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dirty dirty, dirty dirty dirty—”
    Scull just beams and gets up from the table and takes his chair practically out onto the dance floor in front of her and sits down—
    â€œâ€”oh dirty dirty, dirty dirty dirty, dirty dirty, oh, you got dirty hair, you got dirty shoes, you got dirty ears, you got dirty booze, dirty dirty, dirty dirty dirty, oh you got a dirty face you got a dirty shirt, you got dirty hands—”
    Rauschenberg ululates in the background, De Maria explodes all over the drums in some secret my-own-bag fury, Oldenburg beats the tambourine, Poons waffles and grins, everybody looks at Scull to see what he’s going to do. Scull seems to sense this as some sort of test. Enjoy!
    â€œI like it!” he says to Pat Oldenburg.
    â€œâ€”oh dirty dirty, dirty dirty dirty, dirty dirty—”
    â€œThat’s very good! I like it!”
    Â 
    He beams, Rauschenberg ululates, blam bong— Gong — 2:30 a.m., out, out of here, Poons, De Maria, Segal, Rauschenberg, Rosenquist, they’re off, down the elevator, they disappear. Bob and Spike take the last elevator down, with Jonathan and Stephen. They get to the bottom, and it is cold as hell, 2:30 a.m., 17 degrees, in the middle of Flushing, Queens, frozen Flushing with the troglodyte ruins of the World’s Fair, frozen-dump garbage, sticking up in the black—and suddenly the artists are gone—and so is the last bus. It’s unbelievable—Bob and Spike—deserted—abandoned—in the middle of Queens. There must have been some stupid mistake! Either that or somebody told the last bus, and the last bus driver, “This is it, we’re all here,
take off,” and he took off, all those Campus Coach Line buses. A station wagon pulls out. It has a few remaining magazine editors in it, the Time and Life crowd. It disappears. Suddenly it is all quiet as hell here, and cold. Bob Scull stares out into the galactal Tastee-Freeze darkness of Queens and watches his breath turn white in front of him.

    Mens Sana in Corpore Sano
    â€œWe’ll give you a full scholarship, and you won’t have to take but one class a week during basketball season, and you’ll have your own apartment, rent-free, and eighteen hundred dollars a month for books, and a Corvette for yourself and a Caprice Classic for your folks and when you graduate you’ll be able to read the newspaper and the stereo ads and add and subtract on a portable calculator and direct-dial anywhere in the world.”

THE LAST AMERICAN HERO
    b
    T en o’clock Sunday morning in the hills of North Carolina. Cars, miles of cars, in every direction, millions of cars, pastel cars, aqua green, aqua blue, aqua beige, aqua buff, aqua dawn, aqua dusk, aqua Malacca, Malacca lacquer, Cloud lavender, Assassin pink, Rake-a-cheek raspberry, Nude Strand coral, Honest Thrill orange, and Baby Fawn Lust cream-colored cars are all going to the stock car races, and that old mothering North Carolina sun keeps exploding off the windshields.
    Seventeen thousand people, me included, all of us driving out Route 421, out to the stock car races at the North Wilkesboro Speedway, 17,000 going out to a five-eighths-mile stock car track with a Coca-Cola sign out front. This is not to say there is no preaching and shouting in the South this morning. There is preaching and shouting. Any of us can turn on the old automobile transistor radio and get all we want:
    â€œThey are greedy dogs. Yeah! They ride around in big cars. Unnh-hunh! And chase women. Yeah! And drink liquor. Unnh-hunh! And smoke cigars. Oh yes! And they are greedy dogs. Yeah! Unh-hunh! Oh yes! Amen!”
    There are also some commercials on the radio for Aunt Jemima grits, which cost ten cents a pound. There are also the Gospel Harmonettes, singing: “If you dig a ditch, you better dig two … .”
    There are also three fools in a panel discussion on the New South, which they seem to conceive of