Free The Ferrari in the Bedroom by Jean Shepherd Page A

Marshal.
    During the night the temperature had dropped to around zero and a steady snow was falling, causing camera problems. After a breakfast of scrambled eggs done Playboy style, which naturally includes vast copper pots and twenty-seven different varieties of muffin. Playboys live good. They lounged all about the place, Kenosha shoe salesmen and Green Bay insurance men, a speedy lot.
    Fenton was dressed in an exceedingly expensive Abercrombie & Fitch style cowled Arctic coat. It seemed designed for film directors. Unfortunately he didn’t know how to work the complicated belt buckle, but that was only incidental to the dashing hood, which was more photogenic than practical.
    John wore earmuffs and a dogged look. His heart was still in the Bahamas, but his backside was in Wisconsin. I pulled my Robin Hood hat down over my ears, wound my scarf around my neck and we waddled out into the bracing atmosphere of the tundras, which we would battle through a long, miserable, numbing day.
    Jack had set his camera on the highest balcony of the hotel, pointed out at the distant hills. Below the hotel the land angled steeply away to a great hollow, at the bottom of which is a man-made pond. There are no houses, telephonepoles, or signs of habitation to be seen from the balcony, just a great valley of snow, dotted with sharply-etched black trees right out of a Japanese print. A steady 18 mph wind out of the North set the snow swirling in rolling clouds. Jack was excited by the desolation and beauty he saw through his viewfinder. He hopped up and down and slapped his hands together, his green sunglasses dotted with snow flakes.
    “Look, they make real stars!” He was from California, and like many members of primitive tropical tribes, he had never seen snow.
    “Yes they do, Jack, and when you get a lot of those stars piled up you can make a snowman, Jack, or even roll a Bunny in the snow.”
    He couldn’t get over the snow flakes. He kept looking at one that was stuck on the end of his thumb. It was so cold our breath hung steadily in the air. A tall, thin, weather-beaten man, beanpole rather, right out of Central Casting plodded up the hill, wearing a dark green Arctic thermal suit. It was Slim Lechner, “Fishing Technical Advisor” on our expedition, operator of the Fox River Bait Store and classic Midwestern outdoorsman. He was instantly likeable, a born Pfc. which in fact he was.
    “Yep, I was a private for two and a half years, which ain’t easy to manage,” he told me when we began reminiscing about the Army. “They only made me a Pfc. ’cause they put out some rule that they hadda give you a stripe when you went overseas.”
    “You didn’t start throwing your rank around then, Slim, did you?” I asked.
    “Naw, I demanded respect, but I wasn’t too hard on the boys.”
    “We’re gonna open with a Doctor Zhivago shot, with avast Arctic scene of snow,” Fenton explained the scene to John and me while Slim shifted from foot to foot in the snow.
    “Now this is gonna be the first thing they’ll see on the screen. They got no idea that you guys are fishing at the Playboy Club. We come right out of the Bahama sequence into this scene that looks like it could be Greenland or some place. We see two tiny figures struggling through the snow, just two dots, y’got it?”
    We nodded, blowing steam in great clouds. It really would be a spectacular sight on a color TV set. It was genuinely a good idea.
    “Then we cut to you two guys actually fishing and the audience meets you, Shep. You are showing John how a hip fisherman operates, first class. He doesn’t know that you are at the Playboy Club. Neither does the audience, and then, suddenly, out of the snow, come these Bunnies serving you coffee with rum in it. John is amazed, but you play it cool because that’s the way you live. Okay?”
    Slim grinned at this Showbiz talk. Ten minutes later John and I alone, pulling a sled behind us with our “gear,” were far out