God of Speed Read online

  All I ever wanted was to be elsewhere. Or at least connected to it. I taught myself morse code. It was easy to stay home from school. It wasn’t as if I had to plead. The mere mention of a fever or a cough was sufficient for Mother to close the blinds and puff up the pillows and stroke my brow. So I lay in bed all day and read the manual, my pulse racing with anticipation. From the dits and dahs of Continuous Wave Transmission a whole language grew, a binary deliciousness, complexity beyond imagining.

  There are ships in the Gulf of Mexico, great steel vessels plowing through the night. When the house lay asleep I crept down the stairs and out the back to the workshop. Lost inside my headphones, I would sit for hours and listen to the world come in, pulsing through the darkness. At times I picked up signals so weak they might merely have been exotic distortions faintly registered in the ionosphere as the waves crossed the equator or bounced over the pole. I pounded the brass. There was lightning in my fingertips. I sent my thoughts back out the other way.

  At the workbench I twisted the dial. Sounds looped into that hollow space as if from another reality. I felt that every other boy in Houston was fast asleep, while I was exploring not only the cosmos but the beaker in which it was fused. I talked to ships from Ecuador and France. My name is Howard Hughes. I am eleven years old. I live on Yoakum Boulevard in Houston. Where are you going? What are you carrying? How many crew?

  It’s funny how at night I could feel myself to be entirely weightless. But every morning I felt pressed in by the world of things. Little by little I wanted them: the workshop, the wireless, the best of all bicycles, everything shiny, everything full of heft. At some point the piston of desire smashed a jagged hole through the master cylinder, and I wound up wanting the entire world, the great tangle of it all.

  I’m getting a little ahead of myself. Because first, in the workshop, we were all just communicating, and nobody owned a thing. We were so liquid. What is the opposite of that? Arthritic. Because now there is a power of arthritis in my life and the only reason I am kept from the worst of its excesses is that the medicine holds it all back. That eleven-year-old boy by the crystal set in the dark of night wanted nothing more than the great flood, forever and ever. Little Sonny Hughes. But at some point, things changed—at some point, catastrophe became a definite possibility. And then, for a long time, self-protection seemed to be everything. Because you have to be careful. And it was easier to number it all if you owned it all first.

  Now, so many decades later, I like the flooding again, that sense of being liquid inside all this dryness, which is only apparent dryness, of course. The way Empirin glides, and flows. The way at times, after an injection, I could swear not that I am in but that I have in fact become a stream, rippling over the pebbles as I flow. Or the way Valium dulls the roaring of the sky, and makes the vultures pigeons.

  HOW EACH THING FITS

  IT DOESN’T TAKE focus to be born into wealth. I’m the first to admit it. But it takes an awful lot of focus to turn a moderate fortune into vast billions. And I had it for as long as I can remember. At fourteen I convinced Father to buy me a brand new Stutz Bearcat, for the sole purpose of taking it apart, then putting it back together. That is a very big undertaking, but not too big for me. I had the garage space (an area around the car four times its own size) in the enormous workshop, and I had the will, the conviction, and the determination to understand how each thing fits. Out of fourteen thousand eight hundred and forty possible actions, possible paths wrongly chosen, I broke only a single object—a backseat latch I too roughly jiggled out. (I was still learning patience back then.)

  A Bearcat, completely dismantled, completely revealed, spread out across the workshop floor, ready to be reassembled in reverse. Such left-right, up-down symmetry. Such meticulous attention to detail. Every bolt, every washer, every wing nut in its proper place and order.

  It was easier to control it if you understood it. It was easier to understand it if you numbered it all first. Mother would call me in to dinner. I found even dinner an intrusion. I had to get the measure of the engine of the world.

