The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby

by Tom Wolfe

  The symbolic meaning of the automobile tones down but by no means vanishes in adulthood. Police traffic investigators have long been convinced that far more accidents are purposeful crashes by belligerent drivers than they could ever prove. One of the heroes of the era was the Middle Eastern diplomat who rammed a magazine writer’s car from behind in the Kalorama embassy district of Washington two years ago. When the American bellowed out the window at him, he backed up and smashed his car again. When the fellow leaped out of his car to pick a fight, he backed up and smashed his car a third time, then drove off. He was recalled home for having “gone native.”

  The unabashed, undisguised, quite purposeful sense of destruction of the demolition derby is its unique contribution. The aggression, the battering, the ruination are there to be enjoyed. The crowd at a demolition derby seldom gasps and often laughs. It enjoys the same full-throated participation as Romans at the Colosseum. After each trial or heat at a demolition derby, two drivers go into the finals. One is the driver whose car was still going at the end. The other is the driver the crowd selects from among the 24 vanquished on the basis of his courage, showmanship or simply the awesomeness of his crashes. The numbers of the cars are read over loudspeakers, and the crowd chooses one with its cheers. By the same token, the crowd may force a driver out of competition if he appears cowardly or merely cunning. This is the sort of driver who drifts around the edge of the battle avoiding crashes with the hope that the other cars will eliminate one another. The umpire waves a yellow flag at him and he must crash into someone within 30 seconds or run the risk of being booed off the field in dishonor and disgrace.

  The frank relish of the crowd is nothing, however, compared to the kick the contestants get out of the game. It costs a man an average of $50 to retrieve a car from a junk yard and get it running for a derby. He will only get his money back—$50—for winning a heat. The chance of being smashed up in the madhouse first 30 seconds of a round are so great, even the best of drivers faces long odds in his shot at the $500 first prize. None of that matters to them.

  Tommy Fox, who is nineteen, said he entered the demolition derby because, “You know, it’s fun. I like it. You know what I mean?” What was fun about it? Tommy Fox had a way of speaking that was much like the early Marlon Brando. Much of what he had to say came from the trapezii, which he rolled quite a bit, and the forehead, which he cocked, and the eyebrows, which he could bring together expressively from time to time. “Well,” he said, “you know, like when you hit ’em, and all that. It’s fun.”

  Tommy Fox had a lot of fun in the first heat. Nobody was bashing around quite like he was in his old green Hudson. He did not win, chiefly because he took too many chances, but the crowd voted him into the finals as the best showman.

  “I got my brother,” said Tommy. “I came in from the side and he didn’t even see me.”

  His brother is Don Fox, thirty-two, who owns the junk yard where they both got their cars. Don likes to hit them, too, only he likes it almost too much. Don drives with such abandon, smashing into the first car he can get a shot at and leaving himself wide open, he does not stand much chance of finishing the first three minutes.

  For years now sociologists have been calling upon one another to undertake a serious study of America’s “car culture.” No small part of it is the way the automobile has, for one very large segment of the population, become the focus of the same sort of quasi-religious dedication as art is currently for another large segment of a higher social order. Tommy Fox is unemployed, Don Fox runs a junk yard, Spider Ligon is a maintenance man for Brookhaven National Laboratory, but to categorize them as such is getting no closer to the truth than to have categorized William Faulkner in 1926 as a clerk at Lord & Taylor, although he was.

  Tommy Fox, Don Fox and Spider Ligon are acolytes of the car culture, an often esoteric world of arts and sciences that came into its own after World War II and now has believers of two generations. Charlie Turbush, thirty-five, and his son, Buddy, seventeen, were two more contestants, and by no stretch of the imagination can they be characterized as bizarre figures or cultists of the death wish. As for the dangers of driving in a demolition derby, they are quite real by all physical laws. The drivers are protected only by crash helmets, seat belts and the fact that all glass, interior handles, knobs and fixtures have been removed. Yet Lawrence Mendelsohn claims that there have been no serious injuries in 154 demolition derbies and now gets his insurance at a rate below that of stock-car racing.

  The sport’s future may depend in part on word getting around about its relative safety. Already it is beginning to draw contestants here and there from social levels that could give the demolition derby the cachet of respectability. In eastern derbies so far two doctors and three young men of more than passable connections in eastern society have entered under whimsical noms de combat and emerged neither scarred nor victorious. Bull fighting had to win the same social combat.

