Then Steve came riding back in on his turtlenecked stallion and things started to change.

The owner was a deep-breasted Lebanese woman in a black turtlenecked silk dress.

The turtlenecked maintenance workers wear black.

The turtlenecked chickens are terrified of offending fanatical Muslims.

She wore a simple turtlenecked knit sweater, olive green, with three little crew pins on the collar, too small to read from here.

Before they reached it, the front door was flung open, and a woman appeared wearing tight black trousers and a black turtlenecked sweater.

She wore a black turtlenecked bodysuit, not unlike the one he wore, hugging a slim, lithe frame.

But the Dolans are as anonymous as George Steinbrenner, the Yankees' turtlenecked principal owner, is familiar.

Mario Gonzalo, resplendent in a turtlenecked shin in rich purple under a beige jacket, said, "Try Manny Rubin."

His reputation was long-lasting on the gridiron, and in 1941, even Time magazine was still referring to "a turtlenecked Yale man of the Bum McClung era."

The Yankees' spit-polished Alex Rodriguez carefully shapes his sentences to provide the illusion of substance by offering numbing volume, as if a provocative word would awake the turtlenecked gargoyle hovering over the team.

It levels the era's turtlenecked existentialism with one decisive comic blow, but after its point is made it keeps on moving, burrowing through the eye to the subconscious and lodging there like an abstract parasite.

In those days, I was the most malevolent flying object in the galaxy, a turtlenecked suburban bad boy with a full tank of gas, an eight-track recording of "Radar Love" and a movie-inspired fantasy life that began at the end of our driveway.