Geoff Nicholson - Gravity’s Volkswagen

“It’s about passion and obsession,” Josh Martin said. “The Volkswagen Beetle is a symbol. It can symbolise anything you need symbolising.”

“Yes,” I said. “I know that. You’re quoting my own interviews back at me. But it’s also a movie about Volkswagen Beetles. And velociraptors.”

I thought that might get him angry but he just looked at me with disappointment and dismay, and we sat for a while without speaking. It was easiest that way. I listened to the band. I realised we’d been listening to ‘Louie Louie’ for a long time now. Various musicians had come and gone from the stage, the band had grown and contracted again, someone had leapt up and squawked a free-jazz saxophone solo, a large African-American woman had danced the shimmy, but the song had remained seamlessly, relentlessly the same. It had become a bit irritating.

Josh Martin was irritated too. “It the old days I’d probably have hit you by now,” he said to me.

These old days he spoke of weren’t so very long ago as far as I was concerned, and a return to them seemed perfectly likely, but I needn’t have concerned myself. Today he didn’t think I was worth hitting. He got up from our booth and walked over to the stage. For a moment, unlikely as it seemed, I thought he wanted to sing a couple of choruses of ‘Louie Louie’ with the band: stranger things had happened, but that wasn’t what he had in mind at all. He tapped the bass player on the shoulder, and as the guy turned his head, Josh Martin swung a wild, loose punch at him. Even if it had made contact it would probably have done no damage; the bass player was squat and solid and looked like he could take a punch, but in any case he rocked back and the blow went right by him. Still, it evidently wasn’t a thing that could be ignored or allowed to go unpunished.

The bass player grabbed the body of his guitar and jerked it upwards, quickly, sharply but without much effort, and he used it to deliver a dense, precise upper-cut to Josh Martin’s chin. The bass line remained as solid as ever. With a surprising smoothness, Josh Martin’s head snapped back and his body followed, a rearward dive, a flop, and he landed full length on the bar’s sticky wooden floor. He lay there, ignored by the rest of the bar, and he stayed motionless, inert, looking perfectly, unaccountably content, until Cadence and I started to drag him away. As we made it to the door, an old soak at the bar yelled after us, “You should come back next week. It’s ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’ Night.”

Driving a Porsche with three people in it, when one of them has passed out and you’re the one behind the wheel and you’ve never driven a Porsche before, isn’t easy, but it’s probably no harder than being the passenger who hasn’t passed out. At least that’s what Cadence led me to believe. She had to sit on top of Josh Martin as I drove us home. He was feeling no pain, though I guessed he would in the morning.

“I thought you handled him pretty well back there,” Cadence said.

“I didn’t really handle him at all.”

“You didn’t get angry. You didn’t let him get to you. You didn’t rise to the bait.”

“The bait wasn’t very tempting.”

“Still. It’s good that you know how to handle your director.”

“I thought the bass player handled him better than I did,” I said.

We made it back to Idle Palms, managed to get out of the car and to stuff Josh Martin back inside.

“You don’t think he’s dead, do you?” I said.

“He’s just drunk. He’s just sleeping it off.”

“He only had a couple of drinks.”

“In the bar he only had a couple. He drinks all day, Ian, every day, or hadn’t you noticed?”

“I miss a lot of what goes on around here.”

“I guess you do. So. What now? Want to hang out? We could talk about literature. Or something else. Or we needn’t talk at all.”

“I have to get to the speedway,” I said.

“Have to?”

“Well, I want to.”

“But you make it sound like a duty.”

“In a way it is, but like I said to Josh, you could come too.”

“I don’t think so.”

“We could talk about literature while we watch a guy throw car batteries around.”

“No. It would seem disloyal.”

“To Josh? To the movie?”

“Yes.”

“It wouldn’t be,” I said. “It really wouldn’t.”

“For me it would. It’s OK. I’ll find something else to do.”

So I went by myself to see the freak show. I preferred it that way really, although if Cadence or Josh had wanted to come I’d certainly have welcomed them. Maybe it was something to do with the high jinks in the bar, but somehow the show seemed a bit lacklustre that night. I wouldn’t say it had got boring exactly, but it had definitely become very much as expected. Of course that was partly because I’d seen the show so many times before, but then a significant proportion of the crowd had seen it many times too. Motorhead Phil was now selling season tickets, they were being snapped up, and I was starting to recognise some of the regular faces in the crowd.

After the show was over I went to see Leezza, in the usual way, and told her I thought her performance was great, and I wasn’t lying, but I did feel a bit like one of those stage-door Johnnies who turns up every night with a bouquet of flowers and tells the diva how marvellous she was, and he means it all right, but in reality he’s far too infatuated with her to have any idea whether she’s really marvellous or not.

Afterwards, as I walked back to the trailer park, I had a strange sense of disappointment, of an impending decline. I knew that things couldn’t go on for ever as they were, couldn’t in fact go on very much longer at all. One way or another, however many new pages I wrote, however many filmic ideas Josh Martin came up with, however many takes and retakes Angelo demanded, the movie would eventually be finished; not finished in the sense of completed, edited, dubbed, released, distributed, given awards and so forth, but sooner or later it would be over, the last shot would be in the can. Then everyone would depart from Idle Palms and go somewhere else to get on with the next phase of their lives. Why did that strike me as so terrible?

And I knew that Leezza’s stunt jumps must also conclude eventually. Either the distance would get too long for her, in which case she’d bring the car down on top of Barry, which would be a conclusion of a very specific sort, and one that I dreaded, much as it was what everybody else wanted. Or, just perhaps, there might be a less dramatic outcome. Leezza might change her mind, see sense, bottle out. Or Barry would. Or Motorhead Phil would decide that enough was enough. Or the local cops would decide to close down the show, for thoroughly good, obvious safety reasons.

When I arrived back at Idle Palms that night the Porsche was still where I’d parked it earlier, and I could see that Josh Martin was still in there. Perhaps, as Cadence had recommended, he was planning to spend the night there, sleeping it off. It was a much better and safer option than having him drive back to his house in Los Angeles. The car was parked in the shadows under some trees but I thought I could see some movement inside and the glow of a cigarette or joint. At least Josh Martin was alive, and if nothing else, he’d be well placed to start work in the morning.

The Autoerotic Beetle

The Journal of Forensic Science , Volume 18, Number 3, July 1973, reports the case of a forty-year-old airline pilot, from Corpus Christi, Texas, who killed himself with his Volkswagen Beetle. It was, as far as we can tell, an accident. It appears that the man was aiming for sexual gratification rather than death, though risk and danger were certainly part of the equation.