Gravity’s Volkswagen

Seventeen

So, later that same day, to my amazement and consternation, I found myself at a hastily convened meeting of the dozen or so core members of Motor-head Phil’s Famous Automotive Freak Show. Motorhead Phil was running the meeting, displaying the natural authority that comes with being able to toss Volkswagen engines around effortlessly. In person, off stage, he seemed a gentle enough soul, though I did notice that he was toying with a set of jump-leads, repeatedly snapping the clamps on to his nipples, then unsnapping them again. This may not have been a show of strength per se, and certainly it was a bit of a distraction, but it did demonstrate an impressive ability to absorb punishment.

I would surely have felt out of place there in any circumstances but now I was more self-conscious than ever, since the group gathered around me — the tattooed, the pierced, the bodily modified, the tribal, the occasionally hermaphroditic — were all expecting me to come up with some big, creative, artistic idea to make Leezza’s jump seem less ‘easy’.

This was evidently old ground for them, but for my benefit Motorhead Phil recapped some of the bright ideas they’d had in the past. These all seemed to involve things that threatened both Leezza’s dignity and life. They’d considered that she might drive the car naked and/or blindfolded, that the Beetle should actually be ablaze as in the painting, that it should land in a tank of water, that there should be a shark in the water, that there should be a mountain lion strapped next to her in the car. One of the guys still insisted this last was a great idea and he said he knew just where to find a tame mountain lion. However, all these options had, for one reason or another, mercifully, been rejected by Motorhead Phil, whose word was law on these matters. But he and his crew all acknowledged that they still needed something extra for Leezza’s performance and I, the creative one, the novelist, the guy who was having his book made into a movie, was allegedly the man to deliver it. This was simply nuts.

Barry was there too, and he was a mildly reassuring presence, a somewhat familiar and not unfriendly face. In fact the whole meeting was taking place next to his Beetle. It didn’t seem that he was part of the freak show exactly; it was more that he was regarded as something of a good luck charm or a mascot, perhaps because in some ways, given his story, he was the most freakish of the lot of them. It only made me feel straighter and more boringly normal than ever.

“OK, college boy,” said Motorhead Phil, “let’s hear what you have to say.”

It was some time since I’d been called, or been, a college boy, and coming from Motorhead Phil I reckoned it wasn’t altogether a compliment. All eyes were on me, and by now I was extremely nervous, but still, in the way that you sometimes do when you’re truly desperate, I did manage to come up with an idea.

“I think one jump probably isn’t enough,” I said. “You see Leezza do the single jump at the end of the show. She does it, and yes, she makes it look very easy and then it’s over. What if she did a number of separate jumps at different times in the course of the show? With each one getting longer and longer and more difficult.”

A lot of eyes were on me: some of them dead, some forthrightly hostile. My tongue felt a little too big for my mouth but I kept talking.

“So at the start of the show,” I said, “she jumps over, I don’t know, ten Beetles, then later she jumps twelve, then fifteen, so that it gets harder and harder as the show goes on. And maybe at every show the final jump should get longer still. You could sell it like she’s going for the world record.”

Had they given me a couple of weeks, I might well have been able to come up with something better, but in the circumstances what I’d just said didn’t strike me as such a terrible idea, not a notion of absolute genius perhaps, but not absurd or ridiculous. I felt very mildly proud of myself. Nevertheless, the silence that clamped itself on the group after I’d spoken was so profound and contemptuous I thought that they, like Josh Martin, might want to kill me.

It seemed that my involvement with things creative had now managed to alienate me equally from the two apparently quite separate and contradictory worlds of movie making and the automotive freak show. Who’d have thought it? Somebody broke the silence by farting. I was pretty sure it was intentional.

“What is the world record?” Motorhead Phil asked idly.

“I don’t know. I could research it,” I said.

“Nah, don’t bother.”

“Scholars differ,” said the man with the Mohawk and the tribal scarifications, the one who’d previously behaved towards me like a long-lost friend, “but if you said two hundred and fifty feet you’d be near enough.”

Nobody argued with him.

“That’s a lot of Beetles,” Motorhead Phil said.

“About fifty sideways; about eighteen end to end, that’s if you don’t leave any gaps,” the Mohawk man said.

The freak show around me started to get up and wander away; only Barry and I, for different reasons, stayed where we were. I felt terrible. I knew I’d disappointed everyone, but perhaps that was inevitable. They’d been expecting far, far too much from me, hadn’t they?

Then from the interior of his Beetle, Barry’s voice, sounding somewhat less depressed than usual, called out, “I’ve got it. I know what the show needs.”

We all looked in his direction: another Englishman without much grasp of the demands of the freak show genre, you might think.

“Yeah?” Motorhead Phil said.

“I’m what you need,” said Barry.

This sounded incomprehensible, if not downright nuts, but Motorhead Phil and his crew were more trusting and accepting than I was. They gathered round once more.

“Go on,” Motorhead Phil said to Barry.

“All right, I will,” said Barry dramatically.

