The Ferrari in the Bedroom (26 page)

The snow was coming down so fast and hard that I felt I was driving through a white tunnel and I couldn’t see fifteen feet ahead of the Cougar. Right ahead of me I could barely make out the red taillights of a big semi, and I figured I’d hang on to him like grim death, since I figured he could see the road. It got colder and colder, and my windshield was freezing up faster than the defrosters could blow it off.

I had the radio turned to a station in Rawlins, Wyoming, and they began giving out emergency storm alerts. Let me tell you, you’ve never been in a blizzard until you’ve been in a real Wyoming screamer. Well, I figured all I could do was push on. The night was so black that nothing existed except my headlights and all that snow, and those two faint tail-lights up ahead. Well, I hung on to the back of that semi like a barnacle, and I could see another guy hanging on to me off in the haze through my rearview mirror. We boomed on through the night. It seemed like forever. Then, all of a sudden I saw a sign, barely visible through the snow off to my right where some range cattle were huddled up in a snowbank
next to a barbed wire fence. LITTLE AMERICA FIVE MILES AHEAD FREE ICE CREAM CONES.

The sign was shaped like a penguin. For a second or two I thought, Christ, my mind has snapped, at last, I know this snow is bad enough, but ‘Little America’! But no, it was really there. The wind howled and the snow kept getting worse and worse. Temperature must have been down around zero when I came to this turn-off with a big arrow: LITTLE AMERICA.

Well, I pulled off, swung under the underpass amid the snowbanks, and the next thing I knew I was driving into the biggest goddamn gas station I ever saw in my life. They must have had two hundred pumps, and there, spread out before me, was one of the greatest motels of them all. Little America. I went into the lobby, and I can’t tell you how good that heat felt after that night on US 80.

I think I must have got damn near the last room, and here I was in the middle of nowhere, at Little America, on the edge of the void, in a room that had crystal chandeliers, Florentine furniture, silver candelabra, blood-red velvet walls with a carpet so thick I sunk up to my ankles. Outside the wind howled and the antelope came nuzzling up to the glass windows of my room. I wandered down to the dining room where they had fresh Rocky Mountain trout and baked abalone, and one of the greatest bars in all creation, where everyone sat around drinking Jim Beam and laughing at the storm that raged outside.

Why, Jay, Little America is the only motel in the world that has its own Post Office. It’s a whole town. This storm kept up for three days. They kept reporting hunters lost in the hills. And every night I’d come back from that fine Wyoming food and that good Wyoming liquor; lounge
around under my crystal chandelier, with my candelabra gleaming and the red velvet walls glowing like blood, and I figured that if there’s anything finer than a motel named Little America in a storm, I sure as hell don’t know about it.”

SHODDY
PRODUCER:
“Hey, that gives me an idea. Have you ever thought of writing about a motel? See, there’s this poor waitress, kind of a Kim Stanley type, see, and this guy comes in off the road on a cold night, and he’s on the lam, see, and…”

ME:
“Oh for Chrissake, that’s
Bus Stop.”

SHODDY
PRODUCER:
“A bus stop ain’t the same as a motel.”

ME:
“That reminds me, have I ever told you about the Inn of the Six G Flags, outside of Fort Worth? Now there’s a place that…”

The patient, a Caucasian male aged thirty-nine, had appeared in my offices voluntarily and without reference eight months prior to the transcribed session. He claimed he had found my name “in the Yellow Book,” which did not seem significant to me at the time. Most of our sessions were held in the late afternoon, and he usually appeared at them in a somewhat agitated state, occasionally defensive and evasive. He maintained that his sex life was adequate and satisfying; his relationship with his offspring Mark, 9, and Herman, 13, was in all ways normal, with only the usual
amount of bickering. His wife, Marcia, 31, Caucasian, was unaware of his visits. The following transcript took place at 3:30
P.M.
April 5, 1972, in my office.

ABERCROMBIE:
(after lying stretched out on the couch for some three minutes in silence) “Where’d you get that clock?”

DR.
STRAUSS:
(caught off guard) “Uh… what was that?”

ABERCROMBIE:
“Hmmm.” (lapsing into silence) (At this point he began plucking nervously at the naugahyde upholstery of my Barcalounger.)

DR.
STRAUSS:
“Look, Abercrombie, have you ever thought that maybe there’s nothing really wrong with you, that you like a little nap maybe every afternoon?” (I was using the Abell Schnauzer Cross-grain Technique in an attempt to “get at” Abercrombie. I had attempted this before, but with little success. Today it was different. c.f.
Abell Schnauzer, “Notes: Vienna,” Vol. III, pp. 123–26
) “Look, Abercrombie, I’ve got patients with real problems, and…”

ABERCROMBIE:
“You know, you can get one of these with a vibrator, like a buzzer or something, built in, and it jiggles your back.”

DR.
STRAUSS:
“Get what?”

ABERCROMBIE:
“One of these Barcaloungers. I’ve got one that tilts, and it jiggles me. And it’s got a portable bar built in the arm. You just tilt it back and…”

DR.
STRAUSS:
“Look here, Abercrombie, let’s cut out the small talk. I can’t sit around every afternoon and…”

ABERCROMBIE:
(his voice rising in excitement) (I noticed his pupils were somewhat dilated.) “I also got one that has a hammock attachment that you can swing between trees, and…(His voice broke at this point and he began sobbing uncontrollably, a clear example of convulsive
diaphragmatic emotional nerve charge related to secondary traumic self-revelation. I leaned forward, sensing a breakthrough.)

DR.
STRAUSS:
“There, there.”

ABERCROMBIE:
“Oh God, I can’t stop. Please help me, please! I can’t stop. Oh, Doctor…”

DR.
STRAUSS:
“Stop what? Just tell me about it, Abercrombie. Just relax and talk.”

