Street Sleeper

Seven

Fat Les drove in his inimitable way. At times Ishmael had the feeling again that they were being followed, but nobody in their right mind would take the kind of risks necessary to keep up with Fat Les. Marilyn’s father was not, of course, in his right mind, but Ishmael would surely have spotted a Rolls-Royce on their tail.

‘Where are we going?’ Ishmael asked.

‘I want to see the sea,’ Fat Les replied.

‘Right,’ said Ishmael. ‘Back to the old collective unconscious.’

‘Yeah.’

‘This has been a strange night,’ Ishmael said, unnecessarily.

‘It was the best,’ said Fat Les. ‘Best night I’ve had since I was a kid.’

‘But it does show that violence begets violence.’

‘Yeah, there’s no arguing with that.’

‘It turns men into beasts. It’s the death of rationality. And yet, and yet…’

‘Yeah, fun isn’t it?’

‘No, not fun, not fun at all; but tonight with the danger and the threat of mayhem, the smell of death and petrol in the air, well it certainly made me feel alive.’

There is no life without adventure,’ said Fat Les.

♦

Ben Pon manages at last to sell his grey Beetle at only a slight loss, and returns home. A little later Nordhoff makes his own trip to America, but lacking the confidence to take an actual car he contents himself with a sheaf of photographs. He does find somebody prepared to become Volkswagen’s official American importer. In 1950 there are a grand total of 157 Volkswagens registered in the United States.

♦

Fat Les and Ishmael headed for Brighton. Fat Les had been a mod in his earlier years and had a few memorable fights with rockers and police on Brighton beach. For him this was a Proustian journey.

‘We’d missed the war. We were too young for the army, so we had to make our own amusement. We had to fight among ourselves. We fought them on the beaches, in the transport caffs, in the car-parks. Happy days.’

‘I can imagine,’ Ishmael said, though he couldn’t.

‘We rode scooters, wore suits, took pills. What did you do in your youth, Ishmael?’

‘I did my O-levels, went out with Debby, went to see groups at the City Hall. I never had a youth, really.’

‘Poor sod. Is that what you’re trying to do now? Trying to recapture a youth you never had?’

‘No,’ Ishmael said. ‘Youth’s all about having fun. I’m not just having a good time now. I’m looking for spiritual advancement.’

‘Isn’t fun a form of spiritual advancement?’

Ishmael had to think about that.

♦

The Volkswagen’s conquest of America will require a very slick and thorough marketing campaign. In 1959 the advertising agency of Doyle Dane Bernbach takes on the Volkswagen account in the United States.

Despite being the third name in the company title, Bill Bernbach is the genius in the side.

An English graduate from New York University, he is at heart a copywriter, but a copywriter with an unfailing instinct for integrating words and pictures.

He gets to work at nine, goes home at five. He is a brilliant maverick who loves his family.

He carries with him a card that he looks at from time to time, especially when facing some client with whom he particularly disagrees.

The card reads, ‘Maybe he’s right.’

♦

They were parked on the high sea-front at Brighton. There was a wide road, a pavement, a wall, then a sudden drop down to another road at beach level. They looked out to sea. They were drinking Colt 45. If it isn’t cold, it isn’t Colt. It was cold. Ishmael was shattered, freezing and nauseous, and a long way from home, yet for all that he felt at one with it all.

‘To be at one with it all is to be very fucked up,’ said Fat Les.

‘Do you feel at one with it all, Les?’

‘Sure.’

It was three in the morning but the town was not quiet. There were still drunks and loving couples wandering the streets, cars still drove past.

‘We couldn’t have been followed, could we?’ Ishmael said. ‘For one thing they’d have caught us by now.’

‘You worry too much,’ said Fat Les.

Then a four-wheel-drive Japanese jeep flashed past. At first it meant nothing to Ishmael, then it stirred a memory. Was it the one that had been parked outside ‘Sorrento’? It looked similar, the colour might have been the same, but the same could have been said for plenty of other cars. Ishmael was getting paranoid.

