Pirsig celebrates the motorcycle as a way to travel closer to the countryside than the car. Robbins' main character uses her thumb of mythic size to hitchhike all over the country, while Tyler depicts more ordinary hitchhiking as the current equivalent of hopping a freight. Apple creates an odyssey of Mr. Howard Johnson searching for new motel sites in one story, and he dramatizes another part of the infrastructure in describing an enormous service station in Wyoming. Oates sets a story in a shopping plaza with the lack of sidewalks, delays from road construction, and other incidental details. Thompson focuses on the automobile's role in the drug cultures of Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and regrets the superficiality of depending so much on the car. Cervantes shows how Mexican-Americans are excluded from the wealth which is involved in the L. A. freeway system. That system's noises and violence also affect Forché's return from civil war in El Salvador. Carver has a car which is used in the commission of a senseless murder, while Wolff shows an injured man who is left to die in the back of a pickup during cold weather. Car accidents with grotesque effects in Irving's novel are the defining points in characters' lives, and become comments on the association between cars and sex. In Christine, King takes to extreme a boy's occult love affair with his car. Williams depicts the more ordinary envy a yard worker has for expensive vehicles. Phillips shows the car to be protective, defining its own reality, while in Mason's story, the vehicle fails to shelter a young couple from their infant's death at a drive-in movie, or from the husband's disability following a truck accident. A similar theme is developed in King's Cujo with its mad dog which traps a family in their car.
In Albee's play, the airplane is an ironic symbol of the myth of human progress, while Hoban uses it as the central symbol of the lost high-tech society as viewed from a future world long after an atomic holocaust. Blume points to the role of the school bus in teenagers' lives. Paley depicts the rowdiness of teen age boys on a subway, where an accident leads to the death of one of them. Reed surveys several modes of the Bay Area's transportation from an African-American intellectual's perspective, and he dramatizes skyjacking and baggage handling in the airlines.
Author: Robert M. Pirsig (b. 1928)
Title: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Date: 1974
Systems: Motorcycle
Context: Contemporary, Middle West, West, Northwest
A combination of philosophical inquiry and travel narrative, Pirsig's book gives an account of a motorcycle trip from Minneapolis to Northern California - through North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon - on which the author is accompanied by his eleven-year-old son. The trip provides both an opportunity and a discursive frame for the author's detailed examination of the notion of "Quality" - as he writes early in the book, he wants to replace the common "eternal question 'what's new?' with 'what is best?'" Pirsig calls the subsequent discussion a "Chautauqua," in the spirit of the traveling tent-shows that before radio and television brought speakers to all parts of the country, particularly those non-urban areas through which Pirsig is traveling.
Though Pirsig never identifies the specific type of motorcycle he's riding, it's clear from the time frame (the early 1970s) and details he gives about the bike, that the motorcycle is relatively primitive, in terms of touring capabilities, compared to contemporary models. Pirsig discusses the unique attributes of motorcycle travel, comparing it to car travel, contending that the car functions as a buffer between the driver and the world, but that the motorcycle places the rider squarely in the scene, making for a more direct and immediate experience. He further differentiates between the two modes of transportation by pointing out that conversation is difficult on a moving motorcycle and so "instead you spend your time being aware of things and mediating on them." Pirsig also discusses types of roads, maintaining that freeways or interstates are the worst, paved county roads the best. On the smaller roads he contends that the people are not in a hurry to get somewhere, because they live along these roads; they have more of a sense of "hereness and nowness" and that sense rubs off on the traveler/rider. The importance of the present moment, which he later describes as "the totality of everything there is," is a key idea of the book and one that is reminiscent of Kerouac's On the Road and Deans's talk of "IT" and "time" ("Quality" and "IT" have much in common, not least that they are both undefinable). But central to the notion of "Quality" is a careful approach to all experience, and "care" is not particularly important for Dean or Sal. By care Pirsig means that tasks, relationships - any action - should be approached in a manner that seeks a quality experience; this could be paraphrased as "doing things right." As the title suggests, one of Pirsig's major examples is working on motorcycles. He discusses at length his own practice of maintaining his motorcycle, going as far as to classify the many types of difficulties the mechanic comes up against. More than an analogy, though, the type of maintenance he advocates is a direct illustration of the sort of care for quality that the book is finally about. But even more than an illustration, good motorcycle maintenance is a way of being in the world, the most high quality way.
Edition used: New York: Bantam Books, 1975.
Author: Tom Robbins
Title: Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
Date: 1976
Systems: Hitchhiking
Context: 1960-mid 1970s, Richmond, Virginia and Dakotas
An entertaining hitchhiking book, explicitly in the tradition of Whitman ("Song of the Open Road"), Steinbeck, and Kerouac (with whom Sissy Hankshaw, the main character, has a passing relationship). "Sissy Hankshaw arrived at the Rubber Rose - and, subsequently, the clockworks - as she had always arrived everywhere: via roadside solicitation. She hitchhiked into the Rubber Rose because hitchhiking was her customary mode of travel; hitchhiking was, in fact, her way of life, a calling to which she was born" (Ch. 4). The Rubber Rose is the largest all-woman ranch in the West; the clockwork is a mystical place in the mountains near the ranch. She has enormous, medically remarkable thumbs which make her career possible.
As a young child in South Richmond, Virginia, she hitched for the first time in a Pontiac station wagon and never walked to school again; at thirteen she went two hundred miles to Virginia Beach, an act which made her realize that, echoing the dictionary, the thumb gives the hand "greater freedom of movement" (Ch. 6). South Richmond itself is a place settled by "bony-faced psychopaths… [who] had come, mostly by Ford from North Carolina." The men "knew more about the carburetor than they knew about the clitoris." Her family recites the traditional warning about the dangers of girls hitchhiking, but Sissy's one rule, "keep driving" protects her virginity. She is molested from time to time. For example, from "One motorist, a tanned athletic type, managed an occasional French lick while keeping his Triumph TR3 on a true course in moderate traffic." She prefers "gentle, rhythmic tollings. And automatic transmissions. (No girl likes to be molested by a party who is always having to shift gears.)" (Ch. 8). Her girlhood fantasies including hitching to Atlantis, Persia, Tibet, Egypt (Ch. 10).
