Geoff Nicholson - Gravity’s Volkswagen

Our arrival was loud and hardly unnoticeable but nobody came out of the house to see what the hell was going on. We would have to make the first move. There would undoubtedly have been some satisfaction in seeing all the Beetle freaks marauding through Josh Martin’s house, casually destroying things as they passed, and there was every possibility that it might come to that, but initially the majority of the horde stayed outside, forming a guard of honour, while Motorhead Phil, Angelo, Leezza and I made our less grand entrance.

The front gate was unlocked and as we went inside we could hear voices coming from around the side of the house. We followed the sound and stepped on to a green, shady, screened patio. There was a gaudily tiled fountain burbling at its centre, and next to it a stone table at which Josh Martin sat, alongside a man and a woman, each wearing a severe black suit, and together the three of them were perusing a pile of legal documents, and Josh Martin was signing his way through them.

He looked rather better than when I’d last seen him. He had his clothes on for one thing, and he’d managed to wash off most of the engine oil, at least from the areas that showed. I couldn’t have sworn that he was stone-cold sober but he appeared more composed and in control of himself than he had been in a long time.

He looked up at us without surprise, and said insultingly, “Ah, the help has arrived.”

“Any trouble from you,” said Motorhead Phil, “and we’ll turn your house into an architectural junk yard.”

Josh Martin looked casually at the document currently in front of him and signed it with a quiet flourish.

“Not now you won’t,” he said. “It’s not my house. Not any more.”

There was a set of keys on the stone table, and Josh Martin now pushed them across to the black suited woman, who took them sadly, earnestly and handed over a legal document in return.

Josh Martin said, “These good people from the mortgage company are now the owners of this property. They’ve very kindly offered to let me lease back the place at a very reasonable rate, but since I don’t have any money whatsoever I can’t do that, which leaves me homeless. I guess there’s a trailer park in Fonti-nella where I could stay for a while, but you know what, pretty soon the owners of that place are going to find out that I’m broke too. They haven’t been paid, and they’re not going to be paid, and then it’ll be truly over and all I’ll be left with is part of a movie that I can’t afford to shoot or finish or edit or anything else. Welcome to Hollywood, guys.”

This was not what we’d come to hear, and Motor-head Phil and Leezza weren’t even interested, but as far as Angelo and I were concerned it was quite the revelation, far more than the discovery that Josh Martin was Mexican.

All too guilelessly I asked, “But what about the movie’s backers?”

“There are no fucking backers, Ian. There were potential backers once, for a while, but in the end they didn’t back me. They backed out. They were wise, much wiser than me. They saw it wasn’t going to work. But I thought hell, fuck it, live the dream, remortgage your house, make the damned movie, will it into being and then everything else will fall into place and everything’ll turn out just fine. Big mistake.”

Angelo and I were left quite speechless. My stomach descended to knee level. I felt giddy with confusion and disappointment, though not quite disbelief. But Motorhead Phil still had plenty to say.

“Where’s the car you stole, Josh?” he yelled. “Where’s the fucking Beetle?”

“The car, yes,” Josh Martin said. “El vocho volante,” and he laughed, and the laugh was too theatrical for my tastes, or do I mean too filmic, trying to be a little sinister, a little insane, a little superior. Trying too hard. It was certainly a laugh you couldn’t trust. It was a laugh that could very easily get you beaten up.

“I’d had a couple of drinks last night,” Josh Martin said.

“That much we know,” said Leezza.

“Mistakes were made.”

“You crashed the car, didn’t you?” said Motorhead Phil with disgust.

“Not crashed it, not really, no.”

“You’d better tell me what the fuck you’re talking about,” said Motorhead Phil.

“I will, Phil, I will. You see there’s an old Mexican saying that those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. And that’s supposed to apply to all kinds of history: personal history, movie history, whatever. But I don’t believe it. I think the opposite is true. I think all too often those who know their history want to repeat it.”

“This better start making sense soon,” Motorhead Phil said.

“It does. It will. It makes perfect sense, Phil. You see, everybody who’s ever seen Bullitt wants to race a Ford Mustang through the streets of San Francisco. Everybody who’s ever seen Pulp Fiction wants accidentally to blow somebody’s head off in the back of a car.”

I thought he might have a point there.

“Now I’m not gay, Phil, and I know this sounds a little weird, but the truth is I really like a good Doris Day movie. My favourite? The Thrill of It All . 1963, Universal, directed by Norman Jewison; Carl Reiner wrote the screenplay. You know why I like it? Because James Garner drives his car into a swimming pool, and you see…”

He was going to tell us more, but there really wasn’t any need, and he was interrupted as Motor-head Phil got a thrill of his own by decking Josh Martin with a simple, single, strongman’s knock-out blow to the side of his head. I had a feeling it was what Josh Martin wanted.

We ran round to the back of the house where the pool was. It wasn’t nearly as big or as fancy or as blue as the pools you see in movies, though it was in every sense a Hollywood swimming pool. And there at the bottom of it, proving that the legend about floating Volkswagen Beetles was, at least sometimes, untrue, was Leezza’s submerged, waterlogged, earth-bound Beetle.

♦

The guys who knew about these things, Motorhead Phil’s technical crew, said the situation was retrievable. The car wasn’t heavy: a small crane could be hired to fish it out of the pool. With a bit of careful manoeuvring it could be put on the flatbed truck next to Barry’s Beetle. Then it could be taken back to Fontinella, stripped down, dried off, reassembled and it would be as good as ever by next Sunday, and then Leezza could do her jumps exactly as planned. Most of this proved to be true, but not all. There was one small hitch.

The crane was brought, the Beetle was hooked up, and they were soon putting the sodden, dripping, streaming thing on to the truck. Leezza, very concerned, a little tearful and very hands-on, was squatting on the flatbed, peering closely at the underside of her car, trying to see what damage had been done when the car went into the pool. Quite a lot it seemed to me. One of the tyres had burst, the trans-axle was askew and all the basic geometry of the chassis looked out of whack. Leezza was very close indeed to the car, too close, as we now know. While she was inspecting the damage, the crane driver, unaware of where she was and what she was doing, dropped the Beetle the last twelve inches or so on to the truck, and the front right wheel, the one with the burst tyre, landed directly on top of her right foot. If the tyres had still been inflated it surely wouldn’t have been too bad, and obviously it could have been a lot worse, but as it was, the solid metal of the wheel hub and the flattened rubber smashed down against Leezza’s instep, shattering three of her metatarsals. It would be a good long time before she was able to walk or drive again.