Sex in an ordinary Beetle is, there’s no doubt about it, a tricky, cramped, restrained, inelegant, unsatisfactory business, but in a Beetle that’s been stripped down so much that it’s ready to fly, well it’s a very different matter. I say ‘in’ a Beetle but that gives a very limited idea of what we got up to. We had sex in it, on it, inside and out, on every surface, lying against it, using it for support, in the driver’s seat, on the floorpan, on the boot, on the bonnet, our flesh pressed up against the windscreen, against the wheels, against the non-standard aluminium petrol tank. The car became a fun house, a climbing-frame, an apparatus, a sex aid. The Smut Bug. The Fuck Bug.
And when it was over, and I was wallowing in a sump of warm post-coital pleasure, I became gradually aware of my surroundings. We weren’t in such an unfamiliar place after all. We were in the grounds of the speedway, and around us were Beetles in various states of decay. It wasn’t romantic, it wasn’t secluded, and as I now saw, it wasn’t even uninhabited. There, just a car battery’s throw away, was Barry’s Beetle. And there, in the car as ever, was Barry. He’d been watching us and now he was weeping.
My first thought was that somebody, some joker or pervert or sadist, had pushed his car precisely here so that Barry was in a position where he was forced to watch the dirty (in the best sense of the word) deed. But then I saw it another way. Maybe nobody had pushed Barry anywhere. Maybe he’d remained right where he was, where he just happened to be, and Leezza had parked her car right in front of him. What the hell was that all about? Had she done it by accident or design? It was a very unlikely accident. It was an absolutely incomprehensible and disgusting design.
“This isn’t right,” I said, and I got up, pulled on my clothes and stormed away.
“Hey, don’t go,” Leezza said.
I ignored her, walked on and she came trotting after me. That was something but not much, and it explained nothing.
“What’s going on here?” I said. “What are you up to?”
“Nothing,” she said. “At least nothing bad.”
“You once accused me of being cruel,” I said. “How does it compare with this?”
“I’m not being cruel.”
“I think you are.”
“Then I’m being cruel to be kind.”
I didn’t know what she was talking about. I kept walking. She kept coming after me.
“That makes no sense,” I said.
“You don’t know the half of it.”
“That’s because you haven’t told me the other half.”
By now we had gone some distance from the car, from the scene of the crime. We stood there in the dark arguing for a while longer, and then, from behind us, we heard the sound of the engine starting in Leezza’s Beetle. You couldn’t mistake it. My first absurd thought was that it must be Barry. Some miracle must have occurred. He’d transformed himself. He’d got out of his car. He was free, he could walk, he could drive, and his first action was to steal Leezza’s car.
Once I’d dismissed that notion, the reality became all too obvious. The car thief was Josh Martin. He’d been hiding like a predator, lurking amid the cars and scrap metal, waiting for his chance. We’d given it to him. And now he drove right by us, not all that quickly, headlights ablaze, smiling, waving, naked at the wheel of the unfamiliar car, still covered in oil, still conspicuously drunk. The car disappeared loudly into the darkness.
“Oh Jesus,” I said.
Leezza took it very calmly.
“That poor sad fuck,” she said. “He really doesn’t know what he’s let himself in for.”
Twenty-Seven
The Led Beetle
In March 1938, Bruno Schweizer organised an expedition to Iceland, searching for ancient shrines dedicated to the Norse gods Odin and Thor. Some say he was looking for the Holy Grail.
The trip was organised by a German Nazi group, established by Himmler, known as the Ahnenerbe, or more fully Studiengesellschaft fur Geistesurge-schichte, Deutsches Ahnenerbe; in English, the Study Society for Primordial Intellectual Science, German Ancestral Heritage; an organisation engaged in occult research worldwide.
Iceland was a special location for Himmler since he believed it was the birthplace of the Aryan race, with a continuing connection to Thule, the mystical, mythical German homeland. Having not been much invaded over the centuries, Iceland was evidently a place where racial purity could persist.
There’s certainly some fun to be had in imagining Nazi occultists thrashing around Iceland in Volkswagen Beetles, perhaps in the military version, the Kubelwagen, or the amphibious Schwimmwagen, which was occasionally converted into a snow vehicle, known as the Schwimmwagen walzen, but as far as I know Schweizer didn’t have this luxury. In fact he didn’t have much of anything: German currency restrictions hampered, then led to the abandonment, of his expedition.
♦
In June 1970, at the early height of their powers, Led Zeppelin’s touring schedule took them to Iceland. According to their tour manager, Richard Cole, they were there ‘at the request of the British government’, as part of a cultural festival.
It would be idle to accuse Led Zeppelin of being Nazis, despite Robert Plant’s golden-god status, and Jimmy Page’s unapologetic wearing of SS regalia, both in private and public. And it would be equally idle to listen to their music in expectation of hearing joined-up thoughts.
Nevertheless, while on that Icelandic trip they were inspired to write ‘The Immigrant Song’. The lyrics, which for sound copyright reasons I shall paraphrase, speak of a ‘we’ who come from a land of ice and snow to conquer new lands, fill the fields with gore, and become overlords of the world while singing, “Valhalla, I am coming.” If this isn’t pernicious Aryan claptrap then it will certainly do until the real thing comes along.
Unlike the members of the Ahnenerbe, however, Led Zeppelin’s Icelandic expedition was well funded and certain members did have a Volkswagen Beetle experience.
♦
The notion that a Volkswagen Beetle will float on water may well come from the war years, when Allied forces first encountered the Schwimmwagen. But ordinary Beetles do indeed float, and can be made quite seaworthy. I’ve seen modified Beetles at car shows that have chugged quite happily across open water, and a man called Malcolm Buchanan once crossed part of the Irish Sea from the Isle of Man to the coast of Cumbria in a Beetle.
And Volkswagen themselves, or at least their advertising agency, have exploited the myth. A print ad from the 1960s shows a Beetle floating in a tank of water with the caption, ‘Volkswagen’s unique construction keeps dampness out’. A man in a television ad proclaims, “It’s so well put together it’s practically airtight,” and then drives it into water, where it does indeed float, at least for a while.
Having a bad-boy, hell-raising image to live up to, certain members of Led Zeppelin — John Bonham and John Paul Jones, along with tour manager Cole and a roadie — rented two Beetles, one green, one white, and after a certain amount of alcohol and boredom had set in, they decided to see whether there was truth in this advertising.
They found a river and Bonham, with Jones as his co-pilot, powered the white Beetle off the bank, through the air and on to the water. To their considerable surprise the car really did float and remain watertight, for about two minutes, and then water started to seep in around the bottom of the doors. In fairness, the ad never said how long a Beetle would float for.