Street Sleeper

Four

War? What is it good for? Absolutely nothing. Say it again. At least that’s the way it seemed to Ishmael. How did clean-living Barry Osgathorpe come to be involved in a vulgar roadside brawl? There are no easy answers.

He was picking bits of glass out of the broken headlights when a man with very long hair came over to him. The man looked convincingly like a hippy but he was wearing overalls with the motel’s logo on them, and had the air of a gardener or maintenance man.

‘You OK, man?’ he asked Ishmael.

‘Bloody great.’

‘What was going on there?’

Ishmael didn’t answer.

‘I’d have helped you, man, but you know violence isn’t the answer.’

Ishmael suggested he stop being ridiculous.

‘Hey, really, people have got to start loving each other.’

‘Oh, sod off,’ said Ishmael:

And then he heard himself being negative and hostile and he knew he was wrong.

‘In my heart of hearts I know you’re right,’ he said. ‘But do you really expect me to love those two after they smash my car and steal my girl?’

‘Well, I’m an idealist,’ the hippy said. ‘No one ever said it was going to be easy. And you know, ‘my car’, ‘my girl’—dubious concepts. Look, I’m just finishing my shift. I don’t know if you’re heading my way, but maybe you could give me a lift to where I live. It’s just up the road at Fox’s Farm. It’s sort of a commune. You could come over and I could roll us a fat number.’

His simple philosophy had touched Ishmael deeply.

‘I’d love to come,’ he said, ‘but just at the moment I’m on a quest.’

‘That sounds great, but you know it’s getting late, and it’s getting dark, and it doesn’t look as though you’ve got any headlights.’

All this was true.

‘My name’s John.’

‘Call me Ishmael.’

‘You’ll like Fox’s Farm. It’s very mellow. We can have some free-range eggs.’

Ishmael thought. Now admittedly he had already paid for a night at the motel, admittedly the most noble thing would have been to pursue Marilyn and her mother and father immediately and to the end of the earth. On the other hand, motels are soulless places and in any case he doubted whether he was all that welcome following the brawl; equally he had Marilyn’s address, and her parents weren’t going to move house before tomorrow; and it was getting late and dark and he didn’t have any headlights.

‘If you don’t like eggs there are always frozen pizzas in the freezer.’

Ah well, Ishmael thought, another adventure. That’s what I’m here for. Isn’t that what we’re all here for?

‘Take me to your commune,’ he quipped.

♦

Ishmael used to say to Debby, ‘Mark but this pig, and mark in this, how little that which thou denies me is.’ Since this was obscure he would then say, ‘Look, Debby, there are women in this world who are prepared to put their tongues up horses’ anuses, who get penetrated by mastiffs, who get their faces doused in pig semen. So frankly, my love, I don’t think I’m being entirely unreasonable merely by asking, and very politely at that, if I might gently come in your mouth.’

Frankly, Debby thought he was being entirely unreasonable.

‘Go find yourself a pig!’ she’d say. ‘Let your pig do your laundry. You men are all the same.’

Ishmael had never thought that Debby was sufficiently worldly-wise to make that kind of generalization.

‘You’d put your penis in my mouth,’ she’d continue. ‘You’d put it in a pig, you’d put it in half a pound of pork dripping if it didn’t answer back.’

Enthusiastic though she was, Marilyn hadn’t proved to be an enthusiast for the kind of thing he had in mind, either.

She had sprawled, provocatively enough, on the motel bed and inquired, ‘What do you like having done?’

Ishmael replied, ‘I like to see torrents of hot semen coursing like molten lava down your moist, eager, yielding throat.’

He laughed coyly.

‘Sorry’, Marilyn said. ‘I’d really have to quite like you before I did that.’

Ishmael thought it best to let the matter drop. But a commune? Surely this was a good location for the aspiring oralist, with its understood promises of self-sufficiency, casual drug-abuse and free love. It might be all slightly old-fashioned, but Ishmael didn’t want to knock it until he’d tried it.

He and John the Hippy drove ten miles or so in the gathering dusk. On the way Ishmael told his story. John the Hippy seemed impressed. They drove down ever more minor roads until they came to a track that ran through a scrubby bit of woodland. A building was visible. It was a modern, sprawling bungalow with a distinct touch of the commuter-belt about it. Doors and windowframes had, however, been painted in what might still be called psychedelic colours. There was a number of outbuildings — a double garage, a couple of sheds, a disused stable — and scattered among them were the wrecks of old cars, motorcycles, minibuses and caravanettes. Ishmael didn’t take to the place.

