Geoff Nicholson - Gravity’s Volkswagen

Afterwards, as I was on my way to see Leezza as usual, I heard someone behind me shout, “Hey, college boy.” It was Motorhead Phil, of course, and he curled a big, overmuscled arm around me as he said, “We need your creative genius one more time, Ian.”

♦

Again I found myself at a hastily convened meeting of the core members of Motorhead Phil’s Famous Automotive Freak Show, as they gathered around Barry and his Beetle. It was much the same crowd as before, although there was now a bearded lady whom I didn’t recognise from the previous meeting. And once again they were all looking to me to provide some new, inspired idea. Once again I felt sure I was likely to disappoint them.

“Thing is,” said Motorhead Phil, “this has been going on long enough. Too long maybe. I know crowds. These people are getting impatient. I can’t keep ‘em waiting much longer. Sooner or later the old whore has to take her panties off and do the dirty. No disrespect, Leezza. I’m talking metaphorically, right?”

“Right,” said Leezza.

“I want the big one,” Motorhead Phil said. “I want to hit it and quit. I don’t want to make my whole career out of this. We’ve all got other things we want to do with our lives.”

I wondered what kind of second acts there were for people who’d been part of an automotive freak show, but I didn’t dare ask.

“We need a climax,” Leezza said, looking at me meaningfully, though I wasn’t sure of her meaning.

“We need a big finale, a big bang,” said Motorhead Phil.

Everyone stared at me.

“What? You mean Leezza’s Beetle has deliberately to crash?” I said.

“Wow,” said Motorhead Phil. “That’s brilliant. You’re very smart, Ian. I knew you were. Why couldn’t we think of that? A deliberate crash it is.”

“No, no,” I said. “That’s not what I meant at all.”

“Well it’s what you said.”

“But…”

I knew it was no good saying, “But…”

“OK then,” said Motorhead Phil. “So we’ll have a big final night, a whole day of festivities, a day when Leezza and her Beetle are absolutely guaranteed to come crashing down on Barry. We’ll start out with thirty Beetles in the line, then forty, then fifty, we’ll break the world record if we need to, and we’ll carry on, however many it takes, however long it takes, until she fails. You all right with that, Leezza? You all right with that, Barry?”

Leezza and Barry, to my dismay, said they were just fine with that.

“But…” I said again helplessly.

It wasn’t much of a protest, but it was the best I could do.

“You’re not telling me we can’t pack ‘em in for an event like that?” said Motorhead Phil.

“No, I’m not telling you that,” I said.

“Right then. Next Sunday, it is.”

So the end was very definitely in sight, one of the ends anyway. Come next Sunday night something would very definitely be over. Death was not an absolute certainty, I told myself. Cars crashed all the time and people walked away from the wreckage, but in this case death seemed to be what everybody wanted. The crowd, Motorhead Phil, Barry, even Leezza, seemed to be in love with the idea, perhaps the reality, of motorised death. It appeared that nothing else would satisfy them.

I found myself unutterably depressed. I sat in my trailer and I tried to write more scenes for the goddamn movie, but that was now impossible. I was all written out. It happens to us all, and to far better writers than me. Somebody else would have to take over and finish the job. It seemed that just about anybody could: Josh Martin, Angelo, Cadence, somebody they dragged in off the street, or the actors could just make it up as they went along. It wouldn’t be any worse than what I was now capable of producing.

A couple of days passed. I stayed in my lair. Cadence came by occasionally at first, but then she stopped coming. She’d been given a new job on the movie. She was now Josh Martin’s unpaid personal assistant, which she seemed to think was a great step up for her, and it was definitely no skin off my nose. I really didn’t care any more. I tried calling Caroline in England but I kept getting her voicemail. It was probably just as well. I had nothing coherent to say to her or anybody else.

There were two untouched bottles of duty-free vodka in my luggage. I’d been saving them, complimenting myself on the restraint I’d shown by not downing them on my first two nights in Fontinella. Now I abandoned my restraint.

I stopped going to the speedway. It seemed redundant now. I knew that the big fateful crash couldn’t possibly come until Sunday. I’d be there for that all right, but until then I knew that Leez-za’s Beetle would be just fine, would continue to carve its neat parabolas through the thick air of Fontinella. I knew she would land safely, and Barry would survive, and it would all mean nothing. They were just marking time, going through the motions, spinning their wheels, waiting for the big final, fatal day.

♦

There was a brief, brisk rap on the trailer door, an unfamiliar knock, and when I opened up there was the actor playing Ronnie the dwarf. I realised with some shame that I still didn’t know his name.

“I’m outta here,” he said hoarsely.

I didn’t know what that meant. Had he been fired? Had he completed his scenes? Was he just walking off the picture?

“I’m walking off the picture,” he said.

It didn’t come as a huge surprise. It was more surprising that somebody or other hadn’t done it sooner.

It was far more surprising that he’d bothered coming to see me.

“Oh well, have a drink before you go,” I said, offering him a shot of the vodka.

“No,” he snarled. “I don’t want to drink with you. You’re the reason I’m outta here.”

I knew I had many failings but I didn’t think any of them was quite bad enough to make an actor walk off a movie, much less refuse a drink. Had my script-writing really been so terrible?

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.

“You can drop the pretence of being some civilised, urbane, literary Brit,” he said. “You might fool the others, but you don’t fool me. I finally saw what this movie of yours is all about.”

“I’d love to know,” I said wearily.

“Oh you know all right.”

“But tell me anyway.”

“These people in the Beetles, they’re Nazis, right?”

“Yes,” I said, “some of them, some of the time.”

I didn’t see how this could be a surprise to him. If he’d read any part of any version of the script this would surely have been obvious.

“So the trailer park is like a concentration camp, right?” he said.

That, on the other hand, stopped me in my tracks.

“Oh,” I said. “I never thought of it that way.”

“You can’t fool me. That’s how you always thought of it. And the velociraptors are the inmates of the camp. And we all know that the Jews weren’t the only people in the camps. There were gypsies and homosexuals, the disabled, the mentally ill — and dwarves !”

“Yes, I’m sure that’s true,” I said.

“You known damn well that’s true. So destroying the velociraptors is the final solution, right. That’s how you get your racial purity. And in the real world that plan failed. The Nazis lost. The Jews and the dwarves, some of them anyway, survived. But in your movie the Nazis win. The final solution works! How fucked up is that?”

“No,” I said, “no, really. That’s not what I wrote.”

“What we have here in this movie is a piece of pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic, Aryan supremacist fantasy. And you can count me out. I’m outta here.”