Oughta hear him tell.
Well, a Zephyr got sap.
The big cars on the highway. Languid, heat-raddled ladies, small nucleuses about whom revolve a thousand accouterments: creams, ointments to grease themselves, coloring matter in phials—black, pink, red, white, green, silver—to change the color of hair, eyes, lips, nails, brows, lashes, lids. Oils, seeds, and pills to make the bowels move. A bag of bottles, syringes, pills, powders, fluids, jellies to make their sexual intercourse safe, odorless, and unproductive. And this apart from clothes. What a hell of a nuisance!
Lines of weariness around the eyes, lines of discontent down from the mouth, breasts lying heavily in little hammocks, stomach and thighs straining against cases of rubber. And the mouths panting, the eyes sullen, disliking sun and wind and earth, resenting food and weariness, hating time that rarely makes them beautiful and always makes them old.
Beside them, little pot-bellied men in light suits and panama hats; clean, pink men with puzzled, worried eyes, with restless eyes. Worried because formulas do not work out; hungry for security and yet sensing its disappearance from the earth. In their lapels the insignia of lodges and service clubs, places where they can go and, by a weight of numbers of little worried men, reassure themselves that business is noble and not the curious ritualized thievery they know it is; that business men are intelligent in spite of the records of their stupidity; that they are kind and charitable in spite of the principles of sound business; that their lives are rich instead of the thin tiresome routines they know; and that a time is coming when they will not be afraid any more.
And these two, going to California; going to sit in the lobby of the Beverly-Wilshire Hotel and watch people they envy go by, to look at mountains—mountains, mind you, and great trees—he with his worried eyes and she thinking how the sun will dry her skin. Going to look at the Pacific Ocean, and I’ll bet a hundred thousand dollars to nothing at all, he will say, “It isn’t as big as I thought it would be.” And she will envy plump young bodies on the beach. Going to California really to go home again. To say, “So-and-So was at the table next to us at the Trocadero. She’s really a mess, but she does wear nice clothes.” And he, “I talked to good sound businessmen out there. They don’t see a chance till we get rid of that fellow in the White House.” And, “I got it from a man in the know—she has syphilis, you know. She was in that Warner picture. Man said she’s slept her way into pictures. Well, she got what she was looking for.” But the worried eyes are never calm, and the pouting mouth is never glad. The big car cruising along at sixty.
I want a cold drink.
Well, there’s something up ahead. Want to stop?
Do you think it would be clean?
Clean as you’re going to find in this God-forsaken country.