CAR CRASH
__________________
"The ultimate concept car
will move so fast, even
at rest, as to be invisible."
—J. G. Ballard, Crash
It was usually so fast—so exquisitely invisible. Most people didn’t even see it coming. Except men like Coughenour & me. He planned it out—and got off on it. Traffic cameras above the highways & freeways—sometimes caught the action. The act of the Crash itself tho—the marriage of blood & steel. That action event was itself most of the time—simply unbelievably too fast for the human eye. So fast that it was invisible. Head-on collisions were that way—both speeding, fast-moving cars crashing into each other. Other head-on collisions—between heavy moving metal & vast, immobile concrete pillars of freeway overpasses. Such smash-up ecstasies—well, they simply waited patiently for it to happen. The melancholy conjunction formed—by a crushed car in slow motion. Fusing with the serene majesty of cement sculpture. Suddenly stopped still—and frozen in time & space by the cruel concrete gods.
“For Vaughan the car-crash
and his own sexuality had
made their final marriage.”
—J. G. Ballard, Crash
The expressions & postures of the victims. A young male crash victim like Coughenour—who luckily managed to smash himself into an ascending ramp of an airport flyover. The flight paths of the airliners—lifting from the distant runways of the airport. The handsome young man was carefully being steered from his wrecked Corvette—by an olive-skinned man in the midnight-blue uniform of an Indian airline pilot. A thin stream of urine was trickling involuntarily down between his legs—running down onto the debris-filled roadway. The ambulance attendant holding the handsome young man’s shoulders reassuringly.
Standing beside the wrecked cars—I watched his puddle forming behind him on the oil-stained pavement of the crash scene. In the faint mauve fading light of the evening—rainbows began circling in the gasoline puddles around his thick, athletic ankles. He turned and stared at his wrecked, destroyed Corvette sports car. Then he turned & glared at me—a peculiar grimace on his bruised face. A strange clear confusion—between concern & hostility. Even hate. I felt his rage zero in on me—I could feel his distinct desire to strangle me to death within the sacred realm of the yellow-tape.
I found myself getting more & more turned on—by the unusual junction of his thighs. They were spread apart—somehow opening up to me in a deformed inviting way. Or maybe it was just that his legs—were growing faint from loss of blood. If he couldn’t control his pee—what else couldn’t he control? Perhaps he needed to ooze—something else outta him. I wanted to go over & console him for his loss—losing that exquisitely beautiful sports car he was so proud of & in love with.
I wanted to get down on my trembling, bruised knees—right there on the hot oil-stained freeway bridge. It wasn’t the piss dribbling down his left leg—that turned me on. Nor was it the obvious young male hostility—of a twenty year old athletic stud jock that excited me. It was more like the unconscious gesture of his groin & his ugly twisted face—caught up in the extremes of pain & violence so invitingly.
"The crushed body of the
sportscar had turned him
into a being of free and
perverse sexuality,
releasing within its dying
chromium and leaking
engine-parts, all the
deviant possibilities
of his sex."
—J. G. Ballard, Crash
Like the exaggerated pirouette of a nude Nijinsky—caught suddenly erect in his dressing room. With the lips of a mentally defective girl (like me)—going down on him performing the Autopsy on his big boner. How awkward he seemed—this young man. All his masculine grace & stealthy sexy composure lost—revealing the true sexy vulnerability of a young male crash victim in heat.
Caught up & overwhelmed by the sexual violence & loss within such a horrendous performance. Caught up & ritualized—like a mere puppet in an emergency case little scenario. With the ambulance, red flashing lights, twisted metal & gawking audience standing in the broken glass everywhere. And in the middle of it—this lovely young Adonis dazed & simply sprawling there. Piss running down his leg—throwing daggers & the evil eye at me.
And look—what’s that, I said to myself. Surely it’s not an erection—going down the side of his stained trousers? Lounging in the hidden zone—of his sexy loins down there? I turned away from him—I didn’t want him to see my face. My knees grew weak—I felt once again the slow exquisite ache flowing down thru me. A premature ejaculation—a nocturnal emission in broad daylight. The cumly culmination of what Coughenour said would happen—the amazing long drawn-out Climax of the Crash. Taking control of me—rewarding me for the highway finesse of his femme fatale smash-up skill.
