God of Speed Read online

  For some reason, twenty years after the deaths of my parents, this was a time when my mind was having trouble and the past was flooding back. I was trying to relax. It was very difficult. A lot of the time my head hurt. There was a sharp pain, a throbbing behind my left eye. I was trying to hold it all together. It helped to be methodical. I was finding that lists were an asset. Whatever I wrote, it would get done. A starlet’s name on a sheet of yellow paper meant a whole lot of planning and preparation. I was in love with Jane Greer. I was cracking up. I was trying to do things in sequence. There is only so much you can get done in one day.

  Arm in arm with Jane at Ocean Park I thought I could feel, enveloping us like that sea mist, tendrils and wisps of contentment. I thought of a future. My mind opened out into sunlight, slants of sunlight in a room filled with baby’s toys, Jane happy, the infant happy, myself beside myself with happiness. All things are possible. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen, tender and delicate and so filled with yearning. Solicitous and compassionate. She would understand everything there is to understand about me. At Ocean Park I hugged her tight. I forgot for a while my fear of women’s greed, my awareness that all understood that with me there came a wealth beyond accountability. We embraced. Her lips grazed my ear. I could grow to love you, she said.

  I needed only to remember back to that night several weeks earlier, when we had first made love in my suite at the Town House Hotel. After we swam in the pool I suggested she shower in my room. Chlorine is an undisputed force for good, but who wants it to cling there longer than necessary? We took the lift to the suite, wrapped in the hotel bathrobes. I passed her some towels. She went into the bathroom. The shower started running. I waited by the window. She emerged, toweled torso and head. I went inside and showered. Our bathrobes crumpled together on the floor like soldiers haphazardly fallen. I came out, towel around my waist, ready, if she were already dressed, to go into my dressing room. But Jane sat awkwardly on the edge of the bed, her towels still around her. Her eyes were gray and empty like a Sphinx. I sat beside her, leaned, put my hand to the back of her neck. Her skin was hot and moist. She pulled the towel from her head. Her damp hair fell free. We kissed. You would need to watch her closely in Out of the Past (with Robert Mitchum) to know from what I tell you here that I have indeed been one of the lucky men in history. You would need to get from that movie an idea of her sublime sadness. Did I say sadness? I must have meant softness. In her lips was all the ineffable essence of welcoming. Perhaps, on the other hand, if you watch that movie it will merely make you resent me. Not you, specifically, Jack. But the world is full of Hughes-related resentments. For Mitchum was play-acting and I, my friend, was not. Her hair fell free and we kissed. We hoisted ourselves more fully onto the bed. The towel had barely covered her thighs and now no longer did. If I tell you I had sucked on Jane Greer’s delicate nipple, if I tell you that at the entrance to her so precise cunt she had smelled, so neutrally, so abstractly, of nothing but shower and heat, and that down there my tongue and my fingers had grazed until I had—within minutes, miraculously, it seemed—drawn from within her a more pungent feast, acidic and metallic, tasting somehow distantly of blood-tinged plum, of honey and licorice, if I tell you she spread her legs so wide and arched her back and that her ten sharp nails dug deliciously into my scalp and that she held me there and ground me there but not for long since I rose up and entered her, outside and inside carrying now in such a flood of urgency only the loosest of meanings, before she had even once touched with her fingers my cock and my balls, could you grasp just how beautiful this was? You could only stumble in the dark. You could bring to bear perhaps your own experience. It would be the most unsatisfactory of analogies.

  There is a wheel of glory always turning, and wherever I am, I am tracing out glorious circles.

  I was really getting into some troublesome loops, the epoch of Jane and the pier in the mist. I could have grown to love her, too. But I was cracking up around this time. I have the feeling I keep making that point. My thoughts were getting very cluttered. The parts of me that acted were being ordered by the parts of me that directed to do the things that had to get done. There was so much cleaning. There were things that could assail you. Good grief, when I think now of all those moist wet vaginas and what they harbored. How did I ever make it through? Quite clearly I was predestined for the quest. On the other hand, in the midst of Greer’s great generosity, clearly there was absolutely nothing to worry about. Even the clap (though I didn’t expect it, and nor did I get it, from this virginal nineteen-year-old) would have been merely another event in the sequence of events that defined the before, during and after of our days. At least the goddamned days moved on! Otherwise you could be caught there forever: washing your hands, did I get it right, washing your hands, did I get it right, washing your hands, did I get it right, is it gone is it gone is it gone is it gone is it gone. Is it gone now?

