Russell Hoban: The Bat Tattoo

There was still work to be done in the basement but I was getting closer until finally, too late for my mother to see my success, I achieved Mnemoplast. I had a plastic that could be pushed, pulled, squeezed and crumpled but would return to the shape it had been cast in. As I worked in the basement I’d been trying to come up with a commercial application. I wondered what Dad would have done with it; I saw him dead and strapped into a car that crashed into a wall and then the idea came to me.

I patented Mnemoplast, then it took me a little over a year to get my design worked out and production set up but eventually I had my commercial application: Crash Test. It was produced and marketed by Merlin, Inc. for sixty-four-ninety-nine in the US and thirty-nine pounds ninety-nine pence here. It came in a glossy colourfully printed box and when you took it out of the box it felt good in the hand, not cheap. The battery-powered car was nicely detailed but of no recognisable make. When it hit whatever it was aimed at it crumpled and bits of it flew off as well as bits of the driver but it uncrumpled quickly and the loose bits of car and driver were easy to fit back on.

Crash Test appeared in US shops in October 1987, and though sixty-four-ninety-nine was a hefty price it quickly became the Christmas present that parents who couldn’t afford it bought for their kids. The same thing happened when it came out here in November. The distributors had calculated correctly that a strong start in the US would cause a buying frenzy here at the later date. When stocks ran out in less than a month on both sides of the Atlantic there were auctions in which Crash Test changed hands at outrageous prices.

It isn’t always easy to say why people do the things they do. I sold the house, moved to London, and bought a house in Fulham. I feel like a stranger here too but I am a stranger so it’s all right. I married a woman I met here and maybe I’ll say more about that later.

When I went to the V & A to look for the chair-cover bats I was a widower. By then I’d been living in London for eight years. Crash Test had been superseded by computer games and was barely ticking over in the US and UK although it was a little more lively on the Continent. I hadn’t come up with any other commercial ideas or ideas of any other kind; I’d been drawing and painting a little: early on I’d found a life class and I made some OK sketches; I went water-colouring along the Thames; I did some oils also, a few nothing-special street scenes.

There came a time, however, when I had to put artistic development aside and give some serious thought to bringing in money. I’d reached a point where I really had to make something happen before too long when, early in 1999, Merlin forwarded a letter to me from Paris:

Dear Creator of Crash Test,

In the window of a shop I have seen Crash Test and immediately it draws me to itself. I see it demonstrated, see the dummy at the wheel knowing nothing, expecting nothing. The car starts up, not controlled by the dummy but by a hand above him, all-powerful. At speed it hurtles forward into a wall, CRASH! The car is smashed, the doors fly off, the windows also, the dummy’s head, his arms, his legs! Alas! he is destroyed. But no, the all-powerful hand reassembles him, makes the car again like new, and once again Mr Dummy, who from experience has learned nothing, hurtles to his dismemberment.

I purchase the toy, I take it home where it comes out of its box as we come all new into the world. Now I am the all-powerful hand of Mr Dummy’s destiny. CRASH! we go, and CRASH! again. ‘Bravo!’ I cry with vigour and enthusiasm. I applaud, I approve with delight your most profoundly metaphorical demonstration of the human condition. What are we all but dummies doomed to crash head-on into the death that speeds towards us? And for what are we being tested? Who can offer to this mystery an answer that will bear examination? No one! Yes, you have hit the eye of the bull with this so deep perception of la comédie humaine .

Please be so kind as to respond to this letter. I wish to commission privately works from you and I make to you the assurance that you will be well recompensed for the exercise of your most interesting talent.

With admiration and intense good wishes,

Adelbert Delarue

M. Delarue’s address was in the Avenue Montaigne which made me think that he probably wasn’t short of a franc or two. Eager to develop this promising connection, I wrote back and said that I’d be interested to hear what he had in mind. Within a week I had his reply with a cheque drawn on Coutts for five thousand pounds. His letter explained that this was a down payment for the work and that five thousand more would be coming my way on delivery.

He went on to describe what he wanted: a crash-dummy couple, ‘man and woman anatomically complete, with functional parts and receptive orifices’, engaged in sexual intercourse. The figures were to be thirty centimetres tall. They were not to be one composite unit but two independent dummies capable of assuming all positions possible for humans. They were to be ‘electrically activated’ and there was to be sound — he didn’t specify what kind.

My first impulse was just to return M. Delarue’s cheque but then I began to have second thoughts. In Crash Test I was showing a dummy being dismembered; how was that better than showing two dummies having a bit of fun? I could find no moral high ground so the question was simply how much the traffic would bear. I sent back the cheque and wrote that I couldn’t do what he wanted for less than twenty thousand pounds, half of it payable up front. By return of post I got a cheque for ten thousand pounds and the go-ahead. Twenty thousand pounds for a bonking toy! Obviously he was some kind of a nutter but the cheque was good. I’d half expected him to back off when I upped the price but now if I kept the money this thing was going to be for real. I decided to keep the money, and from that moment on I had a patron. I was to let M. Delarue know when the figures were ready and he would send a courier to take delivery and pay me the other ten thousand pounds.

The dummy in my Crash-Test set was a coarse and primitive thing compared to what Adelbert Delarue wanted. Thirty centimetres seems a lot of room until you think of batteries and a motor of some kind, and these would have to be articulated bodies that might be doing the whole Kama Sutra for all I knew. And of course they’d be radio-controlled and I didn’t want them to look like model cars with antennas sticking up out of them.

Then there was the matter of the ‘functional parts’. My first thought was that the male member might as well be in a state of permanent arousal but then I imagined the figure in solitary repose on a desk or table flaunting its priapism so I decided to accept the challenge: zoom lenses got longer or shorter at the touch of a button and the booms of model cranes went up and down so presumably the thing could be managed somehow. As for the ‘receptive orifices’, they’d need a soft lining to prevent the dummies from sounding like an abacus. The audio tape could be in the base, worked by the remote radio control.

What was I going to make my figures out of? The Crash-Test dummies had been plastic mass-produced from my clay model, pretty much like Action Man although better articulated. But for twenty thousand quid M. Delarue was entitled to something a little more upmarket so I decided on wood; it was going to take a lot of time but I wanted my porno-dummies to be work I could be proud of. More or less. I could already imagine carving them and sanding them smooth. Before going to wood, however, I thought it best to do some trial-and-error on a clay model. At Green & Stone in Chelsea where I sometimes bought art supplies I was told that I’d find everything I needed at Tiranti’s in Warren Street.