But then perhaps he had reason to be paranoid. The jeep had driven past at some speed, then turned a corner and gone out of sight. Fat Les and Ishmael continued drinking their beers and looking out to sea. The jeep came by again, slower this time as though the driver was looking them over, though not slow enough for Ishmael to see who was driving. It drove past and turned the corner again.

‘Probably a couple of Brighton wide-boys who feel like picking on drunks,’ Fat Les said. ‘Are you ready for trouble?’

‘I could live without it,’ Ishmael replied.

‘Yeah, but you could live better with it.’

♦

Bill Bernbach knows it isn’t going to be easy to sell the Volkswagen in America.

Voluptuous metal, silvered trim, enough room to have an orgy on the back seat — this is what the public thinks it wants. Bill Bernbach is about to change all that. The public never know what they want until somebody tells them.

Bernbach tells them that this car is eccentric, ornery, a lemon. ‘It’s ugly but it gets you there.’ He makes owning a Volkswagen an act of protest against the excesses of Detroit, against vulgarity, greed and conspicuous consumption.

He tells them that Volkswagen is the car of the nonconformist. And in America there are millions of non-conformists, all waiting for a product they can buy that will confirm their individuality. Millions.

♦

The jeep came round again. It approached along the straight sea-front road, and then it stopped, perhaps fifty yards away. The headlights were turned off. Ishmael still hoped he was mistaken. He hoped it was neither wide-boys, nor Marilyn’s father. Couldn’t it just be a couple out for a late night look at the sea? He couldn’t see the faces of the people in the jeep, but it did look like a man and a woman. Was it Marilyn’s mother and father, the old team back together, united by a shared desire to hit him some more?

The driver’s and passenger’s doors opened simultaneously. Ishmael was ready. Fat Les was eager. A man and woman stepped from the jeep; on the passenger’s side Davey, on the driver’s side Marilyn.

‘Stone the bleedin’ crows,’ said Fat Les.

Ishmael had to agree.

‘Nice diversion,’ said Davey.

‘What?’

‘The Molotov cocktails — a really good tactic. With all that mayhem going on I could crash about inside the house, make all the noise I wanted, and Marilyn’s old man wasn’t going to notice. I had to break down the door to get Marilyn out of her bedroom, but apart from that it was easy.’

‘We stole the jeep — though it wasn’t really stealing, Marilyn knew where the keys were. The only trouble we had was keeping up with you two. But once we saw that you were heading for Brighton that was easy too. We knew we’d find you.’

‘It’s so good to have you here,’ Ishmael said to Marilyn.

‘Looks like it was meant to be,’ Marilyn replied.

‘Are you sure you weren’t followed?’ Fat Les asked.

‘You seem to have done a reasonable job of immobilizing half the motor transport in Crockenfield,’ Marilyn said.

Davey said, ‘And her Dad’s not going anywhere in his Roller until he’s got the sugar out of his petrol tank.’

They celebrated with a few more cans of Colt 45. Taking everything into account it had been a successful quest. It hadn’t gone exactly according to plan, but Ishmael had, by however indirect a method, achieved everything he had set out to.

‘And what do we do now?’ Davey asked.

At first he appeared to be putting the question in general, to everyone, but then Ishmael realized he was only addressing him.

‘I don’t know,’ Ishmael said. ‘What should we do now, Les?’

‘Don’t look at me,’ Fat Les said. ‘How should I know?

You tell us. After all, you’re our leader.’

♦

Bernbach decides that the Volkswagen shall be an East Coast car, a snob car, a holier than thou car. The man who owns a Volkswagen is above all this bullshit whereby you measure a man’s cock by the size of his car, the size of his ego and his salary.

A year is supposed to be a long time in American automobile production, too long a time for a manufacturer to go without making a few styling changes, each year demanding a new model. Bill Bernbach is going to change that.

A full-page newspaper ad shows a man and his Volkswagen. The man is lean and young and he is not smiling. He doesn’t look like a professional model. He isn’t supposed to. His name is Michael Kennedy. He looks like he could be a college professor, an aeronautics engineer, even one of a new breed of hard-edged stand-up comedians. The suit is tight. The tie is thin. He’s even wearing glasses.

