Gravity’s Volkswagen

Twelve

I gave Barry and his Beetle another push to the diner. I was doing it to please a woman: how foolish was that? But this time I definitely did want something for my efforts. After we’d got to the diner, after the food had been ordered and eaten, and when Barry was ready to be pushed back to the speedway, I told him I wanted to hear his story, otherwise he and his Beetle would be staying right where they were for the foreseeable future. I hoped this didn’t make me too cruel a man.

Barry gave me a suffering look, and yet something suggested to me that he was more than willing to tell all, an intuition that proved to be entirely correct. There were times as I listened when I wondered if the story would ever come to an end, and of course it troubled me that Barry told his story in the third person.

Barry said, “It’s the old story, I suppose: a young man grows up in the north of England — Did you know that I’m English, just like you?”

“Yes,” I said. “The accent’s a bit of a giveaway.”

That wrong-footed him for a moment, as though he thought that until then he’d been successfully passing himself off as an all-American boy. He soon got into his stride, however.

“A man grows up in the north of England. He becomes a librarian, a sub-librarian, a sub-sublibrarian, actually. The northern town isn’t such a bad one for a Volkswagen driver in some ways — a rear-engined, rear-wheel-drive car is very good for the steep hills they have there. Not so good in other ways: bad winters, rain, snow, salt, pollution, football supporters. It eats into you. He feels his fate lies elsewhere.

“He decides he wants to be a road warrior, but it’s hard to be a road warrior in England. Actually it’s hard being a road warrior just about anywhere but it’s easier in some places than others. I reckon China and India are where the road warriors of the future are going be knocking about. But I’m old school.

“So he abandons his dull job and hits the road, Ian, in a customised, if decrepit, Volkswagen Beetle that he names Enlightenment, for reasons that largely now escape him. Far does he travel. Much does he see. He hears the heavy-metal thunder. He goes where the streets have no name, and precious few road markings. He keeps his eyes on the road and his hands on the wheel, wet on the wheel more often than not. Sometimes he finds himself unable to drive fifty-five. Sometimes he just shuts up and drives. But before too long he discovers that the M62 is a poor substitute for Route 66. As you would.

“But that doesn’t stop him having picaresque adventures. Oh no. Sex and drugs are taken and given. He encounters fellow travellers such as Fat Les the Vee Dub King and an investigative journalist called Renata and a commune of cynical ex-hippies. Ah, where are they now? And he becomes a bit of a cult; not a huge cult, not an evil cult, but you know, a cult’s always a cult. And he seems to remember there was a climactic battle with the forces of darkness; but he knows he could be mistaken about that.

“Then, later, there is some business with Volkswagen Beetles that were spontaneously combusting all over England, and a gang of Nazi skinheads with ambiguous sexuality, and the kidnapping of a millionaire Volkswagen collector and a weather girl. There’s a rave, there’s a VW meeting called Beetle Mecca, a name that seems a little bit dodgy even at the time. An old story indeed. You could write a book about it.

“But in the end he realises it isn’t enough. He wants someone to show him the way to Amarillo, to San Jose. He wants to be twenty-four hours from Tulsa. He wants to see crosstown traffic. He wants to see diamonds on his windshield. He wants to have a windshield. So he moves across the pond, Stateside.

“Another old story. He arrives full of hope and optimism and expectation. He sees a future for himself. He changes his name. He works hard and illegally. He stays under the radar. He lives as honestly as he can. He acclimatises. He finds love: he loses it. He makes a little money, loses that too. He buys a car. Not a Volkswagen this time. He buys American. It’s a lemon. He trades up. He gets credit. He thinks he’s getting a good deal. In fact he’s getting suckered. He gets into debt. It’s the American way.

“He stays ahead of the game. Briefly. He tries to live by his own rules. He travels. He goes West. He loves the big skies and the wide-open spaces where a man can find himself. He gets lost. He transcends. He endures. He does one or two things that aren’t strictly legal, but he’s not a bad man. He fights the law, and it’s a split decision. He sees a version of the world. He thinks. He feels. He experiences. He has the occasional insight that you might as well describe as spiritual. Doesn’t everybody?

