Finally two salesmen brandishing tire irons came to the door and we managed to negotiate the sale through a tiny slit. Then they opened the door just wide enough to shove the equipment out, before slamming and locking it again. “Now take that stuff and get the hell away from here,” one of them shouted through the slit.
My attorney shook his fist at them. “We’ll be back,” he yelled. “One of these days I’ll toss a fucking bomb into this place! I have your name on this sales slip! I’ll find out where you live and burn your house down!”
“That’ll give him something to think about,” he muttered as we drove off. “That guy is a paranoid psychotic, anyway. They’re easy to spot.”
We had trouble, again, at the car rental agency. After signing all the papers, I got in the car and almost lost control of it while backing across the lot to the gas pump. The rental – man was obviously shaken.
“Say there . . . uh . . . you fellas are going to be careful with this car, aren’t you?”
“Of course.”
“Well, good god!” he said. “You just backed over that two – foot concrete abutment and you didn’t even slow down! Forty – five in reverse! And you barely missed the pump!”
“No harm done,” I said. “I always test a transmission that way. The rear end. For stress factors.”
Meanwhile, my attorney was busy transferring rum and ice from the Pinto ~ the back seat of the convertible. The rental – man watched him nervously.
“Say,” he said. “Are you fellas drinking?”
“Not me,” I said.
“Just fill the goddamn tank,” my attorney snapped. “We’re in a hell of a hurry. We’re on our way to Las Vegas for a desert race.
“What?”
“Never mind,” I said. “We’re responsible people.” I watched him put the gas cap on, then I jammed the thing into low gear and we lurched into traffic.
“There’s another worrier,” said my attorney. “He’s prob – ably all cranked up on speed.”
“Yeah, you should have given him some reds.”
“Reds wouldn’t help a pig like that,” he said. “To hell with him. We have a lot of business to take care of, before we can get on the road.”
“I’d like to get hold of some priests’ robes,” I said. “They might come in handy in Las Vegas.”
But there were no costume stores open, and we weren’t up to burglarizing a church. “Why bother?” said my attorney.
“And you have to remember that a lot of cops are good vicious Catholics. Can you imagine what those bastards would do to us if we got busted all drugged – up and drunk in stolen investments? Jesus, they’d castrate us!”
“You’re right,” I said. “And for christ’s sake don’t smoke that pipe at stoplights. Keep in mind that we’re exposed.”
He nodded. “We need a big hookah. Keep it down here on the seat, out of sight. If anybody sees us, they’ll think we’re using oxygen.”
We spent the rest of that night rounding up materials and packing the car. Then we ate the mescaline and went swimming in the ocean. Somewhere around dawn we had breakfast in a Malibu coffee shop, then drove very carefully across town and plunged onto the smog – shrouded Pasadena Freeway, heading East.
3. Strange Medicine On The Desert . . . A Crisis Of Confidence
I am still vaguely haunted by our hitchhiker’s remark about how he’d “never rode in a convertible before.” Here’s this poor geek living in a world of convertibles zipping past him on the highways all the time, and he’s never even ridden in one. It made me feel like King Farouk. I was tempted to have my attorney pull into the next airport and arrange some kind of simple, common – law contract whereby we could just give the car to this unfortunate bastard. Just say: “Here, sign this and the car’s yours.” Give him the keys and then use the credit card to zap off on a jet to some place like Miami and rent another huge fireapple – red convertible for a drug – addled, top – speed run across the water all the way out to the last stop in Key West . . . and then trade the car off for a boat. Keep moving.