ELLYBEL'S AUTOMOBILE

...Instead of purifying my soul, I Simonize my car...

...It's wonderful, simply wonderful...

...Joe White, recently solemnized on earth and in heaven, and attended, on earth, by your man Mayer...

...It seems that Joe is stationed in Louisville and has a car of his own, and so Elly didn't need hers, and still she didn't want to sell it, as it was a keepsake of great sentimental, if small monetary, value, and so she asked me to look after it in her absence which, though I love Elly, I hope lasts through the Winter...

...THIS piece is going to be about Ellybel's automobile, and here we are, by way of Tacoma and the Florida keys...

...I beat the lights, shake off the cops, and, leaning heavily on Ellybel's horn, intimidate milder drivers into jumping their cars on to the sidewalk...

...I imagine that most of the members of the wedding party had more faith in the State of Illinois than they have in God, but it was, as I say, a pippin of a wedding, and as soon as the rabbi finished his spiel, swallowed his saucer of tea, and retired to meditate on righteousness in such squalor and humility as befits a man of God, Richie, that's Elly's pa, got out some champagne he had scraped up somewhere...

...Ellybel's wedding was the first I have been to in I don't know how long...

...Instead of devoting my spirit to the downtrodden sons of toil, I curse them for threatening to strike the refineries...

...The bottles were dusty, and the stuff wasn't even American, but it went down all right, and, after considerable of it went down, darned if I didn't find myself arguing about the Anti-Defamation League of the B'nai B'rith, it being a minor obsession of mine because it goes around suppressing fascists, including me, in defiance of Mayer's Third Law of Thermodynamics, which asserts that suppressing people may be good for the Gentiles but it certainly is no good for the Jews...

...I am a Man of Property, and the fact that it is Borrowed Property restrains my ego not a whit...

...I scatter pedestrians and dogs, without distinguishing between them...

...and Mrs...

...All at once, instead of being an aging, urban, flat-chested sycophant of powerful men and interests, I am a powerful man and interest myself, and, as I sit behind Ellybel's wheel, lighting Murad after Murad and careening down a ribbon of moonlight, I am able to formulate plans and passions that, only a month ago, I was content to read about, and I am ready to spit in the eye of the Great Otto Khan himself...

...I was home in 20 minutes, had my teeth in the glass and my prayers said in 10 minutes more, and half an hour after Ellybel's wedding, I was dreaming of enchanted gardens, fascinating gamins, and the chocolate dragees they used to sell at Kranz's candy store before the war...

...It's the sense of sudden, stupendous power...

...Finally, I find that my whole Frame of Reference, my whole Area of Orientation, my whole Philosophy of Life has changed...

...And so, on any reasonably clear day, you may see your man Mayer, the former pedestrian and revolutionary, spinning down the Drive, from the far South Side to the far North Side, and even, when the omens are auspicious, to the suburbs...

...NOW I know,having suddenly risen from poverty by virtue of my Initiative, Imagination, Perseverance, and Clean Living, why Calvin Coolidge was elected President...

...Instead of hating Bad Men, I hate men who have big automobiles...

...I had almost forgotten what getting married, or even seeing somebody else get married, was like, and it made me realize, once again, that the home is a great, if complicated, institution...

...I'm in favor of letting the unemployed loafers starve, of exterminating the Germans, of a bigger navy (if there's room for it in the water), of bases in Siberia, of peacetime conscription, and of lower taxes on Small Business, particularly General Motors...

...The groom was less ravishing, but still passable, in a shoddy variety of khaki, hemstitched, doubtless, by exploited labor and sold to the Government at fantastic prices, and paid for by the taxpayers, of whom I am one of the least, but still one of them...

...not at all...

...The solemnization occurred at the home of the bride's parents, Mr...

...It is not that I, personally, am Miss Un-America, or anything like that...

...The solemnization impressed me, as sacraments of all sorts always do, I being a staunch, if foggy, Believer...

...The reason it gives me great pleasure to announce the marriage of Elly and Joe, entirely apart from my affection for the parties thereto, is that immediately after the solemnization, Elly, or Ellybel, as she is known to her friends, handed me the keys to her automobile, and this piece is going to be about how it feels, after three years of hot and cold pavements, to tool around in a great big beautiful piece of machinery...

...As Sam Goldwyn said, the first time he saw a sun dial, "What next...

...it is just that my generation are all married, and half divorced, and their children are all a little too young yet, up in this northern climate, to go through the mill...

...Instead of contemplating the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, I now contemplate the billboards...

...The rabbi sounded good to me, as he joined Elly and Joe in joy and in sorrow, in sickness and in health, until death do them temporarily part, and he topped it off by pronouncing them man and wife, which everyone pretty much expected was going to happen, and he said he was doing so by the power vested in him by God and the State of Illinois...

...And it's not merely getting all over everywhere in no time, either...

...They tell me that I was no more offensive than usual, however, and I was allowed to get out by the front door, along with the rest of the die-hards, at 1 a. m. or so...

...Or maybe a soldier's orphan, just by way of whetting my appetite...

...A. Richard Frank of Chicago, and it was one of the corkingest solemnizations I have ever attended...

...And, instead of the usual routine of moping over to the trolley car, and then transferring from trolley to trolley, and then moping home, I leaped into Ellybel's automobile, twisted its tail, and let 'er (or 'im) go...

...And now, if you folks will excuse me, I will get into Ellybel's automobile and run down a blind man, complete with his Seeing Eye dog...

...I jump into Ellybel's automobile, and in a trice I am transformed from the little piker who goes around preaching nonviolence into a combination of Marshal Rommel, Beardsley Ruml, and Beau Brummel...

...I will get to that part of it pretty soon...

...I think it was gray...

...I intend to vote for him in '48.1 think the unions and the Negroes are getting too powerful and that government ought to keep its hands off of business...

...Instead of lusting after the proper object of lust, I lust after a new rear-drive, light-weight, rotary-drive, twin-screw, root-de-toot postwar Packard, with television on the dashboard, spittoons in the rear, autogiro on the top, and Mercury on the radiator cap...

...You don't think J. P. Morgan actually owned the money that made him so arrogant, do you...

...There was Joe marrying Elly in my clothes...

...THE bride was ravishing, I thought, in gray...