The caption tells us that the Volkswagen he’s leaning against is made up from a 1947 body, a ‘55 chassis, engine and doors, ‘56 seats, ‘58 bumpers, ‘61 tail lights, a ‘62 fender, a ‘63 front end, and a ‘65 transmission.

Yes, the Volkswagen is the same, year in year out. Something constant in a world of planned obsolescence.

The campaign tells us that high volume can be consistent with high quality, that cultural enhancement need not be elitist; though Hitler, of course, got there first with both these thoughts.

The Volkswagen is the hero of the advertising campaign.

♦

A leader? Ishmael? He who had never done more than supervise one part-time member of staff at the library. He didn’t want to be in charge of anyone’s life but his own.

He didn’t mind being able to exert a little influence now and again, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to lead anyone. So he said that everybody should get some sleep. This seemed a nicely modest first piece of leadership. Fat Les and Davey slept in the Beetle. Ishmael tried to sleep with Marilyn in the jeep. Sleep would not come. The front seats were too hard and the benches in the back were too narrow. So they had to talk to each other.

‘Alone at last,’ said Ishmael.

‘I wish we were in some cheap motel,’ Marilyn said. ‘I wish we had some shoplifted smoked salmon and champagne, and that I was showing you my tattoo.’

It sounded all right to Ishmael.

‘How do you want to die, Ishmael?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know. I’m still trying to work out how to live. I don’t think about it.’

‘I think about it,’ she said. ‘I see my body thrown through the windscreen of a speeding car. They pull me from the wreckage, the jugular vein is severed but the face remains serene, the make-up; is still perfect.

‘I see myself slumped over a table in a waterfront bar. The body is ageing but it’s still appealing enough in tight black lace and fishnet. The face is wrinkled, but the eyes are as sensual and as beckoning as ever. There is an empty brandy bottle on the table. The regulars see me unconscious, ‘That’s Marilyn for you,’ they say with affection. ‘Dead drunk again.’ But then one of them touches my skin, as pale and cold as porcelain, and finds that I am just dead.

‘I see a hotel room, very modern, very dark. The curtains are drawn, the television is showing Pandora’s Box. The bed is tangled in an aftermath of passion. My beautiful corpse lies at an angle across the bed, in a posture that is at once impossible and yet impossibly provocative. My hair cascades over my face. One red high heel is still on, my red silk camisole seems perfect but for the one small bullet hole.

‘That’s the way I see it.’

‘I just want to die wise,’ said Ishmael, but he was more than half asleep.

♦

A television commercial. The funeral motorcade of Maxwell E. Staveley, whose will is being read out in voice-over. He leaves his wife a calender, his sons fifty dollars each in dimes, his business partner nothing. But nephew Harold who has oft times said, ‘Gee, Uncle Max, it sure pays to own a Volkswagen,’ gets the entire fortune of one hundred billion dollars.

Virtue rewarded — the American way.

♦

Next morning the four of them had breakfast together in a sea-front café. Ishmael found it a difficult meal to begin with. The others were still keen for Ishmael to do some leadership. But once he put his mind to it it wasn’t so very hard. He decided that Fat Les should teach Davey everything he knew about Volkswagens. He realized this might take years but they could start by rebuilding Enlightenment.

He decided Marilyn would not be at home in a railway arch, but also that the time was not ripe for a return to the commune, so they would stay in a boarding house. They would do a bit of touring around in the jeep even though he knew it would not be as meaningful as touring in Enlightenment. Then after a while they would return to Fat Les’s arch. He and Davey would have been working day and night and have built a very special machine. Then Ishmael and Marilyn would drive off together into infinity, or at least, if she really insisted, as far as Fox’s Farm.

They said their goodbyes. Ishmael and Marilyn checked into a boarding house. It was a warm, clear day. They decided to go to the nude beach and take some LSD.

‘Take some paper with you,’ Marilyn said. ‘You might want to make a few notes.’

