What do you think?
Rate this book
560 pages, Paperback
First published October 12, 1983
“... there was this bill pending that was backed up like a sledgehammer by the new car dealers. Practically all the gold in Fort Knox was behind it. The new car boys were unhappy about the used car boys…. It would have stopped car sales on Sunday. You know. Religion and all that. And it was going to pass for God’s sake. Can you imagine? So Kermit gets this idea. He calls me over and says how about amending the thing to exempt Buddhists. Kermit’s been practicing Zen and he says he might want to start selling used cars on Sunday and why the hell should he have to observe somebody else’s religious holiday? So I put it up and argued and my God it passed! So then some of the others pitched in with amendments exempting Seventh-Day Adventists and Jews and Mohammedians and some oddball sects, and very soon the sponsors got the idea. They could just visualize all those sharpie used car dealers – all those Rasputins – claiming they were big on Zen or Shinto converts and getting away with it. So they withdrew the bill…”However, these moments of realistic-seeming insight do not occur so often. In between the occurrences, there are long, long set pieces of boozy parties given by young people with seemingly inexhaustible access to family money without the drawback of the physical presence of the family members themselves.