Up Till Now: The Autobiography

want.” He opened up the trunk. “This here’s where I keep the chaps I wear when I ride him. These are my lucky chaps—long as they’re in the car this car’s gonna win every race. I love these chaps. But any time you want you put on these chaps and take my horse for a ride.”
    One day I needed to drive to Cairo, Illinois, and I asked to borrow his car. He was thrilled to lend it to me, because I was his friend and that’s what friends do for each other. “One more thing,” he told me. “See the backseat over here? Down there’s where I keep the fire extinguisher. You got to know where that is, ‘cause sometimes, not too often, but sometimes the raw gasoline going into the air cleaner catches fire. It’s no big deal, but if you smell fire you just got to open the hood and hit the fire with the extinguisher, just blows it right out.”
    This was a beautiful, finely tuned race car, and on those back roads I could let it out. I had a fine drive into town and on my way back I stopped at a light. Purely coincidently somebody from our company pulled up next to me and shouted, “Your car’s on fire!” What? “There’s flames coming out the bottom of your car.”
    I leaped out of the car. Smoke was coming out from underneath. I knew what to do: raise the hood, get the fire extinguisher, and blow out the fire. Unfortunately, I immediately discovered I didn’t know how to raise the hood. I looked around desperately for the hook or something, a lever, anything to pop it open, and I couldn’t figure out how to do it. The smoke was starting to get a little thicker. I was beating on the hood with my fists, trying to get it to pop, but it was locked shut.
    Okay, I figured, I’ll get the fire extinguisher and crawl under the car. I can blow it out from there. I opened the door and grabbed for the fire extinguisher, and then grabbed for it again. The fire extinguisher had fallen beneath the seat. I couldn’t reach it. By now the smoke was starting to get very thick.
    I opened the trunk and grabbed the first thing I could find. AsI started to shut it I saw a crowbar. Great, that’s what I needed. I took the crowbar and literally pried open the hood. Then I started beating out the fire with that thing I’d grabbed out of the trunk. I beat that fire again and again but it was much too late, the engine just melted. Eventually I stopped and just stood there, leaving that smoking rag I’d used to beat down the fire sitting on top of the melted engine.
    Oh man, I thought, now what am I going to do? And it was just about that time that I realized I had tried to snuff out the fire with this guy’s lucky chaps. I’d melted his car and destroyed his lucky chaps, it was just awful. Incredibly, this man accepted my apology because I was his friend, and because I had enabled him to become part of the movie company. Apparently that was one of the great thrills of his life. In fact, just to show me that he truly wasn’t angry, a few weeks later he invited me to take his horse for a ride.
    And he didn’t even complain when his horse came up lame. The script included some incredibly powerful and potentially volatile scenes. In a key scene I had to stand on the courthouse steps and inflame the townspeople. I had to make them rise up, I had to put the fear of the devil in them, I had to implore them: Take to the streets! Stop the integration of the high school! Save the South!
    Dressed in my white suit, I told them, “They kept the facts away from you! . . . What I’m gonna tell you is gonna make your blood boil. I’m gonna show you that the way this country’s gonna go depends entirely, and wholly, on you!...Now, you all know that there was peace and quiet in the South before the N-double-A-C-P started stirring up trouble. But what you don’t know is this so-called advancement of colored people is now, and has always been, nothing but a Communist front headed by a Jew who hates America...
    “[T]hey knew that the quickest way to weaken a country is to mongolize it...So they poured all the millions of dollars the Jews could get for them into this one thing...desegregation. [The judge] belongs to a society which receives its funds directly from Moscow! Your mayor and the governor could have stopped it—but they didn’t have the guts...The Negroes will literally, and I do mean literally,control the South!... [If you want to stop it] right here, today, I’m with you. Because I’m an American and I love my country,