  BAY OF PLENTY

  THE SEQUENCE BEING, in 1945 I went a little off kilter. I thought everyone was out to get me; now I realize, I admit it, I can see it more clearly, that probably only half of them were. In any case it pays to be careful, to be clean. And I was very, very tired. It had been a busy war. I had military contracts to fulfill. I had delivery dates. It is not pleasant to have the government bearing down on you. Because everything had to be perfect. So they had to wait. Sure, the war was ending, that specific one, but war was eternal, and there was in fact more money in it cold. But Dr. Verne Mason diagnosed exhaustion. He said, Stop and take a vacation or your body will do it without you. I thought he had a point, that I should get away for a week or so. To slow down the nervous energy. Surely that’s every citizen’s right in a democracy.

  So I called up Joe Petrali, one of my pilots. He prepared the plane.

  Plot me a route to Shreveport, I said. Because in 1912 it had been a magical town, the grand magnolias and the woodbine blooming, the softness of the air, the whistles and the sirens of the Red River steamboats, the night sky pulsing huge and crimson from the gas-lake fires. And Father had taken me with him there on business, a special treat, we were a team, the sun was shining, the century was young, I was six years old. So three decades later I was hoping, I was clenching my jaw with the yearning, that the Shreveport I had known, or some fragment of it, was still there. Because nothing is destroyed or lost. Only the forms of the clusters of atoms change. And all that is needed is patience.

  I went up with Petrali. He asked no questions, a good and loyal man.

  I had tens of thousands of dollars in my suitcase, and shirts and tennis sneakers and very little else. I thought I might go away for a week, but a great sadness was brewing and, behind it, the notion that I might leave my entire life behind, forever.

  The decisions we make in a trough.

  We were high over the wilds of south Texas, not far from Houston. I looked down over that pale landscape, where once I had been small. It had been a very long time, life so far I mean. I could feel it running through my hands. There was so much anxiety. The shoulders were so tight. Suddenly I slumped in my seat. I do not know what came over me. We might as well have been free-falling up there, adrift on the Texas winds. Below us were dinosaurs turning to tar in the swamps. The eons passed. The ice caps came and went. There were owls so asleep you could die of old age in their dreams. With a great sob I let go of the controls and buried my head in my hands. The plane lurched wildly. Petrali sat to attention, took his own controls and wrestled the plane back on course. It was difficult to cry in front of another man. But I was beyond protocol. I was weeping until my neck muscles burned and my lungs were a single lost howl.

  Petrali was a good, kind man, who never said a word. I sat immobile in that cockpit, my body weightless, my eyes washed clean from the crying, confused by everything, by the instrument panel, by the clouds, all the way to Louisiana.

  At last, in the distance, were the vast blue-black bayou cloud formations, pitted with lightning. We fought malevole
nt thundershowers as we landed near dark. The tarmac steamed with dusk heat. I trundled off the plane, heavy with, I’m not certain. Heavy with despair, or exhaustion, or relief, I could not get the coordinates right.

  At the Jefferson Hotel in Shreveport I stretched out in a star shape on the bed. My limbs were still. Life was suddenly plentiful. I fell into a deep sleep from which I woke some hours later. Petrali had gone to a movie, left a note.

  Alone in that hotel room I could finally take stock. Only Petrali knew where I was. I was truly free. The peasants slept by haystacks in the framed print on the wall.

  I rapidly drank a glass of water.

  I tested the bounce of the bed. Its plainness was magnificent.

  These infinite riches in a little room. It seemed, that pulsing Shreveport night, that I awoke from my staleness, into perfume, into colors and flavors. In my waking sleep, in my infinite alertness, God existed in perfect solitude. I was at this point as yet uncreated. And still He called out to me, Am I not your Lord?

