God of Speed Page 7

  We ate apple fritters on a cold fall day at the Farmers Market.

  I’m astonished that I’ve even met you, I said. (It had been my experience that unsurprise was what made up the bulk of my days.)

  She smiled through a mouthful of apple and batter.

  I’ve a vision for today, she said, and you’re included in it.

  Well, I’m happy about that.

  I see a winding road. I see the ocean.

  Sounds like we’re going to Malibu! I said.

  I see us walking barefoot on the beach.

  Even back then I was not a great fan of such close contact with nature—the terrible intimacy, the whiteness of the soles, the loose sand underfoot, the lack of inherent order—but she made all things seem possible for a while, and two hours later I duly rolled up my trousers to the knees.

  I had always been exhausted but I was fifteen years or more exhausted when I thought that love, or Katie, would slow things down. Looking back now I see that all things move slowly if at all, that zero is the number toward which all things cluster, that stasis is the condition, that it is only the mind that screens it all so fast and runs the frames together, and that events cascaded, yes of course, it goes without saying, but that the inside of myself somehow consistently eluded me. Meaning I had no sense of space.

  And now it matters to me. I mean, everything which is gone forever: which is everything. Because sometimes, Jack, I can’t move in here, I tell you. And all there is left to do is to tell you what’s been lost.

  II

  “Speed is simply the rite that initiates us into emptiness.”

  —Baudrillard, America

  ROUND-THE-WORLD RECORD, 1938

  IN 1938 I CIRCLED the globe. The Lockheed Cyclone, most reliable of airplanes. I flew around the world in an endless arc; my end was my beginning. I was the image of glory, to which the whole world turned. My power was immense. Floyd Bennett Field changed only in time while I reeled away. Everything was still there. I taxied the Cyclone into the same hangar. The same wheel blocks in the same place. I was the master of Time. Tom, Dick, Harry and Ed—my four-man crew—were the minions of Time.

  There we were, in the flow and the smoothness of power and speed. There were no angles on this record-breaking flight. I flew a straight line, nothing but a straight line through curved space. More or less. We left New York at 7.19 p.m. and flew all night and fought fierce winds.

  I stared for hours; you would think the horizon doesn’t change. But I moved east, across the Atlantic, away from the sun, with the spin of the planet, so darkness falls early, a grand migration into newness.

  And I knew that with daylight would come Paris.

  And they would be waiting, with bulbs flashing, to connect me back to the world of light. Then I would be me again. I was Howard. Howard Hughes. Desired by all.

  The planet spun, the night rolled into dawn. I ate a stale sandwich, drank some water, pissed. The horizon began to glow pink. Above and below that line of light the sky and the ocean seemed equally dark. After about twenty minutes I could begin to make out the soft shapes of clouds in the distance.

  In Texas as a boy I had known solitude in the woods with my tin toys. Then airplanes allowed me to take my solitude into the air, into space, encased in the freedom my money could buy, that dazzling horizon always unfolding, beyond which could be anything: good, evil, anything.

  Finally the sun began to emerge, scattering light through every scratch and fragment on the windshield. I was shivering by now. The sun was welcome. The cockpit glowed a warm orange. I closed my eyes. I hadn’t slept in nearly twenty-four hours. I must have dozed for a minute or two.

  I woke with a start, thinking the Lockheed was engulfed in flames. Just the sun. Ed Lund was beside me, smiling, refreshed. I saw an ocean liner far below. I woke Dick Stoddart, the radio man. He sent a cablegram via the liner to Katharine Hepburn.

  The morning took shape and there in the distance was the coast of Ireland. Soon we’d cross England, then the English Channel, then track inland to Paris. I stamped, stretched, yawned, cracked my knuckles, drank some coffee, swallowed another amphetamine.

  Some hours from then I would land, like an angel of glamor. Howard Hughes, descending from the clouds, arrayed in silver. Light wrapped itself around the world.

  Le Bourget airfield. The outskirts of Paris at last. I lowered the flaps, dropped toward the field.