  All of which brings to mind that fine afternoon when some high-born Roman women were out in Nero’s box at the Colosseum watching this sexy Thracian carve an ugly little Samnite up into prime cuts, and one said, darling, she had an inspiration, and Nero, needless to say, was all for it. Thus began the new vogue of Roman socialites fighting as gladiators themselves, for kicks. By the second century A.D. even the Emperor Commodus was out there with a tiger’s head as a helmet hacking away at some poor dazed fall guy. He did a lot for the sport. Arenas sprang up all over the empire like shopping center bowling alleys.

  The future of the demolition derby, then, stretches out over the face of America. The sport draws no lines of gender, and post-debs may reach Lawrence Mendelsohn at his office in Deer Park.

  Chapter 3

  The Fifth Beatle

  JOHN, PAUL, GEORGE, Ringo and — Murray the k! — the fifth Beatle! Does anybody out there really understand what it means that Murray the K is the Fifth Beatle? Does anybody comprehend what something like that took? Does anybody comprehend what a victory it was to become George the Beatles roommate in the hotel in Miami and do things like tape record conversations with George during those magic bloomings of the soul just before a man goes to sleep and bring back to the kids the sound of a pure universe with nothing but George, Murray the K and Fedders Miami air-conditioning in it? No; practically nobody out there comprehends. Not even Murray the K’s fellow disc jockey William B. Williams, of WNEW, who likes singers like Frank Sinatra, all that corny nostalgia of the New Jersey roadhouses, and says, “I like Murray, but if that’s what he has to do to make a buck, he can have it.”

  You can imagine how Murray the K feels! He not only makes a buck, he makes about $150,000 a year, he is the king of the Hysterical Disc Jockeys, and people still look at him and think he is some kind of amok gnome. Do they know what’s happening? Here in the studio, close up, inside the glass panels, amid the microphone grilles, cue sheets and commercials in capital letters, Murray the K sits on the edge of his seat, a solidly built man, thirty-eight years old, with the normal adult worried look on his face, looking through the glass at an engineer in a sport shirt. Granted, there are Murray the K’s clothes. He has on a Stingy Brim straw hat, a shirt with wide lavender stripes on it, a pair of black pants so tight they have to have three-inch Chinese slits on the sides at the bottom so they will fit over the gussets of his boots. Murray the K has 62 outfits like this, elf boots, Russian hats, flipnik jerseys, but isn’t that part of it? Murray the K is sitting on the vinyl upholstery on the edge of a chair, which makes it tip forward, and his legs are pumping up and down, but all the time he has to be thinking. He has to concentrate under all these layers of noise, such as the Barbasol commercial.

  “Men, listen as we rub a microphone against an ordinary beard …”

  What comes out of the speaker is a sound like a garbage man dragging a can up the cellar stairs of the Union Square Automat. “… and now listen to the Barbasol sound …”

  This sounds like an otter turned loose in a bin full of i
mmies. And through the whole thing, while all these odd sounds come over the speaker, Murray the K has to sit there in a glass box in the techni-blue of the fluorescent lights and think ahead. He presses down the lever on the intercom box and says to the engineer, “Give me Ringo and me—‘You’re what’s happening.’” Then he wheels around to where Earl, from a British record magazine, is sitting, right behind him in the studio, and Earl gets his word in:

  “Look, Murray, when can we sit down and talk?”

  “Wait a minute,” says Murray, “I got a whole tumultuous opening here and I don’t know whether I’m coming or going. I can’t do a show tonight—look at those commercials!”

  “You sound like you’ve got troubles!”

  Murray the K eyes the Englishman for a second and then says, “Yeah, I’ve got troubles and I’m creating troubles.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Old Barbasol is scraping and rumbling away overhead.

  “The Animals,” says Murray.

  “Murray!” says the Englishman. “The Animals are very big!” “Yeah, but they’re trying to do me in,” says Murray.

