She was slow to look up from whatever was on the screen of the laptop.
“Do you know anything about trajectory physics?” she asked.
“Sorry, no,” I said.
She looked me over and satisfied herself that I was indeed a man who wouldn’t know anything about trajectory physics. She held out her hand and took the bag of money.
“What happened to Cadence?”
“Nothing. They just decided to put me to work. I’m Ian.”
She didn’t seem any more interested in knowing who I was than Barry had been. And a part of me felt like protesting, insisting on my status, pointing out that I wasn’t just some drone or lackey or gofer, that I was actually the author. But again I reckoned that might come over as showing off or, more likely, pathetic, like I was trying too hard to impress, and to be honest I had my doubts about whether literary authorship would actually be impressive to a woman who was concerning herself with trajectory physics.
“Well, thanks, I guess,” she said.
“It’s OK,” I said in return.
“I’m not really sure it is,” she said. “It seems, I dunno, kind of grasping. Still, needs must.”
“It’s all right, it’s not my money,” I said.
That wasn’t quite enough to put her mind at rest.
“Think of it as sponsorship of the arts,” she said.
“OK,” I said, though I couldn’t see that it made any difference how I thought of it. Her eyes turned back to her computer screen.
“So that’s it?” I said.
“Pretty much.”
I had a certain curiosity about the mechanism by which handing money over here produced silence over there, but it was the least of things I didn’t understand about film-making, and I didn’t want to pry. I didn’t want to over-complicate matters: I didn’t want to fuck up. And apparently I didn’t. Silence was duly produced. I’d had a small success, and one that was appreciated. They had me going over there with money several more times that day. I can’t say that, in any sense, I got to know Leezza in the course of these visits, but we did establish a comfortable and friendly working relationship; the kind that giving money to people often results in.
On the third or fourth visit Leezza said to me, “That was a nice thing you did yesterday. Pushing Ishmael to the diner.”
“Ishmael?”
“Yeah, that’s Barry’s name, but he doesn’t always like people to call him that. Anyway, it was decent of you.”
“I didn’t think I could say no.”
“Some would have.”
“If I’d had a car I’d have given him a jump start.”
“Wouldn’t have done any good. That car of his needs more than that. Every guy in this place has tried to get that damn Beetle running and if anybody could, it’d be one of these guys, believe me.”
“I see,” I said.
“And you know, they’ve offered to saw the top off the car so he could climb out, but he won’t have it. Says the car’s got sentimental value, says it’s a part of him. So that’s why somebody has to help him get to the diner. Once in a while some of the guys will be going down there anyway and one of ‘em’ll throw a rope round the front bumper and haul him down, but that gets weary pretty fast. Lot of the guys won’t do it any more. They say he got himself into it, he should get himself out of it.”
“I suppose,” I said, “if they just left him where he was he wouldn’t be able to eat and then he’d lose weight and he’d slim down and then he would be able to get out of the Beetle.”
“That’d be plain cruel,” she said. “You’re not a cruel man, are you?”
“No,” I said, “I’m not.”
“You should come over tonight,” she said.
“Should I?” I asked. It wasn’t an invitation that I expected or even understood.
“It’s opening night. Our first night.”
I looked at her blankly.
“We’re a famous automotive freak show,” she said. “Tonight’s the opening night of our new production. There might be a few glitches, but that’ll make it even more interesting. Starts at eight. I’ll put you on the comp list.”
“Really? Thanks.”
“Sure. Just so long as you give Barry another push to and from the diner.”
Eleven
Linda Lovelace’s Veedub Ordeal
When tangle-haired, slack-throated porn star Linda Lovelace meets Chuck Traynor in Florida in 1970 he’s driving a Jaguar XKE and she’s impressed by that, but the car is only a temporary fixture. Chuck’s career as bar owner, drug dealer and pimp is a volatile one, and the day duly arrives when the Jaguar is gone and he turns up to see Linda in an old Volkswagen Beetle. She’s less impressed, but she stands by her man and the car becomes far more of a fixture in their otherwise increasingly rickety lives.
Chuck is a restless man. Often he says to Linda, “Let’s go for a ride,” and she says fine, and in she gets and off they go, and she never knows where they’ll end up, but that’s OK, she likes that. She likes adventure.
One day they’re driving all the way from Miami, Florida, to Aspen, Colorado, a tough enough journey at the best of times in any car, but much tougher in an old Volkswagen Beetle without air conditioning. Then Chuck decides he’ll make it tougher still and plans a detour to Juarez in Mexico. This surprises Linda a little. Why would they want to go there?
Chuck explains. He’s got a plan. Once they get there, he says, he’s going to make Linda have sex with a donkey: in public, on stage, for money. On previous evidence he’s almost certainly serious about this. The prospect excites him. Having power over Linda excites him even more, and given her endless capacity for compliance she’s unlikely to refuse to co-star in this donkey show.
As he drives, Chuck talks about it endlessly. He’s obsessed. He’s aroused. He starts using the word ‘haemorrhage’ far too often for Linda’s liking, and she starts to wonder if there might be a way out. She prays, asking God to intervene and prevent them ever getting to Juarez.
The next thing she knows they’re on the road outside of Little Rock, Arkansas, and Chuck’s Beetle is suddenly rammed from behind by a drunk in a station wagon. Chuck loses control of the car. The Beetle takes off, swerves to the right, to the left, across the road and into a ditch. It’s a bad crash, but not a fatal one. And as truck drivers descend on the scene and drag Chuck and Linda out of the wreckage she hears one of the truckers say, “Well, that Volkswagen Beetle has had it.”
Linda is relieved and delighted. Something seems to have been confirmed. She tells herself there may well be a God, or at least some higher power that protects overly compliant porn stars, and intervenes just in time to stop them being fucked on stage by donkeys in Mexico. The universe, she concludes, is not entirely malevolent; just the men she meets.
Twelve
I gave Barry and his Beetle another push to the diner. I was doing it to please a woman: how foolish was that? But this time I definitely did want something for my efforts. After we’d got to the diner, after the food had been ordered and eaten, and when Barry was ready to be pushed back to the speedway, I told him I wanted to hear his story, otherwise he and his Beetle would be staying right where they were for the foreseeable future. I hoped this didn’t make me too cruel a man.
Barry gave me a suffering look, and yet something suggested to me that he was more than willing to tell all, an intuition that proved to be entirely correct. There were times as I listened when I wondered if the story would ever come to an end, and of course it troubled me that Barry told his story in the third person.