  The Lockheed bumped to a halt amid the cheering throng. I could feel my body vibrate as I climbed down from the cockpit. God’s pitchfork, Howard Hughes, the biggest, and the first. The clear sound of the future. He has come through the ether like a light wave.

  Félicitations, Monsieur Hughes.

  All of France welcomes you!

  You are tired, sir?

  My ears rang as the propellers died. The bulbs snapped. I was blind among my subjects.

  The afternoon was hot. Through all the human activity I could hear the whole field thick with the buzzing of insects. Perhaps the whole of Paris that day, July 11, 1938, was a hive of nectar and pistil and stamen and flowering, of all the bees sucking the life from the buds. A juicy kind of day. Perhaps the whole of France was awash with the drone of cicadas.

  I walked toward the hangar. It seems to me now there could not possibly have been a single stray thought in my flight-weary brain. I whispered in an official’s ear.

  Mr. Hughes will have two hours’ rest, he said.

  OASIS OF BLOSSOM AND LIGHT

  SOME GIRLS WOULD get all weak-kneed, but not in a good way, about planes. It was not like it’s become by now, with the big 707s and the rise of the airlines ferrying passengers all over the globe; in the thirties all this was only just moving into the possible. (And I helped make it happen.) To some women planes were frightening and powerful at the same time, which seemed to work as a kind of aphrodisiac. There were women who got very nervous about my coming in to land. Well, it’s not like parking a car. Implicit in that balancing act, that aligning of Dunlop with tarmac, was the notion of disintegration, flayed skin and crumpled steel, annihilation and exploding flame. There’s a lot of power involved. You don’t slow it down to twenty knots and come in soft. And from the windshield you can’t fully see what you’re doing. Women sense this. In the co-pilot’s seat it will either give them heart palpitations and dry their throat in a rush of constricted fear or it will flood them with adrenalin and desire. Someone like little Faith Domergue, I knew she never really liked it, those trips out to the airfield, the taxiing and take-off and landing, and I knew especially that the fucking in the air was something of a duty to her, no more than the expected thing. While Katharine Hepburn loved nothing more than a good fuck before or after take-off.

  We were like two bony whippets going at it. I created my own early version of autopilot by jamming a hammer and wire into the joystick, level with the horizon, cruising speed, cruising altitude, all systems go, we had liftoff, we had landing, plump clouds in the distance, the whole vulvic extravaganza, bagpipes playing in the engine’s drone, flight approval, the works. I did more than almost anyone to put the cock into cockpit. I was a leader among leaders.

