The luxury houses were for the area’s Dow executives. To entice them to buy, now that the houses were finished, the development company had stocked each with food, filled up the bars with whiskey, put steaks and beer in the refrigerators, supplied minimal bedroom and living room furnishings, made the beds, laid out towels and linen in the bathrooms, and invited various prospective buyers to come down with their families and move in for a weekend — just to see how it felt living there.
The boys had been given the key to one of the unoccupied houses and told they could stay there for the night.
An hour later, we sat in the living room of one of these assembly-line mansions, a tan brick fireplace at our backs, a stairway beside us swirling up to an indoor balcony and the second floor bedrooms. Outside the windows, we could see the lawn, about three-quarters covered in luxuriant green — that stopped at an austere line of broken right angles, where the sod had not yet been laid. Beyond stretched bleak sand.
The switches on the wall, we’d discovered when we’d first come in and tried to turn on the lights, moved the heavy, gold-flecked draperies back and forth over the picture windows.
With what I’d seen in the kitchen, I told them, I could put together a pretty good dinner —
Timmy looked uncomfortable. Well, he didn’t know if we ought to do that.
Tommy went on to explain: A few weeks ago, the college-age son of one of the other officers of the development company had been given a key, and had brought down a gang of his friends along with various stragglers they’d picked up en route. They’d started an endless party, drinking up all the liquor, eating up all the food, and even smashing the furniture. “Then, when they finished wrecking one place, they just moved into the next house and started all over again. They threw beds and bureaus into the swimming pools. They even had drugs down here!” Each Monday, apparently, a truckload of maids and carpenters and maintenance men came through to make up the beds, fix any minor damages the visiting executives might have done, restock the bar and the kitchen — and for about three weeks that’s more or less what happened, till someone realized the “minor damages” were getting out of hand.
“They did thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of damage,” Timmy explained. “So we’ve got to be real careful. I mean, we’re really not even supposed to be here.”
This story got interrupted once by the doorbell — it was a friendly enough security guard, who seemed to know the difference between a wild house-wrecking party and three young men sitting in the half-dark living room, talking.
We decided to leave the kitchen alone. Tommy would drive back over the long, thin bridge to the mainland and bring back a pizza — which is what he did.
We decided that one Coca-Cola apiece from the kitchen wouldn’t be missed. As we sat, eating our pizza on paper towels in our lap, the doorbell rang again. This time it was a somewhat surlier maintenance man who wanted to know what we were doing, but finally turned around and left. Each of us had his own bedroom that night. Mine opened up onto a covered balcony, larger than my whole three-room apartment back on Sixth Street, looking down over the pool and the boathouse.
After a shower in the immense, tan-tiled bathroom, I went out to stand, naked, at the rail, flipping the switch on the wall that turned the underwater lights on down both sides of the tributary running from the boat house to the canal — permanently lit — itself, by which you could get your boat out to sea.
The sky was dark and cloudless.
I thought about the wild party that had recently progressed through the hulks of the other, ready-made mansions standing along the water. Here and there a light shone in one of the windows. I thought about Bob’s tale of the affair at Virginia Beach. I might even tell him I’d been to such a party, here, next time I saw him. He would know it was bullshit, but he liked a good story.
I went inside and slipped into bed.
Next morning, before eight, we were in the cars and off.
Later that afternoon, while filling stations and piles of dusty tires passed by, I saw a green highway sign, informing me that we were in the Houston suburb of Pasadena, while at that moment, on the car radio, the Beach Boys sang, “The Little Old Lady from Pasadena”—about a suburb in another city entirely.
Outside the terminal, I waved goodbye to Tommy and Timmy. Their sports cars roared away.
At the airport counter, my ticket was waiting.
I had two and a half hours till takeoff. I checked my guitar case and wandered outside around the field, now into some of the maintenance hangars, now back into the waiting room.
This was my first airplane flight. By the time, with the other passengers, I walked across the hot tarmac to climb the roll-away steps into the silver-sided jet, my flimsy red ticket collected by the smiling stewardess, to look left and right for my seat number somewhere along the beige aisle, I realized that the taking off of the spaceships in the science fiction stories that had enthralled me since my childhood had nothing to do with the flight I was about to go on.
In Asimov’s Foundation stories from the forties, or even in Bester’s The Stars My Destination from the mid-fifties, no matter how festooned with scientific gewgaws and technological gadgets, the “spaceports” in these tales were not modeled on any contemporary airport, but rather on some ancient train station, or even a set of boat docks such as the ones I’d just been working at.
With this revelation, my seatbelt across my lap and the instructions of the stewardess as to oxygen and emergency exits still in my ears, I felt the plane beneath me rumble; we rolled forward and — with no change in feel from ground to air — up into Texas sky. The Houston-New York trip (in those days before fuel conservation) took three hours. It seemed to me that the plane went up, leveled off (by now it was dark out the oval windows, and I lay back in my chair, looking at the little starlike perforations in the tan-enameled strip that ran along the edging between the gently curved and padded wall and the overhanging storage compartments with their air nozzles, oxygen compartment doors, individual lights, and call buttons), and came down again.
The reality of crossing in three hours what had taken me four days to hitchhike was shocking — far more and far more deeply than anything I’d ever experienced in terms of sex or emotions; so that when I walked off the plane at Kennedy, I kept saying to myself: “I’m not the same person I was when I got on! I’m a wholly different human being! I live in a wholly different world now — in a wholly different century! I will never be able to look out at the horizon, as only three days ago I did from the rail of Elmer’s boat, and experience it in the same way again. Never. I’m a member of the Twentieth Century now the way most of the people I’ve been working with and talking to for most of the last six weeks are not!”