Gravity’s Volkswagen

Twenty-Four

As usual, I slept badly, and I was woken early by unfamiliar noises outside my trailer. There were unfamiliar noises outside my trailer every morning, but these sounded unfamiliar in a brand-new way. I could hear the engine of a truck, the rattling of a heavy chain, several loud, deep, working men’s voices. I got up and looked out to see that a couple of guys were arranging to tow away Josh Martin’s Porsche, apparently unaware that he was still sleeping in it.

My first thought was that the car must be in the way of the shoot and that some over-zealous and bloody-minded crew members had decided to move it bodily, but I soon realised these were not our guys. There were two men in overalls who were hooking up the car, and I recognised one of them. It was the man whose CV I knew included stints as a security guard and a freak-show snake man. He was now in the towing business it appeared, and he was being supervised by a slick man in a slick grey suit with even slicker grey hair. The slick man was younger than he looked and displayed less tough authority than he wanted to, or perhaps thought he did, but he would do just fine if you were casting someone as a repo man. Josh Martin’s car was being repossessed.

As you would, Josh Martin got out of the car. He did it rather more slowly than you might have expected, given the circumstances, but possibly that was because he was stark naked. Somehow in the course of the night he had shed his clothes, but being naked wasn’t troubling him much. It was troubling the three repo guys a great deal more, and it slowed them down a lot. And when Cadence emerged from the other side of the Porsche, every bit as naked as Josh Martin, things ground to a complete halt.

The basic reasons for Josh Martin and Cadence’s nakedness weren’t hard to fathom: an old story, an older man and a younger woman, the boss and the intern, a boozy night ending with clumsy sex in the cramped interior of a car. That much was perfectly comprehensible. Why they didn’t bother to cover themselves up was far less clear. In retrospect I think Josh Martin may have been having a King Lear moment: savouring being naked, windswept, blasted by fate and the elements, tormented, driven close to insanity; and he was acting out his situation for all to see. What Cadence thought she was up to, I have no idea.

Naked though he was, I still expected Josh Martin to try to stop these men taking away his car. It was what anybody would do. I expected him to reason or cajole, say it was all a big mistake, maybe just get very angry and try to bluster his way out of it. But he didn’t do any of that. He was very accepting, very Zen. A couple of burly drivers from the film crew were standing by, sleeves rolled up, all too ready to step in and exchange blows with the tow-truck guys: it would have been an interestingly matched contest. But Josh Martin was having none of that.

“It’s OK,” he said calmly to anyone who was listening. “They’re taking my car back because I haven’t been making the payments. This is what happens when you don’t pay what you’re supposed to pay. People come and take your stuff back. Cause and effect. There’s no mystery about it. I just can’t afford to make the payments. And even if I could, I wouldn’t. Any spare money I have is going straight into this movie.”

This was encouraging in one way. It said something about Josh Martin’s commitment and priorities. It showed that he cared more about the movie than he did about driving a fancy car. That was surely a good thing, and a pleasant surprise given how negative he’d been about the movie last night. What was troubling was the way he linked these two very different expenses. The monthly payments on a Porsche were no doubt extortionate, certainly by any standards I knew, but compared with the costs of making a movie they were surely small change. The one simply didn’t equate with the other. Was the movie really relying on Josh Martin to dig into his own pocket for its budget?

As he himself had so vividly and accurately pointed out, I knew nothing whatsoever about movie finance, but even so, wasn’t there some ancient Hollywood wisdom about never using your own money to make a film? And weren’t there supposed to be backers, producers, at the very least some shadowy and potentially sinister money men? Weren’t they supposed to step in and throw their weight around when things got tough?

It clearly wasn’t the moment to ask questions about these things. The car duly was towed away, Josh Martin shrugged it off, didn’t refer to it again, and everybody carried on as normal and we got through the movie-making day.

That night, as ever, I went to the speedway to see the show. And there in the crowd, with Cadence hanging on his arm, was Josh Martin. This was a turn up for the books. He hadn’t gone back to his home in Los Angeles after the day’s shoot: the loss of his car would have created difficulties there, though surely not insuperable ones if he’d really been determined. So perhaps he simply wanted to stick around and be with his new sexual conquest. Or just possibly, I thought, he might finally have overcome some of his hostility towards Motorhead Phil and the automotive freak show, listened to what I’d said last night and decided to see what it was all about.

In a way it seemed to me unfair that after all the bile and anger he’d spat at the freak show he was able simply to pay his money at the gate and join the crowd like any other civilian. I thought he should have been forced to do penance first. Alas, life doesn’t work like that. He and Cadence sat some rows away from me, and I felt absolutely sure they didn’t want me to join them, but I kept half an eye on them. Josh Martin seemed distracted most of the time, and he certainly looked drunk, but when Leezza did her jumps he paid serious attention. On the last one he even had his cell phone out and he looked as though he was filming it. I thought that was just plain wrong.

Afterwards, as I was on my way to see Leezza as usual, I heard someone behind me shout, “Hey, college boy.” It was Motorhead Phil, of course, and he curled a big, overmuscled arm around me as he said, “We need your creative genius one more time, Ian.”

♦

Again I found myself at a hastily convened meeting of the core members of Motorhead Phil’s Famous Automotive Freak Show, as they gathered around Barry and his Beetle. It was much the same crowd as before, although there was now a bearded lady whom I didn’t recognise from the previous meeting. And once again they were all looking to me to provide some new, inspired idea. Once again I felt sure I was likely to disappoint them.

“Thing is,” said Motorhead Phil, “this has been going on long enough. Too long maybe. I know crowds. These people are getting impatient. I can’t keep ‘em waiting much longer. Sooner or later the old whore has to take her panties off and do the dirty. No disrespect, Leezza. I’m talking metaphorically, right?”

“Right,” said Leezza.

“I want the big one,” Motorhead Phil said. “I want to hit it and quit. I don’t want to make my whole career out of this. We’ve all got other things we want to do with our lives.”

I wondered what kind of second acts there were for people who’d been part of an automotive freak show, but I didn’t dare ask.

“We need a climax,” Leezza said, looking at me meaningfully, though I wasn’t sure of her meaning.

“We need a big finale, a big bang,” said Motorhead Phil.

Everyone stared at me.

“What? You mean Leezza’s Beetle has deliberately to crash?” I said.

“Wow,” said Motorhead Phil. “That’s brilliant. You’re very smart, Ian. I knew you were. Why couldn’t we think of that? A deliberate crash it is.”

“No, no,” I said. “That’s not what I meant at all.”

“Well it’s what you said.”

“But…”

I knew it was no good saying, “But…”

“OK then,” said Motorhead Phil. “So we’ll have a big final night, a whole day of festivities, a day when Leezza and her Beetle are absolutely guaranteed to come crashing down on Barry. We’ll start out with thirty Beetles in the line, then forty, then fifty, we’ll break the world record if we need to, and we’ll carry on, however many it takes, however long it takes, until she fails. You all right with that, Leezza? You all right with that, Barry?”

Leezza and Barry, to my dismay, said they were just fine with that.

“But…” I said again helplessly.

It wasn’t much of a protest, but it was the best I could do.

“You’re not telling me we can’t pack ‘em in for an event like that?” said Motorhead Phil.

“No, I’m not telling you that,” I said.

“Right then. Next Sunday, it is.”