The novel has a continued strain of commentary of national politics, some of which is conveyed by automotive metaphors. "One June, Richmond, Virginia, woke up with its brakes on and kept them on all summer. That was okay; it was the Eisenhower Years and nobody was going anywhere." In her boredom she tries to hitchhike an ambulance (going both ways) (Ch. 13). During high school she decides to leave home on US 1, north; the pot-smoking, black musician driver amazes her about "the speed at which he made that big Lincoln rocket out of the tobacco slums, forever and forever, bearing Sissy Hankshaw up to the heights" (Ch. 14). Her future husband is quoted,
"Hitchhiking is not a sport. It is not an art. It certainly isn't work, for it requires no particular ability nor does it produce anything of value. It's an adventure, I suppose, but a shallow, ignoble adventure. Hitchhiking is parasitic, no more than a reckless panhandling, as far as I can see."
Sissy's view: "In the Age of the Automobile - and nothing has shaped our culture like the motor car - there have been many great drivers but only one great passenger" (Ch. 15). She spends a decade on the road which is playfully summarized:
She had made Mack trucks rear back on their axles, caused Mercedes-Benzes to forget about Wagner, stopped Cadillacs as cold as a snowman's heart attack…. Wherever traffic flowed she had fished its waters, hooking Barracuda and Stingrays, throwing back Honda minibikes and garden tractors. At her signal, Jeeps and Chryslers fell over one another, Mercurys and Ramblers went into trance, VW's halted with a Prussian exactitude… (Ch. 21).
Sissy is part Indian; she enjoys the fact that the first ride was in a car "named in honor of the great chief of the Ottawa: Pontiac." She has "visions of a future wilderness where bison and Buicks would mingle in harmony and mutual respect, a neoprimitive prairie where both pinto and Pinto would run free (Ch. 18). She arrives at the Rubber Rose in a Chevy pickup. The drug culture of the ranch has appropriate vehicles nearby - a psychedelic VW microbus, a pickup with a handmade camper in the bed and appropriate painting, and so on.
During her first trip to New York she is forced to ride in a taxi, but it, "having no free will, rolled downtown" (Ch. 22). Her years on the road were without agenda or goal, so this is a limitation which makes her (enormous) thumbs itch to get back. The theme of her travels is caught indirectly in the long-awaited third peyote vision of Delores, one of the ranchers: "'The enemy is every expert who practices technocratic manipulation, the enemy is every proponent of standardization and the enemy is every victim who is so dull and lazy and weak as to allow himself to be manipulated and standardized'" (Ch. 115).
Edition used: New York: Bantam, 1977.
Author: Anne Tyler (b. 1941)
Title: Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
Date: 1982
Systems: Car - hitchhiking
Context: Contemporary, Baltimore
Aside from incidental references to family cars and train rides, this novel has a hitchhiking scene which points up how that mode of travel is similar to hopping a freight earlier in the twentieth century. Except here it doesn't work out to be a means of escape. Fourteen-year-old Luke Tull decides to leave his family's home in Lynchburg, Virginia, to visit his uncle and grandmother in Baltimore. His trip starts when he wonders if he could hail a Trailways bus, which inspires him to hitchhike, "as if obeying orders, [he] stuck out his thumb." A truck stops, despite the NO RIDERS sign in the window; "It was filled with loud music and a leathery, sweaty, masculine smell that make him feel instantly comfortable." The driver takes him to Richmond, and, when he gets out he realizes that he is far from home, vulnerable, and anonymous - he wishes he had an i.d. so he would be identifiable if he were killed on the road. A man with a young son offers him a lift, "Luke had never been in a car as old as this one." The man and boy had been on the road for three weeks, apparently visiting some of the father's old girl friends, since he is about to be divorced. In a novel which focuses on the tenuous relations among the various Tull generations, this contact sets up various comparisons for Luke to ponder.
After his second ride drops him off in Alexandria at 4:00, he becomes aware of "the foreign smells of tar and diesel fuel, or the roar of traffic." He thumbs for a short time until he is picked up by a woman in a Dodge, very much concerned for his safety, "'Do you know the kind of perverts in this world?'" She has been "circling the Beltway forever," and, amid her tears and worry, she agrees to take him to Baltimore. She recounts stories of crimes against children, tells him that she could be a kidnapper or murderer. Her driving is a compulsive effort to escape her family, especially her daughter's scorn: "'it's like I'm driving till I find … my past self. Then mile by mile, I simmer down. I let up on the gas a bit more. So, by suppertime, I'm ready to come home again.'" They get to Baltimore's outskirts by 5:00, where they find his relatives' address through the phone book. Almost as soon as he arrives, his uncle calls his folks, thus alleviating their worry. They are willing and able to drive up in their Mercedes, and they take Luke back home the same day. The whole episode emphasizes the closeness of the cities on the east coast. The fact that hitchhiking goes so smoothly, despite the undercurrent of potential danger sets one mood which contrasts with the ease with which the phone and automobile can pull the rug from under the young boy's effort to run away from home.
Edition used: New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Author: Max Apple
Title: The Oranging of America and Other Stories
Date: 1976
Systems: Automobile
Context: Contemporary, Wyoming and other Western states
The title story, "The Oranging of America," shows in a humorous way, what goes on behind the tinted windows of executives' limousines, in this case that of Mr. Howard Johnson. Johnson's famous chain of restaurants was known for serving an interesting variety of ice cream flavors. The limousine has a special freezer in the back which keeps a supply of 18 trial flavors which Johnson, and especially his chauffeur, Otis Brighton (a driver of Louisiana mules in 1925), sample and approve for sale. The freezer motif is taken a step further when Johnson's associate, Mildred Bryce, becomes persuaded to have her body cryogenically preserved; Johnson rewards her many years' of service by ordering a bullet-shaped cryogenic capsule on a U-Haul trailer, which will be pulled by the car, always ready for service. "Mildred Bryce contemplated her immortality, a gift from the ice-cream king."
The "oranging" comes from the roof color of Mr. Johnson's restaurants and motels. The trio of passengers spends most of their time visiting existing sites and selecting new ones. "When she [Mildred] and Howard had started their travels, the old motel courts huddled like so many dark graves around the stone marking of the highway. And what traveler coming into one of those dingy cabins could watch the watery rust dripping from his faucet without thinking of everything he was missing by being a traveler … his two-stall garage, his wife small in the half-empty bed, his children with hair the color of that rust." Mildred's "life was measured in rest stops," and that need, coupled with hunger had been the preliminary sign that new facilities were needed. Right after the Second War, in a twelve-cylinder '47 Lincoln, they toured and found new sites in California, New England, and the Midwest. The key is Johnson's mystical, visionary experience, a sixth sense which visited him in corn fields where "he would mark the spot with his urine or break some of the clayey earth in his strong pink hands."
