Gravity’s Volkswagen

Twenty-Five

So the end was very definitely in sight, one of the ends anyway. Come next Sunday night something would very definitely be over. Death was not an absolute certainty, I told myself. Cars crashed all the time and people walked away from the wreckage, but in this case death seemed to be what everybody wanted. The crowd, Motorhead Phil, Barry, even Leezza, seemed to be in love with the idea, perhaps the reality, of motorised death. It appeared that nothing else would satisfy them.

I found myself unutterably depressed. I sat in my trailer and I tried to write more scenes for the goddamn movie, but that was now impossible. I was all written out. It happens to us all, and to far better writers than me. Somebody else would have to take over and finish the job. It seemed that just about anybody could: Josh Martin, Angelo, Cadence, somebody they dragged in off the street, or the actors could just make it up as they went along. It wouldn’t be any worse than what I was now capable of producing.

A couple of days passed. I stayed in my lair. Cadence came by occasionally at first, but then she stopped coming. She’d been given a new job on the movie. She was now Josh Martin’s unpaid personal assistant, which she seemed to think was a great step up for her, and it was definitely no skin off my nose. I really didn’t care any more. I tried calling Caroline in England but I kept getting her voicemail. It was probably just as well. I had nothing coherent to say to her or anybody else.

There were two untouched bottles of duty-free vodka in my luggage. I’d been saving them, complimenting myself on the restraint I’d shown by not downing them on my first two nights in Fontinella. Now I abandoned my restraint.

I stopped going to the speedway. It seemed redundant now. I knew that the big fateful crash couldn’t possibly come until Sunday. I’d be there for that all right, but until then I knew that Leez-za’s Beetle would be just fine, would continue to carve its neat parabolas through the thick air of Fontinella. I knew she would land safely, and Barry would survive, and it would all mean nothing. They were just marking time, going through the motions, spinning their wheels, waiting for the big final, fatal day.

♦

There was a brief, brisk rap on the trailer door, an unfamiliar knock, and when I opened up there was the actor playing Ronnie the dwarf. I realised with some shame that I still didn’t know his name.

“I’m outta here,” he said hoarsely.

I didn’t know what that meant. Had he been fired? Had he completed his scenes? Was he just walking off the picture?

“I’m walking off the picture,” he said.

It didn’t come as a huge surprise. It was more surprising that somebody or other hadn’t done it sooner.

It was far more surprising that he’d bothered coming to see me.

“Oh well, have a drink before you go,” I said, offering him a shot of the vodka.

“No,” he snarled. “I don’t want to drink with you. You’re the reason I’m outta here.”

I knew I had many failings but I didn’t think any of them was quite bad enough to make an actor walk off a movie, much less refuse a drink. Had my script-writing really been so terrible?

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.

“You can drop the pretence of being some civilised, urbane, literary Brit,” he said. “You might fool the others, but you don’t fool me. I finally saw what this movie of yours is all about.”

“I’d love to know,” I said wearily.

“Oh you know all right.”

“But tell me anyway.”

“These people in the Beetles, they’re Nazis, right?”

“Yes,” I said, “some of them, some of the time.”

I didn’t see how this could be a surprise to him. If he’d read any part of any version of the script this would surely have been obvious.

“So the trailer park is like a concentration camp, right?” he said.

That, on the other hand, stopped me in my tracks.

“Oh,” I said. “I never thought of it that way.”

“You can’t fool me. That’s how you always thought of it. And the velociraptors are the inmates of the camp. And we all know that the Jews weren’t the only people in the camps. There were gypsies and homosexuals, the disabled, the mentally ill — and dwarves!”

“Yes, I’m sure that’s true,” I said.

“You known damn well that’s true. So destroying the velociraptors is the final solution, right. That’s how you get your racial purity. And in the real world that plan failed. The Nazis lost. The Jews and the dwarves, some of them anyway, survived. But in your movie the Nazis win. The final solution works! How fucked up is that?”

“No,” I said, “no, really. That’s not what I wrote.”