  Memo, 1958: No matter what

  No matter how extreme the emergency, no matter how unusual the circumstances may be, no matter what may have arisen, it is extremely important to me that nobody ever goes into any room, closet, cabinet, drawer, bathroom or any other area used to store any of the things which are for me—either food, equipment, magazines, paper supplies, Kleenex—no matter what. It is equally important to me that nobody ever opens any door or opening to any room, cabinet or closet or anything used to store any of my things, even for one-thousandth of an inch, for one-thousandth of a second. I don’t want the possibility of dust or insects or anything of that nature entering.

  THE FERROUS ORIGINS OF DESIRE

  I WOUND UP in the air, without a doubt. But it started in the earth. My daddy said there were many things under the ground, most of them good. After he patented his drill, he came up with the bright idea of never ever selling it. The drill could only ever be leased, one per well, all around the globe, at thirty thousand dollars per lease; when oil was struck the drill would be returned.

  Years later, after the empire had passed on to me, a reporter asked, Mr. Hughes, is it true that the Hughes Drill Bit is a monopoly?

  Of course not, I said. People who want to drill for oil and not use the Hughes Drill Bit can always use a pick and shovel.

  Many things, most of them good. My daddy dropped out of Harvard, where everything was abstract, in 1893, and for ten years wandered the west, where all things were present, he said; albeit submerged. He mined silver in the mountains of Colorado, zinc in the wilds of Indian Territory, lead in southwestern Missouri. He struggled, until the drill bit, and even then he struggled some more. The final prototype, the one that was to make all the money, was not ready until 1908. The point was actually not what lay beneath; the point was the piercing, and the access. My father designed the best drill bit in the world. Does Jack know that? By 1912 there were forty thousand wells around the world, each one leasing a drill bit from Father.

  He was like a sleeper, waking from a dream of light, to find, in fact, that light was everywhere.

  What do you want? he whispered, a glint in his eye, reading me a bedtime story by electric lamp.

  Dig for it, dig for it.

  A DIFFERENT SORT OF PRESSURE

  IN THE GROIN

  THEY GROW UP so fast, Jack! I’m speaking about myself, of course. When I was fourteen, Father sent me to Fessenden School in Boston. The summer before, I had become very ill and thought I might die. I could not move from bed for many weeks. My parents paid for Dr. Chickering to move from New York and into our house in Houston. I did not like this cold hard man. He tried to get me into a wheelchair and out of doors, for the fresh air. I merely wanted delirium in the bed by the window, overlooking the birch trees.

  Eventually he told my father, in secret—that is to say, away from my mother—that I was suffering from hysterical paralysis. In fact I wasn’t entirely paralyzed and was far from being hysterical. I was quite still. I was stoical in my suffering. But could there have been something to that? Hysterical paralysis, I mean? I’m open now, of course, to the psychological hocus-pocus, because I’m trying to get a better grip on things. Father spent so many years all over the southwest as he built his, my, business, that there was, for as long as I could remember, a … strangeness between him and Mother. Dining in the dining car, with ladies fine or otherwise. Oh yes. She would screech it so that it pierced my eardrum even from downstairs, and I would wake up to the sound of crockery breaking. You’ll wake the boy, you’ll wake the boy, that deep tone weary with whiskey. Perhaps there were times I became ill simply to stop them from fighting.

  So Dr. Chickering dragged Mother and me to Michigan, to escape the putrid humidity of Houston. Up there the nights were cold, and at dusk the air was murderous with gnats.

  Mother would tuck me into bed and read to me from Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Those
Houston vowels are the loveliest in the nation. But in Michigan I felt bored rather than sick, and she did not fit into my tiny bed there. In any case, I desperately wanted to be alone, for Dudley had entrusted me with a satchel full of Sunday funnies, more than a year’s worth.

  Momma.

  Sonny?

  Can we find another book?

  She shut the book. Well, if that’s how you feel—

  No, I mean. You can read some more tomorrow, Momma.

  Michigan seemed like eternity, but not in a good way.

  Back in Houston as fall approached, Father said, My goodness, young man, you’re as tall as a tree. It must have been around this time Mother stopped inspecting my testicles for lumps. I became at last self-monitoring at the duty.