ABERCROMBIE:
(in a low voice, his fingers plucking at the Barcalounger) “I’m so ashamed, doctor. It’s getting so that I can hardly face my family. Some nights I think it’s all going to come out, and I can hardly drag myself home.” (He pauses, head buried in hands.)

DR.
STRAUSS:
“Yes. Go on. What are you afraid will come out? You can trust me, old man.”

ABERCROMBIE:
(taking deep breath, dabbing at his eyes with a Kleenex) “Doctor, I just bought a Remote Control Transistorized Rotary Home Barbecue.” (I waited for him to go on. We sat for a few moments in silence.)

ABERCROMBIE:
(in a hoarse whisper) “Now you know.” (pause; a deep breath as though gathering strength) “Yesterday I bought a set of stainless steel matched Corncob Pipe Making Tools, in a leather carrying case.”

DR.
STRAUSS:
“I didn’t know you smoked.”

ABERCROMBIE:
“That’s just it! I don’t! But I couldn’t help myself!” (I was beginning to realize that Abercrombie was no ordinary patient. A new, highly developed Complex was slowly emerging.)

DR.
STRAUSS:
“Abercrombie, I want you to close your eyes and just talk.”

ABERCROMBIE:
“Sometimes I think Marcia suspects, and God, what if the kids found out! I knew that I had to do something about it a few months back, when I was playing
with my new electrically operated Sure-Catch-Em Bait Casting Reel. It was raining out. I could hear the rain banging on the roof, and I don’t know, it just got me that day. I looked around at all of it, and I knew I was damn near at the end of the line, and…”

DR.
STRAUSS:
“An automatic electrically operated bait casting reel?”

ABERCROMBIE:
(brightening) “Yeah, it’s great. It has a cross-hair sight on it. It hooks on to any type of spinning rod. You just hit the trigger with your thumb and zappo, it shoots your lure out maybe a half a mile if you want. It uses these mercury batteries, and…”

DR.
STRAUSS:
“Fishing is a relaxing hobby, and I’m glad.”

ABERCROMBIE:
“Oh, I don’t go fishing or anything like that. I just like this reel. I got a bobber that lights up when a fish bites, and I like to turn that off and on, too.”

DR.
STRAUSS:
“You were speaking of the rain on the roof, it seems to me.”

ABERCROMBIE:
“Oh yeah. Well, you know, doctor, I was just sitting there and I got to thinking that I needed help of some kind, after I went for that amphibious ATV with the…”

DR.
STRAUSS:
“ATV?”

ABERCROMBIE:
“All Terrain Vehicle. With a folding duck blind that has these plastic reeds and cattails.” (At this point I suspected the patient was hallucinating. However, subsequent investigation has proved that there
is
such a device, and his description was accurate.)

ABERCROMBIE:
“It cost me damn near four grand, and I was already up to my ass in debt, what with the three snowmobiles.”

DR.
STRAUSS:
“Three
snowmobiles?”

ABERCROMBIE:
“Yeah, not counting the one that I traded in
on the Honda Scrambler. Jesus! I knew I had to do something after that ATV, you bet. They always say that you can live with the soft stuff, but when you start hitting the hard ones you better watch it.”

DR.
STRAUSS:
“They? Soft stuff?”

ABERCROMBIE:
“I’m not the only one, you know. We can tell each other. I know a lot of them. You see them at lunch hour, and Saturday mornings at Sears, and…”

DR.
STRAUSS:
“See whom?”

ABERCROMBIE:
“Us! There’s this one guy who hangs around the Tool department who’s really gone. This guy has a thing on socket wrenches. He must have twelve million dollars worth of socket wrenches stashed around.”

DR.
STRAUSS:
“Socket wrenches? Is he a machinist?”

ABERCROMBIE:
“Hell, no. He’s a TN. Got a thing on socket wrenches. Jesus, they’re the worst. He don’t use ’em, he just buys ’em.”

DR.
STRAUSS:
“A TN?”

ABERCROMBIE:
“Yeah, Christ, they’re the worst. Them TNs got a mean streak in ’em.”

DR.
STRAUSS:
“Excuse me, just what is a TN?”

ABERCROMBIE:
“Oh Christ, I forgot. You’re not one of us. A TN is a Tool Nut. That’s just what we call ’em in the trade. They’re mostly harmless.”

DR.
STRAUSS:
“The trade?”

ABERCROMBIE:
“Yeah. I started as an RB. A guy over in Bloomfield Heights turned me on.” (At this point Abercrombie was relaxed and seemed to be almost enjoying his confession. At the time I was as yet unaware of the implications of what he was saying.)

ABERCROMBIE:
(continuing) “God, I’ll never forget it. I was just wandering around on my lunch hour. looking in store windows along Sixth Avenue when this guy standing next to
me looking in this window said, ‘Boy, those Japanese jobs are something! There’s one that picks up the Weather band
and
Sonar as well as FM.’ At first I didn’t pay any attention to him, but then I noticed he was panting, and was sweating a lot. I said, ‘Sonar?’ He answers, ‘Yeah, it makes a kind of buzz. You never know when you might need it to navigate with.’ Well, to make a long story short, I bought this thirty-nine band Japanese radio that got Sonar and I noticed the other guy bought one too, and everybody in the store seemed to know him. It was the beginning. I still see him around, and he’s gone down hill a lot and looks kind of seedy, the way RBs get in the end.”

DR.
STRAUSS:
“RB? Does that refer to…?”

ABERCROMBIE:
“Yeah, you guessed it. Radio Bug. A lot of us get started on soft stuff like radios and work up. ’Course, Radio Bugs like to pretend that it’s just a harmless habit, no worse than maybe martinis, but don’t you believe it.”