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Jean Shepherd, from Indiana originally, is a radio monologist whose show has been broadcast "live" every night for years by a strong AM station in New York City. Recently other stations around the country have started running his tapes, and he has been narrating a series, "Jean Shepherd's America," on public television. His collections of reminiscences and observations in book form, of which this is the third, have sold out big printings, though their titles never appeared on the New York Times best-seller list. A part of their sizable readership (Shepherd's books are probably not only bought, but read) is very likely drawn from the same audience that is devoted to Playboy - it was in Playboy that many of Shepherd's philosophical anecdotes first appeared in print, and he has the unique distinction of winning that magazine's "Humor Award" four times. Thus Shepherd is something of a success in the mass media. Millions of Americans, it can be taken for granted, are acquainted with his stories, and get satisfaction from listening to him go on and on, while others, who for various reasons may not read Playboy, listen to late night radio monologues, or watch public television, must, as one of the conditions of existing in the U.S., have been confronted by Shepherd's unidentified voice doing beer and car commercials at all hours and in many places, even if they have not paid attention.
Shepherd on the radio (it is on his regular radio show that he is at his quintessential) puts his listeners at ease by greeting them with affectionate disdain, and then starts talking at random, in a friendly, enthusiastically blasé and cynical, vulgar and seductive voice, about things he has seen, heard, read, been told of, or smelled that day in Manhattan, his adopted home. Seemingly improvising, he will pass on news of matters mostly bizarre and ridiculous, yet none of them anything but true and actual, he swears, and somehow significant, until, inevitably, one of these items, usually a sense impression, will touch a nerve of memory, and Shepherd will be impelled to tell a story about his wonderful childhood. As a cookie turned the thoughts of Proust's narrator to the past, so the odor of dynamite at a demolition site on Sixth Avenue startles Shepherd, bringing back vividly remote escapades with fireworks in Hammond, Indiana, when he was "a kid." Hammond (or "Hohman," as Shepherd disguises it in his books) is the equivalent of Combray or Hannibal in an endlessly articulated remembrance. It takes only a few hours of listening to Shepherd to get acquainted with this little universe: a town located between the cornfields and the steel mills, punished by mid-continental extremes of climate, lapped by the dirty water of Lake Michigan, populated by what sociologists used to call blue-collar workers, now "ethnics," in the tough tail-end of the Great Depression. This place and time are ritually re-experienced through the eyes, ears, etc. of Shepherd the boy, Shepherd the adult storyteller using, for this purpose, the historical present: "I'm a kid, see, and one day. . . ."
Suppose it is firecrackers Shepherd has been reminded of. He will get into a state, an ecstasy of memory. He will describe each particular brand of explosive in peculiar language: "The Cherry Bomb. Ah, what pristine, geometric tensile beauty; a perfect orb, brilliant carmine red, packed chockablock with latent terror and destruction." Though this quotation is from Shepherd's first book (In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash), for which it may be assumed he had tapes of his monologues transcribed so that he could polish and fix them up to literary level, his extemporaneous language in front of the microphone is often just as gorgeous. The same recall and feeling are applied to stories of other childhood joys and woes—threadbare Christmases, all-day stickball games, the first blind date, Shepherd's father's passion for used cars. The element of nostalgia, and regret, in this, often gets thick. It sometimes leads to the drawing of implicit, and invidious, comparisons between the intensity and integrity of emotion, and of life therefore, in the poor Midwest in the late 30's, and the falseness and cheap luxury of life today.
Aimed for disaster (mostly small, humiliating disasters) as Shepherd's stories are, full of the pathetic aspirations of little people (children and parents), fairly swarming with the minutely observed details of secondhand furniture, cars, toys, and clothes as the stories may be, the feeling that comes off them is not bitter or unhappy. Partly because sickness and death do not intrude, partly thanks to Shepherd's incorrigible habit of talking bittersweetly about almost everything old at the expense of the new, his childhood and the Hard Times that he keeps insisting were "no fun, folks," come out romanticized. Which can't be said about his vision of New York—no diamonds on black velvet here, as twilight descends on Gotham's towers. Only gum wrappers in the subway and transvestites on the street. "New York" can mean the actual city, or it may serve as shorthand for what all of America, to Shepherd's amusement and dismay, is becoming. Some of his complaints may seem trivial, but they are heartfelt. "Of course," he remarks in the midst of remembering defunct makes of automobiles. "at that time cars had distinctive personalities and characteristics in themselves and did not all come stamped out of the same mold, painted with the same paint, and advertised by the same agency."
