Gravity’s Volkswagen

Thirteen

That night I felt slightly guilty about sneaking away from the trailer park and the movie set in order to go to the automotive freak show at the speedway, but only slightly. Even if my toing and froing with small quantities of money had redeemed me somewhat, I still didn’t feel that I’d exactly been ‘embraced by the film-making community’. It was good to have somewhere else to go.

I was impressed and surprised to find that my name really was on the guest list, and a man in the box office — nose-ring, Mohawk, tribal scarifications — welcomed me like I was his long-lost pal. I hurried through the eerily empty parking lot to an equally eerily empty stadium.

The word speedway probably has a different meaning in England than it does in America, but I’d definitely pictured something grander than the reality I now saw. There was a simple continuous oval of tarmac, a racing circuit, but stretches of it were in such terrible shape that nobody in their right mind would have wanted to drive a car around it, certainly not at any speed. Fortunately it didn’t look as though anybody was about to do that. Rather it appeared that most of the action was going to take place on a short, straight section of serviceable track directly in front of a block of raked wooden seating, where a makeshift stage had been built. Behind the stage, in the grassy centre of the circuit, a dozen or so of the decrepit Beetles I’d seen behind the speedway fence were now arranged side by side in a straight row, with a ramp at either end.

Things were slow to get going. I think they were waiting for the audience to build, but it never really did. There weren’t more than thirty spectators all told, but they (we) were an enthusiastic bunch. There was music provided by someone calling himself DJ Ballard, who had two turntables and a vicious drum machine. He started making noise and a couple of guys on skateboards appeared, and did a few tricks that involved jumping over stationary, then moving, cars. It looked difficult and potentially dangerous but it wasn’t all that exciting and there was nothing about it that was consistent with my, admittedly hazy, idea of what an automotive freak show might be.

Things got a bit more freakish when a strong man appeared. He was short, wide, glistening, stripped to a thick waist: a body builder’s physique run somewhat to seed. This, if the Gothic letters tattooed on his chest were to be believed, was Motorhead Phil himself. Given Josh Martin’s opinion of him, I’d been expecting someone totally monstrous, but this man, at least when seen from a distance, looked benign enough. He certainly did a lot of smiling and waving to the crowd. However, he soon demonstrated his really quite frightening strength.

He began by throwing some car batteries around one-handed as if they were bathroom sponges. Then he grabbed the front end of one of the lined-up Beetles and raised it to head height and held it there effortlessly for a good long time before carelessly lowering it again. It occurred to me that he’d have been the ideal man to have on your side if you were, say, trying to push a Volkswagen Beetle to and from a nearby diner.

Then Motorhead Phil squatted down, grabbed a car engine that happened to be lying around near by, complete with fan shroud and exhaust, and raised it some way above his head before tossing it through the air on to the roof of one of the Beetles in the row, which crumpled like tinfoil.

Finally Motorhead Phil took up a central position on the stage and posed like a superhero as half a dozen members of the crew came up and danced around him brandishing car bumpers as though they were samurai swords. The dancing was pretty awful, but it was soon over. Then the dancers started bashing Motorhead Phil with the bumpers, on the back, across the torso and eventually over the head, and while the bumpers got all bent out of shape, Motorhead Phil remained steadfast and impassive, his face bearing the easy expression of a man who was perhaps being gently flayed with feather boas. You had to be impressed.

Then there was a comedy juggler, as thin, gaunt and wiry as a stick insect, who did a plate-spinning act with hubs caps, then appeared to swallow a couple of spark plugs, though there must surely have been some sleight of hand involved there, and then he inserted a dipstick into his throat, the sort of thing a sword-swallower might do, which was for real, as far as I could tell.

And there was sex of a sort. A heavy, sensual, bronze-skinned woman in a slither of a bikini lowered herself into a Beetle via its open sunroof. Shortly thereafter half a dozen crew members crowded round the car, each carrying a big blue bucket. They reached into the buckets, and pulled out many, many handfuls of snakes, of varying lengths and thicknesses, and threw them in through the sunroof on top of the woman.

I noticed that one of the crew members was the former Celluloid Security guard, the one Josh Martin had fired the previous day. I was glad he’d found a job. Life’s like that, I suppose. The door of security slams in your face; the door of snake wrangling immediately opens.

The snakes did what snakes do, they writhed and wove themselves around the woman’s body, and she did her best to make dance moves while sitting in place, shifting rhythmically from buttock to buttock in the car seat. I could definitely say I’d never seen anything like it before, but that didn’t mean I particularly wanted to see anything like it again.

Later another woman, thinner, less bronzed, and actually less sensual, appeared bound in a straight-jacket. She got into another of the Beetles and assistants fastened the seat belt around her. Doors and windows were shut tight and then, exploiting the Beetle’s fame for being waterproof, giant hoses were shoved in, again through the sunroof, and the car began to fill rapidly with water.

There was a lot of thrashing and churning as the Beetle filled all the way to its roof and beyond. The water turned into a bubbling, opaque mass, and you couldn’t see what was going on in there, but it went on long enough to make you worry about the fate of the woman inside. And then just when you thought something must have gone horribly wrong, she emerged through the sunroof, free of the straight-jacket and the seat belt, and also free of the rest of her clothes. This was quite the crowd pleaser.

