“So how?” she demanded.
I hadn’t a clue what to say. Look, I’m a writer, I know all about criticism. I know that nobody who makes art or entertainment or anything in between ever really wants to hear anything other than, “You and all your works are truly, wholly wonderful.” They don’t have to mean it: they just have to say it.
And as for ‘constructive criticism’, well, there’s no such thing; that’s like constructive pillaging or constructive carpet bombing. So I had absolutely no intention of criticising Leezza and her act, not in any way, not constructively, much less destructively. And when I said, “You make it look so easy,” I thought I was delivering a fine and positive, but essentially bland, neutral and harmless compliment. She didn’t take it that way at all.
“Damn it,” she said, and she was suddenly very upset. “That’s just what Motorhead Phil keeps telling me. He says I make it look way too easy.”
“I’m sure it’s not easy at all,” I said.
Leezza slapped her hand against the apex of the steering wheel. For the first time I noticed that the steering wheel was made of transparent Perspex, and that Leezza had the most wonderful, long delicate hands.
“Oh, but it is easy,” she said. “That’s the thing. It’s just a matter of knowing some math, some physics and a little calculus. You have to know what gravity is, you have to know about velocity, drag and wind resistance. But if you understand them, then you understand everything. After that, anybody could do what I do. If you’re in this car, and it’s going at the right speed, in the right direction and the angle of the ramp is what it should be, then there’s no way the jump can fail. It’s inevitable. It’s just what happens. It’s about trajectory-control theory, a time-order set of states in a dynamic system. It’s about the forces of nature, orbital mechanics. It’s not about the driver. It’s not about me.”
“I see,” I said, and I understood what she was saying, at least I thought I did, that although a car flying through space may appear to be defying the laws of gravity, in fact it’s absolutely obeying them. That had a great appeal to it, and that being the case, what I said next seemed thoroughly innocent at the time.
I said, “Maybe it should be more about you.”
Seventeen
So, later that same day, to my amazement and consternation, I found myself at a hastily convened meeting of the dozen or so core members of Motor-head Phil’s Famous Automotive Freak Show. Motorhead Phil was running the meeting, displaying the natural authority that comes with being able to toss Volkswagen engines around effortlessly. In person, off stage, he seemed a gentle enough soul, though I did notice that he was toying with a set of jump-leads, repeatedly snapping the clamps on to his nipples, then unsnapping them again. This may not have been a show of strength per se, and certainly it was a bit of a distraction, but it did demonstrate an impressive ability to absorb punishment.
I would surely have felt out of place there in any circumstances but now I was more self-conscious than ever, since the group gathered around me — the tattooed, the pierced, the bodily modified, the tribal, the occasionally hermaphroditic — were all expecting me to come up with some big, creative, artistic idea to make Leezza’s jump seem less ‘easy’.
This was evidently old ground for them, but for my benefit Motorhead Phil recapped some of the bright ideas they’d had in the past. These all seemed to involve things that threatened both Leezza’s dignity and life. They’d considered that she might drive the car naked and/or blindfolded, that the Beetle should actually be ablaze as in the painting, that it should land in a tank of water, that there should be a shark in the water, that there should be a mountain lion strapped next to her in the car. One of the guys still insisted this last was a great idea and he said he knew just where to find a tame mountain lion. However, all these options had, for one reason or another, mercifully, been rejected by Motorhead Phil, whose word was law on these matters. But he and his crew all acknowledged that they still needed something extra for Leezza’s performance and I, the creative one, the novelist, the guy who was having his book made into a movie, was allegedly the man to deliver it. This was simply nuts.
Barry was there too, and he was a mildly reassuring presence, a somewhat familiar and not unfriendly face. In fact the whole meeting was taking place next to his Beetle. It didn’t seem that he was part of the freak show exactly; it was more that he was regarded as something of a good luck charm or a mascot, perhaps because in some ways, given his story, he was the most freakish of the lot of them. It only made me feel straighter and more boringly normal than ever.
“OK, college boy,” said Motorhead Phil, “let’s hear what you have to say.”
It was some time since I’d been called, or been, a college boy, and coming from Motorhead Phil I reckoned it wasn’t altogether a compliment. All eyes were on me, and by now I was extremely nervous, but still, in the way that you sometimes do when you’re truly desperate, I did manage to come up with an idea.
“I think one jump probably isn’t enough,” I said. “You see Leezza do the single jump at the end of the show. She does it, and yes, she makes it look very easy and then it’s over. What if she did a number of separate jumps at different times in the course of the show? With each one getting longer and longer and more difficult.”
A lot of eyes were on me: some of them dead, some forthrightly hostile. My tongue felt a little too big for my mouth but I kept talking.
“So at the start of the show,” I said, “she jumps over, I don’t know, ten Beetles, then later she jumps twelve, then fifteen, so that it gets harder and harder as the show goes on. And maybe at every show the final jump should get longer still. You could sell it like she’s going for the world record.”
Had they given me a couple of weeks, I might well have been able to come up with something better, but in the circumstances what I’d just said didn’t strike me as such a terrible idea, not a notion of absolute genius perhaps, but not absurd or ridiculous. I felt very mildly proud of myself. Nevertheless, the silence that clamped itself on the group after I’d spoken was so profound and contemptuous I thought that they, like Josh Martin, might want to kill me.
It seemed that my involvement with things creative had now managed to alienate me equally from the two apparently quite separate and contradictory worlds of movie making and the automotive freak show. Who’d have thought it? Somebody broke the silence by farting. I was pretty sure it was intentional.
“What is the world record?” Motorhead Phil asked idly.
“I don’t know. I could research it,” I said.
“Nah, don’t bother.”
“Scholars differ,” said the man with the Mohawk and the tribal scarifications, the one who’d previously behaved towards me like a long-lost friend, “but if you said two hundred and fifty feet you’d be near enough.”
Nobody argued with him.
“That’s a lot of Beetles,” Motorhead Phil said.
“About fifty sideways; about eighteen end to end, that’s if you don’t leave any gaps,” the Mohawk man said.
The freak show around me started to get up and wander away; only Barry and I, for different reasons, stayed where we were. I felt terrible. I knew I’d disappointed everyone, but perhaps that was inevitable. They’d been expecting far, far too much from me, hadn’t they?
Then from the interior of his Beetle, Barry’s voice, sounding somewhat less depressed than usual, called out, “I’ve got it. I know what the show needs.”