"Gas Stations" traces the proliferation of highways and roadside conveniences into the western states after the second World War. The story begins at "World's largest, eighty-three pumps, forty-one urinals, advertized on road signs as far east as Iowa. Oasis, Wyoming, U. S. 40, hard to miss as you whiz on by. Even Jack Kerouac on an overnight cross-country spin used to stop here for soft ice cream." The narrator's Chevy is gassed at pump #48, and he reads the story of its founding. As with Howard Johnson's restaurants, it was founded on a dream. The owner as a shepherd boy in the 1920s survived a blizzard and decided to name this place of struggle "Oasis"; in the 1930s there was no road within 100 miles. The narrator flashed back to "Ted Johnson's Standard," the gas station of his childhood. Ted "was the magician of the fan belt," and he combined mechanical skill with a concern for the safety of his customers. He kept a record of their "deathless days" for twenty years. It turns out that the huge station's founder had made a fortune in the 1930s after he took the freight to South Dakota and then Chicago. Months before World War II he returned to Oasis where the nearest road is now fifty miles away. He built towers of fluorescent lights, put in pinball machines, a wax museum, and a restaurant: "'The road will come.'"
The narrator talks with "Mr. Big" who is sitting at the counter. In the 1970s the owner's problems are Arabs and OPEC, who are buying up Coney Island and Disneyland, and probably have taken Ted Johnson's Standard. He now gives out free headdresses during Ramadan and "Allah Lives" bumper stickers. The narrator has a J. Paul Getty franchise on a station outside San Francisco where he will have only three pumps for three grades of gas, and "rubber machines and ten-cent Cokes if I can get them." "Mr. Oasis" advises him to learn dentistry and laughs heartily at his sentimental plan. Ellie, a waitress on roller skates in the big station, decides to leave Oasis and to go with the narrator; she promises to check the oil and clean windshields and to help continue the tradition of good service. As they move off, he has a vision of Mormons on camels in pursuit. The final scene links the powerful engine, auto safety, and sex. "Three hundred and forty cubic inches rumble. I buckle up, Ellie moves close. Careful on the curves, amid kisses and hopes I give her the gas."
Edition used: Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1981.
Author: Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)
Title: "Stalking"
Date: 1972
Systems: Automobile, highway
Context: Contemporary, shopping mall
Thirteen year old Gretchen visits a shopping plaza in pursuit of an "Invisible Adversary," a haunting spirit or a mental projection. Part of the theme of the story is that Gretchen goes to and leaves the plaza on foot, and thus sees some of the details from an anomalous point of view.
Her stalking begins when she enters the BUCKINGHAM MALL, 101 STORES: "Cars and trucks and buses from the city and enormous interstate trucks hauling automobiles pass by on the highway." There is no sidewalk, so she walks across the grounds, first past an office building under construction, a "gouged-up area," then a brand new gas station which hasn't been opened for six months. The station is "all white tile, white concrete, perfect plate-glass windows, with whitewashed X's on them, a large driveway and eight gasoline pumps, all proudly erect and ready for business"; however, one wall has tar on it, and some windows have been broken. A barricade diverts traffic to a "narrow, bumpy, muddy lane" on the shoulder to the highway. She jumps over the final, dirty landscape feature - "a concrete ditch that is stained with rust-colored water."
The cars gradually slow down as she gets nearer the plaza until there's a single lane of traffic into the service drive. The parking lot is "A city of cars on a Saturday afternoon." The signs for the lots and lanes are "spheres, bubbles, perched up on long slender poles. At night they are illuminated." After a couple of acts of petty vandalism, like stuffing up a public toilet, the adversary scolds her. She spots him in the "maze of cars" and pursues him across the lot and two muddy fields, in effect driving him to run across the highway where he is struck by a car. He stumbles and staggers along the sidewalk on the other side, and then to the Piney Woods subdivision where Gretchen lives, and where, again, there are no sidewalks. The stalking ends in her house with the adversary's bloodstains on the carpet.
Edition used: Hans P. Guth and Gabriele L. Rico, eds. Discovering Fiction. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Blair, 1993.
Author: Hunter S. Thompson (b. 1939)
Title: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Date: 1971
Systems: Automobile
Context: 1971, Las Vegas
Thompson's account of a week spent in Las Vegas first appeared in Rolling Stone in November 1971. The book is a fevered, high speed description of journalist Raoul Duke (aka Thompson) and his "attorney's" drug inflected adventures in Vegas, where they are ostensibly "covering" first the Mint 400, an off-road motorcycle and dune buggy race, and then the National District Attorney's Conference on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. But while these events are the official assignments (and pay the bills), the real goal is to "find the American Dream." The first and crucial step in this search involves renting a car that will take the two men from Los Angeles across the desert to Las Vegas; but not just any car will do - it must be a convertible and it must be large. They settle on a red Chevy that Thompson dubs the Red Shark. After a night of driving all over L.A. making drug buys (they load up on acid, mescaline, opium, marijuana, amyl nitrate, cocaine, ether, uppers, downers, and more) they take off for Nevada.
The ensuing encounters with "authority" in its many different guises (including a scene in which a highway patrolman pulls over Duke) depict the relationship between the remnants of 60s counterculture and those who have "cophearts." In the midst of the Vegas week the red Chevy is exchanged for a new white Cadillac Coupe de Ville (also a convertible - this one referred to as the "White Whale"), which is described at length ("Everything was automatic"). The big cars are partly about "total control," being untouchable, but they also are a facade, particularly for Thompson and his attorney, who are clearly trying to pose as something they are not, to successfully swindle the cops, the hotels - everyone in power. Thompson plugs into the power grid through the large machines, which he identifies as the proper vehicles for a quest for the American Dream; but in contrast he also claims that "old Americans go out to the highway and drive themselves to death with huge cars." The excessiveness of the cars is what makes them an appropriate and central element of the American Dream, as does their essential phoniness, the realization that what they communicate and accomplish is basically a superficial form of intimidation that is anything but appealing. Considered in the context of the late 60s and early 70s, particularly the dissatisfaction with the Vietnam War (which comes up several times in the book), the Chevrolet and Cadillac, though at moments in the narrative suggestive of the familiar notion of freedom, more importantly represent the exploitive and violent aspects of the "American Dream."