♦

The little girl who peered through the Benz showroom window with Peter, who had her ears boxed by Adolf Hitler, is called Nina. Half Austrian, half Swiss she grows up with ambitions to become an actress. She cannot decide whether she would be happier as a serious Brechtian ensemble player or as a Hollywood sex symbol, Hollywood having been forced to develop a taste for things and people European these recent years.

She practises giving interviews. The Hollywood option seems to trip more easily from her tongue. ‘I have a love affair with the camera,’ she explains, ‘and my career would always come before any man.’

August 1938 finds her still in Berlin. Bertolt Brecht is long gone and Nina is singing French, English and German songs in a Troika just off the Tauentzienstrasse, and supplementing her income with a little light-weight prostitution. It is the old story. It’s a living.

After her act she mixes with the spare audience. Favours to none, to all she smiles extends, and at the end of the evening she is sharing a table with Richard Huntingdon, an Englishman, sometime journalist, sometime poet, sometime luster after a man in a uniform.

‘We have special cause for celebration tonight,’ Nina says.

‘Why is that?’

She shows him her Kunst-der-Freude-Wagen-Sparkarte — her Volkswagen saver’s card.

♦

‘Nice place you have here,’ Ishmael lied. ‘We like it,’ said John the Hippy.

Ishmael parked the car. They got out.

‘No need to lock the car,’ Ishmael said brightly, thinking that a commune would surely be the one place guaranteed not to rip-off a traveller.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said John the Hippy. ‘You can’t be too careful these days.’

Yes, thought Ishmael, the sixties ended a long time ago.

Nudity, wholefood, group sex, arts and crafts, lots of very small children with names like Mothership, loud rock music, a lot of personal and political commitment, and a general refusal to work on Maggie’s Farm — these were the things that Ishmael had expected from your standard commune.

The reality was somewhat different. Ishmael discovered with horror that several of the men were wearing ties. They had day-jobs where they had to dress up like ‘straights’ but even when they got back to the commune they kept the ‘straight’ clothes on. OK, so the girl who was cooking supper for everybody had a gold stud through her nose, but when the meal was served there didn’t appear to be anything very, say, macrobiotic about it. It was pie and chips. No slap in the face for the bourgeoisie there.

♦

Richard takes the saver’s card and examines it carefully. He sees the Gothic print and seemingly endless spaces for the sticking of savings stamps.

‘I am to be the owner of one of Herr Hitler’s Strength-Through-Joy cars,’ she says giggling. ‘The people’s car.’

‘Smashing,’ says Richard. ‘Congratulations. When are you taking me for a ride in it?’

‘Oh, the moment it’s delivered, I promise you.’

‘Is there much of a wait? A few weeks? A month?’

‘Richard,’ she says in mock anger, ‘don’t be so naive. Obviously the car isn’t delivered until it’s paid for.’

‘I’m not sure I follow.’

‘It’s very simple. I save five Marks each week…’

‘How much does this car cost?’

‘Nine hundred and ninety Marks.’

Richard winces.

‘I simply save five Marks every week, a stamp is put on the card, and when the card is full, and when the cars are in full production, I shall have one.’

♦

The only stereotype about communes that Fox’s Farm helped to reinforce was that everyone seemed drugged, positively sedated. He saw perhaps a dozen inmates, there was no way of telling what relationship anyone had with anyone else, no way of telling what they were, what they felt, not even what their names were. And the main reason for this was that nobody ever said anything. Nobody asked him to sit down, nobody introduced themselves. They didn’t seem to notice him. They just sat around eating, drinking and being sullen.

Ishmael was against meaningless chatter as much as the next man, but he had to start somewhere. He tried to make conversation.

‘Nice lifestyle you have here,’ he said, though his heart was not in the remark and perhaps they were aware of it since they completely ignored it.

Perhaps they were inhibited because he was a stranger, so what better way of overcoming this than by avoiding social niceties completely and getting right down to brass tacks.

‘Look, what’s your ideology here?’ he asked.

The intense silence around the table became, if possible, even more profound, but he did seem to have provoked some reaction. The woman with the nose-stud looked up from her meal and stared out of the window, her eyes fixed on some distant object invisible to the naked eye.

‘We talk about ideology,’ she said. ‘We talk as though we know who we are and where we’re going; but we’re lost. Most of us are very, very lost.’

‘I once was lost, but now I’m found,’ Ishmael said.

This did produce a vague mutter from one or two of the people around the table, but Ishmael couldn’t tell if this indicated approval.

