop, to piss, to stretch their legs, to get hamburgers, to do this, to do that, but I didn’t pay any attention, I just went driving on. My foot glued to the accelerator, my fingers resting lightly on the steering wheel, my back absolutely straight, my head almost motionless, my eyes trained on a point twenty or thirty feet in front of the windshield. The rhythm of motion possessed me. It was almost a sexual thing: the long glossy car leaping forward, raping the highway, me in command. I took real pleasure from it. I actually got hard for a while. Last night, with those whores Timothy found, my heart wasn’t really in it, Oh I went three rounds, but only because it was expected of me, and in my thrifty hayseed way I didn’t want to waste Timothy’s money. Three pops I had, the way the girl said it: “You want to work off another pop now, sweet?” But this, with the car, the long sustained unending thrust of the cylinders, this is practically a kind of intercourse, this is ecstasy. I think I understand now what the motorcycle freaks feel. On and on and on. The throbbing underneath you. We took Route 66, down through Joliet, through Bloomington, on toward Springfield. Not much traffic, lines of trucks in some places but otherwise hardly anything, and the telephone poles going ftick-nick-nick past me all the time. A mile a minute, three hundred miles in five hours, even for me an excellent average for driving in the East. Bare, flat fields, some of them still covered with snow. Complaints from the peanut gallery, Eli calling me a goddamn driving machine, Ned nagging me to stop. I pretended I didn’t hear them. Eventually they left me alone. Timothy slept, mostly. I was king of the road. By noon it was apparent we’d be in St. Louis in another couple of hours. The plan had been to spend the night there, but that no longer made sense, and when Timothy woke up he got out his maps and tourist guides and started figuring the next lap of the trip. He and Eli had a fight over the way Timothy had planned things. I didn’t pay much attention. I think Eli’s point was that we should have headed for Kansas City, not St. Louis, coming out of Chicago. I could have told them that a long time ago, but I didn’t care what route they took; anyway I wasn’t keen on passing through Kansas again. Timothy hadn’t realized Chicago and St. Louis were so close together when he first sketched our route.
I tuned out on their squabbling and spent some time thinking about something Eli had said last night while we were running around sightseeing in Chicago. They hadn’t been moving fast enough for me, and I tried to nag them into hustling some, and Eli said, “You’re really devouring this city, aren’t you? Like a tourist doing Paris.”
“I haven’t ever seen Chicago before,” I told him. “I want to get in as much of it as I can.”
“Okay, that’s cool,” he said. But I wanted to know why he was so surprised that I was curipus about strange cities. He looked uncomfortable and seemed eager to change the subject. I prodded him. Finally he said, with the little laugh he uses to tell you that he’s going to say something with insulting implications but you mustn’t think he’s serious, “I just wondered why someone who seems so normal, so well-adjusted, is all that interested in sightseeing so intensely.” He amplified, unwillingly: to Eli, the hunger for experience, the quest for knowledge, the eagerness to see what’s over the next hill are all traits that pertain primarily to those who are underprivileged in some way — members of minority groups, people who have physical blemishes or handicaps, those troubled by social hangups, and so forth. A big good-looking muscular clod like me isn’t supposed to have the neuroses that engender intellectual curiosity; he’s supposed to be relaxed and easygoing, like Timothy. My little display of intensity was out of character, according to Eli’s reading of what my character ought to be. Because he’s so far into the ethnic thing, I was ready to have him tell me that the desire to learn is fundamentally a trait found in his people, with a few honorable exceptions. But he didn’t quite come out with that, though he was probably thinking it. I wondered then, and still do, why he thinks I’m so well-adjusted. Must you be five feet seven, with one shoulder a little higher than the other, in order to have the obsessions and compulsions that Eli equates with intelligence? Eli underestimates me. He’s got me stereotyped: big dumb handsome