  One time we flew all night in the Sikorsky, LA to Salt Lake City, Salt Lake City to Lincoln, Lincoln to Chicago and on to New York by dawn, to refuel yet again and head up the coast to Connecticut, to Fenwick, the Hepburns’ summer home. Kate curled up and slept on the daybed. I’d had the seats removed. It was like our little apartment in the sky. For a while I forgot about her. Blackness was everything; or the vague suggestion of horizon. I was there with my dials and controls. The great Midwest rolled under us, milk and honey and the restless cattle in the dark fields, the high schools asleep, the children asleep, the soft breathing of millions. The hours passed. The city lights like diamond glints or clusters of algae phosphorescent in some deep ocean. There’s always about an hour when you expect to see the faint pink smudge of dawn appear and when you think you’re beginning to see it, but you are not. You imagin
e it all. It is the longest time of night. And finally it really does start to come, that longed-for hint of sun. An hour or more before the sun itself, a blue glow lightening slowly away from darkest blue, to pale mauve. To pink. Suddenly (I mean eventually, I mean the two things came at once) there were hands over my eyes. Boo! Guess who? She ran her fingers down my chest, down into my groin. I stirred, half-turned, her shirt hung open, her dart-like breast protruding. Her silk underclothes fell effortlessly to the floor, six thousand feet above the earth. She was red, red, red, her freckles, her fiery bush, her hair set free, the bands of flushing up her neck that overcame her whenever sex was close. I was ramjet-ready, Lord yes. I sprawled out from the seat, my long legs spread. She sat astride, she smothered me with slippery kisses. Oh, to be straddled by a star in a high, thin atmosphere. Oh, the vibrating of the pilot’s seat. She ground and groaned, smearing my thigh with her wetness. We kissed a good long while as the light seeped in and the objects reappeared. Joystick. Altimeter. Ignition. Intercom. She docked at last. I slid into Katharine Hepburn like Joy into a burrow, if Joy were a rabbit, heading for home. I held her bony ass in the palms of my hands. Beyond her flaming tresses the sky was turning pink. This was way past purple, I think I need to stress. And of course there is that Other, that Ultimate pink, in there, down there, where I am, where I am in, where I am in and out, where I am in and out, where I am in and out, where I am watching with such wonder, watching the edges of her pink, her pinkness, her pinkocity, almost hidden, almost exposed, enveloping, regularly, pretty much, my dick. I am in and out of there, more often in, more often in, it is in that really matters. The sky is beginning to flare pink behind her. Goodness I seem to have changed tense in all the excitement. The sky was beginning to flare pink behind her. We slowed it down. I held her buttocks in place with the controls. We gently rocked. The plane swayed, tracing a path of sine waves through the air. Katharine, Katie. I watched the first edge of the sun split the sky. Then I looked down at our genitals so happily enmeshed. Then back up at the sun. It’s like a dialogue with the host star of your system: Are you watching this? Are you watching this? And I looked into Kate’s green eyes. And perhaps, turned inwards to the fuselage of that plane, turned away from that fluorescently expanding display of light, she saw that sun come up on the horizon of my pupils. Who ever knows such things? You would think all that angularity meant a certain coldness. On the contrary, she comported herself, she faced the world, she did her thing, demanded her demands, methodical and businesslike … and then she let go. And she was gone. I passed much happy goneness with that girl.

  Later, returning from the east, the Grand Canyon opened beneath us, a giant gash, astonishment made geological. Lake Mead passed. The Mojave desert was like a wreck, a great ruin, the lone and level sands stretching far away, coming into that oasis of blossom and light, Los Angeles.

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

  LESSENING THE RISK OF FAILURE

  BUT POTENTIAL HAS a way of going sideways. I was always moving from woman to woman, but they were in motion, too—it could get confusing. Everybody leading their own separate lives. What a concept.

  After Katharine, I distracted myself with the delicious Fay Wray, whose whole body tensed when she finally came, whose very lungs contracted and forced out of her that mournful whimper. There were moments with Fay when I felt a kind of balance, afterwards; so completely opened out was she, in her sweetness, when she sighed, and sweetly smiled, and slept. Memory is a funny thing. Time can be sped up or slowed down according to your means. But mostly we had trouble ever catching up with our breath, and I sweated a lot, and it dripped from my chin into Fay Wray’s eyes. She had a tiny potbelly that bulged when she pushed. We fumbled for each other, we grappled; it seemed, while it lasted, there was no struggle ever so sublime and serene.

  But then I was getting bored already, and at any rate was back in contact with Ginger Rogers by now, the post-Hepburn consolation chase. One fading, one active, and one to pursue: always a good system to keep rolling over. The very last time I saw Fay she’d covered the entire bed with gardenia petals, an act more imaginative in the symbolism than the reality, though the smell, admittedly, was exquisite. They are very soft to lie upon, at first. Three days later I was still fishing fragments of mulch from between my buttocks.

  I was a mystery even to myself, Jack. To be perfectly frank, after Kate Hepburn, just as after Billie Dove, I suppose one could say I went off the rails again, sexually speaking. A lot of Ginger Rogers, a little Bette Davis. It was all too much. Katie, Carole, Fay. Even the greatest prize was not enough. Did I say too much then not enough? It was a very long time ago. I pissed everybody off. I remember one time trying to make Hepburn jealous by being very public over on the east coast with Rogers. At the same time I was chasing (and fucking) Olivia de Havilland, bad manners enough from Ginger’s (and Kate’s) points of view. Then I was chasing (but not, alas, fucking) Olivia’s sister, Joan Fontaine. Absolute idiocy, and I wasn’t thinking on my feet, and I did not account for sisterly loyalty. That about ruined it for everyone.