I could hear them—the Angels & Devils of Automobile Heaven & Hell. Hallelujah!!! They sang. The lovely smell of Gasoline—and Semen!!! The pungent, turgid Male Beauty of it all—Twisted Steel & Sick Technology!!!
"At the logic of fashion,
such once-popular perversions
as sodomy will become derided
__________________
"The ultimate concept car
will move so fast, even
at rest, as to be invisible."
—J. G. Ballard, Crash
It was usually so fast—so exquisitely invisible. Most people didn’t even see it coming. Except men like Coughenour & me. He planned it out—and got off on it. Traffic cameras above the highways & freeways—sometimes caught the action. The act of the Crash itself tho—the marriage of blood & steel. That action event was itself most of the time—simply unbelievably too fast for the human eye. So fast that it was invisible. Head-on collisions were that way—both speeding, fast-moving cars crashing into each other. Other head-on collisions—between heavy moving metal & vast, immobile concrete pillars of freeway overpasses. Such smash-up ecstasies—well, they simply waited patiently for it to happen. The melancholy conjunction formed—by a crushed car in slow motion. Fusing with the serene majesty of cement sculpture. Suddenly stopped still—and frozen in time & space by the cruel concrete gods.
“For Vaughan the car-crash
and his own sexuality had
made their final marriage.”
—J. G. Ballard, Crash
The expressions & postures of the victims. A young male crash victim like Coughenour—who luckily managed to smash himself into an ascending ramp of an airport flyover. The flight paths of the airliners—lifting from the distant runways of the airport. The handsome young man was carefully being steered from his wrecked Corvette—by an olive-skinned man in the midnight-blue uniform of an Indian airline pilot. A thin stream of urine was trickling involuntarily down between his legs—running down onto the debris-filled roadway. The ambulance attendant holding the handsome young man’s shoulders reassuringly.
Standing beside the wrecked cars—I watched his puddle forming behind him on the oil-stained pavement of the crash scene. In the faint mauve fading light of the evening—rainbows began circling in the gasoline puddles around his thick, athletic ankles. He turned and stared at his wrecked, destroyed Corvette sports car. Then he turned & glared at me—a peculiar grimace on his bruised face. A strange clear confusion—between concern & hostility. Even hate. I felt his rage zero in on me—I could feel his distinct desire to strangle me to death within the sacred realm of the yellow-tape.
I found myself getting more & more turned on—by the unusual junction of his thighs. They were spread apart—somehow opening up to me in a deformed inviting way. Or maybe it was just that his legs—were growing faint from loss of blood. If he couldn’t control his pee—what else couldn’t he control? Perhaps he needed to ooze—something else outta him. I wanted to go over & console him for his loss—losing that exquisitely beautiful sports car he was so proud of & in love with.
I wanted to get down on my trembling, bruised knees—right there on the hot oil-stained freeway bridge. It wasn’t the piss dribbling down his left leg—that turned me on. Nor was it the obvious young male hostility—of a twenty year old athletic stud jock that excited me. It was more like the unconscious gesture of his groin & his ugly twisted face—caught up in the extremes of pain & violence so invitingly.
"The crushed body of the
sportscar had turned him
into a being of free and
perverse sexuality,
releasing within its dying
chromium and leaking
engine-parts, all the
deviant possibilities
of his sex."
—J. G. Ballard, Crash
Like the exaggerated pirouette of a nude Nijinsky—caught suddenly erect in his dressing room. With the lips of a mentally defective girl (like me)—going down on him performing the Autopsy on his big boner. How awkward he seemed—this young man. All his masculine grace & stealthy sexy composure lost—revealing the true sexy vulnerability of a young male crash victim in heat.
Caught up & overwhelmed by the sexual violence & loss within such a horrendous performance. Caught up & ritualized—like a mere puppet in an emergency case little scenario. With the ambulance, red flashing lights, twisted metal & gawking audience standing in the broken glass everywhere. And in the middle of it—this lovely young Adonis dazed & simply sprawling there. Piss running down his leg—throwing daggers & the evil eye at me.
And look—what’s that, I said to myself. Surely it’s not an erection—going down the side of his stained trousers? Lounging in the hidden zone—of his sexy loins down there? I turned away from him—I didn’t want him to see my face. My knees grew weak—I felt once again the slow exquisite ache flowing down thru me. A premature ejaculation—a nocturnal emission in broad daylight. The cumly culmination of what Coughenour said would happen—the amazing long drawn-out Climax of the Crash. Taking control of me—rewarding me for the highway finesse of his femme fatale smash-up skill.
