Geoff Nicholson - Gravity’s Volkswagen

And he was. If he’d stayed I might have taken the trouble to explain that my book was a warning against Nazism, that I was on the side of the underdog, that my heart was in completely the right place, that the Nazis were in the camp just as much as the velociraptors were, that the trailer park didn’t actually resemble a concentration camp, that the trailer park setting wasn’t even my idea. But maybe I wouldn’t have bothered trying to explain any of this to him. Maybe I just couldn’t have cared less any more.

♦

The night was by no means over. It was late and it was very dark but I wasn’t feeling nearly as drunk as I should have been, given the amount of vodka I’d consumed. I sat on the front step of my trailer and looked out into the darkness. I could see a campfire over in a far corner of the trailer park, with a few people gathered round it. I couldn’t tell who they were or what they were doing, but I could hear fake, whooping laughter, and every now and again the flames from the fire soared upwards, out of control, as if somebody had thrown a splash of petrol on to it. I heard a dog barking ecstatically, and there was a woman’s voice, or possibly a boy’s, yelping in pain or pleasure, or both.

Then, in the darkness I heard a scuffling, and then I could see something moving slyly towards me. It was a stooped figure, a man moving unsteadily, almost naked, his body smeared with what looked like engine oil, and with various tools strapped around him like weapons: a spanner, some wire-cutters, a ratchet screwdriver. It was Josh Martin. He was far drunker than I was, and he looked infinitely crazier.

“How’s it going, Ian?” he asked, the wildness of his voice quite out of sync with the ordinariness of the question.

“Not so good,” I replied.

“Tell me about it,” he said. “I mean, don’t. Don’t tell me. I don’t need to know. I’m about ready to call it a day.”

“The movie?”

“Yeah, the fucking movie. My fucking pet project. I just hate it. I hate Volkswagen Beetles. I always will. I always have.”

“I don’t think you really mean that.”

“I wouldn’t lie to you, Ian.”

He swayed towards me and I handed him the vodka bottle which he swept up in a proprietorial way.

“But you signed up for the movie,” I said. “You agreed to direct it. You wrote the original script, for Pete’s sake. Didn’t it occur to you that Volkswagens might be involved?”

“Don’t get sarky with me, Ian. Of course it occurred to me. Of course it fucking did. But I was trying to exorcise my demons, OK?”

“You have demons?”

“Yes.”

That answer didn’t surprise me, although how these demons connected with the movie was anybody’s guess.

“Volkswagen demons,” he said.

“You have Volkswagen demons?”

“Yes. There. I said it. Happy now?”

“I’m not any more or less happy, Josh,” I said. “I just wish I knew what you were talking about.”

He looked at me hard, with a stare that oscillated between condescending pity and absolute contempt.

“Sometimes I forget just what a foreigner you are,” he said; then, as if being a foreigner was suddenly a thing in my favour, he slapped his bare chest and added, “This isn’t a suntan, you know? OK? I’m a Mexican.”

He said it as if this were the big ‘reveal’, the grand, dramatic discovery that would have me speechless with shock and wonder. It didn’t.

I said, “So?”

His being a Mexican meant nothing to me. It was a neutral fact. It didn’t ring any cultural bells for me. The only Mexicans I knew were screen Mexicans: Salma Hayek, Eli Wallach in The Magnificent Seven , Charlton Heston in ‘ Youch of Evil , Luis Guzman in The Limey , Danny Trejo in just about anything. OK, so not all of these, I was fairly sure, were actual Mexicans, though I’d have been hard pressed to say which were and which weren’t, with the exception of Charlton Heston.

“You like stories, Ian,” Josh Martin said. “I got a story for you. It’s mine. It’s not a bad story. Maybe there’s a movie in it. It starts with my parents sneaking over the border with me in their arms. I was two years old. We were as illegal as it gets. The Latin peril. We spoke maybe twenty words of English between us. I was called Juan Martinez.

“My mom got a job as a maid; my dad worked in a garage. He knew about cars. And like any Mexican mechanic he knew all about Volkswagen Beetles. Where he came from it was all Volkswagen Beetles all the time. The taxicabs were Beetles, the police cars were Beetles. Even some of the gangs drove Beetles. Though my dad called ‘em Vochos in his lingo.

“And in LA there was always work for a VW mechanic, especially if he was illegal and would work for poverty wages. My dad was a pretty good mechanic, I think. But how would I know? I mean he wasn’t some automotive genius, he wasn’t in love with Volkswagens, but he cared about doing a good job. He tried not to rip anybody off even when he was being ripped off himself.

“And he learned to speak some English, enough for his work, so he could talk about compression ratios and heat exchangers and distributor caps, though he’d have had a hard time holding a conversation about anything else. Every day he came home late from work, smelling of gasoline, and his hands were black with oil, and there were always VW parts lying around the apartment — hub-caps, carburettors, headlamp lenses. Guess what? I learned to hate that shit.”

The campfire on the far side of the trailer park flared up again and a man’s voice howled like a cartoon wolf before breaking into laughter.

Josh Martin ignored it and continued, “And are you surprised if I tell you I had a lousy relationship with my dad? I was smart, and I went to school, and I learned to speak English pretty good, and I wasn’t too dark, and although I never pretended to be anything I wasn’t, a lot of people could look at me and mistake me for a gabacho .”

“A what?”

“One of you. A white boy. An Anglo. And my dad kind of spoiled the effect, you know? It was a problem. So I didn’t like my dad. I didn’t like him because of what he was. And I didn’t like myself any better than I liked him. And I pretty much didn’t like the world, didn’t like anything, so Volkswagen Beetles were definitely on the list of what I didn’t like. But you know, you grow up, you get on with it. And so I left it all behind. I moved on, I got ahead. I stopped being called Juan Martinez. I got a couple scholarships. I made a career in the movies: the immigrant dream. Right?”

“I really don’t know,” I said.

Teah, I think you do, Ian. And you know, you get older, and I’m not saying you get any wiser, but if you’re lucky you get a bit less angry. You decide there are some fights you want to avoid. You decide your life might be better if you could get along with your old man. So I decided I’d try and get reconciled with my dad. Like in the movies. Old story, right?

“But it never happened. He died before we could ever really patch things up. And I can’t say that Volkswagens killed him. I can’t say that working fifteen-hour days, hundred-hour weeks, for poverty wages, in a metal shed in Echo Park, and having no health insurance was what killed him, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t help.

“So we flash forward. And I signed on to make this movie. Didn’t just sign on. I developed this movie. I produced this fucking movie. Because I thought I had something to answer for. I thought it might be my tribute to my dad, a way of accepting my past. And you’re right, Ian, about the Beetle, the Bug, the Vocho, the Pulguita: it can symbolise any damn thing you want it to symbolise. And for me, I thought OK, it might symbolise father and son, filial love, trans-generational respect, accepting who you are and where you come from.