  And none of it actually meant anything; the simple fact was I couldn’t stop myself. I acted on the spur of the moment. Often I didn’t know what I was going to do five minutes before I did it. There’s no explanation for anything. I was driven. Because it was there. Because you either respond to the Instructions or you don’t. And you only live once. It was just who was who at the time. Olivia was riding on Gone With the Wind, Joan heading into Rebecca. It’s not that I actually was a shallow person, Jack, more that existence itself is nothing but a laminate. I went with the flow of my power.

  But I knew that change would find me, eventually, regardless of whether I sought it first. So as a preliminary step I spring-cleaned the Muirfield house in 1939: there was ten years or more of junk there stretching back to Billie Dove, back even to Ella. I packed it all up, all the silverware, all the crystal goblets, sent it all off to the storehouse, 7000 Romaine, where it could gather dust and dream deep inanimate dreams for the decades to come. I wanted to be alone. I wanted some space. Well, I wanted to be relatively alone.

  In a crate in the cellar I found the propeller from the Thomas Morse Scout that I’d crashed in 1928 when I was shooting the stunt for Hell’s Angels. I dragged it clunking up the stairs and laid it in the corner of the dining room, like a display in a museum. Damned thing had stalked me, nearly taken my head off as the plane collected the runway and shattered like glass. And now, eleven years later, what a busy eleven years it had been. How quickly all the women came and went, Jack.

  So I kept that deformed propeller on display. Cary Grant came for dinner one night and sputtered, Howard, what the hell is that?

  My reminder, I told him, that death is only ever an instant away. I didn’t really believe it at the time, but I liked the theatricality.

  For weeks I brooded up at Muirfield, missing them all. Ginger, the lot of them. Ginger especially, who had once told me she’d slept with a lot of men, she knew a lot about them, and that she had insight that I was fundamentally damaged in my relationships with women.

  How many men? I’d interrupted.

  That’s a typical man’s question, she’d replied.

  No, but how many?

  Howard, please don’t sidetrack the conversation.

  No, but it seems a reasonable—

  —four hundred and seventy-nine.

  Now you’re just being facetious.

  My point, if you’ll let me continue—

  Four hundred and seventy-nine. Now that’s some damage.

  She shook her head and sighed. It’s like you’re not really there.

  I’m always here. Look, here I am.

  You don’t open yourself, Howard.

  There was a long silence then, longer than the kind I would ever allow in my movies.

  I’m completely open, I said. I’m just not good at talking about it.

  Then she smiled warmly, or rather, sadly,
and said, Howard.

  Spending time with Ginger had always made me feel good. I respected her bluntness. She didn’t seem as desperate or flighty as most of the others. It seemed that for Ginger sex was like laughter. Like oxygen perhaps: it seemed she was saying, we none of us need bother be very aware of our breathing. As for me, I merely thought the fun would go on forever. At all times back then, with everyone, mind you.

  Yet I hated the uncertainty of Ginger’s affections, and I hated her nonchalance. She acted as if she could take me or leave me! It put a panic in my throat. I always found the best thing in these circumstances—in most circumstances, if I’m truly honest—was to sleep with other women, to lessen the risk of failure by spreading it around.

  What was I to make of her insight? I’m sure we’re all damaged, when you think about it, Jack. I’m sure we’ve all got something we don’t want to feel. Like feelings, for instance! I don’t see how that’s relevant to how we … well, how we brace ourselves and move forward. Because that is what we do. We pull up our socks.

  Yet on Muirfield Drive, sleepless from the amphetamines and endlessly going over everything in my head, what I remembered, time and time again, was that rainy day when the circus all became too much for Ginger, and she ended it. The roads were slick. I had not been concentrating and, coming down La Cienega, had a small car crash, possibly my fault. My head hit the steering wheel. I wound up in the hospital, concussed. Noah was downstairs doing his best to keep the press placated and informed in the waiting room. Then Ginger burst into my hospital room, startling me with the foaming incoherence of her rage. It was most unfair. My head hurt. I told the nurse to leave. Ginger flung the engagement ring at me. Why you, why you, and words to that effect.