Edition used: New York: Popular Library, 1971.
Author: Lorna Dee Cervantes (b. 1954)
Title: Emplumada
Date: 1981
Systems: Freeway, car
Context: 1970s, 1980s, Southern California, Mexican-American perspective
"Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway" opens describing the freeway across the street from the speaker's home. A "blind worm, wrapping the valley up from Los Altos to Sal Si Puedes," the freeway is blind, or indifferent, not only to its destination, but also to the life that exists along side it. Three generations of the speaker's family hide in the freeway's ominous shadow which, worm-like, lengthens at dusk. Freeway imagery opens and closes this long poem, signifying the speaker's departure from this family and her eventual return.
Dedicated to the "lumpen bourgeoisie," "To My Brother" recounts a life of poverty. Dreams of escape sustain the brother and sister through the daily struggle to pay their bills; escape is symbolized differently for each: his fantasy car versus her "dime bag of uppers for the next / buzzing shift." The speaker and her brother conduct a nightly argument, "a bicker / to buy a new used car, / a four-door sedan, a six/ month guarantee." While saving for a car is patently absurd in these circumstances, to entertain the possibility is essential to their psychic survival.
"Las casitas" of the Mexican/Mexican-American cannery workers are set in ironic juxtaposition to the expensive superhighway, "Freeway 280" of the title, that speeds travelers past: "The freeway conceals it / all beneath a raised scar." The metaphor is economic as well as organic; the scar seals over (economic) damage with a display of speed and wealth. The speaker notes that once, the freeway meant order and escape: "I wanted out, wanted the rigid lanes / to take me to a place without sun, / without the smell of tomatoes burning / on swing shift in the greasy summer air." But in likening the freeway to a scar, she makes it a sign not only of loss but also of continuing life and health. Beneath the "fake windsounds of the open lanes" gardens, trees, lots "come back stronger than they were." Back in the poor neighborhood she once fled from, the speaker believes that here she will find "that part of me / mown under / like a corpse / or a loose seed."
"Poema Para Los Californios Muertos" again makes a freeway the sign of the wealth and vitality that has been taken or extracted from a region, the poem opens: "These older towns die / into stretches of freeway. / The high scaffolding cuts a clean cesarean / across belly valleys and fertile dust." The cesarean is both a strange birth and a violent theft; Los Altos, California, "once a refuge for Mexican Californios," is now "a bastard child" where "Californios moan like husbands of the raped." The town becomes the illegitimate offspring of a rape, and in this sense the freeway represents U. S. territorial expansion and annexation of Mexican land.
Edition used: Pittsburgh, PA: U of Pittsburgh Press.
Author: Carolyn Forché (b. 1950)
Title: The Country Between Us
Date: 1981
Systems: Train, car
Context: 1970s, Los Angeles, travel in El Salvador
This collection of poems, which has been described as an effective synthesis of the personal and the political, is largely inspired by and about Forché's time spent in El Salvador (1978-80) and the difficulty of her subsequent return to the U.S. In "Return" the narrator speaks of the psychic transition involved in moving from El Salvador to Los Angeles; the sound of tire blow-outs makes her think of death, and strange cars near the house suggest an insidious and always watching presence. She recalls driving "those streets with a gun in my lap," and tells of the American attaché's wife who flies her own plane around the small country, offering her help. In "Departure" a train both slices and sutures the landscape, and provides a means of anonymous escape for the "dead," who can't know each others' names, but who must flee alone - trusting no one - from threatening government forces. In "On Returning to Detroit" another train trip is described, a cold journey in which a fine ice covers everything inside and out. The narrator watches the other passengers and imagines their lives, particularly that of a woman who is clearly grieving something or someone.
Edition used: New York: Harper and Row, 1981.
Author: Raymond Carver (1939-1988)
Title: "Tell the Women We're Going"
Date: 1982
Systems: Car
Context: 1970s, Washington state
This short and somewhat cryptic (a common attribute of Carver's minimalist style) story tells of two young men, briefly chronicling their friendship, beginning in high school, when they went in together to buy a '54 Plymouth for $325, and working up to the present time of the story's action, when the two are married and in their early to mid-twenties. In the midst of an afternoon barbecue, Jerry (who already has two children, with a third on the way) suggests that he and Bill (who is still childless) go on a "littlerun." They drive through rural Washington, along the "Naches River highway" until they come to a familiar tavern. After several hours of drinking they return to the car. While driving they come across two young women bicycling down the road. When their attempts to pick them up fail they follow them to Picture Rock, a locally known spot. There Jerry follows them up one of the paths, and in the last line of the story we learn that, out of sight of the highway, he kills them both with a rock.
Though Carver's stories are generally difficult to decipher, it does seem that the "run" the men make is initially meant to serve as an antidote to their boredom; similarly, the murder seems to operate as a violent outlet for Jerry's frustrations, which aren't explicitly described but suggested by the brief and bare-boned account of his life since high school. Also, the car Jerry and Bill are driving that afternoon is a '68 Chevy hardtop, a rather nondescript model that fits well with Jerry's rather nondescript existence.
Edition used: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. New York: Vintage, 1982.
Author: Tobias Wolff (b. 1945)
Title: "Hunters in the Snow" In In the Garden of North American Martyrs
Date: 1981
Systems: Automobiles
Context: Contemporary
A man named Tub, carrying a hunting rifle is waiting for a ride from his friends. A passing driver is frightened by the rifle and "hit the gas. The tires spun on the ice." Later, "A truck slid around the corner, horn blaring, rear end sashaying. Tub moved to the sidewalk and held up his hand. The truck jumped the curb and kept coming, half on the street and half on the sidewalk. It wasn't slowing down at all." This turns out to be his companions, and Kenny, the driver, mocks him: "'You ought to see yourself… He looks just like a beach ball with a hat on.'" They are late, so private transport can be off schedule just as public systems are.
The truck is a mess. Juvenile delinquents threw a brick through the windshield and the heater doesn't work, so the three men are quite cold throughout their driving. As hunters they notice that most of the land they pass is posted; they really aren't welcome. After stopping to hunt for a while, Kenny (driving) and Frank pull out and force Tub to scramble to catch on and then to ride in the back. Tub winds up wounding Kenny, and he is put in the truck bed as they look for medical attention. Despite the weather the car starts: "you've got to hand it to the Japanese." Tub and Frank's hands get so cold they stop at a bar to warm up; they have left their injured companion outside. By story's end they have lost directions to the hospital, which, we assume, does in Kenny. It is hard to tell from the flat tone of the story whether this is a general slam at male hunters in pickups or a more personalized tale of Tub's revenge.