  I said, Yes, I bear witness to it.

  I saw myself distantly, dwelling there already, in glorious isolation on some faraway beach.

  In the morning I said to Petrali, You’ll be hearing from me. I took a Greyhound bus to Florida. I disappeared for three months. I had military contracts to fulfill. I had delivery dates. It was all running far behind. None of it mattered. I knew I had to actually not care, not just pretend to not care.

  The white highways of Florida unfolded. I was sensing some palm at the end of my mind; I would know it when I got there, to the place where I could rest in the shade of that tree. My own reflection in the Greyhound window was drenched in light as the wooden churches and roadside diners flickered past.

  *

  I became the wanderer. Not Howard Hughes, but a simple man, with modest needs. I rented a beachfront cottage near Fort Lauderdale, three months’ cash up front. I wandered all day, for days, just the wind and the seabirds and the tussocky dunes and the noise of the waves. My skin browned. My hair was stiff with salt. I grew a beard. The ocean was a desert; for ninety days I fasted there. I lived on the sun, and on oranges and Hershey bars. I burned almost all my clothes one night in a bonfire on the beach. I understood simplicity at last. I slept eleven hours at a stretch, dreamlessly and still. I spoke to no one for days on end. A family said Good afternoon. Good afternoon, I nodded back, my pockets full of seashells. But one night I dreamed of a gold-feathered bird.

  And in the morning I felt a stirring, at last, in my cock. I had found by the ocean God without and God within, but now the Appendage God was getting restless. He snapped my mind back into place. I woke as if from a holy dream. As if from a stillness in the desert. There were women! There were all those juicy girls. Where had I been? It was June by now, June ’45, debutante season in New York. And Faith was in Los Angeles. And Ava, too. There were others, their names escape me right now, but that is beside the point. Oh all the girls so wanted to be naked, Jack. I had to get back, and fast, to the world of that nakedness. But I felt very replenished by Florida. And gave it thanks.

  DEBS

  BACK IN NEW York in June ’45 I started sleeping with the debutantes, like Brenda Frazier and Gloria Vanderbilt. Sometimes it was a toss-up between the debs and the starlets. But the debutantes were better in bed, and besides, they bought their own flowers. I fucked Gloria Vanderbilt in the cockpit at twelve thousand feet. Then her aunt, her guardian, Gloria Vanderbilt Whitney, old society indeed, called me and tried to get me to engage in a “conversation”. Behind everything she said, I could hear it, I could feel it, she was sneering at the oil money. The old bag squawked at me, You are twenty-five years older than Gloria and your seeing her is scandalous and do you have the intention of marrying her and if so could you make that intention formally known?

  Twenty, I said.

  What’s that?

  I’m twenty years older.

  What a telephone call.

  Her niece had a cunt like a peach! Glorious Gloria, those little half-moans and sighs.

  But could I even be bothered to lie?

  THE ANSWERING ECHO

  OH YES. BOOM. The war ended.

  It was effortless. And then, after a while, it wasn’t anymore. Perhaps if the Mormons had been around on July 7, 1946, the day I crashed the XF-11—my exquisite reconnaissance prototype, a Defense contract I was testing—well, perhaps things might have turned out differently. If I’d been writing memos, instructions, which they’d then been executing, there would have been less for me to concentrate on. I could have shared the burden of responsibility around among the minions. I could have delegated, Jack. That’s what I do these days, it frees me up in here. But the Mormons didn’t arrive until a decade after all this disaster. And not a moment too soon.

  I still to this day don’t know what went wrong on July 7, 1946. I was ironing out the glitches, the plane had minor problems, I was pushing its limits for the army tests, and maybe I was a little sleep-deprived. It was the day after I’d met Jean Peters—silly Jean, who much later would become my second and final wife. (I almost said fatal—they are similar words, don’t you think?) It was the first glorious summer after the war had ended. I noticed, at those heady summer parties, love abuzz in the air, in the gentle murmurs of conversations, in the nervous giggling of starlets everywhere.

