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?