Edition used: Eugene Current-Garcia and Bert Hitchcock, eds. American Short Stories, 5th ed. Glenview: Scott, Foresman, 1990.
Author: John Irving (b. 1942)
Title: The World According to Garp
Date: 1978
Systems: Car accident
Context: Contemporary
Irving's novel is filled with tragic and violent events that affect the characters' lives, and two of these key events involve cars. In the chapter "Walt Catches Cold," a car accident occurs that causes a crucial change in Garp, the central change of the story, involving his understandings of sex, lust, and responsibility. While Garp takes his two young sons, Duncan and Walt, to the movies, his wife Helen struggles to break off an affair with Michael Milton. Helen and Milton sit in his car in her driveway, as Helen tries to convince him it's over; Milton insists Helen go down on him one last time. At the same time Garp, is heading home early, driving his VW Bug. As we have seen earlier in the novel, Garp has a practice of cutting off the engine and lights as he nears his house, and gliding silently up the driveway. On this night he does the "trick" as usual, to please the boys, unaware of Milton's car, which he rear ends at a high speed. On impact Helen bites off Milton's penis, Duncan pitches forward onto the VW's stickshift and puts out one of his eyes, Garp breaks his jaw, and Walt is killed.
Garp, who is a writer, subsequently works to purge his guilt and remorse by writing The World According to Bensenhaver, a shockingly violent novel whose first chapter is included in Irving's book. In Bensenhaver a young mother is abducted from her home by a teen-aged boy and driven in a turquoise pick-up to a nearby rural area. The boy pulls off on the side of a small two-lane road and attempts to rape the women on the bench seat of the truck; but in the midst of the rape she gets ahold of the fishing knife he has used to threaten her, and in a grisly and graphic scene she eviscerates her rapist.
In both scenes described Irving works with conventional notions of the car as a familiar location for sex, but in Garp car sex turns out to be violent and dangerous; in the context of the action of the rest of the book, the suggestion is clearly that it's better to stay home.
Edition used: New York: Pocket Books, 1979.
Author: Stephen King (b. 1947)
Title: Christine
Date: 1983
Systems: Automobile
Context: 1978, Libertyville, Pennsylvania, outside Pittsburgh
The Christine of the title is a 1958 Plymouth Fury, a hulk seemingly beyond repair, that is bought in the beginning of the novel (1978) by teen-aged Arnie Cunningham from the 71-year-old Roland LeBay. Arnie vows to fix up Christine, though his parents object strongly to the car, particularly because it signifies a loss of control over their son. Miraculously, though no one sees him do the work, Arnie restores Christine to immaculate condition. And as the car changes, he too changes: his acne clears up, he becomes less self-effacing, more confident, and he gets a girlfriend, Leigh Cabot, a very attractive new girl at school. But soon after he finishes the car, Buddy Repperton and three of his cronies, classmates and devoted tormentors of Arnie, trash the car, completely destroying it. Arnie, who used to be so calm and even tempered, is livid and rages that he'll "get" whoever's responsible, and all the rest of the "shitters" who have been trying to keep him down.
Throughout the early part of the novel there are suggestions that Christine has a life or personality of her own, that "she" is not a normal car, but possesses some sort of supernatural - and evil - power. These hints are confirmed after she's been wrecked, when we find that she can repair herself. Christine's odometer runs backward, and so when she moves she goes back in time, reversing the direction of her deterioration; Arnie's role in the original and the subsequent restoration has been to literally push her around the junkyard behind Darnall's Do-It-Yourself Garage (where he keeps the car), moving the odometer back and "fixing" the car. After Christine becomes fully operative - she strikes out on her own. She begins to kill those who have attacked her, and who have thus attacked Arnie; but she does so only when Arnie has a solid alibi (he's out of town when most of the murders occur). And though she is severely damaged during each of the killings, she is completely fixed by the time the drive back to the garage is complete.
By this time in the novel it's clear that Arnie has changed drastically, and that the change is undeniably linked to the car. It turns out that Arnie is literally becoming Roland LeBay, a man who has been described as perpetually angry and bitter. LeBay has risen from the grave to continue wreaking his revenge on all the "shitters" who have thwarted him. We learn from his brother that LeBay was in the army, a mechanic who could never afford a new car of his own, but who for thirty-four years repaired the cars of others. On retirement he finally bought his first new car - Christine - and she had become the most important thing in his life, the one dependable relationship. Arnie becomes as difficult and ornery as LeBay was, and his relationships with his parents, with his only friend, Dennis, and with Leigh all deteriorate. After Christine polishes off Buddy et al., she begins to threaten those close to Arnie, anyone who he thinks is against him (which is almost everyone). The book ends with Christine trying to kill Dennis and Leigh, who have begun their own relationship, a secret Arnie discovers.
Throughout the novel - and inevitably throughout this discussion of the novel - the Plymouth Fury is gendered, referred to as "she." And, to everyone but Arnie, "she's" not a nice girl, but a vindictive "bitch" - a pejorative that is repeatedly invoked. Further she's a "whore"; when LeBay sells Christine to Arnie, Dennis is reminded of "a very old pimp huckstering a very young boy." Leigh is jealous of the car, and uneasy whenever she is a passenger. She's vaguely uncomfortable making out in the car, feeling that there "the act of kissing him, making love to him, seemed a perversion worse than voyeurism or exhibitionism - it was like making love inside the body of her rival." When Arnie ridicules Leigh's jealousy, telling her he thought girls were only jealous of other girls, she responds "`Cars are girls.'" And for Arnie it seems that Christine is the perfect girl, the perfect companion and comforter: "She would never argue or complain, Arnie thought. She would never demand. You could enter her anytime and rest on her plush upholstery, rest in her warmth. She would never deny."
