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A Fistful of Fig Newtons: A Novel - Softcover

Shepherd, Jean

 
9780385188432: A Fistful of Fig Newtons: A Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0385188439 ISBN 13: 9780385188432
Verlag: Crown, 1987

Inhaltsangabe

From the wild and wacky world of favorite funnyman Jean Shepherd, a dozen truer-than-life tales of tailgating on the Jersey Tumpike, infuriating infants, and other everyday catastrophes, defeats, and humiliations that are the familiar fate of Americans everywhere.

Jean Shepherd was one of America’s favorite humorists, his most notable achievement being the creation of the indefatigable Ralphie Parker and his quest for a BB gun in the holiday classic A Christmas Story. But he was so much more, a comic Garrison Keillor–like figure whose unique voice transcended the airwaves and affected a whole generation of nostalgic Americans. A Fistful of Fig Newtons is classic Jean Shepherd—sidesplittingly funny and sardonically irreverent. It is a brilliant comic assessment of American life—all of them delivered in Jean Shepherd’s witty, classy, unforgettable style.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

For many years a cult radio and cabaret personality in New York City, Jean Shepherd was the creator of the popular film A Christmas Story, which is based on his novels In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash and Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories, and which has become a holiday tradition on the Turner Network. Jean Shepherd passed away in 1999.

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From the wild and wacky world of a favorite funnyman, a dozen truer-than-life tales of tailgating on the Jersey Tumpike, infuriating infants, and other everyday catastrophes, defeats, and humiliations that are the familiar fate of Americans everywhere.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

You let other women make a fool of you . . .

I banged on the steering wheel as Peggy Lee belted it out in her mean, silky, snotty, "get me some money" voice.

"YEAH, YEAH!" I hollered stupidly as Billy Butterfield's trumpet rasped out the bridge.

You sit there won'drin' what it's all about . . .

Stuck in rush-hour traffic, the maniac in you takes over. The mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel was four blocks and two thousand cars away.

My radio was tuned to WNEW, the only station that the bastard can get in midtown Manhattan. In a way, that curious misfortune might have been one cause of what was to follow. WNEW is an instant time warp leap into the past. A flick of the knob and you're magically back in the 1940s and '50s of Peggy Lee, Dinah Shore, Ella Fitzgerald, and a lot of singers who haven't made a record since Eisenhower retired to Gettysburg.

My mind ticked over idly. I hummed, I whistled, I spit out the window.

You sit there won'drin' what it's all about . . .

The radio buzzed obscenely, a rank, juicy Bronx cheer of a buzz, and quit. God dammit! I thumped my fist on the plastic dashboard, sending up motes of cigarette ashes from the ashtray, but the radio remained as silent as a dime-store Buddha incense-burner. If there is ever a time when you need a car radio to keep you company, it's in a long line of creeping traffic.

I thumped the dash. No luck. All the while my eyes were darting back and forth over the traffic; left, right, rear mirror, right, left, rear mirror, clickety-click-click, in the style of the true urban driver. There's always a yellow cab or a Puerto Rican in a battered van, marked ACE PLUMBING SUPPLIES, ready to beat you out for every precious inch. Nerves is what it takes, nerves of steel; cobalt steel. Fighting your way to the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel at rush hour is no place for lady drivers with blue hair or frail stockbrokers with rimless bifocals.

An airport bus sent a blast of diesel fumes that caught me fair and square, a clean shot.

"Braak, braaak"-my city cough rattled my ribs. "BORK!"

Suddenly there was a brief opening ahead. I shot forward, skittered through the line like an NFL halfback and gained a full car length on a cursing Connecticut driver who got caught lighting his cigar. I cackled. I could see him in my rear mirror mouthing evil words. I threw him a quick finger and whipped up next to a looming tractor-trailer. I was grateful for a moment or two of shade. I was actually within striking distance of the tunnel mouth itself, at last.

The streams of traffic, in five or six lines, edged into the evil black mouth. Theoretically, there is supposed to be a system for alternate cars to go forward into the tunnel, each in his turn, but like everything else in the urban jungle of today, that system is an outmoded joke, like taking off your hat in an elevator or opening doors for women.

I had a brief image of a hulking giant trying to put toothpaste back into a Colgate tube as I hunched over my wheel, deep in battle. I saw my chance. A tiny opening between a big, blue clunker of a Buick Riviera and a puttering Valiant. I slammed the transmission into LOW-LOW, floored the accelerator.