♦

‘But that will take four years,’ Richard says, aghast.

‘Yes. It’s a long-term plan. You’re always telling me that I should not live so much in the present. I thought about it for a long time. Besides, there will be hundreds of thousands of us all saving together through this marvellous scheme.’

‘Hundreds of thousands of you, each paying five Marks a week for a car that you will not see for at the very least four years? It sounds as though some of you Germans have more money than sense.’

‘You think the German people are unwise?’

‘Let’s just say I don’t see the English workman falling for this inverted form of usury.’

♦

Lightening the mood Ishmael asked, ‘Does anybody know where there’s a good cheap Volkswagen garage around here?’

A man in a tie said that he did, and he gave the impression that given time he might even tell where it was.

Then the meal was over. Everybody stood up and went into the living-room to watch television and take some drugs. Ishmael felt unwanted and unwelcome. He went to look again at the damage done to Enlightenment. He stood drinking in the night air and picking flakes of paint off the driver’s door.

A few minutes later the man who knew where the Volkswagen garage was came out. He handed Ishmael a slip of paper with an address and a map on it. Ishmael got the feeling that this was to be considered a grand gesture and thanked him accordingly. The tie-wearer nodded and left. ’

Then John the Hippy came out.

‘That was beautiful,’ he said. ‘Just beautiful.’

‘Huh?’

‘The way you talked at supper. It was so precise, so intense. We don’t believe in pointless talk. We believe in clearing the mind of babble, and it’s obvious you feel the same way. You’re only concerned with fundamentals — lifestyle, ideology, how to get your Volkswagen repaired, the nitty-gritty.’

Ishmael hadn’t even been trying.

‘We think you’re a very wise man. We think you’re something special. We wondered if you might stay here for a while, be a kind of spiritual guide.’

This seemed a bit extreme, even to Ishmael.

‘I’m flattered of course, but there are other places I have to be.’

‘Shit, it’s always the same with gurus. Where do you have to be?’

‘Wherever Marilyn is. I thought I’d talk to her father. It won’t be easy, but I think the direct approach is usually best. I thought I’d ask for his daughter’s hand, something like that.’

‘Wow.’

‘All right, so he and his wife beat me up, but at least we were communicating. It was very brief but I did detect a glimmer of genuine contact, and that makes me believe that I can reach out to him as one human being to another.’

‘You certainly cut through the bullshit,’ John the Hippy said. ‘You’re a lesson to us all. You get beaten up, your car gets vandalized, you lose your girl yet you keep your wisdom.’

‘What else have I got? What else has anybody got, John?’

John the Hippy was speechless.

‘Thank you,’ he said.

‘Here,’ said Ishmael, ‘I’d like you to have this.’

He reached into his pocket and produced the Gold American Express card that had belonged to Marilyn’s father.

‘Take it,’ Ishmael continued. ‘I think the owner may be too preoccupied for the time being to get round to reporting it missing. You can probably get a couple of days’ use out of it.’

John the Hippy beamed.

Then one of the girls came from the bungalow. She was in her early teens, had silky hair, shorts and a personal stereo.

‘And we’d like you to have this, ‘ she said.

She handed Ishmael a grubby envelope. Inside were two squares of blotting paper, each with a small, dark stain at its centre.

‘Acid,’ she said. ‘The American Express card of the mind.’

♦

‘We all know about your English workman,’ Nina says. ‘Besides, he has never been fortunate enough to have the opportunity of buying such a special vehicle. Cheap to run, cheap to service, whatever that means, designed by Dr Porsche, you know. Herr Hitler has already laid the foundation stone of a huge factory for the car. He has begun building autobahnen. In four years you will envy me.’

‘If, in four years, you have seen so much as one rubber tyre, I shall indeed be very surprised.’

‘But already the cars are being driven, admittedly only by leading members of the Nazi Party at this stage, but…’

‘If you want my opinion, they are the only people ever likely to drive them.’

‘I’m not sure that I do want your opinion. It depresses me. I prefer to think that the German economic recovery will continue, that it will accelerate, bringing greater prosperity for all, and then I may have my Volkswagen in much less than four years.’

