Republican Party Reptile(28)

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.”

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.