And then, across a not remotely crowded speedway, I saw Leezza, or at least I thought I did, and then I thought no, it couldn’t possibly be her, and then I thought yes, it definitely was. There was good reason for my confusion. Earlier that day I’d thought she was out of place among the freak-show crowd, and the parts of the show I’d seen so far only confirmed that; but when I saw her walking across the tarmac there was something about her that seemed very different and very freakish indeed. She was wearing a flame-retardant suit, the kind that racecar drivers wear, but this one had been painted with lurid red and orange flames.

That was a nice little touch, I thought, but there was something about the body wearing the suit that seemed lurid too. Leezza was a slight woman and she had small breasts: I’m a man and a writer; we male writers notice stuff like that. But now she had huge breasts, or at least huge falsies, or the flame-retardant suit did. It bulged out as though it had been conceived by a porn star’s plastic surgeon. Well, I thought, porn stars and plastic surgeons know a thing or two about what the public wants; and no doubt a freak show needs all the falsity and exaggeration it can find.

Leezza’s image was topped off by a long, red, utterly fake-looking wig: you could definitely have called it flame-coloured. And when I saw Leezza put on a pair of huge wraparound, diamante sunglasses, the effect, or disguise, was complete; Leezza no longer looked even remotely like herself. No doubt that was all part of the idea, though I was slow to grasp the rest of the idea.

Until then I hadn’t noticed that the vehicle I’d seen earlier, the one shrouded in the blue tarp, the one Leezza had been leaning against, was positioned a little way off to the side of the stage. The tarp had been left in place all this time, but now, with some ceremony, a couple of crew members pulled it aside and revealed the machine beneath.

I’d been quite wrong about it not being a Beetle. A Beetle was most definitely what it was, or at least what it had started life as. It was now a vehicle that had been stripped down, reduced to its basics, concentrated, distilled. It was partly a Baja, partly a dune buggie, partly a sandrail, partly a rat rod, and yet it was something quite other than all these things.

Very little of the original was left: no doors, no roof, no bodywork to speak of, although a sleek, pointed version of the distinctive Beetle snout remained in place and a mouth full of vicious teeth had been painted across its very tip. There was just one seat, the kind you might find in a jet fighter, and there was a full roll cage.

At the rear of the thing was the engine, naturally. Clearly it was the usual flat-four, horizontally opposed, air-cooled Volkswagen engine, but it had been decked out with various performance add-ons. I knew enough to recognise twin carburettors, upgraded air filters, an oil intercooler and a stinger exhaust, but there were all kinds of high-tech gadgets clamped around it that I couldn’t identify. It looked all business, serious business, disreputable business, but again it took me longer than it should have to work out just what that business was.

Leezza got in the car, looking completely and utterly at home, like she absolutely belonged there, and she started the engine. It was one of the most exciting noises I’d ever heard: not just loud, not just powerful, but truly, scarily elemental. It still sounded like a Volkswagen, but a Volkswagen on heat, on steroids, on hallucinogens, a Volkswagen that was ready to scream the place down. Leezza put the car in gear, gave it a sudden blast of throttle and the machine lurched forward, spun its rear wheels, kicked up its front end and did a gorgeous, dangerous wheelie. I was in love.

DJ Ballard put on what he thought was appropriate music, Van Halen’s ‘Jump’, which I thought was a bit old hat. It was the cue for Leezza to drive the car in a long wide loop, away from the seats and the stage at first, but then she turned, began her approach, and brought the car all the way round so that it lined up with the ramps and the row of Beetles in the centre of the track. When the car was dead straight on to the upward ramp, it began to gather speed. The acceleration was so smooth and controlled that it was hard to tell just how fast the car was going, but you knew it must be pulling some serious Gs, and there was only a fraction of a second between it hitting its spot at the base of the upward ramp and becoming airborne. The car launched itself effortlessly into space.

The flight was long and smooth and very clean.

The car remained straight and level, floating, gliding, mocking gravity. It passed without effort over the line of Beetles and landed on the other side, smoothly, precisely at the very centre of the downward ramp. The body sagged deeply on the rugged suspension, the wheels shrugged off the impact, then the car righted itself and went a couple of hundred yards before Leezza spun it round in a handbrake turn. Some cheap fireworks went off in the grass, and DJ Ballard changed the music to ‘Ghost Riding The Whip’, which I thought was much hipper.

The crowd, such as it was, cheered and applauded loudly, trying to make up in enthusiasm what it lacked in numbers. And one voice was louder, more raucous and frantic than all the rest. It was Barry. Someone had pushed his dead Beetle into position beside the seats so that he had a good view of the jump, or as good as you could have while trapped inside a Beetle. He yelled until he was hoarse, continuing long after everybody else had gone quiet. There was something manic about his enthusiasm. You would have thought he’d seen a miracle, and in truth we all knew he hadn’t.

The stunt had been fantastic in a way, very impressive and obviously extremely skilful. You had to admire the clinical, scientific way it was done, and yet I couldn’t help thinking there was something just a little too studied and perfect about it. I didn’t know much about stunt driving then, and I only know a little more about it now, and I certainly didn’t want to see a terrible crash, yet it seemed to me that a great stunt needed to look riskier, to be a bit more ragged, to steer closer to disaster.

As a way to end an automotive freak show it was curiously sedate, and it had absolutely nothing in common with the image on that painting by the gate, the one that showed the flaming car flying over the bottomless ravine. I couldn’t have said I went home disappointed but I was certainly left wanting something more. Maybe, I told myself, that was the whole idea.