Renata returns home. Her home is what she supposes a career-woman’s flat is supposed to look like. It is a studio apartment with modern furniture in primary colours, polished boards, a hand-coloured print of a ‘57 Chevy on the wall, a fair number of books, most of them read, a chrome drinks trolley, a discreet colour television, a hi-fi, a black Venetian blind.

She has been sent a record by a group calling themselves the Glove Compartment. The picture on the sleeve shows a photograph of the Ford works at Dagenham, and an elegant female hand holding a cocktail glass. Renata pours herself a tumbler of apple juice and steels herself to play the record. The music is young, brash, and not particularly in tune. A reedy teenage voice sings:

When I’m feeling troubled

When I’m not feeling free

There’s a weight on my shoulders

And it’s bothering me,

I go down to the garage

And I turn the key

Then I drive like a bastard

In my Ford Capri.

Ah well, she can give it an honourable mention in the news column. It could easily fill two or three column inches. But there are more pressing matters. She needs to wash her hair, do her nails, phone her mother and come up with thirty more things that you always wanted to know about the Volkswagen Beetle.

♦

Ishmael’s notes.

1 a.m. Call me Ishmael.

The beach.

The sun.

A few nude people — mostly men as a matter of fact.

1.30 a.m. The beach.

The sea.

The sun has gone in a bit.

Fewer nude people. One man has been staring a little unpleasantly at Marilyn but she doesn’t seem to object.

2 a.m. I say to Marilyn, ‘Have you taken LSD before?’

‘A few times.’

‘Will it be fun?’

‘Not fun exactly.’

‘Will it be a learning experience?’

‘Everything is a learning experience.’

The sea.

The beach.

The sun’s come out again. Not much seems to be happening to my consciousness. Maybe it wasn’t really LSD.

2.30 a.m. The beach.

The horizon.

The shape of the world is changed by the movement of pebbles.

The sky.

The DISTANCE.

Space that is limitless. Infinity in all directions.

We are each at the centre of the universe.

Looks like it really was LSD after all.

3 a.m. The beach.

Pebbles. They seem to move. They do move, of course.

The planet moves through space. Our bodies move in time to cosmic rhythms.

Bodies on the beach. Pale hieroglyphs. Their arrangement spells out messages when seen from above. A code? Who does the decoding?

3.30 a.m. All this time Marilyn’s been reading a book. It has an Impressionist painting on the front. The colours move and vibrate. There is writing on the cover, but I can’t read what it says. A code? What I can make out is a line of the blurb which says ‘this unique book’. I shall have to think about that.

3.45 a.m. The sea.

In what sense can a book be said to be unique?

Printed matter, mechanical reproduction, unlimited editions. Not much uniqueness there.

‘What makes a copy unique,’ says Marilyn, ‘is its position in space.’

4.30 a.m. Waves crash on to the shore.

The sky. The tides.

Lunar music that changes our positions in space.

5.15 a.m. The beach.

The wind.

The sun has gone in.

The beach is emptying. Ugly people. Grey sacks of flesh, open pores, moles that sprout hair. They speak out of the corner of their mouths. They talk dirty. They know something I don’t. About the code? They put their clothes on. They put their skins on. Their skins are suits made out of a kind of rubber, very life-like, a substance not found in nature. Inside the rubber skin there is a form of life — part insect, part vegetable, and too loathsome even to think about. They are changing the shapes of space. Of course — that explains Marilyn’s father’s strange behaviour.

6 a.m. I am sitting in the Neptune Burger bar.

I felt a bit bad for a moment back there at the beach. Better now, except I have trouble holding my cup of coffee. It keeps changing size.

On the way here I saw a lot of parked Volkswagens, I counted them and noted the pattern.

The streets.

The Volkswagen stands at the crossroads of history.

As do we all.

7 a.m. I am sitting in a pub called the Green Man — fertility. The beer tastes like urine.

The carpet.

The seats.

The juke box.

I’d like to hear some music from the road, from the spheres. The juke box is playing ‘On the Blanket on the Ground’.

Things are getting jagged again.

