The Ferrari in the Bedroom by Jean Shepherd Read Free Book Online

loved and left male after male as the afternoon wore on toward that disastrous moment when Attila the Hun slammed the door open and hollered “Where’s supper!” For her, Helen represented real life that was being lived somewhere Out There, and oddly enough was a spookily accurate harbinger of Career Girls to come. Countless offices today are riddled with steel-jawed, skiing, surfing, motorcycle riding Helen Trents that have about as much use for males as James Bond has for chicks.
    Ah yes, James Bond. The new Helen Trent for a multitude of sunken-chested, bespectacled, Pepsi-drinking
Playboy-
reading, fantasy-ridden, lonely males. 007, the nuclear bomb of Passion (or at least Sex, and there is a difference, gentlemen) has become the will-o-the-wisp dream phantom of the great horde of those who prefer to read, or are afraid to date. The amazing number of males who today moon about Sex, read about it, see it in films, write about itand do everything but
have
it is highly reminiscent of the virginal ladies who in the 1950s and early 40s read
True Confessions, True Romances,
and gaped at Bette Davis epics of celluloid sensuality. The old novel of the beautiful sensual female has all but disappeared. Kathleen Winsor and
Forever Amber
are fragile period-pieces of another age, written for women who dreamed, to be replaced by the current crop of novelistic Male sexual fantasies of the Norman Mailer/J. P. Donleavy/Ginger Man stripe. Sebastian Dangerfield is the reading man’s Amber. Fantasy studs who thunder their way through billowy fields of acquiescent females, untouched by any of them, triumphant to the end, but all with a wicked glint of delightful, boyish humor in their dancing eyes.
    Exactly the way Amber St. Clair was described by an earlier fantasy merchant of an earlier era. Even the names are similar; Amber St. Clair—Sebastian Dangerfield. My god, will Sexual wonders never cease?
    The women who read and quivered to Amber had as little real Sex in their lives as the nervous, hollow-cheeked, gaunt admirers of Philip Roth have in theirs. And for the same reasons. They both belong to a Minority group in the Sex game.
    Today’s movies bulge with Male pipedreams, gigantic heroes in the arenas of Studdery that boggle the imagination. Why, if one believes the movies even Woody Allen has a chance with Ursula Andress, and poor tired-eyed, weak-chinned Peter O’Toole is more effective than a red-eyed, short-tempered Durham bull among a herd of cows.
    And what are the New Women doing during all this? Nothing. They don’t have to. Now in the saddle, growing taller and heavier by the minute, they no longer need the fantasies and dreams of an earlier time.
    The resident Husband now quietly mooning over the automatic washing machine, eyes glazing lustfully over Miss June, the Playmate of the Decade, his well-thumbed paperback edition of
The American Dream
by Norman Mailer in the back pocket of his lowcut saddle-stitched Neo-Gary Cooper Levi’s, waiting for the dryer to finish the week’s laundry, his hands chafed and worn by long immersion in Mr. Clean, The Dishwater Wonder, uneasily fears the moment when Helen of Troy slams open the front door and bellows, “WHERE THE HELL’S SUPPER!!”
    We are all in it together, and there is no turning back. The Great Role Reversal is rumbling upward and outward in an enormous mushroom cloud of irresistible force and all we can wait for now is the fallout and the casualty reports. A new age is dawning.

5
Confessions of a
TV Fisherman

    EDITOR’S NOTE: Have you envied those lucky devils who constantly appear on TV outdoor specials fishing and hunting all over the world, and in color: Rip Torn shooting caribou; Robert Stack hunting everything; Bing Crosby popping away at quail? How does it feel to be one of these fortunate Showbiz outdoorsmen?
    Jean Shepherd,
Field and Stream
contributor and four-time
Playboy
Humor Award winner, TV and radio performer and avid although largely unsuccessful