“Party?” said the driver.

“I’ve always found that a rhinoceros makes a pretty poor kind of party guest,” said Dirk. “Try it if you must, but brace yourself.” It was Dirk’s view that asking direct questions made people wary. It was more effective to talk complete nonsense and let people correct him.

“What do you mean, ‘party’?” said the driver.

“The party the other rhinoceros was attending,” said Dirk, tapping the side of his nose, “when it died.”

“Attending?” said the driver with a frown. “I wouldn’t say that it was actually attending the party.”

Dirk raised an encouraging eyebrow.

“It charged down out of the hills, smashed through the perimeter fence, crashed through the plate-glass windows into the house, took a couple of turns around the main room injuring about seventeen people, hurtled back out into the garden where somebody shot it, whereupon it toppled slowly into a swimming pool full of mostly naked screenwriters, taking half a hundredweight of avocado dip and some kind of Polynesian fruit melange with it.”

Dirk took a moment or two to digest this information. Then, “Whose house was this?” he said.

“Just some movie people. Apparently they’d had Bruce Willis round only the previous week. Now this.”

“Seems a bit rough on the old rhino as well,” said Dirk. “And now here’s another one.”

Excerpts from an Interview with the Daily Nexus, April 5, 2000

How does Douglas Adams arrive for coffee? If he were like the Montecitans stopping by Pierre Lafond’s, he would show up in an SUV, a luxury car, or a luxury SUV. The basic cup of coffee at Pierre Lafond’s costs $1.25 and is called “organic French roast.” It tastes exactly like McDonald’s coffee or organic crankcase fluid, not that the drivers of SUVs seem to care.

I expected more from Adams than an SUV. I wanted to see him skip out of a spaceship, materialize, or even just walk. This is a guy who wrote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and has managed to make life, the universe and everything much more entertaining. So, I wondered, how would he arrive?

Black Mercedes.

Adams is six feet five inches tall, with intensely round eyes. He hadn’t had a good day. His daughter was sick, and the croissant he was eating at 5:00 P.M. was lunch. Life hasn’t been bad for the forty-nine-year-old Adams, though. He travels the world, his nine books have sold over 15 million copies, and the oft-delayed Hitchhiker’s movie is now being produced by Disney and has the director of Austin Powers signed on.

“The perennial movie, which has been about to be made for about twenty years and is even more about to be made now,” Adams said. “But we shall see. I wish I had never thought of doing it as a movie. I’d have about ten years of my life back.