Geoff Nicholson - Still life with Volkswagens

He does not feel at all accepting of them. There are only half a dozen or so of them, though he doesn’t dare look at them long enough to do any counting. At first he thinks they might be football supporters. Certainly they look like a peer group, a gang. But he knows it isn’t the football season, and the more he thinks about it, the more it appears to him that their shared interests are probably not very sporting.

They have extremely short hair and very big boots, but those things in themselves might not be so very decisive. No, it’s the tattoos that really give them away; the spider’s webs around their necks, the union jacks, the swastikas. These are, unless he’s very much mistaken, neo-Nazis. He submits to a small shudder.

They stand in an invisible, though palpable, cloud of anger, hostility and violent obscenity. They are hyperactive, like a barrel load of monkeys. At the moment they are righting among themselves, but it seems only a matter of time before they find some more proper object. No doubt a Jew or a black or a homosexual or a woman would be ideal, but failing that it seems perfectly likely that they might set about a man in a camper van who could all too easily be mistaken for a middle class dweeb. Davey thinks about scurrying back to the van but suspects that might only draw attention to himself. They would see his fear, and like a pack of dogs they’d know he’d identified himself as a victim. He stands on the forecourt of the pub, equidistant between his van, the pub entrance and the gang of skinheads, and he feels utterly paralysed.

At which point a man emerges from the pub. He is a middle aged man in a rather elegant black suit. The suit is sombre and sober enough but he’s wearing it with highly polished, studded cowboy boots, and he has strange items of adornment; a gold hoop earring, a belt buckle in the shape of a dog’s skull, a number of big, flashy rings on his fingers. His hair is cropped and silver. His face is large but solid and a short deep scar runs mournfully down from the left corner of his mouth. He walks purposefully but coolly towards the gang. At first Davey thinks it might be the landlord of the pub asking them to leave. That would be enormously brave of him, but it soon becomes obvious that a more subtle and convoluted transaction is taking place.

The besuited man talks to the skinheads quietly, slowly, and they immediately fall silent and listen attentively enough. He is apparently a man of few words. After barely a minute he has said all he has to say. He returns to the pub and as he does so the skinheads walk across the car park, over to a shabby white Transit van, their means of transport. They scuffle and throw punches at each other as they pile into the back.

Davey watches as they accelerate away in a screech of gravel and rubber. He’s glad they’ve gone. He saunters into the pub. It is spacious. There are beams and artexed walls, and a booming colour TV is showing a film about hyenas. Davey feels quite reassured. He enjoys a very leisurely ploughman’s lunch and a half of low alcohol lager. He consults his guide to local campgrounds and decides to head for a four star site situated twenty or so miles away. He will have to double back on himself and drive past the lay-by containing the hostile New Age travellers. He thinks he will give them a cheery wave as he passes to show there are no hard feelings.

He leaves the pub and sets off, but as he approaches the lay-by, he realises something is terribly wrong. The camp fire may have been a bit unruly before, but now a big roll of black smoke hangs over the place, and as he gets closer he can see that the entire site is in disarray. The vehicles have been attacked, smashed up, overturned. The teepee and the huddle of tents have been flattened, and there are now no signs of children or dogs. Davey slows the van and he can see some of the travellers. They are sitting or lying around, looking as though, well, as though they’ve just been beaten up by a gang of neo-Nazi skinheads. Several are clutching bloody rags to their faces and heads.

Davey thinks of stopping to offer assistance. After the way they rejected him it would be extremely noble, positively Biblical, to help them out. However, the memory of being called a middle class dweeb is still smarting, and he thinks ‘Sod it’, floors the accelerator and drives on.

♦

Here is Elvis Presley at the wheel of a dune buggy making the movie Easy Come, Easy Go . Now, at heart Elvis will always be a Cadillac man. Even at his funeral he will travel in a white Cadillac hearse with one silver Cadillac limousine in front and sixteen white Cadillac limousines behind. One of the first things he ever did when he became rich and successful was to buy his Momma a pink Cadillac. It probably looked a little loud and out of place on the streets of Memphis, but Hell, the boy has never been one for understatement and his heart was undoubtedly in the right place. Maybe the real problem is that Elvis has trouble expressing affection. When he wants to show people that he loves them he gives them something expensive, like a Lincoln convertible or a pick up truck. On one occasion he spent 950 thousand dollars buying trucks for each and every one of his entourage before the Colonel finally put his foot down.

Elvis loves all kinds of machinery, be it cars or motorcycles or tractors or golf carts. He drives Ferraris and a Stutz Blackhawk and all kinds of Mercedes and any number of muscle cars. But this dune buggy is something different again. Yes, it’s noisy and small, it’s cheap, it’s certainly hard to drive compared with an American automatic, and it’s based on one of those Volkswagen Bug things. He saw plenty of those things when he was stationed in Germany and he wasn’t too impressed. As a matter of fact, when he was in Germany he drove a white BMW which the press nicknamed the Elviswagen. And when he was courting Priscilla, he regularly sent a chauffeur-driven Mercedes to pick her up from her home in Wiesbaden and drive her all the way to his place in Bad Nauheim.

The Volkswagen, then, is just about as un-Elvis a car as you could imagine, and yet as he uses it to drive round the Easy Come, Easy Go movie set, as he ferries girls and friends around the lot, he gradually starts to like it. It’s kinda fun. It’s young and it’s hip and it’s funky. It’s more California than Vegas, and at this point in his career he doesn’t think that’s such a bad thing. He decides he’ll get one for his automobile collection.

At any given moment the best of Elvis’s cars stand on the drive of Graceland, ready and waiting, clean and polished, full of gas, and raring to go. Of course, even the best cars, some would say especially the best cars, can be a little temperamental; but Elvis has no time for other people’s or objects’ temperaments. He has to be able to get into any of his cars, start the engine first time, floor the accelerator and drive away. And if one of those suckers won’t start, he gets angry as hell. Not that he can’t deal with that anger. He has a pretty good way of dealing with it. He simply gets out of the offending car, draws his gun and shoots it. He shoots lots of things, like televisions and stereos and radios, but shooting automobiles is most fun. Of course, it doesn’t make the car any easier to start, but it definitely makes him feel a whole lot better.

He emerges from Graceland, dressed in his karate robes, his hair and sunglasses firmly in place. He walks along the line of cars put there for his consideration, wondering which one he’ll favour today, and he decides it’ll be the good old Volkswagen dune buggy. He climbs in, and it settles a little on its suspension. He turns the key in the ignition and it won’t start. He gets out, swearing under his breath about Kraut technology, takes a thirty-eight from the shoulder holster that he wears under his karate gear and pumps a couple of shells into the engine block. Then he moves on to his next choice, a Ferrari Dino which starts immaculately first time, and he drives away.