In my younger days, my father gave advice I've pondered since: "Remember, it's not whether a man drives a Coupe de Ville or Nova that constitutes the content of his character," and, in consequence, I've become the confidant of wild, unknown men as Gatsby - who gives his name to this tale.

I'd leased a weather-beaten bungalow in West Egg, next the mansion tenanted by a neighbor whom I'd only seen standing at water's edge by moonlight, staring across the bay towards a single green light, at the edge of a dock. This history of the summer, then, begins when I steered my venerable but dependable Vega over to fashionable East Egg to visit the Buchanans.

I'd known Tom from college, a man of family money and acute, limited intelligence who'd married Daisy, my second cousin. When the butler entered, murmuring something to Tom, who left angrily, Daisy's friend, Jordan Baker, whispered: "He's got some woman."

Half-way between West Egg and New York City is a valley of ashes, over which loom the wild, blue billboard eyes of Eckleburg, Optometrist, and it was there Tom introduced me to his "girl" when we went up to town, one afternoon, in his blue Camaro. I'd followed him to a garage, ash-gray and unprosperous, and he clapped the proprietor on the shoulder, saying "Hello Wilson, old man." The stout, sensuous Myrtle sent her husband off on some errand, and Tom whispered "Get on the next train."

We cabbed up to 158th Street and I commenced getting drunk with company, including Myrtle's sister, Catherine who, learning I lived in West Egg, opined that Gatsby had something to do with NASCAR... or drugs, or oil... and might be a nephew of the Kaiser.

She leaned against me, confiding that neither her sister nor Tom could stand the person they were married to. "But," interjected Mrs. Wilson, "his wife's Catholic and they don't believe in divorce." Mrs. Wilson kept shouting Daisy's name. "I'll say it whenever I want - Daisy! Daisy! Dai..." until Tom broke her nose with his open hand and my escape from the ordinary was done.

On the first night I went to Gatsby's house, I'd mingled with hungry Europeans and prosperous, celebrated Americans, until Jordan Baker invited me to her table. Round midnight a man of about my age asked if I'd been in the war. I said I had been in the Third Division and, after discussing certain gray French villages, added that I lived just next door, "and this man Gatsby sent his chauffeur over with an invitation."

He looked puzzled. "I'm Gatsby, old sport," he finally said, giving one of those rare smiles that bespeak the mark of excellence. He was not drinking and, as the hilarity of the evening swelled, grew more correct. Most of the remaining women were having fights with men said to be their husbands. It must have been almost two when I saw Jordan Baker, with Gatsby - she sidled past, whispering into my ear, "I've just heard the most amazing thing!" but our attention was diverted by a discordant din - a brand new Silverado run into a ditch. An owl-eyed man we'd encountered in Gatsby's library emerged, staring with a pleasantly puzzled expression.

"Like a rock!" he finally declared and, as the caterwauling horns reached a crescendo, I cut across the grass, towards home.

One morning, late in July, Gatsby invited me for a drive up to the city in his gorgeous, yellow Pontiac Bonneville and, in a cellar on 42nd Street with nymphs and muses daubed across the ceiling, introduced me to the cheerily dissolute "Bunkie" whom, he explained, was more father than mentor. "Fixed the soap box derby," Gatsby winked, tactfully omitting certain other difficulties which I now understood these gentleman to have created.

Jordan was incurably dishonest, a gossip and a wretched driver, also, but had a body by Fisher, as it is said, and we shared tender curiosities. "He bought that house, you know, because Daisy lives across the bay and he's had a crush on her for years," she said. "He told me to ask if you'll invite Daisy to your house and let him come over."

Obligated, now, I called Daisy and invited her to West Egg, telling her not to bring Tom. I walked around outside while they made good things happen until the rain stopped, and Gatsby insisted upon inviting both of us to another of his bacchanals.

It was a famous evening... Jordan was escorted by Tiger Woods and Buddy Holly in beautiful new Buicks; Milton Berle was there, Dan Garlitz, Jim Aubrey and O. J. Simpson - Colonel House plinked "Rocket 88" on the piano, then Sammy Davis Junior belted out "Little GTO", "Lean on Me" and, lastly, "Dead Man's Curve", whereupon Daisy's eyes darkened with disgust.

"If it wasn't for the mist, we could see your house across the bay," Gatsby appealed. "You keep a green light burning on your dock."

He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should say, to Tom, "I never loved you!" To obliterate the past. Gatsby talked a lot about the past... someone's past, perhaps, it was life's illusions he recalled. So his career as West Egg's Trimalchio ended abruptly for the disapproval in Daisy's eyes. Sycophants in flimsy, foreign coupes massed at Gatsby's gate, beating at their puny horns, but we gathered at the Buchanan's now. It was infernally hot - Daisy and Jordan reclined on a couch like silver idols, begging to go to town while Tom bellowed and threatened on the phone and Gatsby - in a gaudy suit so new, so right, pink as a game show Cadillac - stood on the veranda, staring across the bay before turning, rigidly, and sighing: "Her voice is so full of... money."

