newspaper photographers, polaroid snapshots of himself on location, enjoying the attentions of the makeup lady, gesturing at the producer for the photographer’s benefit. All these photographs dated back to the time before Vaughan’s accident, as if the subsequent years marked a temporal no-zone, a period whose urgencies went beyond vanity. Yet, as he moved around the apartment, taking a shower and changing his clothes, Vaughan was self- consciously absorbed in these fading images, straightening their curling corners as if frightened that when they finally vanished his own identity would also cease to matter.
I saw this attempt at tagging himself, to fix his identity by marking it upon some external event, as we drove along the expressways that evening. Listening to his radio, Vaughan lay in the front passenger seat beside me, lighting the first of his cigarettes. The fresh scent of his well-showered body was overlaid, first, by the smell of hash and then by the tang of Vaughan’s semen moistening the crotch of his trousers as we passed the first of the automobile crashes. As I drove the car through the network of back streets to the next accident site, my head invaded by the burning resin, I thought of Vaughan’s body in the bathroom at his apartment, the powerful hose of his penis jutting from his hard groin. The scars on his knees and thighs were like miniature rungs, handholds on this ladder of desperate excitements.
By the early hours of the morning we had seen three car-crashes. Inside my fuddled head I assumed that we were still trying to track down Seagrave, but I knew that Vaughan had lost interest in the stunt-driver. After the third of these crashes, when the police and ambulance attendants had left, and the last all-night truck driver had returned to his vehicle, Vaughan finished his cigarette and walked unsteadily across the oil-slick concrete to the motorway embankment. A heavy saloon car driven by a middle-aged woman dentist had skidded through the railings and overturned in the abandoned allotment garden below. I followed Vaughan and watched from the ruptured balustrade as he climbed down to the now upended car. Vaughan walked through the knee-deep grass around the car, and picked up a piece of white chalk discarded by the police. With his hands he felt the sharp edges of the fractured glass and metalwork, pressing against the crushed roof and hood panels. Resting for a moment, he urinated in the darkness against the still warm radiator grille, sending a cloud of vapour into the night air. He stared down at his half-erect penis, looking back at me in a muddled way as if asking me to help him identify this strange organ. He placed it against the right-hand front wing of the car, and with the chalk drew its outline on the black cellulose. He inspected this thoughtfully and, satisfied, moved around the car, marking the profile of his penis on the doors and fractured windows, on the trunk lid and rear fender. Carrying his penis in his hand to shield it from the sharp metal, Vaughan climbed into the front seat and began to draw the outline of his penis against the instrument panel and centre arm-rest, marking out the erotic focus of a crash or sex act, celebrating the marriage of his own genitalia and the skull-shattered dashboard binnacle against which this middle-aged woman dentist had died.
For Vaughan the smallest styling details contained an organic life as meaningful as the limbs and sense organs of the human beings who drove these vehicles. He would stop me at traffic lights and stare for minutes at the junction of a wiper-blade mounting and windshield assembly in a parked car. The body contours of American saloons and European sports cars, with their subordination of function to gesture, delighted Vaughan. We would follow a new Buick or Ferrari for half an hour, as he studied every detail of body trim and rear deck moulding. Several times we were stopped by police for hanging about a parked Lamborghini owned by a well-to-do Shepperton publican as Vaughan obsessively photographed the exact rake of the windshield pillars, the jut of a headlamp visor, the flare of a wheel housing. He was obsessed with the design of chromium accents on fender louvres, stainless- steel body-sill mouldings, windshield-wiper cowl panels, hood locks and door latches.
He would saunter through the parking lots of the Western Avenue supermarkets as if strolling around a beach colony, fascinated by the high-rise fenders of a Corvette being reversed out by a young housewife. The front and rear air spoilers plunged Vaughan into a trance of recognition, as if he were seeing again some paradise bird. Often, as we drove along the motorways, Vaughan gestured me across the lane marker lines, positioning the Lincoln so that the exact profile of a passing coupe roofline shone in the speeding sunlight in front of us, savouring the perfect proportions of an abbreviated rear deck assembly. The equations between the styling of a motor-car and the organic elements of his body Vaughan mimed continually in his own behaviour. Following an Italian concept car with truncated rear fenders Vaughan’s gestures towards the airport whore sitting between us became stylized and exaggerated, mystifying this bored woman with his surging talk and shoulder movements.