“What we have here in this movie is a piece of pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic, Aryan supremacist fantasy. And you can count me out. I’m outta here.”

And he was. If he’d stayed I might have taken the trouble to explain that my book was a warning against Nazism, that I was on the side of the underdog, that my heart was in completely the right place, that the Nazis were in the camp just as much as the velociraptors were, that the trailer park didn’t actually resemble a concentration camp, that the trailer park setting wasn’t even my idea. But maybe I wouldn’t have bothered trying to explain any of this to him. Maybe I just couldn’t have cared less any more.

♦

The night was by no means over. It was late and it was very dark but I wasn’t feeling nearly as drunk as I should have been, given the amount of vodka I’d consumed. I sat on the front step of my trailer and looked out into the darkness. I could see a campfire over in a far corner of the trailer park, with a few people gathered round it. I couldn’t tell who they were or what they were doing, but I could hear fake, whooping laughter, and every now and again the flames from the fire soared upwards, out of control, as if somebody had thrown a splash of petrol on to it. I heard a dog barking ecstatically, and there was a woman’s voice, or possibly a boy’s, yelping in pain or pleasure, or both.

Then, in the darkness I heard a scuffling, and then I could see something moving slyly towards me. It was a stooped figure, a man moving unsteadily, almost naked, his body smeared with what looked like engine oil, and with various tools strapped around him like weapons: a spanner, some wire-cutters, a ratchet screwdriver. It was Josh Martin. He was far drunker than I was, and he looked infinitely crazier.

“How’s it going, Ian?” he asked, the wildness of his voice quite out of sync with the ordinariness of the question.

“Not so good,” I replied.

“Tell me about it,” he said. “I mean, don’t. Don’t tell me. I don’t need to know. I’m about ready to call it a day.”

“The movie?”

“Yeah, the fucking movie. My fucking pet project. I just hate it. I hate Volkswagen Beetles. I always will. I always have.”

“I don’t think you really mean that.”

“I wouldn’t lie to you, Ian.”

He swayed towards me and I handed him the vodka bottle which he swept up in a proprietorial way.

“But you signed up for the movie,” I said. “You agreed to direct it. You wrote the original script, for Pete’s sake. Didn’t it occur to you that Volkswagens might be involved?”

“Don’t get sarky with me, Ian. Of course it occurred to me. Of course it fucking did. But I was trying to exorcise my demons, OK?”

“You have demons?”

“Yes.”

That answer didn’t surprise me, although how these demons connected with the movie was anybody’s guess.

“Volkswagen demons,” he said.

“You have Volkswagen demons?”

“Yes. There. I said it. Happy now?”

“I’m not any more or less happy, Josh,” I said. “I just wish I knew what you were talking about.”

He looked at me hard, with a stare that oscillated between condescending pity and absolute contempt.

“Sometimes I forget just what a foreigner you are,” he said; then, as if being a foreigner was suddenly a thing in my favour, he slapped his bare chest and added, “This isn’t a suntan, you know? OK? I’m a Mexican.”

He said it as if this were the big ‘reveal’, the grand, dramatic discovery that would have me speechless with shock and wonder. It didn’t.

I said, “So?”

His being a Mexican meant nothing to me. It was a neutral fact. It didn’t ring any cultural bells for me. The only Mexicans I knew were screen Mexicans: Salma Hayek, Eli Wallach in The Magnificent Seven, Charlton Heston in ‘Youch of Evil, Luis Guzman in The Limey, Danny Trejo in just about anything. OK, so not all of these, I was fairly sure, were actual Mexicans, though I’d have been hard pressed to say which were and which weren’t, with the exception of Charlton Heston.

“You like stories, Ian,” Josh Martin said. “I got a story for you. It’s mine. It’s not a bad story. Maybe there’s a movie in it. It starts with my parents sneaking over the border with me in their arms. I was two years old. We were as illegal as it gets. The Latin peril. We spoke maybe twenty words of English between us. I was called Juan Martinez.

