“So. You’re pretty interested in rhinoceroses, then,” said Joe conversationally.
“Not especially,” said Dirk. “Not till I read my horoscope this morning.”
“That right? Don’t believe in them myself. You know what mine said this morning? It said that I should think long and hard about my personal and financial prospects. Pretty much what it said yesterday. ‘Course, that’s pretty much what I do every day, just driving around. So I suppose that means something, then. What did yours say?”
“That I would meet a three-ton rhinoceros called Desmond.”
“I guess you can see a different bunch of stars from New Zealand,” said Joe.
“It’s a replacement. That’s what I heard,” volunteered Joe.
“A replacement?”
“Yup.”
“A replacement for what?”
“Previous rhinoceros.”
“Well, I suppose it would hardly be a replacement for a lightbulb?” said Dirk. “Tell me—what happened to the, er, previous rhinoceros?”
“Died.”
“What a tragedy. Where? At the zoo?”
“At a party.”
“A party?”
“Yup.”
Dirk sucked his lip thoughtfully. There was a principle he liked to adhere to when he remembered, which was never to ask a question unless he was fairly certain he would like the answer. He sucked his other lip.
“I think I’ll go and take a look myself,” he said, and climbed out of the car.
The large, dark green truck was pulled onto the side of the road. The sides of the truck were about four feet high, and a heavy tarpaulin was roped down over an enormous crate. The driver was leaning against the door of the cab, smoking a cigarette. He clearly thought that being in charge of a three-ton rhinoceros meant that no one would argue with him about this, but he was wrong. The most astonishing amount of abuse was being hurled at him by the drivers negotiating their way one by one past his truck.
“Bastards!” muttered the driver to himself as Dirk wandered up to him in a nonchalant kind of way and lit a companionable cigarette himself. He was trying to give it up, but usually kept a pack in his pocket for tactical purposes.
“You know what I hate?” said Dirk to the truckdriver, “Those signs in cabs that say ‘Thank You for Not Smoking.’ I don’t mind if they say ‘Please Don’t Smoke,’ or even just a straightforward ‘No Smoking.’ But I hate those prim ‘Thank You for Not Smoking’ signs. Make you want to light up immediately and say, ‘No need to thank me, I wasn’t going to not smoke.’”
The driver laughed.
“Taking this old bugger far?” asked Dirk, with the air of one seasoned rhinoceros delivery driver comparing notes with another. He gave the truck an appraising glance.
“Just out to Malibu,” said the driver. “Way up Topanga Canyon.”
Dirk gave a knowing cluck as if to say, “Don’t talk to me about Topanga Canyon, I once had to take a whole herd of wildebeest to Cardiff in a minibus. You want trouble? That was trouble.” He sucked deeply on his cigarette.
“Must have been some party,” he remarked.
“Party?” said the driver.
“I’ve always found that a rhinoceros makes a pretty poor kind of party guest,” said Dirk. “Try it if you must, but brace yourself.” It was Dirk’s view that asking direct questions made people wary. It was more effective to talk complete nonsense and let people correct him.
“What do you mean, ‘party’?” said the driver.
“The party the other rhinoceros was attending,” said Dirk, tapping the side of his nose, “when it died.”
“Attending?” said the driver with a frown. “I wouldn’t say that it was actually attending the party.”
Dirk raised an encouraging eyebrow.
“It charged down out of the hills, smashed through the perimeter fence, crashed through the plate-glass windows into the house, took a couple of turns around the main room injuring about seventeen people, hurtled back out into the garden where somebody shot it, whereupon it toppled slowly into a swimming pool full of mostly naked screenwriters, taking half a hundredweight of avocado dip and some kind of Polynesian fruit melange with it.”
Dirk took a moment or two to digest this information. Then, “Whose house was this?” he said.
“Just some movie people. Apparently they’d had Bruce Willis round only the previous week. Now this.”
“Seems a bit rough on the old rhino as well,” said Dirk. “And now here’s another one.”
Excerpts from an Interview with the Daily Nexus, April 5, 2000
How does Douglas Adams arrive for coffee? If he were like the Montecitans stopping by Pierre Lafond’s, he would show up in an SUV, a luxury car, or a luxury SUV. The basic cup of coffee at Pierre Lafond’s costs $1.25 and is called “organic French roast.” It tastes exactly like McDonald’s coffee or organic crankcase fluid, not that the drivers of SUVs seem to care.
I expected more from Adams than an SUV. I wanted to see him skip out of a spaceship, materialize, or even just walk. This is a guy who wrote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and has managed to make life, the universe and everything much more entertaining. So, I wondered, how would he arrive?
Black Mercedes.
Adams is six feet five inches tall, with intensely round eyes. He hadn’t had a good day. His daughter was sick, and the croissant he was eating at 5:00 P.M. was lunch. Life hasn’t been bad for the forty-nine-year-old Adams, though. He travels the world, his nine books have sold over 15 million copies, and the oft-delayed Hitchhiker’s movie is now being produced by Disney and has the director of Austin Powers signed on.
“The perennial movie, which has been about to be made for about twenty years and is even more about to be made now,” Adams said. “But we shall see. I wish I had never thought of doing it as a movie. I’d have about ten years of my life back.
For the first time in over a decade, Adams is working on a book.
“There was a point where I just got massively fed up with it. My books tend to use up ideas at a ferocious rate,” he said. “I never intended to be a novelist to begin with. So I decided to go and do a whole bunch of other things... . The consequence of that is I have a huge backlog of story ideas, and now the sort of panic is, ‘Can I do them all in the rest of my career, given the speed at which they’re arriving at the moment?’ The other panic, of course, is the perennial writer’s problem of application. I think I have more fear of writing than most writers.”
The new book is not a Hitchhiker’s book—there are already five of those—or a Dirk Gently book, but “it will be recognizable in style to anyone who knows those books.
“Since then, I’ve now got lots and lots of different story lines waiting for me to turn them into books. One of them I shall apply the title Salmon of Doubt to, but I don’t know which one yet.”
In 1990, Adams, with zoologist Mark Carwardine, wrote Last Chance to See. It’s one of his hardest books to find, and his favorite. When Adams—who has lived in Santa Barbara for the last two years—speaks today at UCSB, it’s the book he’ll talk about.
“I do talks around most of the rest of the country,” Adams said. “So I was very keen to do one here, just to sort of say, ‘Hi, here I am.’”
Adams gives a lot of speeches, usually about high technology to large companies.
“I actually much prefer doing this particular one, which I only ever usually get to do at colleges because it’s funny, but big corporations don’t particularly like to hear about protecting endangered wildlife,” he said. “You lose a lot of money to endangered wildlife.”