  I think that Father tried to send me far from Mother, to make more of a man of me. So Fessenden was an escape. But then I needed to escape Fessenden.

  The first time you leave the earth can mark you forever.

  It happened that Father was free one week, and took the train to Boston from business in Chicago. He picked me up from school. We drove to New London, to the Harvard–Yale Boat Race on the Thames. Father promised me if Harvard won I could have anything I wanted. There was only one thing on my mind. In Boston Harbor a Curtiss seaplane was moored. Rides were five dollars each. It was not what he had in mind. I cajoled, I cried, I pleaded.

  The plane bounced along the water as if it were solid ground. We picked up speed and the ripples began to blur. The engine roared louder and louder. We reached full throttle. Suddenly—it didn’t feel quite right but there you have it—we were lurching through air, about six feet above the water, skewing slightly in left and right flutters as if at any moment we might turn ninety degrees in one direction or another. Then we strained steeply upwards and the plane seemed to funnel all its focus forward. I felt a pressure in my groin that I would come to know many thousands of times. We looped out over Boston. The dockside terminals became little boxes. Father stood down there somewhere, 1920 on the Massachusetts earth, watching me soar away. The tiny cars made tiny turns at tiny intersections. The world so very oddly wrought. The fields were merely containers for color. The cows did nothing but mark out space. The wind attacked the wing struts in its roaring. The noise was deafening. The pilot, with limited swivel in his cramped seat in front of me, tried to point out landmarks, but his hand-signals seemed overly general. The whole world was down there, and me up above it.

  KATHARINE ON THE WING

  IN HOUSTON ALL those oil baron boys had called me a sissy. At Fessenden they were eastern preppies and things were a bit more subtle. In Texas they hurt you openly. You copped a beating. In Boston they did it ever so politely, and with a smile. It was much, much worse. You could smell it in the air. When Father enrolled me at Thacher School in California I felt my world open out somewhat. I was fifteen when I went there in August and sixteen when I left about a year later; in that time I’d begun to have a sense of myself in my own body.

  The Thacher boys were not in fact that much different from those at Fessenden, it’s just that in California one was freer to be left alone. At Thacher I felt myself to be my own man. Father sent me money to buy a horse, the status symbol du jour at the school. It was not like the motorized bike back in Houston: it was not just a matter of speed. On a horse there was smell, and muscle, and thighs on a saddle, and a sense, merely, deliciously, of being here.

  Thacher was like paradise on earth—or microparadise, at least. Often in later years I would fly over the Ojai Valley, banking over all the contours of the hills, out over the orange orchards and the peach trees in blossom, remembering such simplicity down there two decades earlier, when for a moment no gap had existed between life as I experienced it and life as I wished to experience it. I would dip down the pine gulches, watching the shadow of my plane race across the land; remembering those days when I was happy.

  Sometimes, remembering that time when I was happy, I was happy in my remembering, too. Loop-the-loops of happiness. Kate Hepburn, fearless, full of laughter, looking up from a crossword puzzle in the co-pilot’s seat.

  That’s where I went to school, down there.

  Oh you poor lost lamb, she said. Saint Howard of the Desert.

  Katharine was so beautiful it would scare a man. Beautiful and hardly even tried. For a while I loved that freckled girl, though her strength and independence made me nervy. Nonetheless, one way or another I was in her life and she in mine for a year or two, of which I would count at least several glorious weeks, a month or two perhaps, as burning more brightly than usual, flame and flight and fucking everywhere.

  She was wonderfully supportive. When things were just beginning, when everything was still just chase and consummation, it was she to whom I first laid out my plans to fly around the world, and she who said, Do it all, grab it all, eat it all.

  In 1937 we flew all summer long, mostly in the Sikorsky S-43, that lovely big amphibian. We landed wherever we pleased. The days seemed to bristle then burst with heat. In the middle of the lagoon on Santa Catalina Island we sunbaked on the Sikorsky wing as a giant turtle rose nearby to float and watch, with implacable curiosity, ourselves and our strange craft. On the other side of the continent, one day high above Long Island Sound, Katharine stripped and stood beside me in the cockpit, her cunt all but in my face. She had the knack of making me laugh, somewhat nervously, from time to time.

