Republican Party Reptile(30)

Actually, at the time when this thought occurred to me we were out in west Texas, half a thousand miles from any population center or major military base, so Julian and I probably had nothing at all to fear from the barbarous Red hordes. The highway patrol, however, was another matter. You may wonder how we kept ourselves from being fined into starvation or, anyway, thrown into jail during this transmigration. The credit for that goes all to the radar detector. After a couple of days we learned to read the machine so that we could tell even at what angle the radar gun was pointed and whether it was in a moving patrol car or a stationary one. In fact, our biggest legal danger lay not in getting apprehended by the police but in apprehending them, coming up over some rise at 110 or 120 and rocketing up the tailpipe of an unsuspecting smokey. We spent a lot of time peering down the road trying to figure out what we were about to overtake, and every time we crossed a state line we had to spend about an hour figuring out what that state’s patrol cars looked like. But, as it was, we only got one ticket all week. It was on the last night, right after the New Year’s weekend, in jammed-solid, rush-hour-like traffic from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. We were in California, where the highway patrol doesn’t even have radar, and all we were trying to do was get around one carload of vacationers to get stuck behind the next when we were pulled over. Officer Huyenga (as best I can make out his signature on the ticket) was politeness itself and should be promoted to governor. “It’s a shame,” he said, “to have a car like this and only be able to go fifty-five.” We suppressed a chuckle, and I believe he did too, and so we got our only ticket—for going ten miles an hour over the limit.

From Atlanta to Dallas we’d stayed on the Interstates, but once past Fort Worth we took the empty, two-laned U.S. 180 across the astonishing west-Texas landscape and then, in the twilight, through the big mesas that make up the southeast corner of New Mexico. There we got into our only other real race of the trip, with a pickup truck full of drunk bauxite miners or some such, and those boys could really drive a pickup truck. They held their own up through a hundred miles an hour on the curves and bends into Carlsbad, and then we left them and went back into Texas down switchbacks and hairpins skirting the edges of Guadalupe Peak. This was where I first discovered why you wear driving gloves. I’d always thought they make you look like a golf pro, but somebody had given me a pair as a going-away present and I found that you wear them because of how much your palms sweat when you’re scared. But the Ferrari was just as solid at ninety and a hundred in the mountains as it had been at 130 in the straights. Nothing that either of us ever did so much as made one tire blush with the thought of wavering from its appointed course. In fact, the only thing that made the mountains exciting was that although the Ferrari wasn’t going to put us over the side, there was every chance that Julian or I might. But we didn’t, and we drove into El Paso for the evening.

No matter how many times you’ve seen it, it’s incredible the way the cities of the Southwest pop up from nowhere at night—vast, glowing fairylands. Although in this particular fairyland we took a wrong turn and wound up with an accidental ten-minute tour of Ciudad Juárez. The Ferrari startled the Mexican customs official into a ballet of Señor-you-may-pass-through-with-pleasure-with-honor-with-gratitude pantomimes. I’m sure it made his night. The Mexican customs official startled us, too, because that was when we discovered we were in Mexico; with horrible visions of Ferrari confiscations, I got turned around and headed back to America. The American customs officials were also extremely courteous. I guess they figured that whatever it was we were smuggling we’d already smuggled it and were happily living off the proceeds, so it was too late now. Juárez, incidentally, greatly testifies to the value of western civilization by exhibiting no sign of it anywhere.

The next day we drove to Las Vegas. Oh, the pure joy of the thing—knowing that out there, down that road, there’s a fellow doing sixty-five or seventy, a little nervous, watching for cops, maybe his wife’s telling him to slow down, and then screaming out of nowhere comes something not half his height, an eardrumpopping Doppler whizz just beneath the very bone point of his left elbow resting on the window frame. Whaizzat??!!! What was that??!! We could see his bumper wiggle behind us as he’d give the wheel a startled jerk, and we’d be in the next county before that fellow’d regain his composure.

Julian hit the record high speed of our trip—140, on 1-10 going into Deming, New Mexico. And at Lordsburg we turned off onto U.S. 70 up into the mountains and Indian reservations east of Phoenix and from there across the desert all the way to Lake Mead. And we didn’t meet a single dislikable person. Not that day or any other, from the puzzled receptionist at Ferrari North America to Officer Huyenga of the California Highway Patrol. Fine, upstanding, friendly, outgoing Americans who wanted to know how fast it would go, every one. It was truly heartening. The nicest bunch of people you’d ever care to meet. It made me wish I didn’t belong to the Republican Party and the NRA just so I could go out and join both to defend it all. And rolling through the desert thus, I worked myself into a great patriotic frenzy, which culminated on the parapets of Hoover Dam (even if that was kind of a socialistic project and built by the Roosevelt in the wheelchair and not by the good one who killed bears). With the Ferrari parked up atop that orgasmic arc of cement, doors flung open and Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls” blasting into the night above the rush of a man-crafted Niagara and the crackle and the hum of mighty dynamos, I was uplifted, transported, ecstatic. A black man in a big, solid Eldorado pulled up next to us and got out to shake our hands. “You passed me this morning down in New Mexico,” he said. “And that sure is a beautiful car. And you sure must have been moving because I’ve been going ninety on the turnpike all day and haven’t stopped for anything but gas and I just caught up with you now.” But we hadn’t been on the turnpike, we told him. We’d been all through the mountains and had stopped for lunch and had been caught in Phoenix traffic half the afternoon. “Goddam!” he said. “That’s beautiful!” Now where on the face of God’s green earth are you going to find a country with people like that in it? Answer me that and tell me anyplace but here and I’ll strangle you for a communist spy.