Gravity’s Volkswagen

Twenty-One

Being so fully occupied no doubt made me oblivious to many things that were happening on the shoot. I’m sure there were the usual number of friendships, enmities, crushes, intrigues and what not, but I was just too busy to pay any attention, much less be involved. I still had my suspicions that Angelo might be planning some sort of palace coup, and that Josh Martin might end up as a Mad King in exile, but for now, while we all kept working, that seemed less likely to happen, and in any case I didn’t see what I could do about it. I tried to keep my head down, keep out of trouble and keep on writing.

And then one evening, about six o’clock, when I was thinking I still had another page of dialogue in me, trouble came knocking. Josh Martin arrived at my door. Cadence was there in the trailer with me as usual, twiddling her thumbs, trying and failing to be busy, but now she went into action, stapling together some sheets of paper that didn’t need any stapling.

“Come on,” Josh Martin said expansively. “We wrapped early. We should go to a bar. We should drink. We should talk. We should bond. We should bare our souls to each other.”

I feared that Josh Martin’s bared soul might be an ugly and dangerous thing, but taking everything into account I decided I might do myself more harm by turning down this invitation than by accepting. I said OK.

“I’ll slip away then,” Cadence said.

“No you won’t,” Josh Martin insisted. “You’ll come and bare your soul too.”

She giggled girlishly, and I was glad she agreed to come. She would dilute Josh Martin’s potent presence, and I suspected that after a few drinks she might prove to have a much more appealing soul than he did. Getting three people in a Porsche can surely never be easy, and I had never actually been in one before, but we managed to fit ourselves in, with Cadence draped, absolutely decorously, across me, and we drove into Fontinella, to a watering hole called a the Nerf Bar, a small, single-storey building the colour of Cheddar cheese. The Porsche looked well out of place in the car park, but then so did anything that wasn’t a pick-up truck.

Some plastic letters on an illuminated sign outside the bar announced that this was ‘Louie Louie Night’. It took us a while to realise what that meant. As we went in, a small band was already set up in the corner of the bar, and they were playing basic but efficient rock and roll. They were performing ‘Louie Louie’, a great song in its way, crude, simple, a song that anybody can play, and that anyone can sing along with, at least the chorus; the verses are inscrutable and unintelligible and meant to be that way.

Josh Martin ordered three beers and three tequila chasers and we settled into a corner booth that was upholstered in cherry-red plastic. We were as far away from the band as we could get: not very far, given the size of the bar.

“Do you live with a lot of self-doubt, Ian?” Josh Martin asked me bluntly.

We were straight into the baring of souls.

“Of course,” I said.

“Yeah, I thought so.”

“Doesn’t everybody live with self doubt?” Cadence asked.

“I don’t,” said Josh Martin. “Least I didn’t used to. Now, I’m not so sure. It’s this movie. It’s doing it to me.”

“Self-doubt isn’t the worst thing in the world,” I said. “If Hitler had had a little more self-doubt then, well…”

“Hitler,” Josh Martin said with feeling and made a lemon-sucking face. Things got no better when he said, “So how are you feeling about the movie, Ian?”

“I’m feeling good,” I said.

That wasn’t absolutely true. In reality I was actually too busy working on the script to have time to consider how I felt about it, but that seemed like no bad thing, and I thought it was best to sound upbeat. I also felt that Josh Martin wanted me to ask him how he felt about the movie, but I wasn’t going to give him that satisfaction. He’d have to do his soul baring without any prompting from me.

The band continued to play ‘Louie Louie’: it was a long version. At one point a dapper old cowboy got up and played a hot, country-style violin solo, then a pair of Latina girls sang a couple of verses, very possibly in Spanish. They looked like they were having fun; rather more than we the audience were.

“You don’t think maybe there are some flaws in the basic premise?” Josh Martin said, meaning Volkswagens and Velociraptors, not the extended rendition of ‘Louie Louie’.

“It’s a bit late to think about that, isn’t it?” I said.

“Is it?” he said. “I think about it all the time. I find myself asking where’s the art? Where’s the poetry? I think that nobody believes in the automobile any more. I think nobody believes in polluting the planet. I certainly don’t. I want to be green. I want to do something for the environment. I want to make a difference. I want to reduce my carbon footprint.”

