Barry hung his head to let me know he’d finally finished.
“Wow,” I said. “That’s quite a story.”
“I’ve been rehearsing it.”
“It sounded like it.”
“I’ve had a lot of time on my hands.”
“I can see that.”
“I try to be media savvy.”
“Yes, I can see that too.”
“So did I give value for money?”
“Yes, yes, you did.”.
“You got what you wanted? A story?”
“Yes.”
“Time to push me back to the speedway then.”
“You drive a hard bargain, Barry,” I said, and he didn’t disagree.
Thirteen
That night I felt slightly guilty about sneaking away from the trailer park and the movie set in order to go to the automotive freak show at the speedway, but only slightly. Even if my toing and froing with small quantities of money had redeemed me somewhat, I still didn’t feel that I’d exactly been ‘embraced by the film-making community’. It was good to have somewhere else to go.
I was impressed and surprised to find that my name really was on the guest list, and a man in the box office — nose-ring, Mohawk, tribal scarifications — welcomed me like I was his long-lost pal. I hurried through the eerily empty parking lot to an equally eerily empty stadium.
The word speedway probably has a different meaning in England than it does in America, but I’d definitely pictured something grander than the reality I now saw. There was a simple continuous oval of tarmac, a racing circuit, but stretches of it were in such terrible shape that nobody in their right mind would have wanted to drive a car around it, certainly not at any speed. Fortunately it didn’t look as though anybody was about to do that. Rather it appeared that most of the action was going to take place on a short, straight section of serviceable track directly in front of a block of raked wooden seating, where a makeshift stage had been built. Behind the stage, in the grassy centre of the circuit, a dozen or so of the decrepit Beetles I’d seen behind the speedway fence were now arranged side by side in a straight row, with a ramp at either end.
Things were slow to get going. I think they were waiting for the audience to build, but it never really did. There weren’t more than thirty spectators all told, but they (we) were an enthusiastic bunch. There was music provided by someone calling himself DJ Ballard, who had two turntables and a vicious drum machine. He started making noise and a couple of guys on skateboards appeared, and did a few tricks that involved jumping over stationary, then moving, cars. It looked difficult and potentially dangerous but it wasn’t all that exciting and there was nothing about it that was consistent with my, admittedly hazy, idea of what an automotive freak show might be.
Things got a bit more freakish when a strong man appeared. He was short, wide, glistening, stripped to a thick waist: a body builder’s physique run somewhat to seed. This, if the Gothic letters tattooed on his chest were to be believed, was Motorhead Phil himself. Given Josh Martin’s opinion of him, I’d been expecting someone totally monstrous, but this man, at least when seen from a distance, looked benign enough. He certainly did a lot of smiling and waving to the crowd. However, he soon demonstrated his really quite frightening strength.
He began by throwing some car batteries around one-handed as if they were bathroom sponges. Then he grabbed the front end of one of the lined-up Beetles and raised it to head height and held it there effortlessly for a good long time before carelessly lowering it again. It occurred to me that he’d have been the ideal man to have on your side if you were, say, trying to push a Volkswagen Beetle to and from a nearby diner.
Then Motorhead Phil squatted down, grabbed a car engine that happened to be lying around near by, complete with fan shroud and exhaust, and raised it some way above his head before tossing it through the air on to the roof of one of the Beetles in the row, which crumpled like tinfoil.
Finally Motorhead Phil took up a central position on the stage and posed like a superhero as half a dozen members of the crew came up and danced around him brandishing car bumpers as though they were samurai swords. The dancing was pretty awful, but it was soon over. Then the dancers started bashing Motorhead Phil with the bumpers, on the back, across the torso and eventually over the head, and while the bumpers got all bent out of shape, Motorhead Phil remained steadfast and impassive, his face bearing the easy expression of a man who was perhaps being gently flayed with feather boas. You had to be impressed.
Then there was a comedy juggler, as thin, gaunt and wiry as a stick insect, who did a plate-spinning act with hubs caps, then appeared to swallow a couple of spark plugs, though there must surely have been some sleight of hand involved there, and then he inserted a dipstick into his throat, the sort of thing a sword-swallower might do, which was for real, as far as I could tell.
And there was sex of a sort. A heavy, sensual, bronze-skinned woman in a slither of a bikini lowered herself into a Beetle via its open sunroof. Shortly thereafter half a dozen crew members crowded round the car, each carrying a big blue bucket. They reached into the buckets, and pulled out many, many handfuls of snakes, of varying lengths and thicknesses, and threw them in through the sunroof on top of the woman.
I noticed that one of the crew members was the former Celluloid Security guard, the one Josh Martin had fired the previous day. I was glad he’d found a job. Life’s like that, I suppose. The door of security slams in your face; the door of snake wrangling immediately opens.
The snakes did what snakes do, they writhed and wove themselves around the woman’s body, and she did her best to make dance moves while sitting in place, shifting rhythmically from buttock to buttock in the car seat. I could definitely say I’d never seen anything like it before, but that didn’t mean I particularly wanted to see anything like it again.
Later another woman, thinner, less bronzed, and actually less sensual, appeared bound in a straight-jacket. She got into another of the Beetles and assistants fastened the seat belt around her. Doors and windows were shut tight and then, exploiting the Beetle’s fame for being waterproof, giant hoses were shoved in, again through the sunroof, and the car began to fill rapidly with water.
There was a lot of thrashing and churning as the Beetle filled all the way to its roof and beyond. The water turned into a bubbling, opaque mass, and you couldn’t see what was going on in there, but it went on long enough to make you worry about the fate of the woman inside. And then just when you thought something must have gone horribly wrong, she emerged through the sunroof, free of the straight-jacket and the seat belt, and also free of the rest of her clothes. This was quite the crowd pleaser.
And then, across a not remotely crowded speedway, I saw Leezza, or at least I thought I did, and then I thought no, it couldn’t possibly be her, and then I thought yes, it definitely was. There was good reason for my confusion. Earlier that day I’d thought she was out of place among the freak-show crowd, and the parts of the show I’d seen so far only confirmed that; but when I saw her walking across the tarmac there was something about her that seemed very different and very freakish indeed. She was wearing a flame-retardant suit, the kind that racecar drivers wear, but this one had been painted with lurid red and orange flames.
That was a nice little touch, I thought, but there was something about the body wearing the suit that seemed lurid too. Leezza was a slight woman and she had small breasts: I’m a man and a writer; we male writers notice stuff like that. But now she had huge breasts, or at least huge falsies, or the flame-retardant suit did. It bulged out as though it had been conceived by a porn star’s plastic surgeon. Well, I thought, porn stars and plastic surgeons know a thing or two about what the public wants; and no doubt a freak show needs all the falsity and exaggeration it can find.