Geoff Nicholson - Gravity’s Volkswagen

Her blankness remained intact. I felt like an idiot.

“Right. That’s your place over there,” she said.

She pointed at a trailer pressed up against the fence that separated the trailer park from the speedway next door. The trailer was small but quite cool looking; maybe not as cool or as elegant as a genuine, blob-like, aluminium Airstream, but it was trying hard. Of course I’d heard that Hollywood stars are provided with trailers, some of them vast, luxurious things apparently, but I didn’t think they actually lived in them.

“Yours is one of the better ones,” Cadence said. “And you’ve got it to yourself. I’m sharing mine with five other people.”

Was that supposed to make me feel bad or good? It was nice that I was being treated well, but when the VIP treatment consisted of a trailer pressed up against a chain-link fence I had to wonder just how high the production values were.

“Yeah,” said Cadence, doing a fair job of mind reading. “All the money’s going to be up on the screen. I believe that’s what we’re supposed to say.”

The Pope’s Revisions

Idon’t suppose the Pope, any Pope, does a great deal of driving. Possibly some Popes have been motoring enthusiasts in their earlier life, but once they become Supreme Pontiff the opportunities for putting the pedal to the metal must surely be severely limited.

I think we can safely say that Pope John Paul II, ne Karol Wojtyla, was no great fan of German automobile technology. Not least of the indignities he had to endure under the Nazi occupation of his native Poland was being run down and seriously injured by a German truck in 1944 in the town of Wodawici. It’s thought the accident may well have had some bearing on his decision to become a priest. He was ordained in 1946, and became Pope thirty-two years later in 1978.

That was the same year that Volkswagen stopped producing the Beetle in its European factories, though production continued in Latin America — in Brazil and especially in Mexico — right through into the next millennium; just.

Pope John Paul II visited Mexico five times, in 1979,1990,1997, 1999 and 2002. The last three trips were made after he’d already been diagnosed as suffering from Parkinson’s disease, but that didn’t get in the way of an enormous mutual affection between John Paul and the Mexican People. He even developed a catch phrase ‘ Mexico — Siempre Fiel ’ (Mexico, Ever Faithful).

In 2004, a large delegation of autoworkers from the Mexican Volkswagen plant in Puebla decided to show their own affection, and specifically their gratitude for the Pope’s canonisation of Juan Diego in 2002. At a General Audience at the Vatican, this delegation presented the Pope with an ‘Aquarius blue’ Volkswagen Beetle. It was no ordinary Beetle. It was one of a limited edition, named the Ultima Edicion, the last three thousand genuine Beetles ever to be made anywhere in the world. It had actually been produced the previous year: Beetle production officially ended worldwide on 30 July 2003.

The Ultima Edicion had a higher spec than most Beetles: 1600cc engine, electronic fuel injection, halogen headlights, front disc brakes, factory-installed immobiliser. By some accounts (though not all) the car presented to the Pope was the very last Beetle ever made, which would make in number 21,529,464: other accounts place that particular car in the Volkswagen museum in Wolfsburg, which strikes me as far more likely. Either way, what better gift for an eighty-four-year-old man, by then suffering from a plethora of other illnesses in addition to Parkinson’s disease, than a car he could never possibly drive? He was good enough to bless it anyway.

Iwoke up early in unfamiliar, and as I now saw, rather grubby surroundings. A lot of people had evidently slept in that trailer before me, and many had left their traces in the form of cigarette burns, gouges on the walls and ceilings, and anonymous stains everywhere else. Still I wasn’t going to complain. If money was tight on the movie, who was I to expect special treatment?

I looked out through the trailer’s scratched plastic window and saw a lot of people milling around, the film crew no doubt. They were an unlikely mix of surly, stocky, older white men and bright, lean, hip, multi-ethnic younger people of both sexes. It was hard to imagine how they all got along together, but at that moment they were unified in scooping up the breakfast buffet that was laid out on some trestle tables. I decided to join them.

My focus and concentration wasn’t all it might have been, and it took me for ever to get washed and dressed. But at last, as I was ready and about to go outside and face this strange new world, there was a pounding on the trailer door, which then flew open despite being locked. And there stood Josh Martin, my director. He looked older, fatter, wearier, than in his online picture, but then I suppose we all do. He looked more suntanned too. I said hello: he didn’t.

“These people,” he snarled. “These fucking people.” And he made a grand gesture that seemed to take in the whole world, me included.

“Which people?” I asked.

He looked at me as though only a complete idiot wouldn’t know exactly what he was talking about, and at that moment, right on cue, I became aware of a terrible clanking and hammering. It was coming from near by, though not from inside the trailer park, rather from the speedway next door.

“Take a look at this shit,” he said, and we left the trailer so he could show me what was going on.

In the hot light of morning I could see just how close together the trailer park and the speedway were. Last night the stadium had looked deserted, but now there were many signs of intense though unfathomable activity, people running around carrying power tools and large pieces of plywood. Engines were being revved, sheet metal was being hammered, glass was being pulverised. It all seemed, in fact, very much the sort of noise and activity that might be expected to come from something that called itself a speedway. For that matter, I now saw there were a few Volkswagen Beetles on the other side of the fence, inside the speedway grounds. These weren’t customised or exotically painted like the ones connected with the movie, in fact most of them looked like non-runners, but it suggested to me that the speedway folk might be natural allies rather than the ‘fucking people’ Josh Martin said they were. Of course I knew nothing about it.

At that moment the air was split by the metal seething of a frighteningly powerful electric saw. I jumped several feet.

“That must be hard to live with,” I said.

“Oh you think?” Josh Martin said. “And what if you were trying to make a fucking movie? What if you were trying to record some fucking live fucking sound?”

“I can see your problem,” I said.

“You can’t see the half of it,” he said.

I didn’t doubt that he was right but I couldn’t see what I was supposed to do other than offer abject sympathy. For a moment he became slightly quieter and more thoughtful, more sorry for himself possibly.

“I was told it was abandoned,” he said. “The old abandoned Fontinella Speedway. That’s what everybody always calls it. But now there’s a fucking freak show going on in there.”

He had a point. Now that I’d had a better look, I could see that the people working on the other side of the fence were a wild bunch, all bare chests and shaved heads, tattoos and piercings and overcomplicated facial hair. And by no means all of them were men.

Mostly they were doing things with cars, but they certainly weren’t doing anything as straightforward as repairing them or making them run. Some people were erecting scaffolding towers, building a stage, constructing a couple of ramps. It was too early to make a judgement, but my immediate impression was that everybody on the speedway side of the fence was working much more purposefully and enthusiastically that anybody on the movie set.