Tom insisted upon driving Gatsby's Pontiac with Jordan and I, while Gatsby and Daisy followed in the Camaro. We ran low on gas and stopped under the Optometrist's glare, and an ashen-eyed George Wilson asked: "Will you sell me that breath-taking Bonneville?" Then, he told Tom that Myrtle wanted to go West, adding: "I just got wised up to something funny."

"What kind of row are you trying to cause in my house?" Tom snapped when we reached New York, having engaged a Plaza suite, a swell suite, though stifling.

"Your wife doesn't love you. She's never loved you," Gatsby said quietly. "We build excitement together."

"That's a God Damned lie! Daisy loves me and I love her. Once in a while I go off on a spree, but I always come back."

"You're revolting," answered Daisy. "I - I never loved you."

"Not at Kapiolani? Not in Chicago? Look at me, now!"

"No..." she said, but without rancor - then turned to Gatsby, saying: "You want too much! I did love him once, but I loved you, too."

"Too?" Gatsby repeated.

"She's not leaving me," Tom said, "for a common hoodlum. I've looked into you, I know about your drugs and oil and the soap box derby! You and that Bunkie took stolen cars upstate, chopped them, and sold the parts overseas, to the Irish! You two can start on home, now," he added. "In Mr. Gatsby's breath-taking Bonneville."

It was seven o'clock when Jordan and I joined Tom in his Camaro, and I remembered that it was my birthday. I was thirty! And on we drove, towards death, through the cooling twilight.

The "death car", as newspapers called it, sped out of gathering darkness as Mrs. Wilson crossed the road, waving and shouting. Tom pulled over, saying he must see what was new, today, and beheld Myrtle's body lying on a worktable while a policeman took down notes and Wilson swayed, crying out "O my Ga-od!"

"Pull yourself together, man!" said Tom, "that wasn't mine, that yellow Pontiac. We just drove up, from New York, in that blue Chevy," he pointed, as the policeman leaned forward.

We returned to East Egg - I wasn't twenty yards from the Buchanan house when Gatsby stepped from the bushes in that pink suit, luminous under the moon - and I guessed the truth. "I tried to make her slow down, old sport," he appealed, "she couldn't shake that convention of the Pontiac being an old lady's car. I thought it was a coyote in the road, I... I only came back to be sure he wouldn't do violence to her."

I said I would look, and circled back to the porch, peeking despicably through a kitchen window. Daisy and Tom were seated opposite each other over ale and fried chicken - there was an intimacy between them, they might have been conspiring.

"You know," Gatsby remarked, then, "I haven't used my pool all summer."

Wilson must have walked all the way to West Egg. A servant heard shots, but thought nothing of them. Gatsby's pneumatic mattress lolled in the water trailing a crimson wide-track... it was only later that the gardener noticed Wilson's body in the grass, and the holocaust was complete.

I found myself on Gatsby's side, and alone. Daisy and Tom had gone away; those who'd danced to Gatsby's tunes, ate his food and drank his liquor, also expressed regrets. Only his father, Henry Gatz, showed up from Minnesota, helpless and dismayed:

"If only he'd kept an eye on the future and an ear to the ground, the rainbow could have been his."

There had been one curious phone call - a surly fellow who said his people were ready to "take care" of somebody called Nader, but hung up when I replied that I was not Gatsby. "You leave a nice impression with nice music and beautiful young people and nobody cares about the bullshit," Bunkie said in declining to attend. "Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is still alive."

So only Mr. Gatz, a priest in another Pontiac, some servants, the West Egg postman and the owl-eyed fellow from Gatsby's library lay him to rest. But, as we straggled back through the gate under a downpour, O. J. Simpson drove up, glaring murderously at our pitiful contingent. "They used to go up to his house by the hundreds," he spat, from the snug harbor of his shiny Nova, then turned a fierce figure-eight in cemetery mud.

Late in October, I saw Tom Buchanan and asked what he'd said to Wilson. "The truth," Tom retorted, "...he'd a revolver, would've killed me if I hadn't told him it wasn't my car."

The last time I saw Jordan Baker, she'd asked if I remembered a conversation we'd had about cars. "You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver?" They had been careless people, Tom and Daisy, they smashed up things and creatures and let other people clean up the messes they'd made. They did not follow this advice from the General Motors Corporation - drive responsibly, and never when under the influence of alcohol.

On my last night in West Egg, I went to Gatsby's big failure of a house to look around. Most of the big shore places were closed, and as I sat, brooding, I thought of his wonder when he first beheld the green light on Daisy's dock. Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic promise of GO! that precedes the placing of pedal to metal which revs up the heartbeat of America.

So we drive on, against a flow of dull, imported, rice-burning traffic, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

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