“It doesn’t last. He loses his optimism. He loses some hair. He loses his boyish good looks. He gets older. He feels older still. Then he looks as old as he feels. Things falter. He loses impetus. He loses his job, his apartment, his good health. He has no health insurance. He changes his car. He trades down. Once he had something bright and shiny and fast, something with status and attitude and a libidinal frisson. Now he reverts. He settles for a thirty-year-old Volkswagen Beetle. He thinks it’s what he should have had all along. He thinks a man cannot escape his destiny.

“He finishes up living in his car. That’s not so terrible. Many have done it before him, people on the way up as well as on the way down. But he knows he’s not on the way up. He’s depressed, and that’s not unreasonable. It’d be unreasonable to feel any other way. He finds solace where he can: in a bottle, in his car, in the arms of less than willing women, at the drive-thru windows of a thousand and one fast-food restaurants. He eats, he drinks. He’s seldom merry. But this is America. Everything is there to help him consume, and consume he does: high calories, empty calories, junk calories, killing calories. He tells himself it’s life and life only.

“He’s demoralised. He’s immobilised. He’s close to paralysed. He can’t see the road ahead. And even if he could see the road ahead he still wouldn’t have the stamina, the driving skills or the gas money to take that road. Que sera sera.

“He gets heavier, denser, broader, lardier. He becomes big as a barn door, bigger than a car door. He has trouble walking, or at least he would if he tried to walk. But he doesn’t. He stops trying. He tries to stay exactly where he is. In his car. At last he has some success.

“Of course there are some problems when your car is your home: it’s easy to become homeless. You can get towed. You can get totalled, even while you’re in the car. He can’t leave his Beetle overnight at a garage to be repaired because then he’d be out on the street. So he neglects some basic maintenance. He sits tight. He sits in the driver’s seat. The inside of the Volkswagen Beetle becomes his whole world. He likes it there. He feels accommodated. He feels safe. He lowers his sights. He drops his standards. His personal hygiene suffers. He doesn’t think so much about washing. He doesn’t worry so much about smelling. Why should he? Who’s going to smell him? He doesn’t get close to people. And toilet arrangements are always tricky when you’re living in your car, and trickier still if you never leave it; but he has a lot of time to come up with solutions: tubes, funnels, reservoirs, valves, absorbent pads.

“And then the car falters. Seriously. It becomes unreliable. It becomes a liability. It becomes inert. It becomes a non-runner. He knows that a man without wheels is only half a man. He has wheels but they don’t move. Does that make him more or less than half? The party’s over. The beast is dead. It’s time for all concerned to go to a better place.

“And he thinks yes, OK, it’s a time of change, a time to move on, a time to go with the flux. It’s time to get out of the car, but he can’t, he’s too big. He’s morbid. He’s obese. He’s stuck in his shell. The body of the car has become his exoskeleton, his prison. It’s a tragedy. It’s a travesty. It’s a metaphor.

“And then, by hazard, he meets up with an automotive freak show who let him park at the abandoned speedway they’ve taken over; which is better than nothing, but hardly the answer, not that he can imagine there being an answer. And he thinks that, on balance, in the final analysis, at the end of the road, it really doesn’t matter much. Doesn’t matter if you have a good car or a piece-of-shit car, if it runs or not. And that’s the least of what doesn’t matter. Movement, happiness, health, love: there’s some of the stuff that doesn’t matter at all. And it definitely doesn’t matter if you’re dead or alive. Not to him, not to anyone.

“So yes, it’s the old story, and yes, we all know where it’s going to end, and we all know it’s not going to end well. The breaker’s yard. The scrap heap. The recycling plant. That’s the oldest story of all.”

Barry hung his head to let me know he’d finally finished.

“Wow,” I said. “That’s quite a story.”

“I’ve been rehearsing it.”

“It sounded like it.”

“I’ve had a lot of time on my hands.”

“I can see that.”

“I try to be media savvy.”

“Yes, I can see that too.”

“So did I give value for money?”

“Yes, yes, you did.”.

“You got what you wanted? A story?”

“Yes.”

“Time to push me back to the speedway then.”

“You drive a hard bargain, Barry,” I said, and he didn’t disagree.