  What a sixth sense the man has! In the very same moment the red light is going on, before he can even see it, Murray is wheeling around, putting his face up to the microphone, starting his legs pumping and throwing body English into his delivery—and out comes the incredible cascade of words:

  “All right, baby, that’s Barbasol, baby, and this is the boss sound, 1010 WINS in New York, and that’s what’s happening, babe, John, Paul, George, Ringo and yours truly, Murray the K, the Fifth Beatle, seven minutes before seven o’clock, Beatle time, Beyezeatle Teyezime, and you ask Ringo what’s happening, baby——–”

  All this starts out in a Southern accent ground out from way back in the throat like a Bible Way preacher and then turns into hippodrome circuit showbiz, and all the while Murray the K is wrenching his body this way and that and the words are barreling out on top of one another, piling up hysteria until he points at the engineer and—pow—the tape of Ringo and him is on, and the voice of Murray the K is heard shouting;

  “What’s happening, baby?”

  And the curious black-water adenoid of Ringo Starr the Beatle is heard shouting:

  “You’re what’s happening, baby!”

  And Murray shouts, “You’re happening, too, baby!”

  And Ringo shouts, “O.K., we’re both happening, baby!”

  And—what is happening?

  What is happening is radio in the modern age. It is a curious thing, psychologically. Radio is back strong after its early losses to television, but in an altogether different form. The radio is now something people listen to while they are doing something else. They’re getting dressed in the morning, driving to work, sorting mail, painting a building, working in a manhole and listening to the radio. Then comes nightfall, and all the adults in New York and New Jersey and Long Island and Connecticut, like everywhere else, are stroked out, catatonic, in front of the television set. The kids, however, are more active. They are outside, all over the place, tooling around in automobiles, lollygagging around with transistors plugged into their skulls, listening to the radio. Listening is not exactly the word. They use the radio as a background, the aural prop for whatever kind of life they want to imagine they’re leading. They don’t want any messages at all, they want an atmosphere. Half the time, as soon as they get a message—namely, a commercial or a news spot—they start turning the dial, looking for the atmosphere they lost. So there are all those kids out there somewhere, roaming all over the dial, looking for something that will hook not the minds, but the psyche.

  That was the problem for which Murray the K, at Station WINS, was the solution. Given the problem, this man was a genius. He was probably the original hysterical disc jockey and in any case he was the first big hysterical disc jockey. Murray the K doesn’t operate on Aristotelian logic. He operates on symbolic logic. He builds up an atmosphere of breathless jollification, comic hysteria, and turns it up to a pitch so high it can hypnotize kids and keep them frozen to WINS through the commercials and everything else. The name Murray the K itself is an example of what he does. His real name is Murray Kaufman, but who cares if they’re listening to somebody named Murray Kaufman? Murray the K is different. It doesn’t mean anything, but it signifies something, a kind of nutty hipsterism. Symbolic logic. He does the same thing with sound effects. The sound effects come on cartridges. He can ask the engineer for No. 39 and wham, when he gives the signal, the biggest crash in the history of the world comes over the air. There are freight trains, cavalry charges, the screams of men plunging down an abyss, nutty macaw laughter from the jungle, anything, and it all goes off like rockets in an on-going lunacy, all spliced together only by the hysterical apostrophes—“All right, baby!”—of Murray the K.

  For a while, after discovering hysteria and symbolic logic, Murray the K was murdering the competition. His rating was 29, he says, against 9 for the next best disc jockey in New York. Other stations were slow to copy the new technique because—well, it was too damned nutty. It sounded kind of demented or something. But they got over that, and pretty soon two stations, WABC and WMCA, had set up teams of disc jockeys who were working the rock and roll and hysteria gimmick practically around the clock. WABC called its group the All Americans and WMCA called theirs the Good Guys. Some of them, like Bruce Morrow of WABC, “Cousin Brucie” he is called, could even keep up with Murray the K in sheer pace. It got wild on the airways. There was a great manic competition going on, shrieks, giggles, falsettos, heaving buffoonery, laughing gargles, high school beat talk, shouts, gasps, sighs, yuks, loony laughs, nonsense rhymes, puns, crazy accents, anything that came spinning off the mind. And by last February 7, Murray the K was losing. He was behind both the All Americans and the Good Guys in the ratings.

  “For one thing,” says Murray the K, “I was boxed in. The station made some changes in the format and there was a half-hour news bloc in front of me and a talk show behind me.”

