One of my oddest trips in a lifetime of odd trips was one that I took with Terry Southern across the U.S.A. in 1964. At that time I’d known Terry (whom I also called, depending on mood and circumstance, “Tex” or “T”) ever since 1952 during a long sojourn in Paris. Like a patient in lengthy convalescence, the city was still war weary, with its beauty a little drab around the edges. Bicycles and motorbikes clogged the streets. The Paris Review was then in its period of gestation and the principals involved in its development, including George Plimpton and Peter Matthiessen, often spent their late evening hours in a dingy nightspot called Le Chaplain, tucked away on a back street in Montparnasse. In the sanitarium of our present smoke-free society it is hard to conceive of the smokiness of that place; the smoke was ice-blue, and almost like a semisolid. You could practically take your finger and carve your initials in it. It was smoke with a searing, promiscuous smell, part Gauloises and …