  I’m ready for a skinny dip! she said.

  We landed smoothly on the sound. We dived off the wing (she was clothed now, in a yellow bathing suit) and swam a circle around the plane. There was a time in my life when all this wetness mattered. There was a time, lying side by side on that warm port wing and drying off, when droplets of water clung to the backs of her thighs and when my fingertip could prod and test the heft of a single droplet’s elasticity, viscosity, until that drop’s potential energy burst forth into the kinetic and ran in a tiny rivulet down between her legs. I traced my fingers down there too. She shifted her weight, imperceptibly, spread her legs an imperceptible distance wider. I stroked her inner thighs. My knuckles pressed (and all this imperceptibility was growing less imperceptible by degrees) against the soft plumpness of her sex. She arched her backside (quite perceptibly) into the air, and pushed a little harder against my knuckles. There was a time when summer actually loosened me up, as I gather it can from time to time for most of the rest of the world.

  Hmmm, Howard, she murmured, face hidden beneath a sun hat and buried in her arms, stretched out on that membrane of sunstruck wing. Do take me inside and fuck me when you’ve half a mind.

  There was a time my life was so filled with potential.

  THE HORSE WHO LIVES ON IN

  THE STABLES OF THE INFINITE

  I WAS UNSADDLING my horse in the Thacher School stables when a junior boy came to tell me there was a message waiting for me. Mr. Sherman Day Thacher himself came out from his office. I knew immediately something was wrong. It’s from your father, he said, handing me a cablegram. I opened it and read: Mother is ill. Rupert will bring you home to Houston. Love Howard R. Hughes. I went a little blank just then. On the train to Los Angeles I tried to imagine all the ways in which life would be different if Mother were dead, at the same time trying to override such thoughts with a constant stream of prayer: for Mother to be all right. I had no idea of anything that could be wrong; there was no specific sickness I knew of. But the mind of a sixteen-year-old is infinite in its potential for self-pity. It was not consciousness of my mother as a separate being that I felt, but rather sorrow for myself. The train passed through endless fields, but even agriculture seemed part of the overladen, the rather irrelevant, weight of existence. Tractors trundled distantly, dragging behind them splayed plumes of dust, which appeared almost static in the flat midday light.

  I traveled through the oranges that day, every orange glowing, all of California brightly glowing. Every sphere suspended.

  I was lost, becoming free, sixteen year
s old and rolling through the dark heart of those fields of fruit, the secret blackness of the Golden State.

  Uncle Rupert was there to pick me up. I searched his eyes. He looked away. He wrote for the moving pictures but was not much used to real life impinging.

  How is she?

  She’s very ill, he said.

  Less than ten minutes later, he turned to me in the limousine. All right, he said. You have to know. I don’t think it can wait until Houston. Sonny, your mother is dead.

  It is difficult to jam memory into just such a moment. She stroked me through all the illness called childhood. Through late nights when I wheezed and wheezed her soft hands massaged camphor oil into my chest. She slept in the same room with me until I was eleven years old. Father slept in the study upstairs. How many sleeps till Santa Claus, Mother? Three more sleeps, Howard. You must be patient. Two more sleeps. One more sleep. In the morning when you wake, it’ll be No more sleeps, and Santa will have filled your stocking. We can go through all the presents together. Hush now, hush now.

  The point is, Jack, that sometimes I was the anxious one, and she calmed me. Surely you’ll understand if I tell you that. But she had great fear about impending illness, and taught me how to fear it all myself. I had watched for many years as she scrubbed and scoured the pots and pans, relentlessly, as the maids rolled their eyes. I had watched her triple-sink system, for dipping and scalding and disinfecting the amoeba-swarming vegetables. Not even the lowliest carrot escaped her attentions. Her vigilance was the last defense.