  Sure, Murray the K may have been boxed in, but a lot of times radio stations don’t show much appreciation for the esoterica of disc jockey competition, just as nobody else out there does. Murray the K had put in four years at WINS, which was some kind of a record, but historically that doesn’t mean much. There are about 25,000 or more disc jockeys in the country, and the turnover is ferocious; they are all the time quitting or getting fired, and about 95 per cent of them, employed or unemployed, have their jaws open and their eyes set on the 16 big disc jockey jobs in New York, the minimum expectation here being $20,000 a year for a no-talent disc jockey who works regularly.

  Actually, Murray the K has done a great deal to diversify his work. About half his income comes from things like pop music shows he puts on at the Fox Theater in Brooklyn, his personal appearances at places like Freedomland, the Murray the K T shirts he sells, the record albums he “hosts,” such as “Murray the K’s Golden Gassers” and “Murray the K and Jackie the K’s Golden Gassers.” Jackie is his wife. Jackie’s father, Hilary Hayes, runs Murray the K’s office over at Station WINS, upstairs in a two-story building on Central Park West right where it hits Columbus Circle. And one of the finer points of Hilary Hayes’ approach is that Murray the K is not merely WINS’ outstanding disc jockey, he is a showman and personality in his own right. Hayes is a white-haired man who sits up there in the office at a desk underneath a poster reading, “Kongratulations to Murray the K, You’re What’s Happening, Baby.” On the other side of the desk are a bunch of girls, volunteers, who answer Murray the K’s mail, 150 or so letters a day. The girls being volunteers, there are always a lot of new girls, and he has to keep going over the instructions for answering the letters.

  “Now remember,” he tells them, “end the note with ‘Murray sends his love’ before ‘Sincerely,’ and remember to say, ‘Listen to the boss show’—don’t name it, if they don’t know which it is, too bad. Also, remember, we’re not happy because they listen
to WINS—we’re just happy they listen to Murray the K. If he was on any other station, we’d be just as happy.”

  The truth is, however, that for Murray the K, like every other disc jockey, all of it would evaporate, the T shirts, the albums, everything, if he ever found himself without a top radio show. That was what he had to think over when the All Americans and the Good Guys made their big surge. And then came February 7, 1964, the day of the biggest coup in Murray the K’s life.

  That was the day the Beatles first arrived in the United States, out at Kennedy Airport. The scene out there was the expected madhouse, 4,000 kids ricocheting all over the place, hurling themselves at plate glass to try to break through into the customs area when the Beatles got off the plane and came through, things like that. Every newspaper, television station, network, all the wire services, all the radio stations, everybody who could get somebody out there was covering it, and they were all angling for something exclusive. At WINS they had been trying to figure out which of their regular news reporters to send out to Kennedy to do a live broadcast of the Beatles’ arrival, and they couldn’t think of anybody suitable, and then Joel Chaseman, the station’s manager, got the idea of why not send Murray the K.

  The trouble was, the press was only going to get one shot at the Beatles, and that was when they were led into a steaming little press room and put up on a platform with literally about a hundred reporters, photographers and interviewers packed into the room around them in overcoats, it being February. To make it worse, all the photographers were yelling at once, and it was bedlam generally, but this was Murray the K’s finest hour. Murray the K must have looked odd even to the Beatles. Here he was with a straw hat on in February, hunched up practically in a ball at the foot of the platform, looking up at them with his best manic look on and sticking a stick microphone up to about the level of their knees. Murray the K was copping an interview. The photographers were supposed to have first crack at the Beatles, but Murray the K was copping an interview by shooting questions up to them from somewhere in the general area of their feet, so they could answer into the microphone at their knees. Some photographer would be yelling something like, “Hey, how about you guys getting in a little closer there!” but all the time Murray the K would be singling out one Beatle like George Harrison and saying something like, “Hey, George, baby, hey, hey, George, George, baby, yeah, hey down here, how did this reception compare with the reception you got in Stockholm, baby?” Murray knew their whole history. And George, a literal-minded boy, would look down and see this odd friendly face under a straw hat and say, “Well, we were worried at first. Everywhere else we couldn’t hear the plane for the screams, you know. But here we could hear the screams but we could also hear the planes—you know?—it worried us. It didn’t seem big, you know, sort-of-thing.”