Among the various meanings of the word "switch" offered in Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, I find that all of them are strongly suggestive of the relationship between Louis Coyote and myself:

"Switch: (l) to strike or beat with, or, as if with a switch. WHISK. LASH. (2) a: to turn from one railroad track to another: SHUNT, b: to move (cars) to different positions on the same track within terminal areas. (3) to make a shift in or exchange of (~the talk to another subject). (4) to lash from side to side--switchable. switcher."

The last of the above was prophetic. As it turned out, Louis and I were, literally, "switchable switchers."

I laughed uneasily after I said to Louie, "You know what we're doing, don't you? We're about to pull a Prince and the Pauper."

Louie didn't know what I was talking about. It was hard for me, at first, to remember that an intelligent man is not necessarily an educated man. I made a silent, firm resolve never to talk over his head again. The handsome, charming man I admired and envied had a painful inferiority complex about his lack of formal education. I wanted to make him understand that everything he was--and everything he was not--added up to my passionate desire to switch places with him. It was no use telling him that the pampered darlings I went to the fancy schools with were, compared to him, the dullest, most predictable, most limited, and least sexy bores on earth.

It was no use telling him how I envied every rotten break, every deprivation, every emotional and physical agony he had endured in his twenty-two years of living--because it made him what he was!

What he was, in my crazy-romantic view, was so beautiful, glamorous, and sexy that I hated my super-rich, sterile, terminally boring existence all the more. I didn't want to be like him. I wanted to become him--Louis Coyote--half Cherokee Indian, half German--son of an El Paso couple who had died as they had lived--dirt-poor losers in a society that worshiped the values and lifestyle epitomized by my vaunted foster family--the Norbachs of Long Island--the same nouveaux riche barbarians I was running away from when I, literally, collided with Coyote in a fog so dense that we couldn't see each other's faces clearly until we had checked into that hotel room in the little town just ahead. All across the country there are hotels called "Terminal" simply because they are in the vicinity of a train or bus station--as if nobody ever considered another meaning of the word. I always asked, "What man in his right mind would want to check into The Terminal Hotel?"

I thought of all those Tennessee Williams cafes and bars and hotels and streetcars: Desire, Tarantula Arms, Last Chance, and, of course Terminal.

But in the Hotel Terminal, in that obscure little room, the dark innuendo of the word did a full one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn. For there, something long-despised died, and something long-wanted was born.

The cars we had abandoned were left joined at the heads like Siamese twins. We had been driving very slowly because of zero visibility; so, we escaped injury. But all our pushing, pulling, huffing, and puffing efforts to separate our two vehicles were in vain. We finally broke up, laughing, and started walking.

Nobody in Tiny Town was going to do anything except stay comfortably indoors until that pea soup lifted. So, we decided to do the same. We checked into a room that was not altogether uncomfortable, despite the exceptionally quaint custom of a "double room" turning out to be a rather large room with one double bed.

"I don't mind if you don't," said Mr. Coyote. I assured him that sleeping with another guy was nothing strange to me, having been raised in a house with four older foster "brothers."

This, in fact, was not altogether true. I didn't mention that the house I was raised in was a seventy-five-room mansion with twenty guest rooms and that all my life I had slept all by myself in the smallest of the family bedrooms, which was five times larger than the hotel room Louie and I were in.

Not that having my own room granted me any rights of privacy. My four "house-peers" considered it their privilege as well as their pleasure to burst in on me in the middle of the night and subject me to the kind of abuse usually associated with college fraternity hazings. One would suppose this sort of thing would go away as we all got older. Instead, it only got kinkier.

Louis and I called for room service, which they had never heard of. They did, however, send up a young boy--he couldn't have been older than nineteen. He didn't resemble a bellhop at all, but he filled his Levi's very well and condescended to get us some clean glasses and a bottle of Scotch in exchange for a lot of admiration and an enormous tip.