Lads at the bar. Low-lifes. Smart, casual clothes. Always a bad sign. They’re beautiful in their own way, but it is not my way. It is not the WAY.

The juke box has started playing ‘My Way’.

I try to read their minds, their faces. It isn’t hard. Their minds are full of bad chemicals. One day they’re going to die. Why not today?

8 a.m. Still in the Green Man.

The effects seem to be wearing off. The beer glasses above the bar reflect light — it’s just FANTASTIC.

I felt like taking my clothes off and standing naked so that the drinkers in the pub could see me as I really AM. Marilyn talked me out of it.

9 a.m. The beach again.

I am naked but my clothes are not far away.

Marilyn and I have just made love on a blanket on the shingle. Pebbles. Waves. EVERYTHING MOVED. It would. It has to. Oneness. Making love to a Goddess.

10 a.m. Back at the boarding house.

More or less back to normal, except for being very sensitive to noise from outside.

Who’s making the noise? The Crockenfield Blazers?

I wish I could sleep, but every time I close my eyes there’s an abyss. ABYSS. The window rattles. There are dark shapes just outside my field of vision.

The vibrations.

The wallpaper.

The fucking insects.

And do I trust Marilyn? After all, she is her father’s daughter. She carries the genetic code. She is also, of course, a Goddess.

From the street the sound of a Volkswagen. You can hear the state of the engine, the condition of the valves, the exhaust, whether it’s a man or woman driving, his or her age, the state of mind, the state of the driver’s soul.

Don’t get too near the soul. That’s where the insects live.

Nobody move.

Nobody say anything.

Get those insects out of here.

Beetles. Yes. Significant. Yes. Get it?

11.30 a.m. Marilyn is trying to help me ‘mellow out’. She’s given me red wine, orange juice and vitamin C tablets.

Or so she says.

Somebody fill that abyss will you?

Blood oranges, a breeding ground for maggots, dead dogs, bad souls. Welcome back to ‘Sorrento’.

Nobody touch that light switch.

My flesh itches. Hair growing where it didn’t grow before. Not hairs but legs. Spiders inside the skin, their legs sticking out through the pores.

Who’s got the ray gun?

Who’s got the nuclear device?

Let’s blast those suckers.

They’re going to have to die. Every one of them. All of us in the end, but some of them first. It’s only a gesture but it’s a start.

It’s obvious.

Marilyn’s father knew what he was talking about. He would. He’s got his contacts. The time for talk is past. There are to be no prisoners. No surrender.

The slugs in the library. The velour tracksuit.

Kill the fuckers. Starting now.

Don’t think I can write any more just at the moment…

The record continues,

I wanna be free

Don’t need no more deception

I wanna clean-living girl

With no social infection

I wanna Ford Capri

That’s got fuel injection.

Renata takes the record off before the fuzzed guitar solo cuts in. If they have ever written ‘em like that before she suspects they won’t be writing ‘em like that very much longer. She turns the television on. There is a young black reporter standing in front of a wrecked car in a rural setting. The car could be a Range Rover. The reporter looks ill at ease, like someone only acting the part of a reporter, someone who has been hopelessly miscast.

He says, ‘The sleepy village of Crockenfield was literally rocked last night. This house’ (there is a shot of a large detached house with grounds) ‘called ‘Sorrento’ and owned by Mr Andrew Lederer was fire-bombed, cars such as the one behind me were set alight, there was a chase, shots were fired. Why?

‘The attack was apparently motiveless, nothing was stolen and in the end nobody was hurt, although that in itself seems miraculous. And the only clue is that the attackers left the village in a supercharged Volkswagen Beetle.

‘More curious still, I’ve spent most of the day here in Crockenfield and haven’t been able to find anyone prepared to talk about the episode.

‘Mr Lederer says he is too busy to speak to the media and claims it was merely youthful high spirits on the part of some of his daughter’s friends.

‘Where is his daughter by the way? And how is it that his attractive blonde wife managed to sleep through the entire episode?

‘Here is Constable William Peterson…’

A tense young Constable speaks direct to camera.

