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.