Geoff Nicholson - Gravity’s Volkswagen

The unnamed man left home at 6 a.m. on one of his days off, telling his wife he was going to a remote area to practise his pistol shooting. He was found about an hour and a half later by a passing fisherman who didn’t know what the hell he’d found.

The subject was naked and dead, wearing a body harness that was attached via a chain to the rear bumper of his Beetle. The car was not moving even though it was in gear, with the engine running, and the steering wheel was tied up so that it could only move in tight, anti-clockwise circles.

The car was a 1968, 1500 model, one of the less common, though by no means rare, semi-automatic versions that has a gear lever but no clutch pedal. Once the car was in gear and running it would move slowly, relentlessly, in concentric circles. The man had chosen a wide piece of road, an area big enough to accommodate the car’s turning circle, which according to a road test in Autocar magazine, dated February 1968, would have been 36 feet 7 inches ‘kerb to kerb’.

It’s assumed that the dead man was using his Beetle as part of an arcane, highly personal, sexual ritual. Having taken off his clothes, used the harness to attach himself to the car, then set it in motion, he would have been forced to run in circles after it; a peculiarly mechanical form of submission and subservience. To end the ‘performance’ all he had to do was reach into the car, turn off the ignition, and everything would stop. Perhaps he had done this successfully on any number of previous occasions.

This time, however, by mischance, the chain connecting him to the car got caught around the Beetle’s rear axle and he’d been ‘reeled in’, brought down to the ground, then dragged round in circles, unable to reach the ignition key. Even though the chain itself had eventually brought the car to a halt, by then our man was crushed against the rear wing and was dead of asphyxiation.

There are so many ways to have sex. There are so many ways to die. To find a unique way of doing both, and one that involves a Volkswagen Beetle, has a certain bizarre glory to it, though I suspect this was of little comfort to the pilot’s widow.

As usual, I slept badly, and I was woken early by unfamiliar noises outside my trailer. There were unfamiliar noises outside my trailer every morning, but these sounded unfamiliar in a brand-new way. I could hear the engine of a truck, the rattling of a heavy chain, several loud, deep, working men’s voices. I got up and looked out to see that a couple of guys were arranging to tow away Josh Martin’s Porsche, apparently unaware that he was still sleeping in it.

My first thought was that the car must be in the way of the shoot and that some over-zealous and bloody-minded crew members had decided to move it bodily, but I soon realised these were not our guys. There were two men in overalls who were hooking up the car, and I recognised one of them. It was the man whose CV I knew included stints as a security guard and a freak-show snake man. He was now in the towing business it appeared, and he was being supervised by a slick man in a slick grey suit with even slicker grey hair. The slick man was younger than he looked and displayed less tough authority than he wanted to, or perhaps thought he did, but he would do just fine if you were casting someone as a repo man. Josh Martin’s car was being repossessed.

As you would, Josh Martin got out of the car. He did it rather more slowly than you might have expected, given the circumstances, but possibly that was because he was stark naked. Somehow in the course of the night he had shed his clothes, but being naked wasn’t troubling him much. It was troubling the three repo guys a great deal more, and it slowed them down a lot. And when Cadence emerged from the other side of the Porsche, every bit as naked as Josh Martin, things ground to a complete halt.

The basic reasons for Josh Martin and Cadence’s nakedness weren’t hard to fathom: an old story, an older man and a younger woman, the boss and the intern, a boozy night ending with clumsy sex in the cramped interior of a car. That much was perfectly comprehensible. Why they didn’t bother to cover themselves up was far less clear. In retrospect I think Josh Martin may have been having a King Lear moment: savouring being naked, windswept, blasted by fate and the elements, tormented, driven close to insanity; and he was acting out his situation for all to see. What Cadence thought she was up to, I have no idea.

Naked though he was, I still expected Josh Martin to try to stop these men taking away his car. It was what anybody would do. I expected him to reason or cajole, say it was all a big mistake, maybe just get very angry and try to bluster his way out of it. But he didn’t do any of that. He was very accepting, very Zen. A couple of burly drivers from the film crew were standing by, sleeves rolled up, all too ready to step in and exchange blows with the tow-truck guys: it would have been an interestingly matched contest. But Josh Martin was having none of that.

“It’s OK,” he said calmly to anyone who was listening. “They’re taking my car back because I haven’t been making the payments. This is what happens when you don’t pay what you’re supposed to pay. People come and take your stuff back. Cause and effect. There’s no mystery about it. I just can’t afford to make the payments. And even if I could, I wouldn’t. Any spare money I have is going straight into this movie.”

This was encouraging in one way. It said something about Josh Martin’s commitment and priorities. It showed that he cared more about the movie than he did about driving a fancy car. That was surely a good thing, and a pleasant surprise given how negative he’d been about the movie last night. What was troubling was the way he linked these two very different expenses. The monthly payments on a Porsche were no doubt extortionate, certainly by any standards I knew, but compared with the costs of making a movie they were surely small change. The one simply didn’t equate with the other. Was the movie really relying on Josh Martin to dig into his own pocket for its budget?

As he himself had so vividly and accurately pointed out, I knew nothing whatsoever about movie finance, but even so, wasn’t there some ancient Hollywood wisdom about never using your own money to make a film? And weren’t there supposed to be backers, producers, at the very least some shadowy and potentially sinister money men? Weren’t they supposed to step in and throw their weight around when things got tough?

It clearly wasn’t the moment to ask questions about these things. The car duly was towed away, Josh Martin shrugged it off, didn’t refer to it again, and everybody carried on as normal and we got through the movie-making day.

That night, as ever, I went to the speedway to see the show. And there in the crowd, with Cadence hanging on his arm, was Josh Martin. This was a turn up for the books. He hadn’t gone back to his home in Los Angeles after the day’s shoot: the loss of his car would have created difficulties there, though surely not insuperable ones if he’d really been determined. So perhaps he simply wanted to stick around and be with his new sexual conquest. Or just possibly, I thought, he might finally have overcome some of his hostility towards Motorhead Phil and the automotive freak show, listened to what I’d said last night and decided to see what it was all about.

In a way it seemed to me unfair that after all the bile and anger he’d spat at the freak show he was able simply to pay his money at the gate and join the crowd like any other civilian. I thought he should have been forced to do penance first. Alas, life doesn’t work like that. He and Cadence sat some rows away from me, and I felt absolutely sure they didn’t want me to join them, but I kept half an eye on them. Josh Martin seemed distracted most of the time, and he certainly looked drunk, but when Leezza did her jumps he paid serious attention. On the last one he even had his cell phone out and he looked as though he was filming it. I thought that was just plain wrong.