STILL CIRCLING MOOSE JAW

Here is a story written with a gin-colored typewriter ribbon; it evaporates off the page as you read it. Take that very crucial scene where the title is explained. Our main character, Wally Dixon, a middleaged millionaire whose only object in life is to be happy and to wed or bed Angela, is standing at an airline ticket counter. Apropos of next to nothing, Wally says to the woman ahead of him, ""I was only fooling, lady, while you were falling in love."" Meanwhile, two college girls whom he never met are nibbling his ear and snapping their garters. The ticket vendor gives Wally a kiss with his ticket and tells him his plane is late. Says Wally impishly, ""The plane is actually at this moment still circling Moose Jaw while the pilots study a 1938 Texaco road map."" Says a college girl, ""But in a larger sense, aren't we all still circling Moose Jaw? What is life, after all, but the rejected broccoli from an airline lunch?""...And so on. As in J. P. Donleavy's recent A Singular Man, also about a millionaire, any nonsensical thing can happen any time, and anyone can say anything. It is carte blanche gone berserk. The plot is about Wally's attempt to smuggle Cuban tobacco into the States, and the backgrounds are New York, Tampa, Havana (with Fidel), Cincinnati, the Upper Amazon, and Outer Bissell. A cynical riot.