I sprinted through the gate and made it into the world outside the trailer park. It was an escape of a sort, but it was a very bleak world out there. Josh Martin shouted after me, “You can run but you can’t hide,” although actually I intended to do both.
Now he came running too. We were both driven by desperate urges: mine to survive, his to hurt. It might have been interesting to find out which urge was stronger, but I much preferred not to. And then I heard the sound of a car engine. It wasn’t familiar exactly, but it was certainly unmistakable. It was the stunt Beetle from the freak show, the one I’d seen Leezza do her flying jump in the previous night, and it was now barrelling along the empty road, coming towards me, Leezza at the wheel as before, though no longer in the flame-coloured wig or the big-breasted, flame-retardant suit or the wraparound, diamante sunglasses.
My guess was that the vehicle was built for straight-line speed rather than manoeuvrability, but even so I leapt out in front of it, and Leezza had the presence of mind and the skill to swerve and slow down, just enough for me to jump in.
If Leezza was surprised by events, she didn’t show it. Maybe this was the sort of conflict and mayhem you got accustomed to if you were part of an automotive freak show. Or maybe she had a very placid personality. Either way she didn’t add to the drama. She put her foot down and we accelerated away, leaving behind in our wake the apparently unstoppable force that was Josh Martin. There was only one seat in the Beetle so I crouched on the bare metal of the floorpan and held on to whatever bits of welded tubing and bodywork I could find. It was a wild ride, a tough ride, a loud ride, but it wasn’t a bad ride.
“Is this thing street-legal?” I shouted above the engine roar.
“Well, it’s in the street, isn’t it?” said Leezza.
Fifteen
The Beetle’s Burden
These days everybody seems to know Chris Burden as a big-deal, big-time, serious artist with an international reputation. And he is. But for a long time, as far as I knew, he was just some obscure performance artist who once had himself crucified to the back of a Volkswagen Beetle. The ‘piece’ was called Trans-fixed.
It was created, or at least took place, on 23 April 1974 in a garage on Speedway Avenue in Venice, California. Burden stood on the Beetle’s rear bumper and had nails driven through the palms of his hands into the roof of the car.
The Beetle was then pushed halfway into the road and the engine was revved hard for two minutes, so that it ‘screamed in pain’ at Burden’s suffering. Then they turned the engine off and pushed the car back into the garage and decrucified the artist. It was all about the relationship between technology and the body, apparently, though I suspect there may also have been some Vietnam War subtext.
It’s one of those pieces that for entirely obvious reasons is far more talked about than seen, and for all the ‘documentation’ that accompanies the work, art history, unsurprisingly, is a bit vague about the specifications of the Beetle used.
From looking at colour photographs of the event we can definitely see the car was pale blue, a standard Volkswagen colour. Its rear bumpers have overriders, which means it couldn’t be earlier than a 1957 model, and the tail-lights tell us that it’s definitely pre-1961, which was when the design changed. In other words, Burden was nailed to a car that was at least fourteen years old, possibly a little older. I suppose that’s understandable. Nobody’s going to hammer nails into their shiny new car. I’ve not been able to find any information about what subsequently happened to Burden’s Beetle.
Actually, it’s always struck me that a Beetle is less than the ideal vehicle for a crucifixion. It’s too narrow and too curved. You’d be much better off using something like an E type Jag with its long flat bonnet, or even the side of a Volkswagen camper.
And I’ve always thought it would have been so much more resonant if Burden had been driven around the LA freeways for a few hours, bleeding, in pain, wondering whether he’d been forsaken, getting the backs of his legs burned on the engine lid, and possibly being speared by a Roman soldier and given vinegar to drink. Still, what do I know? And I suppose that’s how it always is with performance art; everybody’s a critic.
Sixteen
I had seen next to nothing of Fontinella, but now, still in my precarious position on the floor of Leezza’s stunt Beetle, I got the grand tour. It was a flying visit and a mystery trip, and it was taken at a terrifying speed that made it hard for me to concentrate. I saw railway tracks, marshalling yards, every kind of business relating to trucks and cars. There may have been an old main street that was a piece of classic Americana, but I didn’t see it. Instead I saw some second-division fast-food restaurants, Mexican supermarkets, a surprising number of Thai massage parlours, and quite a few trailer parks that looked far less appealing than Idle Palms. I saw all these things briefly and in a bit of a blur, but I saw them.
Eventually Leezza slowed down and then stopped. We were on the outskirts of the town, in a thrillingly bleak and anonymous bit of territory, a patch of land between an unfenced railway siding, a holding pen for trucks that were being repaired and a disused cement works. Why, I wondered, didn’t Josh Martin film here? If you were looking for a post-Apocalyptic landscape this would do just fine. I told myself it was better not to think about why Josh Martin did or didn’t do things.
“You’re full of surprises, aren’t you?” Leezza said.
“Yes,” I agreed. “Sometimes I even surprise myself.”
“Was that guy really trying to kill you back there?”
“Maybe,” I said. “He’s the movie director so I suppose he can do what he likes.”
“Does this mean you’re out of a job?”
“I never really had a job,” I said.
“What? You’re like a freelance.”
“You could call it that. I just happened to write the book that he happens to be trying to turn into a movie.”
“You wrote a book?”
She sounded amazed rather than impressed.
“More than one, if you must know,” I said.
“Wow, I didn’t know people still wrote books.”
“They certainly do,” I said. “It’s just that very few people read them any more.”
“And sometimes they get turned into movies.”
“Rarely, but yes,” I agreed.
“So you’re creative. You’re like an artist?”
“On a good day, yes.”
“You know about art and stuff?”
“Just enough to get by.”
“That’s good. Your opinion means something. Right. So what did you think of the show?”
The idea that an English novelist’s opinion might mean something to a member of an American automotive freak show was flattering yet hard to take seriously. Even so, I wasn’t exactly lying when I said, “I liked it. I thought it was really good.”
“You don’t have to be polite,” she said.
“There’s no harm in being polite,” I said. “But I mean it.”
“So what was your favourite part?”
“You,” I said, and this time I wasn’t lying at all.
“You were great. That was a quite a jump. This is quite a vehicle.”
“You didn’t think it could have been better?”
“I suppose anything can always be better.”