Free The Ferrari in the Bedroom by Jean Shepherd

earphones.
    “They stopped.” The phantom rock band apparently was just tuning up somewhere.
    “VIP scene, shot two, take two.” CLAP!
    Bunny Pert, her gamin face lit with an incandescent smile, laid an icy slab of fish on my plate. I grinned dumbly at it; trying to look elegant as across the table John was doing likewise. Behind me the gas fireplace roared menacingly. It wouldn’t look right in the scene if my coat was on fire. This could turn into a Marx Brothers picture very easily.
    “Beautiful, beautiful. Wrap it up!”
    Art had triumphed again.
    “Okay, gang, all I need now is a couple of reaction shots. We’ll take you, John, first.” Jack and his minions focused the camera full-face close-up on John.
    “Shep, you sit out of range and give him something to react to.”
    Again the clapboard routine. John smiled casually into the camera, a grizzled pro, something he had done into countless lenses.
    “Wrap it up. John, give Shep something to work on.” We reversed places. This time the faint blue glittering lens focused on me. CLAP!
    My lip curled casually, a man enjoying a fish dinner amid Bunnies. I, too, have faced many a camera. I turned my Cute face on, full camera.
    “Beautiful. Wrap it up. Strike it, boys. That’s it. That went real good.”
    The VIP scene was over, a full day’s work for a crew; actors, cameramen, Bunnies. God knows how much it cost. It would last maybe forty-five seconds on screen and would look so easy, so natural.
    We went downstairs to the Living Room again. By now I had no taste for fish. I had a steak. John ordered ribs. Fenton had London Broil. By unwritten protocol the crew eats at a different table from the producer and stars. A deafeningrock band made conversation impossible. We shouted back and forth for a while but our heart wasn’t in it. It had been a tough day. Outside, the temperature was dropping. It was now near zero and as black as the inside of your hat, but here in the Playboy Hotel it was all golden and warm and totally affluent. John went up to bed. Fenton and I lingered for a while and then called it a day. For some reason I was tired. Tomorrow will be a real bummer, to use Lee’s phrase, especially in this cold. They’re calling me at 6:30 A.M. That means maybe four hours of sleep. I’d better grab ’em.
    January 19, 1972 10:40 PM
    [written aboard United Airlines 727 flight Chi./NY]
    Never again will I consider ice fishing a sport that real human beings indulge in. Masochists, yes. Idiots training to join Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, yes. Guys writing books who want to experience first-hand what the Panzer divisions went through in the frozen wastes of Mother Russia, yes. As for me, if dem warm breezes ain’t blowin’, old Dad is gonna get all the fish he needs at the nearest A & P.
    I should have known, after that nightmare. What a buster! I had this dream where I was trying to buy a ticket at the box office that they had set up next to a trout stream in Montana. There were two hundred thousand wildly cheering fans in the stands, watching Elvis Presley and Bob Hope fish for rainbows while Fred McMurray played the saxophone. I couldn’t get a ticket. It was sold out, and the next thing I knew I was trying to climb under the fence at this stadium they had built entirely around a North Woods lake, where the cast of
Oh! Calcutta!
was fishing for Northerns from red, white and blue kayaks. They were in costume, and it was being televised by Telstar around the globe, on some show called “Interplanetary Sportsman,”choreographed by Gene Kelly, with an original score by Henry Mancini. A giant neon-encrusted blimp sailed overhead, emblazoned:
    ROONE ARLEDGE PRESENTS
    Just at the point when the cast, in costume, was singing a salute to Curt Gowdy to the tune of “Old Black Joe” I woke up in a cold sweat. For a minute I lay there not sure whether it was a dream or not. After all, I was about to go ice fishing with a couple of Bunnies and a TV