Coming from a Porsche driver this seemed a bit rich. If you were looking for someone with impeccable green credentials Barry was surely your man. He didn’t use petrol. He didn’t use electricity as far as I could see. He certainly didn’t use much hot water. I thought it best not to mention Barry to Josh Martin.

“Well,” I said, “in the movie there are only about twenty people left on earth so, you know, global warming really isn’t that big a problem for them.”

Josh Martin tugged at his hair fiercely to show that this didn’t solve his basic objection.

“That’s just part of the same problem,” he said. “Here I am making a science-fiction movie while the world burns. Nobody believes in science any more. Nobody even believes in fiction.”

“I do,” I said.

He ignored me. “Everybody wants to see movies based on true stories,” he said.

“All stories are true,” I said.

This was a pet theory of mine — everything is true, everything is permitted — but I didn’t get a chance to explain it. Without realising it, I must have glanced at my watch.

“Somewhere you need to be?” Josh Martin demanded.

“Yes, actually,” I said. “But not for a while.”

Josh Martin looked like he was settling in for a long, chaotic night in the bar, and I of course wanted to get to the speedway before too long, to see Leezza doing her jumps.

“What’s the big attraction over there anyway?” he demanded.

It seemed like one of those things I couldn’t really explain in words.

“You should come along,” I said. “Come and see for yourself.”

“Fucking freak show,” Josh Martin said. “Fucking parasites. Fucking scum. Fucking Motorhead Phil.”

The words sounded angry but he delivered them with a profound and unexpected sadness. Something about the very existence of the freak show filled him with a terrible anguish.

“Look, Josh,” I said, “these people really aren’t so bad. They like Beetles. You like Beetles. Isn’t that enough for you to get along?”

“Where the hell did you get the idea that I like Beetles?”

“Oh, come on, Josh,” said Cadence. And she placed her hand on his tanned forearm.

“Really? How do you get that idea?”

“Because you’re making a movie about them?” I suggested gently. “Because you optioned the book. Because you wrote a movie script about them. Because one way or another you’re spending a fair chunk of your life surrounded by them.”

“Sometimes, Ian,” he said, “I wonder if you’re just pretending to be very dumb. Or if you’re actually very, very dumb indeed. This movie isn’t about Beetles any more than Moby Dick is a movie about a whale.”

“I know that,” I said.

“It’s about passion and obsession,” Josh Martin said. “The Volkswagen Beetle is a symbol. It can symbolise anything you need symbolising.”

“Yes,” I said. “I know that. You’re quoting my own interviews back at me. But it’s also a movie about Volkswagen Beetles. And velociraptors.”

I thought that might get him angry but he just looked at me with disappointment and dismay, and we sat for a while without speaking. It was easiest that way. I listened to the band. I realised we’d been listening to ‘Louie Louie’ for a long time now. Various musicians had come and gone from the stage, the band had grown and contracted again, someone had leapt up and squawked a free-jazz saxophone solo, a large African-American woman had danced the shimmy, but the song had remained seamlessly, relentlessly the same. It had become a bit irritating.

Josh Martin was irritated too. “It the old days I’d probably have hit you by now,” he said to me.

These old days he spoke of weren’t so very long ago as far as I was concerned, and a return to them seemed perfectly likely, but I needn’t have concerned myself. Today he didn’t think I was worth hitting. He got up from our booth and walked over to the stage. For a moment, unlikely as it seemed, I thought he wanted to sing a couple of choruses of ‘Louie Louie’ with the band: stranger things had happened, but that wasn’t what he had in mind at all. He tapped the bass player on the shoulder, and as the guy turned his head, Josh Martin swung a wild, loose punch at him. Even if it had made contact it would probably have done no damage; the bass player was squat and solid and looked like he could take a punch, but in any case he rocked back and the blow went right by him. Still, it evidently wasn’t a thing that could be ignored or allowed to go unpunished.

The bass player grabbed the body of his guitar and jerked it upwards, quickly, sharply but without much effort, and he used it to deliver a dense, precise upper-cut to Josh Martin’s chin. The bass line remained as solid as ever. With a surprising smoothness, Josh Martin’s head snapped back and his body followed, a rearward dive, a flop, and he landed full length on the bar’s sticky wooden floor. He lay there, ignored by the rest of the bar, and he stayed motionless, inert, looking perfectly, unaccountably content, until Cadence and I started to drag him away. As we made it to the door, an old soak at the bar yelled after us, “You should come back next week. It’s ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’ Night.”