Another aspect of the novel is the link between cars and rock and roll. Each chapter is headed by an epigraph of rock lyrics that deal with cars; most of the songs are from the late 50s and early 60s (Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, etc.), but there are also a few from the 70s (Bruce Springsteen, in particular). Also, sometimes when Arnie is driving around Christine's radio plays a station that seems to be broadcasting from the late 50s; and we learn that LeBay was an avid listener to early rock music. The car in these songs - and for Arnie and LeBay - is a sort of mini kingdom, in which the male driver is in charge and can't be ordered around. Christine does function as a refuge, but an imperfect one - the world does intrude. When that control is abrogated, Christine, working for her owners, strikes back violently. It's as if the promise of rock and roll is going to be fulfilled one way or another, if not by escaping in the car, then by using the car as a weapon against the "shitters" that prevent that escape.
Edition used: New York: Viking, 1983.
Author: Joy Williams (b. 1944)
Title: "The Yard Boy"
Date: 1982
Systems: Automobile
Context: Contemporary, Florida
The young man pointed to in the story title has two possessions, a pickup truck and a stuffed plover. He once ran over an old lady and broke her leg (but the consequences are not played out). He drives over causeways to the Florida keys where he works at mowing lawns and talking to flowers.
A client, Mrs. Wilson, has a Mercedes 350 SL which she had driven up to 130 MPH with "no sound of strain at all." She takes the yard boy for a ride. "She darts in and out of traffic with a fine sense of timing. Behind them, occasionally, old men in Gremlins [suggesting the American Motors' subcompact and goblins] jump the curb in fright. Mrs. Wilson glances at them in the rear-view mirror seeming neither satisfied nor dissatisfied." A Good Humor truck "scatters a tinkle of music and a carton of Fudgesicles as it grinds to a stop." The surrealistic account of the ride points out the arrogance of rich people driving in expensive cars.
Edition used: Eugene Current-Garcia and Bert Hitchcock, eds. American Short Stories, 5th ed. Glenview: Scott, Foresman, 1990.
Author: Jayne Anne Phillips (b. 1952)
Title: "Fast Lanes."
Date: 1987
Systems: Car
Context: late 1970s, Colorado to West Virginia via the south
This thirty-page story, set in the late '70s, is about a three week road trip from Denver to West Virginia (via Texas), undertaken by two casual friends, Thurman and an unnamed women, in a small Japanese pick-up. The two characters appear to be unrecuperated hippies; but while Thurman seems to have found a satisfactory life as an itinerant carpenter, the women is clearly a "floater" without direction, bent on self-destruction through drugs, alcohol, sex, or whatever means available. Thurman considers the fast lane on the highway dangerous, and suggests she use it only to pass; but the woman wants to stay in the fast lane, doesn't want to bother going around slower moving vehicles.
At the beginning of the trip the relationship between the two had to be negotiated: the woman asked if it was going to be a "kissy-poo number." As the "rider" (Thurman calls himself "the driver") she is relatively powerless, at the mercy of Thurman. But it turns out that Thurman will not take advantage of her helplessness - and she largely chooses to be helpless; he teaches her to drive the truck, which has a standard transmission, encouraging her to become more than a passenger. As a self-described floater, the woman has a fear of home (she's going back to West Virginia to visit her sick father). She focuses not so much on the road, but on the truck itself, which is a sort of capsule containing all of reality, all that she wants to acknowledge anyway. The truck is a moving shell that protects her from the life that awaits all along the road.
Edition used: Fast Lanes. New York: Dutton, 1987.
Author: Bobbie Ann Mason (b. 1940)
Title: "Shiloh"
Date: 1982
Systems: Automobile, truck
Context: Contemporary, Kentucky and Tennessee
The troubles begin when Leroy Moffitt is injured and disabled in a highway accident, so he can't continue to work as a truck driver. His rig is "like a gigantic bird that has flown home to roost" at the start of the story, or, as his frustration grows, "like a huge piece of furniture gathering dust in the backyard." His wife, Norma Jean, sells cosmetics at the Rexall, and explains about what she sells, but "he thinks happily of other petroleum products - axle grease, diesel fuel. This is a connection between him and Norma Jean." Actually, the real troubles in the marriage began when, as 18-year-old newly-weds, their four-month-old baby dies of sudden infant death syndrome in the back seat, between features at a drive-in.
Since he is disabled from driving the truck, he is home and drives around town "rather carelessly. Power steering and an automatic shift make a car feel so small and inconsequential that his body is hardly involved in the driving process.… Once or twice he has almost hit something, but even the prospect of an accident seems minor in a car." [A humorous word play appears in Norma Jean's mother's story about a baby whose legs were chewed off by a "datsun," a mistake for "dachshund," which she persists in making even after being corrected. This exchange is a vehicle to point to Norma Jean's guilt for the baby's death.]
The main event is a drive to the Shiloh battlefield; Leroy tells his mother in law, "'I've been to kingdom come and back in that truck out yonder… but we never yet set foot in that battleground.'" Here it is not so much a battleground, but a surrender, as the Moffitts split up there.
Edition used: The Story and its Writer, ed. Ann Charters, 3rd ed., Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1991.
Author: Stephen King (b. 1947)
Title: Cujo
Date: 1981
Systems: Automobile, bus, airplane
Context: Contemporary, Maine
King's story of a rabid dog (the Cujo of the title) and the complicated series of events that lead to tragedy is dependent on the movements of the many characters, and their various locations at key moments in the plot; these movements are undertaken by airplane, greyhound bus, van, and most importantly, Ford Pinto. The main focus of the story is the Trenton family, Vic, who is partner in a small advertising firm in the Maine town where the novel is set, his wife, Donna, and their four-year-old son, Tad. Because of a crisis with his business, Vic must leave town, for Boston and New York; Donna is left with an ailing Pinto (they have a Jaguar too, but she can't drive a stick shift) which she takes, the day Vic leaves, to a local man, Joe Camber, who works out of his barn at the end of a lonely rural road. Camber's wife, Charity, and son, Brett, have also just left town, on a bus to Connecticut to visit relatives. It turns out that the Camber's dog, Cujo, has contracted rabies, and it's on the day of Donna's attempt to get the car repaired that the rabies has progressed to the point of driving Cujo - a two-hundred pound St. Bernard - mad. By the time Donna and Tad arrive at the Cambers', the dog has already killed Joe as well as the nearest neighbor, Gary Pervier, a solitary alcoholic.