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Shepherd's stock of stories sounds inexhaustible at first, but actually it is finite. A listener who cares to can make a list of two or three dozen stories that are told and retold with slightly different touches. Most of these stories were collected in Shepherd's previous books, so it might be expected that he would have to try something quite different in The Ferrari in the Bedroom. The difference, it turns out, is that the comparisons between past and present that were implicit before, are explicit now, and the contemporary incidents that triggered Shepherd's memory are liable now to furnish an occasion for a harangue that is not so much satirical or funny as embittered. This development does not come out of the blue. In a way it is a question of emphasis, proportion, and a sympathetic listener or reader might have sensed it coming. For example, in a story that opened in Shepherd's Manhattan apartment as "the long December afternoon was darkening into night," that had to do with Shepherd rummaging in a cardboard box full of evocative junk from childhood (Captain Midnight Photomatic Code-O-Graph badge, Tom Mix Special Sun Watch, genuine Mystic Voodoo Skull Ring, etc.), and that was published in his second book, Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories, there was a passing reference to the "nasal tones of a twelve-year-old protest caroler [in the next apartment] singing Jesus Don't Love Me Anymore, But I Got You, Babe, the current spiritual smash." Considered in the context of Shepherd's work, which can be heavy-handed, this flick of the whip was light and on target, and it must have made all but the stupid and self-righteous laugh. In his latest collection, Shepherd dwells on the same foolishness in a way that may make the stupid and self-righteous laugh alone.
Thus, his sketch, "I Hear America Singing," pits two groups of passengers against each other in a transcontinental jet in which Shepherd finds himself. One group is composed of college students, the other of middle-aged traveling salesmen. The students are costumed in carefully frayed jeans and work shirts, and they are entertaining themselves (though not Shepherd or the other passengers) by strumming guitars and singing proletarian blues. The salesmen, with their "cauliflower ears and "sun-reddened necks" are offended, and so is Shepherd. "You can't imagine them hungry," he says of the youngsters who are singing about deprivation while winging at high altitude on their parents' money. The salesmen, Shepherd surmises without evidence, fought at Anzio and Guadalcanal; the male students, weak-wristed as they strum, are sissies, he hints. No violence ensues in this confrontation between exaggeratedly idealized generations and classes. But it is clear, at the very least, that the younger generation's sentiments are phony, and its music worthless.
Probably, some of those who get as much pleasure from Shepherd's attacks as from his reminiscences are those disturbed and disgruntled and defensive people who may or may not have had a hard time in the Depression and the Second World War. "The nuttiness is spreading in our land," Shepherd declares, putting into words the tacit credo both of satirists and of moralists; the real-life models of Archie Bunker, too, must be sure that they know what he means. Yet they can't make up his audience entirely. He has a diverse appeal. It is just as easy to imagine the long-haired son or grandson of a hard-hat listening to Shepherd's delicious stories in bed after lights-out, or the man who reads Playboy giving a shiver of recognition when Shepherd remembers the horrors of teen-age courting. Shepherd's appeal is finally to a very wide range of American men and boys - the two categories are not mutually exclusive - and his appeal rests securely on the metaphor that adult life is a continuation of a boys' pickup sandlot game. In The Ferrari in the Bedroom this profound, stubborn figure of speech is put once and for all in Shepherd's recognizable voice:
Jeff, at twelve, five-foot-three, weighs two hundred and thirty-six. Slow of foot, dull of mind, Jeff is a natural catcher. Jeff ultimately makes every team he goes out for, just barely. His bulk carries him through. Kids bounce off him like hailstones. However, in spite of his size he is a notably poor hitter, and his position in life is strictly Defensive. It is almost impossible to reach the plate when Jeff is squatting like a rubber Buddha with an inhumanly low center of gravity. Throughout life he will be known as "good old Jeff" and will be sent continually for more beer at parties and will be useful for pushing the car and all the other basic tasks that man falls heir to. Jeff is a born Pfc., which he will later be, and will spend a lot of time on Guard duty and washing trucks in the Motor Pool. He will eventually become Assistant Night Foreman in the Shipping Department of Amalgamated.
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