Geoff Nicholson - Street Sleeper

‘Feels good, doesn’t it?’ Fat Les said.

Ishmael had to agree. They got in the car.

‘Where are we going?’ Ishmael asked.

‘Not far, look ahead.’

♦

On 17 January 1949 the Holland America Line’s ship Westerdam arrives in New York. In its hold is a grey Beetle saloon, chassis number 1-090195, engine number 1-120847. It belongs to Ben Pon who has been sent to America by Nordhoff to interest dealers in becoming agents for Volkswagen in America. He can hardly stir the slightest interest.

As he circulates New York dealers, who are anticipating an explosion of affluence, of fins and chrome, a casting-off of austerity in favour of motor design that is slick, erotic and occasionally laughable, Pon must surely have thought that Sir William Rootes, and Ernest Breech of Ford who said the Beetle was ‘not worth a damn’, were being proved horribly right. If nothing else these men must have known their market. The response he gets is always the same. Who won the war? We beat the bastards fair and square, now we’re supposed to buy their cars so that they can rebuild their economy. What do they take us for? Bums?

♦

There was a Range Rover parked a little way ahead. Two men were standing beside it. One of them shouted, ‘Stop the car. Stop right where you are.’ Fat Les stopped the car. It seemed to make everyone happy.

The other man called, ‘Get out. Let’s have a look at you.’

They got out to be looked at.

‘They don’t look like very much to me,’ one of the Range Rover men said.

These two didn’t have shotguns. One had a fairly savage-looking piece of chain, the other was carrying a piece of wood about the size and shape of a cricket bat, but it was jagged with nails sticking out of it.

‘They must be the poor relations,’ Fat Les said.

The two pairs of men stood about a cricket pitch’s length apart, gunslingers at a double shoot-out.

‘We may not look like much,’ Ishmael said, ‘but you’d be surprised. You know the problem with chains and bits of wood is that you have to get close before you can use them. You’re not going to get close.’

Suddenly there were petrol bombs in Fat Les and Ishmael’s hands. They threw them. One landed on the roof of the Range Rover, the other just in front of it. The two men ran and dived for cover. It took a while for their vehicle to catch fire, but catch fire it did.

‘Had enough yet?’ Fat Les asked.

‘Not nearly enough,’ said Ishmael.

‘That’s my boy.’

Then they heard the sound of a two-tone horn. Whether it was police, fire or ambulance they didn’t know, but it was time to be going. Fat Les took the remaining bottles out of the car, dropped them in the middle of the road to form a zebra crossing of petrol and broken glass. He threw a piece of burning rag at the petrol. A sheet of flame danced satisfyingly from the tarmac. They returned to the Beetle, drove round the wreck of the Range Rover and set off again into some unimaginable future of love, revenge, class warfare and oral sex.

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.