♦

Next morning Ishmael drove the couple of miles to the address he had been given for the Volkswagen garage. It was down a dry mud track that ran between a row of blackened railway arches and a set of allotments. At first there was just a mass of tall weeds and a few derelict bits of motorcar that were recognizably from Beetles. Then, poking above the weeds were four complete cars parked in a neat line, and a little way off a pale blue Beetle in front of a door that opened into one of the arches. Above the door was a hand-painted sign that read ‘Fat Les — the Vee-Dub King’. There was nobody visible but the music of Wagner, played at awesome volume, came from inside the arch. The door was open a couple of feet. Ishmael stuck his head inside. The music grew louder but he couldn’t see anyone. It was dark. He entered and trod on half a hamburger. Then he detected a movement in a dark corner and saw a rather fat, sweaty, unshaven forty-year-old man. Les he supposed, sitting up in a tartan sleeping-bag.

‘Good morning,’ Ishmael shouted politely above the music.

Fat Les seemed half asleep or still half drunk, or both. He waved a weary hand at Ishmael.

‘Sorry, Wagner old mate,’ he said, and reached out a hand to turn off the music. ‘That’s my get up and go music. Doesn’t always work. I suppose you’ve got a Volkswagen.’

‘I certainly have,’ Ishmael said proudly.

Fat Les got out of his sleeping-bag. He was naked but for a pair of nylon, paisley briefs.

‘I suppose it needs something doing to it.’

‘Yes. I need some new headlights.’

That didn’t seem to make Fat Les very happy. He shambled around the garage for a while, pulled on a shirt, picked up a few cold chips from a paper plate, searched half-heartedly for trousers, looked at Ishmael accusingly.

♦

‘And if your Herr Hitler plunges Europe into war?’

‘Then, Herr Richard, I suppose it will not much matter if we have our own motorcars or not.’

‘Then I suppose, Nina, your fine motor factory, dedicated to producing cars for the people, might very easily be switched to military production, and who knows, your people’s car itself could perhaps quite easily be converted into a vehicle of war.’

♦

‘Did you see my sign outside?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Ishmael.

‘Remember what it said?’

‘Fat Les — the Vee-Dub King.’

‘Right. The King. Not Fat Les the Vee-Dub bodger, not Fat Les the Vee-Dub wanker. The King.’

‘It’s a very nice sign. Did you do it yourself?’

Fat Les stared at him, as sullen as a hippy from Fox’s Farm.

‘Let me tell you something.’

‘Please,’ said Ishmael.

‘Let me tell you what I do with Volkswagens.’

‘This is really great.’

‘Let’s say you need a new engine. You could have it rebored, turboed, hot-rodded, supercharged. I could bolt in a Porsche, or we could get really flash and put a Rover V8 up the front end. Then we’d get new carbs, heavy-duty fan and oil cooler, racing cam, performance exhaust, probably with a zoom tube. If we’re doing that lot you’re going to have to up-rate your suspension and your brakes, and put in an anti-roll bar, and you’d be daft not to do something with your wheels — slot mags, dish mags, alloys, low profiles, 135 fronts, 165 rears. I can chop it for you, channel it for you, section it, french it, louvre it, raise it or lower it, front or back. I can nose and deck it. I can give you spoilers, fins, whale tails, portholes. No problem. If you want to get really technical I can put in a cocktail cabinet in the back seat that plays ‘Born to Run’ every time you open it.’

‘Great,’ said Ishmael.

‘But you just want a new set of headlights.’

‘Yes please,’ said Ishmael.

He was very impressed by Fat Les. Of course, he hadn’t understood more than a few words that his speech had contained but it was so refreshing to meet someone so clearly involved and in love with his work.

Fat Les was sullen again. There was a long silence.

‘Just a pair of headlights,’ Ishmael said again brightly. ‘That’s all today, thank you.’

He laughed nervously. The silence continued.

‘I suppose I’d better have a look at this motor of yours then,’ Fat Les said at last.

He never did find his trousers. He walked out in his shirt and briefs and looked at Enlightenment. He gave a deep, a cosmic sigh and circled the Beetle. He looked at it from all angles, sometimes getting down on the ground and poking the chassis with his fingers, causing little showers of rust. As he continued the inspection his spirits plummeted, and by the time he’d finished it was as though he had been plunged into a well of weariness and despair. He looked at Ishmael, who was too frightened to say anything.

‘Yes, you do need new headlights.’

Ishmael nodded eagerly. He thought of telling Fat Les the whole story of how they had come to be smashed but Fat Les was not looking receptive.

‘You also need new tyres, new brake pipes and cylinders, new sills, about three hundred pounds of welding…’

He went on like this for a while. Ishmael tried to pretend that he knew what Fat Les was talking about.

‘Let’s face it, old son, you need a new car.’