For Vaughan, the colour-keyed interiors of the Lincoln and the other cars which he began to steal for an hour or so each evening exactly simulated the skin areas of the young whores whom he undressed as I drove along the darkened expressways. Their bare thighs modulated the panels of pastel vinyl; the deep-cone speakers recapitulated the contours of their sharp breasts.
I saw the interior of the motor-car as a kaleidoscope of illuminated pieces of the bodies of women. This anthology of wrists and elbow, thigh and pubis formed ever-changing marriages with the contours of the automobile. Once Vaughan and I drove along the perimeter highway to the south of the airport; I held the car carefully on the apex of the high-cambered surface, celebrating with Vaughan the exposed breast of a schoolgirl he had accosted near the studios. The two of us isolated the perfect geometry of this white pear drawn from her tunic in the motion of the car along the curved road surface.
Vaughan’s body, with its unsavoury skin and greasy pallor, took on a hard, mutilated beauty within the elaborately signalled landscape of the motorway. The concrete buttresses along the base of the Western Avenue overpass, angular shoulders spaced at fifty-yard intervals, brought together the sections of Vaughan’s scarred physique.
During the many weeks in which I acted as Vaughan’s chauffeur, giving him money to pay the prostitutes and part-time whores who hung about the airport and its hotels, I watched Vaughan explore every byway of sex and the automobile. For Vaughan the motor-car was the sexual act’s greatest and only true locus. With each of these women Vaughan explored a different sex act, inserting his penis in vagina, anus and mouth almost in reponse to the road along which we moved, the traffic density, the style of my driving.
At the same time it seemed to me that Vaughan was selecting certain sexual acts and positions in his mind for future use, the maximum sex act within the automobile. The clear equation he had made between sex and the kinaesthetics of the highway was in some way related to his obsessions with Elizabeth Taylor. Did he visualize himself in a sexual act with her, dying together in some complex car-crash? During the mornings and early afternoons he followed her from her hotel to the film studios. I did not tell him that our negotiations to feature the actress in our projected automobile commercial had fallen through. Vaughan’s hands moved through small contortions as he waited for her to appear, fretting around the rear seat, almost as if his body was unconsciously miming in fast motion hundreds of acts of intercourse with her. I realized that he was assembling in disjointed form the elements of a conceptual sexual act involving the actress and the route she would take from the studios at Shepperton. His self-conscious gestures, the grotesque way in which he hung his arm out of the car, as if about to unscrew it and toss the bloody limb under the wheels of the car following us, the rictus of his mouth as he framed his lips around a nipple, seemed to be private rehearsals for a terrifying drama unfolding in his mind, the sex act he saw as the climax of his own death-collision.
During these last weeks Vaughan was determined to touch with his own sexuality the places of a secret itinerary, mapping with his semen the corridors of this future drama. Gradually, we came nearer to an open confrontation with the police. During the rush-hour one evening, Vaughan signalled me to wait at green traffic lights, deliberately blocking the line of cars behind us. Headlamps flashing, a police car pulled alongside us, the co- driver assuming from Vaughan’s contorted position that we had been involved in a major accident. Covering the face of the girl beside him, a teenage supermarket cashier, Vaughan held himself in the posture of the injured ambassador we had seen taken from his crashed limousine. At the last moment, as the policeman stepped from his car, I ignored Vaughan’s protest and accelerated forwards.
Tired of the Lincoln, Vaughan borrowed other cars from the airport parking lots, using a set of trade passkeys which Vera Seagrave had given him. We let ourselves in and out of these day-parked vehicles, whose owners were in Paris, Stuttgart or Amsterdam, driving them back to their parking places in the evening when we had finished with them. By this time I was unable to rally myself and make an effort to stop Vaughan. As obsessed with his hard body as he himself was with the bodies of automobiles, I found myself locked into a system of beckoning violence and excitement, made up of the motorway and traffic jams, the cars we stole and Vaughan’s discharging sexuality.
During this last period with Vaughan I saw that the women he brought to the car each evening had begun to resemble more and more closely the colouring and figure of the film actress. The dark-haired schoolgirl resembled the young Elizabeth Taylor, while the other women represented her at successively older stages.