‘We heard shots, an explosion or two, and then we saw this Volkswagen leaving the scene at a hundred and twenty miles per hour. Basically we’re baffled.’

Renata feels it would not take very much to basically baffle Constable Peterson. The reporter appears on screen again.

He says, ‘Who fired those shots? Is there some strange vendetta that stalks the village of Crockenfield? Is there a political motive? And just who is hiding what from whom?

‘This is Dudley Johnson, Kent at Six, Crockenfield.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ says Renata.

♦

Later, Ishmael would be told that it can sometimes take years to recover from a particularly bad trip. In his own case he was unable to leave the boarding house for a few days. Marilyn was a tower of strength. She sat with him a lot, stroked his head, brought him food, and tried to talk him back to normality.

♦

Renata tries to remember more about her hitch-hiker. She recalls the leather jacket, the ghetto-blaster, and some talk of a friend who was mad on Beetles, then a lot of nonsense about a damsel in distress. If she were a real newshound, a real pro, she would be on the phone, in her car, solving the mystery, getting the story, getting a scoop, getting on in her career. If she were even a decent, concerned citizen she would phone the police and give a description of her hitch-hiker.

What she actually does is take a piece of paper from her bureau and scrawl on it:

FACT: The sleepy village of Crockenfield was rocked earlier this month when the home of Mr Andrew Lederer was mysteriously fire-bombed. Police were baffled. The only clue was that the attackers were driving a hot Volkswagen Beetle.

What the hell? She was never claiming to be Norman Mailer. She goes into her bathroom, turns on the immersion heater and decides to leave the phone call to her mother until another day. She decides she needs something stronger to drink than apple juice. She looks at what she has just written.

‘Only another twenty-nine facts to go,’ she says contentedly.

♦

Marilyn had done a marvellous job of reasoning with the landlady of the boarding house. She explained Ishmael’s loud behaviour, his screams, his breaking of the bathroom mirror, and his loudly proclaimed threats to blow up Brighton with his psychic powers, by saying that he had been in the Falklands and had a close friend blown up by an Argentinian mine. She knew the Falklands didn’t have the same cachet as Vietnam but nobody could have mistaken Ishmael for an American vet.

The landlady was pacified at least for a few days. Then Ishmael developed the habit of waking at three in the morning and screaming ‘Kill the parasites’. The landlady put up with it for three nights, and the intensity of his screams was considerably lower by the third night, but then she threw them, very politely, out.

Many girls would feel they had made a mistake if they were taken from home in a petrol-bombing raid and finished up in a Brighton boarding house looking after an acid casualty. Not Marilyn. She took it all in her stride. She took a lot of notes. Ishmael would lie on the bed, listening to the traffic noise, while Marilyn filled reporters’ notebooks with very small handwriting. She had a feeling it might be useful later.

♦

The putty features of Marty Feldman stare out from a newspaper ad for Volkswagen. The skin is grainy, the mouth soft, the eyes pointing to different corners of the page. The ad asserts that since Marty Feldman is extremely ugly his success must be based on talent alone — just like the Volkswagen. Not just a pretty face.

But it’s worth remembering that Feldman’s is a comedian’s face and that a certain ugliness is something that many comedians trade on. Marty Feldman would not have become a successful romantic star, however talented.

Then again, another Volkswagen ad is headlined, ‘After a few years, it starts to look beautiful.’

Bill Bernbach has other things on his mind. He is working on a campaign for the second most successful car-hire company in America. Second most, second best, are hard concepts to sell in America, but he manages—‘We try harder.’

♦

Ishmael and Marilyn were sitting in the cab of the jeep.

‘What do you want to do? Try another boarding house?’

‘OK,’ Ishmael replied.

‘Would you like to go to Hastings? Lewes? Day trip to France?’

Ishmael shrugged.

‘Anything you like,’ he said.

‘I know,’ said Marilyn. ‘Let’s go to Fat Les’s garage. You could see how they are getting on with rebuilding Enlightenment.’

Ishmael smiled.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’d like that.’

‘It’ll do you the world of good,’ said Marilyn.

They were both wrong.