The Pinto, which has carburetor problems, barely makes into the Camber's driveway before quitting for good. The dog, seemingly waiting for them to appear, attacks the car, trying to get in at Donna and Tad. A two day siege ensues, two days marked by record temperatures of over 100 degrees. Trapped in the Pinto Donna and Tad struggle to survive as the malevolent dog lurks nearby; at one point Donna tries to get to the Camber's house but the dog attacks her, wounding her in the stomach and thigh before she can struggle back into the car. In the middle of the second day, due to a long chain of events, the local sheriff shows up, but Cujo stalks and kills him. Finally, both weakened by the two day struggle, Donna and the dog engage in a last encounter, in which she manages to kill Cujo with a baseball bat. At that moment Vic shows up in the Jaguar, only to find Tad dead in the Pinto, seemingly from the combination of dehydration and fear.
The above account of the plot suggests a more pedestrian and straightforward story than King actually provides. Cujo is linked with an evil that is unearthly and unstoppable: prior to the events at the Cambers', Tad has had visions of a "monster," one much like a rabid dog, lurking in his closet, waiting to attack him; and the dog is also linked to Frank Dodd, a serial murder who had preyed on the small town a decade earlier. Donna perceives Cujo's actions as more calculated and intelligent than possible for a normal dog; and his physical endurance and strength seem unnaturally excessive, even for a St. Bernard. The suggestion is clearly that he is possessed by more than rabies.
Sitting in the Pinto, trapped by the dog, Donna imagines the car shrinking, until it is the size of a coffin. But the car also offers protection, the only barrier between them and certain death. For Tad, however, the choice is only between a quick and a slow death. Choosing a Pinto as the death car may be some sort of sick joke on King's part, an allusion to the infamous proclivity of Pinto gas tanks to explode in rear-end collisions, but beyond that the car in general is transformed in the novel from convenient family transportation to the parent's worst nightmare. Donna's job as mother (and Vic's as father) is primarily to keep Tad safe, to keep the "monsters" at bay. At a very young age Tad learns, from seeing the monster in his closet every night, that monsters are real and threatening and that he needs protection; his parents try to reassure him that there are no such things as monsters but Tad remains unconvinced. Trapped in the car, Tad grips a piece of paper with the "Monster Words" on it, a catechism his father composed as a means of reassuring the boy at night. Ironically, a "well" car would offer them an easy escape from the "monster," but in Cujo events consistently take an unhealthy or inconvenient turn: people don't show up when they're supposed to, the weather turns unbearable, and cars don't start. When things don't go as they usually do, as they're supposed to, that opens the door to the evil that Cujo contracts and executes. A working car can take you down the highway, the cool wind blowing in the open windows, but a car that stops running can leave you trapped and helpless. And a car can stop running at any time.
Edition used: New York: Viking, 1981.
Author: Edward Albee (b. 1928)
Title: Seascape
Date: 1975
Systems: Jet plane
Context: Contemporary
Albee's two-act play takes place on a sand dune, where Nancy and Charlie, a middle-aged retired couple, discuss what they want to do with the rest of their lives. While Charlie wants to "rest," Nancy is interested in a more active life. Near the end of the first act they notice in the distance down the beach what they think are some people. But these two "people" turn out to be human-size sea creatures, sort of lizard or newt-like (named Leslie and Sarah), who have been drawn out of the sea to explore the land. The initial encounter is a frightening one for both couples; the two males brandish sticks at one another. But at that moment a jet plane flies low overhead with a deafening roar, and Leslie and Sarah, overcome with fear, "race back over the dune toward the water."
Low flying jet planes appear four times in the play: just as the play begins, during Charlie and Nancy's conversation, and twice during the encounter between the two couples. In the initial scene Nancy says, "Such noise they make," and Charlie replies, "They'll crash into the dunes one day. I don't know what good they do." This same dialogue is repeated three of the four times as the jet appears, hinting at the threat the jets will clearly come to embody in the play. Coupled with the lengthy and often sceptical discussion of evolution the two couples engage in (the humans try to explain the concept to the sea creatures), the ubiquitous presence of the jet suggests a distrust of the whole idea of human "progress," especially technological progress. After the discussion of evolution - and of human social and sexual mores - Leslie and Sarah are not convinced that the long human journey from primeval water to land and eventually modernity has been a movement for the better. They reject modern civilization, in part epitomized by the jet, which is so frighteningly and violently loud and obtrusive, and so heedless of the people on the beach. Leslie and Sarah are more closely connected to the natural world, a connection that has clearly become tenuous for Nancy and Charlie and for the rest of humanity. The sea creatures rightfully fear the jet, instinctively conscious of the threat of high tech, the ways in which it produces "brute" behavior. Though the conversation between the two couples is largely a matter of Charlie and Nancy teaching Leslie and Sarah about the human world, the play suggests that humans have much to learn from a species that is not corrupted by "civilization."
Edition used: New York: Athaneum, 1975.
Author: Russell Hoban (b. 1925)
Title: Riddley Walker
Date: 1980
Systems: Airplane
Context: Contemporary
Hoban's apocalyptic novel is set over two thousand years in the future, in what was England, and chronicles a sort of initiation journey, the coming to knowledge of twelve-year-old Riddley Walker. Riddley's world is one of a very few people living within fenced enclosures, under what are by contemporary standards very primitive conditions. The "1 Big 1" had gone off in 1997, and humanity was nearly destroyed, and continues to exist only in a debased state. Even the language of the novel, which is written as a first person narrative by Riddley, is a corrupt version of modern English, a version that requires a slow and careful reading and occasionally concentrated effort to decipher. The myths of the survivors contain germs of technological knowledge - nuclear fission, in particular, is recognizable in its mythic form - and some of the characters in the book, Riddley among them, are trying to recover that knowledge. But their efforts, though they form the focus of the story, are clearly, from a late twentieth century perspective, hopeless: they have images representing the knowing but not the knowing itself. These people have only recently made the transition from a nomadic existence to farming, and they are far from developing what now could be considered even rudimentary technologies, such as electricity (in terms of transportation they don't appear to have yet rediscovered the wheel, but there is mention of boats).