‘No,’ Ishmael said very firmly. ‘This car is my vehicle. This car and I go to the end of the road together. You know, sometimes as I drive along with the wind in my hair, because of the hole in the roof, an empty road, the English countryside, the car struggling to get to sixty miles an hour, everything rattling and sounding as though it’s about to fall apart, well you might find this silly, but at times like that, this car and I feel like one.’

Fat Les was silent for a very long time. He looked at Ishmael, looked at Enlightenment, at his own car, at the ground, at the sky. He scratched his gut and said, ‘I don’t think that’s silly at all. In fact that’s about the most intelligent remark I’ve heard from a punter in years. Most of the people I have to deal with — they’re turds, tossers — they don’t care what anybody does to their cars so long as it’s cheap and fast. Philistines. No sense. No soul. You, though, I reckon you’re all right.’

Fat Les had a pair of headlights in stock and he fitted them on Enlightenment.

‘At least your headlights are legal,’ he said when he’d finished. ‘I wish I could say the same for the rest of it. I just hope the bogies don’t stop you.’

‘Bogies?’

‘Police.’

‘Yes, it’s so hard to live a life untrammelled by petty restrictions.’

‘I’ll say. And your car does make you a bit of a target. The fuzz want everybody driving around in neat little boxes, safe little family saloons with as much character as a parking ticket.’

♦

‘Ah, Richard,’ says Nina wistfully, ‘you are too intellectual, too political for me. Allow me my dreams of freedom, of speed and escape.’

‘I will allow you anything, my dear, but there are others…’

‘Then order me another bottle of vintage champagne.’ On the dance floor boys in blazers and girls with cropped hair dance, perform a dumb-show of pleasure. It is no more authentic than the bottle of ‘vintage’ champagne that is brought to the Englishman’s table, no more real than Nina’s dream of owning her own car. But in Berlin on that autumn night as goose-steps echo back and forth between the ornate, peeling stucco of tall, terraced houses, as triangles are daubed on front doors, and as shops’ windows and faces get smashed, it is all any of them have got.

♦

‘I don’t want to be safe,’ said Ishmael.

‘Good for you. On the other hand, if your master cylinder goes while you’re braking to avoid a pile-up…’

‘I suppose there’s safety and safety.’

‘I suppose there is.’

‘I’ve decided it’s time to take a few risks.’

‘I can see that,’ Fat Les said looking at Enlightenment. ‘How far do you have to get exactly?’

So of course Ishmael had to tell him the whole story. Fat Les was a great listener.

‘So you’re just going to talk to her father?’

‘Initially, yes.’

‘And when that doesn’t work?’

‘Well I abhor violence. Something will come to me.’

‘I hope it’s the kind of something that gets him in the goolies before he gets you.’

‘I’ll keep it in mind,’ Ishmael said. ‘But I still believe in the value of one human being talking to another.’

‘But does her father?’

‘I think I can make him see things my way.’

‘You’re a weird bugger, aren’t you?’

‘I’ve heard people say that sort of thing.’

He’d heard people like Debby, Marilyn, Marilyn’s mother and father, the people who used to work with him in the library, the man in the yellow cardigan, Howard with the rattan table, though who was he to talk?

Fat Les went over to his own Beetle and ran his hand over the roof. The hand was short, fat and oil-stained, but it was a loving hand.

‘This Beetle of mine has a top speed of a hundred and twenty miles per hour, nought to sixty in seven seconds,’ Fat Les said. ‘If the fuzz ever chased me, and if they ever caught me, which they couldn’t, they’d still never believe that the car was capable of the sort of speeds I do in it. That’s the advantage of going like a million dollars and looking like forty-five quid.’

‘Appearance and reality,’ said Ishmael.

‘Your car looks like a ten-bob postal order that’s gone past its expiry date.’

Ishmael shrugged.

Fat Les pointed at the row of four Beetles.

‘I don’t suppose you’d consider borrowing one of them, would you?’

‘No,’ said Ishmael.

‘I didn’t suppose you would.’

‘There are certain journeys that must be made in certain ways,’ Ishmael said.

‘Yeah,’ said Fat Les. ‘I reckon you’re not wrong.’

‘How much for the headlights?’ asked Ishmael.

‘No charge.’

‘Come on, we road warriors like to pay our way.’

‘No, you’re the most entertainment I’ve had in this place in a decade.’

Ishmael started Enlightenment. He was setting off to perform a desperate act of rescue. He hoped he was man enough. He thought he probably was, just about, on a good day.

‘Just one thing,’ Les shouted above the grind of the engine. ‘If talking doesn’t work, and if by any chance you get involved in a bit of aggro, and if you’re in a position to do it; give the bastard one for me.’