Gravity’s Volkswagen

Eleven

Linda Lovelace’s Veedub Ordeal

When tangle-haired, slack-throated porn star Linda Lovelace meets Chuck Traynor in Florida in 1970 he’s driving a Jaguar XKE and she’s impressed by that, but the car is only a temporary fixture. Chuck’s career as bar owner, drug dealer and pimp is a volatile one, and the day duly arrives when the Jaguar is gone and he turns up to see Linda in an old Volkswagen Beetle. She’s less impressed, but she stands by her man and the car becomes far more of a fixture in their otherwise increasingly rickety lives.

Chuck is a restless man. Often he says to Linda, “Let’s go for a ride,” and she says fine, and in she gets and off they go, and she never knows where they’ll end up, but that’s OK, she likes that. She likes adventure.

One day they’re driving all the way from Miami, Florida, to Aspen, Colorado, a tough enough journey at the best of times in any car, but much tougher in an old Volkswagen Beetle without air conditioning. Then Chuck decides he’ll make it tougher still and plans a detour to Juarez in Mexico. This surprises Linda a little. Why would they want to go there?

Chuck explains. He’s got a plan. Once they get there, he says, he’s going to make Linda have sex with a donkey: in public, on stage, for money. On previous evidence he’s almost certainly serious about this. The prospect excites him. Having power over Linda excites him even more, and given her endless capacity for compliance she’s unlikely to refuse to co-star in this donkey show.

As he drives, Chuck talks about it endlessly. He’s obsessed. He’s aroused. He starts using the word ‘haemorrhage’ far too often for Linda’s liking, and she starts to wonder if there might be a way out. She prays, asking God to intervene and prevent them ever getting to Juarez.

The next thing she knows they’re on the road outside of Little Rock, Arkansas, and Chuck’s Beetle is suddenly rammed from behind by a drunk in a station wagon. Chuck loses control of the car. The Beetle takes off, swerves to the right, to the left, across the road and into a ditch. It’s a bad crash, but not a fatal one. And as truck drivers descend on the scene and drag Chuck and Linda out of the wreckage she hears one of the truckers say, “Well, that Volkswagen Beetle has had it.”

Linda is relieved and delighted. Something seems to have been confirmed. She tells herself there may well be a God, or at least some higher power that protects overly compliant porn stars, and intervenes just in time to stop them being fucked on stage by donkeys in Mexico. The universe, she concludes, is not entirely malevolent; just the men she meets.