  And Jean Peters was radiant. The Fourth of July parties stretched into the Fifth of July, then the Sixth. Everybody was at Jimmy Cagney’s place at Newport Beach, from which yachts were ferrying guests across to Santa Catalina Island. Jean Peters, a pretty slip of a thing, was all over Audie Murphy—war hero groomed for a film career, who certainly couldn’t act but apparently could fight. I knew, looking at her (she glanced at me briefly, she knew who I was in that room, she positioned herself ), that I would have her eventually.

  I offered to fly some of the guests over, meaning Jean and whoever else was necessary to make it all look less calculated. Tactically speaking, this meant Audie Murphy, too, but I got him placed up the back of the plane and managed (Would you like to know how an airplane works?) to have little Jeannie seated beside me, admiring all those shiny controls, pretending she wasn’t really sitting beside the richest, most eligible bachelor in the country, albeit a man twice her age.

  I didn’t drink; the energy that kept me awake and going at parties like this was other people’s wildness, the smell of sex, the frenzy of connectedness, or at least yearning for such. Parties. They took away my loneliness. I always felt cut off from the other humans. I wanted autonomy, but of course I hated all that distance. There is no way around these kinds of dilemmas. The whole thing is overshadowed anyway by the presence of death. The most beautiful girl of them all, one day she’ll be old and dry. A while later she’ll be dust. Even old Howard is no exception. In fact, it’s possible that parties, indeed gatherings of any kind, only add to the sum of the world’s loneliness.

  But on Santa Catalina I watched the dancing, and I chatted here and there, and I put up with the exquisitely boring Audie Murphy and even pretended to sincerely offer him advice (How To Make It In Hollywood), all the while merely viewing him as an obstacle to the acquiring of Jean Peters, that wholesome Ohio girl so ripe for the plucking. Perhaps I slept an hour or two in a bunk on Jimmy Cagney’s yacht; at any rate I lay down, and morning came. I didn’t pay enough attention to the importance of that test flight.

  I flew Jean and Audie and Johnny Meyer back to Hughes Aircraft at Culver City. They disembarked and set themselves up on viewing chairs on the edge of the tarmac. Out from the hangar came the beautiful XF-11, sixty-five feet long, wingspan 101 feet, 3000 horsepower engines, a shining bolt of propulsion. I had to prove it could fly photosurveillance runs from sufficient height and at sufficient speed to outmaneuver enemy ground-to-air action. I had to push that little flyer. And I had to impress this brand-new bony-armed girl.

  I took the plane through its paces, from Culver City, looping out over Venice Beach, around through Bev
erly Hills and back to Culver City. There is not a lot of difference between the front projection techniques I developed in my earliest films (in Wings, for example, or Hell’s Angels) and the view through the windshield of the XF-11. A sense of the unreal, a break with the open perspectives of sight. A screen. I’m talking not just of the rush of the wind, but of speed itself. I’ve flown in open biplanes. But that’s entirely different. In an open cockpit what becomes apparent is an immediate relationship with the massive machineries of flight: an immersion in engine and wind. The great noise of a laborious metallic effort to break the bonds of gravity and land. In the XF-11, surrounded by exquisite technology and a plexiglass curve, you can look at the screen and enjoy the movie.

  Several circuits later all seemed well. Everything was smooth at five thousand feet. Then the right wing suddenly tilted as if I were no longer in air but held in place in a shuddering aspic, the plane gone violent, the rivets jarring loose. I fought the joystick. It fought back. The XF banked into a spiral. For a moment I thought the wing had gone. I stood and craned; it was still there. I increased power to the right engine, thinking this would surge us out of the problem; but the spiral merely tightened, steepened and sped up. I didn’t panic. Panic is a luxury. I reduced the power. I could control direction, minimally, but not the hurtling descent. Beneath me the city blurred by, but bigger and closer. I was losing altitude rapidly: two thousand five hundred feet over Washington Boulevard; two thousand feet at Venice; a thousand over Pico; then Wilshire; five hundred feet over Santa Monica Boulevard. I was trying to pull a curve out of doom and the engines were making a terrible racket. Up ahead, the Los Angeles Country Club seemed the landing zone of choice, my mind computing that trees were a problem but far less so than these houses looming closer.