Unlike me, he welcomed the attention that was now coming his way, positively basked in it.

“Well,” he said, “I think Ian’s got a point, and he’s not wrong, but he’s only half right. He hasn’t gone far enough. We’ll go further. We’ll go all the way. We’ll go too far. We’ll do what he says, gradually make the line of Beetles longer and longer, but the thing is, I’ll be in the line. Me. We’ll get somebody to push my car so I’m in there with the other wrecked Beetles. And I’ll be the last car in the line. I’ll be stuck there. I’ll be unable to start the car, unable to get away, unable to get out of the door. At risk. If Leezza screws up and doesn’t make the full distance she’ll land right on top of me. And I’ll be killed. A blaze of glory. A show stopper. Death with dignity. It’ll be a real crowd pleaser.”

To me this sounded at least as bad as the mountain lion idea, but Motorhead Phil, for one, seemed to like the sound of it.

“Yeah,” he said thoughtfully. “I can see it’s got something going for it. Thrills, spills, the sense of imminent death, a fat self-loathing guy in a Volkswagen Beetle; it might work. But I still think it needs something else.”

He thought hard, and as he thought he pulled just as hard on a jump-cable that was attached to his left nipple.

“How about this?” Motorhead Phil said. “Every show, every night, the line gets longer, so the jump gets longer too, so Barry’s chances of survival get less and less. However great Little Miss Ballistic here is, sooner or later she’s going to screw up and come crashing down to earth, so then she’s guaranteed to squash the fat bastard. No offence, Barry.”

“None taken, Phil,” said Barry.

I felt a certain duty to be offended on Barry’s behalf.

“Yeah, that’s it,” said Motorhead Phil. “I like it. It’s got an inevitability about it. Let’s do it.”

The others agreed with him, and obviously there was no arguing about the matter of inevitability, but I couldn’t see that necessarily meant it was a good idea.

“Are you really sure about this, Barry?” I asked.

“Of course I am. You know, when I first came to this country I always used to drive like a nutcase,” he said. “I went too fast, I overtook on blind spots, went round corners on two wheels. I didn’t care. But I had a charmed life. I never had a crash. I never spun off the road. A cop pulled me over in South Dakota once, asked me if I had a death wish. I said I did. But it didn’t do me any good. Wishing’s not enough.

“So then I started eating myself to death, and that’s going all right, I suppose, but it’s a slow business. I’m sure I’ve got sky-high blood pressure and that my cholesterol’s through the roof, and probably I’ve got a fatty liver and of course I don’t do any exercise so my muscles are all wasting away. But I’m still alive. And really it’s a miserable business, believe me. A Volkswagen Beetle that drops out of the sky with a beautiful woman in it and puts me out of my misery. What could be better? Who wouldn’t want that?”

I turned to Motorhead Phil. I knew he wasn’t exactly the voice of reason here, but as the guy in charge of the show I thought that, if nothing else, he might be dissuaded by legal considerations.

“Won’t this be like murder?” I said.

“Murder cum suicide I’d call it,” said Motorhead Phil. “But we’ll get Barry to sign some papers absolving us of responsibility, and it’s not like he’s got any family who are going to sue us. And even if they did, we’ve got no money, so no way are we worth suing.”

So it all came down to Leezza. She’d been silent until now, and I took her silence as disapproval, as resistance. I didn’t think she could be seriously considering this homicidal variation on her stunt. She was a sane, sensible, scientific sort of a woman, wasn’t she? Surely she’d find this whole idea offensive if not downright wicked. What did I know?

“Are you all right with this, Leezza?” Motorhead Phil asked her.

“If you are and Barry is, then sure,” she said, with all the casualness in the world.

And that was that. It was confirmed that everybody, with the possible exception of me, was all right with it. Motorhead Phil slapped a heavy hand on my shoulder.

“Yeah, you did well, Ian,” he said. “For a college boy.”

It seemed he now meant the term as a genuine compliment, though a stunt that threatened, indeed eventually promised, the death of a fat man in a Beetle wasn’t something I was all that keen to take credit for. And in any case, I thought it might still never happen. Perhaps everyone would sleep on it, feel differently in the morning and have second thoughts: maybe common sense would prevail. Who was I trying to kid?

One small consolation was that I didn’t think I’d be around to see it. This was my swansong. I reckoned my days of hanging around the movie set, and therefore my days in Fontinella, were all but over. I had a movie director who wanted to kill me. I knew I wasn’t welcome on the set. I needed to get out of there. I didn’t even want to go back to my trailer, even though it was too late to leave now. Leezza noticed my reluctance.

“You can sleep here if you want to,” she said.

It was a very nice offer, and perhaps not a wholly unexpected one. It had been a strange day, the sort that brings people together. Leezza and I had definitely bonded in the course of it. I assumed that I was being invited to spend the night with her, but I was wrong about that too.

She pointed to the distant line of non-running Beetles parked in the centre of the speedway.

“Pick a Beetle,” she said. “Any Beetle.”