But in their myths, in their collective memory, they sense what they have been, sense that they have been much more "powerful." While the ultimate violence and suffering brought about by that power is acknowledged in their myths, there is still a longing for that past, a longing that translates into the attempt to somehow put the "Littl Shynin Man," who in one of their central myths was pulled in two, bringing about the final destruction, back together again, and so recapture that past power. That past power is largely symbolized by the memory of airplanes, which are cited several times as evidence of the superiority of prior knowledge. Riddley, when he discovers what seems to be a room full of computers, exclaims "'O what we ben! And what we come to!'" He asks himself "How could any 1 not want to get that shyning Power back from time back way back? How cud any 1 not want to be like them what had boats in the air and picters on the wind?" Similarly, another participant in the quest, Goodparley, says, "'Them boats in the air seams like they ben hevvy on my back longs I can member. What wer it put them boats up there in the air dyou think? Power it musve ben musnt it. Youve got to have the Power then befor youwl have the res of it havent you.'" Airplanes then represent the almost unimaginable knowledge that has been lost, and function as the focus of the yearnings of Riddley, Goodparley, and others. Further, the airplane is a significant image because it not only shows what has been lost, but it is a technology that played an important role in events leading up to the apocalypse. That is to say, airplanes, jets, are a technology that has been utilized for the purpose of vast destruction, as have most of humanity's highly advanced technologies. Humanity's extraordinary manipulative abilities, which are particularly amazing from Riddley's perspective, are shown in the novel as not simply "1 thing," but a mix of the "good" and the "bad," the creative and the destructive. The novel ends not with the rediscovery of the mechanics of air travel or nuclear power, but with the unexpected discovery of the "1 Littl 1" - gunpowder. That some sort of more familiar "civilization" will as a result eventually evolve is not difficult to imagine. It seems at the end of the novel that humanity is back on track - albeit the same track that led to the annihilation in one fell swoop of most life on earth.
Edition used: New York: Washington Square Press, 1980.
Author: Judy Blume (b. 1938)
Title: Blubber
Date: 1974
Systems: School bus
Context: Contemporary, suburbs
The Judy Blume books are famous for dealing with "real" ethical issues shared by school children. To help establish credibility, the novel includes several trips on school buses, the need for a child to be driven to school by car because her project is too big for the bus, and definition of the suburb as having a 25 mph speed limit, looking somewhat like the country, and being where "everyone who lives here works in the city, like my mother and father." The suburban car-culture is assumed to be well-known by the readers.
Edition used: New York: Dell Yearling, 1974.
Author: Grace Paley (b. 1922)
Title: "Samuel." In Enormous Changes at the Last Minute
Date: 1974
Systems: Subway
Context: Contemporary, New York City
This very short story takes place on a subway train, in which a car full of white passengers watch as three black boys "jiggle and hop on the platform between the locked doors" of the cars. While the men remember dangerous and "brave" things they had done when boys, the women think disapprovingly of the danger. After one woman gets up and admonishes them, the boys only laugh, prompting a man "whose boyhood had been more watchful than brave" to stand up and pull the emergency cord. Immediately the brakes lock up and the motion pitches one of the boys, Samuel, off the platform and down between the cars, where he is killed. In this story communal transportation provides the opportunity for childhood adventure (similarly one of the men had remembered jumping onto speeding trucks when he was a boy), as well as a location for a tragic playing out of race relations. Paley gives little space to a description of the setting, assuming in her readers a knowledge of subway trains, particularly the placement and function of an emergency cord.
Edition used: Eugene Current-Garcia and Bert Hitchcock, eds. American Short Stories, 5th ed. Glenview: Scott, Foresman, 1990.
Author: Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
Title: The Last Days of Louisiana Red
Date: 1974.
Systems: Cars, cabs, railroad, airplane
Context: 1970s, Berkeley, California; African-American perspective
This novel spoofs academic life (particularly the academicization of Black Studies and African American literary studies) and satirizes social movements in Berkeley. Reed also delivers a harsh critique of black militants. Louisiana Red is a degenerate form of HooDoo magic - a liberal politics of blame, begging and "giving each other the business" so that no one gets too far ahead of anyone else. With moochers and legitimate HooDoo Workers moving all across the country, air transportation takes on a central role. The book also highlights the occupation of chauffeur.
Brief mentions (Ch. 1) show the railroad to be outdated - the old Santa Fe passenger station in San Francisco is now a steak joint. The more state-of-the-art commuter trains are perfect machines; however, the narrator attributes any mechanical problems to ghosts, not computers: "the problems of the Bay Area Rapid Transit are due to the burial grounds of the Costanoan indians it disturbs as it speeds through the East Bay." In a similar way, the narrator will conclude that the problems of contemporary culture, such as the high blood pressure caused by Louisiana Red, can be traced back to the unquiet ghost of slavery.
The novel shows that a certain knowledge of transportation makes one "city-wise" or cosmopolitan and commands prestige. Max Kasavubu, a white professor of literature from Columbia, teaches at Berkeley: "He wrote short stories in which he would cite all of the New York subway stops between the Brooklyn Ferry and Columbus Circle. This impressed his colleagues who like many members of the northern California cultural establishment felt inferior to New Yorkers. He derived his power from this and was able to get a job."
Max is writing a daring interpretation of Native Son, which proves that Bigger actually escapes execution at the novel's end and implies he will return as Savior to the black race. Kasavubu's obsession with the character of Bigger leads to long hallucinations about the social prestige and sexual threat contained in the white fantasy of the black chauffeur. Consequently black chauffeurs show up throughout the novel, signifying either prestige or sexual aggression. Also, as masters of transportation, chauffeurs are admired as "professionals," men in control of their city and their clients (Ch. 9).
Two scenes turn on air traffic. One underscores differences between the airport culture of New York and that of San Francisco (Ch. 9). After meeting his party at the baggage claim, Inspector Papa Labas studies two beggars/proselytizers working the crowd. He criticizes them for their lack of style and wit, claiming NYC panhandlers had developed begging into an art form: "Can you lend me fifty-cents? I just killed my mother-in-law and don't want to repair the axe."
In a final scene that parodies TV and film action dramas and ridicules dogmatic terrorists (Ch. 37), Minnie, the head moocher, busts two fellow moochers out of jail and skyjacks a plane to make their getaway. Until the takeover, we see the boredom of air travel through the eyes of one passenger. After ten minutes out, he's already drinking a Bloody Mary, reading a magazine, looking out at a bland view. He naps for half an hour, then strolls to the "bilingual toilet." Once the skyjack is underway, the moocher-flunkeys don masks like woolen socks and collect the passengers' valuables. Minnie recognizes this particular passenger as a small time actor on his way to a gig in New York; she proceeds to lecture him on lack of social relevance in his last performance. Minnie is shot on the spot for talking too much. How the passenger gets the gun on board, we don't know, but the fact that the ticket-holder has a gun and the skyjackers do not comments on the politics of airline safety.
Edition used: New York: Atheneum, 1989.
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