“My mom got a job as a maid; my dad worked in a garage. He knew about cars. And like any Mexican mechanic he knew all about Volkswagen Beetles. Where he came from it was all Volkswagen Beetles all the time. The taxicabs were Beetles, the police cars were Beetles. Even some of the gangs drove Beetles. Though my dad called ‘em Vochos in his lingo.

“And in LA there was always work for a VW mechanic, especially if he was illegal and would work for poverty wages. My dad was a pretty good mechanic, I think. But how would I know? I mean he wasn’t some automotive genius, he wasn’t in love with Volkswagens, but he cared about doing a good job. He tried not to rip anybody off even when he was being ripped off himself.

“And he learned to speak some English, enough for his work, so he could talk about compression ratios and heat exchangers and distributor caps, though he’d have had a hard time holding a conversation about anything else. Every day he came home late from work, smelling of gasoline, and his hands were black with oil, and there were always VW parts lying around the apartment — hub-caps, carburettors, headlamp lenses. Guess what? I learned to hate that shit.”

The campfire on the far side of the trailer park flared up again and a man’s voice howled like a cartoon wolf before breaking into laughter.

Josh Martin ignored it and continued, “And are you surprised if I tell you I had a lousy relationship with my dad? I was smart, and I went to school, and I learned to speak English pretty good, and I wasn’t too dark, and although I never pretended to be anything I wasn’t, a lot of people could look at me and mistake me for a gabacho.”

“A what?”

“One of you. A white boy. An Anglo. And my dad kind of spoiled the effect, you know? It was a problem. So I didn’t like my dad. I didn’t like him because of what he was. And I didn’t like myself any better than I liked him. And I pretty much didn’t like the world, didn’t like anything, so Volkswagen Beetles were definitely on the list of what I didn’t like. But you know, you grow up, you get on with it. And so I left it all behind. I moved on, I got ahead. I stopped being called Juan Martinez. I got a couple scholarships. I made a career in the movies: the immigrant dream. Right?”

“I really don’t know,” I said.

Teah, I think you do, Ian. And you know, you get older, and I’m not saying you get any wiser, but if you’re lucky you get a bit less angry. You decide there are some fights you want to avoid. You decide your life might be better if you could get along with your old man. So I decided I’d try and get reconciled with my dad. Like in the movies. Old story, right?

“But it never happened. He died before we could ever really patch things up. And I can’t say that Volkswagens killed him. I can’t say that working fifteen-hour days, hundred-hour weeks, for poverty wages, in a metal shed in Echo Park, and having no health insurance was what killed him, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t help.

“So we flash forward. And I signed on to make this movie. Didn’t just sign on. I developed this movie. I produced this fucking movie. Because I thought I had something to answer for. I thought it might be my tribute to my dad, a way of accepting my past. And you’re right, Ian, about the Beetle, the Bug, the Vocho, the Pulguita: it can symbolise any damn thing you want it to symbolise. And for me, I thought OK, it might symbolise father and son, filial love, trans-generational respect, accepting who you are and where you come from.

“And you know, it might. But not here, not now. Right here and now, what we got, this movie, it’s a piece of cheese, a piece of Twilight Zone crap. It’s about Volkswagens and velociraptors. It really is. And that’s no fucking good. Fact is, Ian, I hate Volkswagen Beetles now more than I ever did before. And of course I still hate myself, and I’d sure probably hate my dad if he was still alive, but you know what, I hate you a whole lot more than I hate anything or anyone else.”

He looked demented. He looked murderous. He looked like he was about to hit me. I could see he was in terrible pain, a wounded animal, not so much King Lear now as one of Dr Moreau’s beasts. Are we not Volks? I didn’t believe that I was personally responsible for all, or even very much, of that pain, and I thought he had no reason to hit me, but if hitting me would have made him feel better, if that would have made everything all right, I’d have been happy to let him do it. He didn’t. He slunk away more beast-like than ever, taking my bottle of vodka with him.