ZZZzziiiiPP! I made it, I made it! Whoopee! I was in the tunnel!

Two snakelike lines of traffic inched through this gloomy tile-and-concrete alimentary canal, the lower colon of the city of New York spewing its waste out into New Jersey.

The tunnel jogged slightly to the left. The entrance behind me disappeared. I was now far below the sinister, sludgy waters of the mighty Hudson. God only knows what indescribable obscenities lay above me, protected only by a thin shield of rusting steel and crumbling concrete. Hardly a soul alive today remembers when the ancient tunnel was built. Dimly lit by yellow bulbs, the tunnel lives in a perpetual basement gloom. No dawn, no sunset, no spring or summer, fall or winter; only Man and the rats inhabit this man-made wonder of nature.

It affects people in many ways. I once knew a man who was in every way a civilized creature, the product of centuries of Western culture-Yale, Skull & Bones, a reader of John Updike, a subscriber to the opera-who had one fatal flaw. The instant he entered the tunnel he reverted to his ancient Paleolithic forebears. Deep fears gripped him. He saw lurking carnivores with yellow eyes in the shadows. Perspiration gushed from his every pore. Each minute in the tunnel was sheer hell. It finally got so bad that he sold his elegant ancestral home in Princeton, moved to a cockroach-infested, furnished flat in Manhattan, where he remains today, a prisoner of the Island.

Other victims of tunnel madness have an uncontrollable urge to blow their horns, apparently in the feeble hope that the echoing din will reassure them that they are still alive. I've always thought that a deep study of the effect of long, sinister tunnels on the mind of commuters would be a valuable one, perhaps giving us a clue to the rising incidence of madness, breakdowns, and broken marriages among ex-urbanites.

I crept forward. Overhead, little yellow lights blinked, indicating some poor bastard was in trouble ahead.

Purgatory. That's what the tunnel is. I'm suspended between heaven and hell; no time, no seasons, accompanied only by my sins and fears. My personal tunnel defense has evolved over years of driving. I let my mind roam free as a bird, shutting out the gloomy Now.

Ahead of me in a heavily souped-up Dodge Charger (a true Kid car), a crowd of male college students swilled cans of Budweiser. A peeling decal on the rear window read RUTGERS SCARLET KNIGHTS GO! I could see a hulking undergraduate in the rear seat, blowing large pink bubbles of the finest Fleers. He wore a scarlet-and-black Rutgers T-shirt with the numerals 69 obscenely emblazoned for the world to see. The bubble burst, draping his nose with pink, rubbery chewing gum.

"Ah," I muttered, "the cream of our youth, the future hope of America."

A can flew out of the window and bounced off the tile walls of the tunnel, ricocheting onto my hood where it dug a neat gouge in the expensive paint.

"Hey, Sixty-nine, you slob!" I yelled into the echoing din; fruitlessly, of course. My tunnel-loosened mind darted nimbly to another T-shirt, another university many states away.

Old Number 76, where is he today? My mind savored his Armageddon, his defeat, his disgrace.



A Fistful

of Fig Newtons

or

the Shoot-Out

in Room 303



The squat, chunky glass nestled chill and reassuring in my hand. It was one of my treasured set of matched old-fashioned glasses celebrating the long-past Bicentennial of our blessed land. Each tumbler bore in magnificent cut-glass bas-relief a portrait of a Founding Father. Thomas Jefferson, his face stern and yet patriotically inspiring, sweated slightly on the side of my icy glass. Under his portrait, etched with authority, was a quote from the Great Democrat himself:

I believe in The People.

I stood at the window of my fourteenth-story apartment and stared listlessly out into the gathering gloom. Far below me were hordes of wandering picketers, their signs waving in the dusk, distance muting their hoarse obscenities. Occasionally a siren wailed, accompanied by the distant wink of red flashers. The apartment lights dimmed momentarily but struggled bravely back on, narrowly averting the third blackout of the week. The Jack Daniels glowed deep in my interior. Going about its therapeutic work, it warmed me.

I glanced down at Jefferson, whose ear was just under my right thumb.

"Tom, I'm not sure it's working out."

Another muttering wave of distant protest...

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Verlag
Crown
Erscheinungsdatum
1987
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385188439
ISBN 13 
9780385188432
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
304
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