Americana

I didn't know what was so fu

"Fools, pretenders, pharisees and knaves. Beastly here with the final hour of 'Death Is Just Around the Corner.' Some philosophical patter. Some strolls down lobotomy lane. An occasional pocket of dead air. It's just occurred to me, like jukes and jingoes, that you won't be needing my special form of truth much longer. Drugs are scheduled to supplant the media. A dull gloomy bliss will replace the burning fear of your nights and early mornings. You can look forward to experiencing a drug-induced liberation from anxiety, grief and happiness. Endoparasites all, you'll be able to cling to the bowel-walls of time itself But I shall be missed. Pills and magical Chiclets are no substitute for the transistorized love which passes between us in the savage night. I pale with sickly forethoughts. But onward, chloroformed brutes, into the mysteries and mayhems. I ran into an old friend today, Lothar Nobo, the former George Jefferson Carver Eleanor Roosevelt III. No doubt the news has reached even the most barricaded among you that Lothar Nobo is currently the nation's chief spokesman for black manhood and pride, pending release of next month's top forty. I first met Lothar last year on the J. Edgar Hooverplatz in West Berlin where we were both attending the international book-burning fair. If I recall, he made a few rather demeaning statements to the press concerning the private parts of our esteemed head of state, H. C. Porny. But I don't want to talk about that. Suddenly I prefer to discuss more gentle matters. Enough of obscenity. My life is being overwhelmed by redeeming prurient value.

Everywhere I walk, I see the flowering of my nightlong labors. Now that history has absolved me, and with a vengeance, I think I'd like to go very far away-to the Aran Islands, to the Sahara, to some village high in the Himalayas. There to situate my stale body and well-paid mind against the wild dogs of nature. Sea, desert and mountain. What neo-saintly El Dorados of solitude. What amazement on my face when I emerge from my earth-covered wickiup to see not the diffident old gents and waxy ladies of Sixty-fourth Street but some tall Mephistophelean yak shambling through the snowdrifts. I spin my Harry Winston prayer wheel. Or I stand above the furious sea, urbane man of Aran, spitting in my own face. Temporal salvation. Alone, I might be able to sustain a serious thought or two. Pure mathematics of the desert. To be gone from this radioactive puddle. My skin is getting dry and flaky. My tongue is coated with isotopes. My extremities, all of them, are turning blue. All secrets are contained in the desert. Lines intersecting in the sand. Where you are and what you are. Bedouinism in all of its bedpan humor. Buckmulliganism in its bowl. An Irish Arab lives in my i

The test track was a nine-mile circle in the desert. It was sunrise and we were parked on an overpass watching the trucks and cars move beneath us. Clevenger said they rolled twenty-four hours a day, six days a week, all kinds of weather. Every so often one of the drivers falls asleep, he said; goes barreling off the road; turns over six or eight times; burns to death. Trucks don't bounce as much as cars but seem to burn better. Then he said it was time to be checking in at the office but first he took a turn around the track, nine very hasty miles, his final burst for the wire, speedometer quivering at 117. I wondered why he had come out here before going home.

In the office he showed me some schedules and gave me a brief run-down of the operation. He had twelve more or less steady employees; four were white, two black, six Mexican. The workload was informally organized in such a way that the Mexicans did most of the driving, the blacks most of the tire-changing, the whites most of the balancing and measuring as well as the checking of air pressure, temperature, tread loss and the rest. I told him I wanted to drive and change tires and he seemed to look at me in anger at all dumb-ass northern guilt and i

"Anybody who tries to predict the weather in Texas is either a stranger or a damn fool."

"Right," I said.

A man stood by the window drinking something hot from a paper cup and Clevenger went outside to talk to him. I called Warren Beasley at his home.

"For our cash jackpot of $840,000, can you identify the man or woman who was playing third base for the Philadelphia Phillies at the exact moment that James Mason walked into the sea to save Judy Garland's career?"

"I don't talk money without my lawyers," he said. "Who is this?"

"David Bell. I heard the show a couple of hours ago. I'm down here in the middle of nowhere. I thought you were kind of unfu

"I couldn't sleep," he said.