I could hear them—the Angels & Devils of Automobile Heaven & Hell. Hallelujah!!! They sang. The lovely smell of Gasoline—and Semen!!! The pungent, turgid Male Beauty of it all—Twisted Steel & Sick Technology!!!
"At the logic of fashion,
such once-popular perversions
as sodomy will become derided
clichés, as amusing as pottery ducks
on suburban walls."
—J. G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibit
How can I describe it? For a moment I felt like we were the principal actors—at the climax of some grim melodrama in an unrehearsed theatre of sports car technology. He phoned me up weeks earlier—told me I’d never get the insurance money from the accident.
He didn’t care about his crushed body—or even his Corvette destroyed in the collision. That image of us standing there at the scene of the crime—with hundreds of drivers waiting in line behind the wreck with their headlights blazing. I couldn’t get him outta my head—the distraught young jock pissing down the side of his leg. I had to be around him at the end—to get to know the true inner secret of his hatred for me.
To get my eyes on the anger, the sense of betrayal, the insolence of his knowing me deep-down inside himself—that I was indeed the perp. The perp who had perpetuated the sick, psychopathic crime against him—against him & his beloved, sleek Corvette. There on the cold cynical cement overpass—leading down into the busy airport where he was supposed to pick up his girlfriend back home from New York.
I bribed my way into his apartment—with a check I knew would bounce. I wanted to know if his greed—would overcome his hatred of me. At least as long as it took to cash it—while I had the whole weekend to seduce him. And get to know him better—better than he ever wanted to be known.
He was even more awkward in bed—than he was after the fuckin’ crash. His angular movements—hardly seemed streamlined in any way. How can you fuck up an orgasm—even with a stupid jock empty of any brains?
Repeating the climax I felt after the accident—wanting to complete the circle of love & revenge that I started. When I swerved into the kid’s Corvette—slicing thru that narrow angle, splitting the plastic fender deeper & deeper, until he sideswiped the culvert & steel railing of the bridge. Carefully steering my Cadillac—making sure the Corvette would never ever be drivable again.
It was reassuring to me—the strength of his awkward male beauty. How he let me have it all—down to the last spastic dribble and twisted, sprained neck over the edge of the bed. A thin stream of semen—dripping down the same muscular leg that I admired so much that evening of the Crash. I hugged him then—reassuring him that the $10,000 check would perhaps make up for my homicidal homo stupidity.
Tasting him all the way back to my condo in the Bronx—feeling the karmic completion of the climax’s circle all the way back home. The delicate ecstasy of it—the young male crash victim’s hesitant yet humpy ejaculation.
“Do we see, in the car-crash,
the portents of a nightmare
marriage between technology,
and our own sexuality? … Is
there some deviant logic
unfolding here, more powerful
than that provided by reason?”
—J. G. Ballard
I couldn’t help it—once I was the first to reach the site of a car crash one Xmas night next to a louche liquor store. The young stud was sitting there—unsteadily in the crushed front seat of his parent’s station-wagon. Fragments of the tinted windshield—were glued to his forehead like emerald-green jewels.
As the ambulances (more than one) approached—their emergency red swirling red lights & insane sirens were unnaturally exciting me to no end. I got to him before they did—he was still conscious and lying there with his legs spread apart. Such a vulnerable angel of young male despair—with a huge boner going spaz down there.
I barely had time to slip my hand—down past his belt into his shorts. I searched desperately like a distraught wife losing her beloved husband—like Helen of Troy weaving my fingers deep into the pubes of Paris dying in my arms.
He stared at me—without speaking. I watched the blood—irrigate his white T-shirt. Turning it from crisp clean white—to the last crimson blush of his own negligent homicide. I held his face carefully in my hands—whispering sweet nothings in his ear. Together we helped lift him to the ambulance—the emergency personnel & me. He didn't make it to the hospital.
“Through Vaughan I discovered
the true significance of the crash,
the meaning of whiplash injuries
and roll-over, the ecstasies of
head-on collisions.”
It’s all Coughenour’s fault—he’s the one that sucked me into the World of Wounds. I’m sure he lied to me—surely all his obsessions with the mysterious eroticism of wounds & the perverse logic of his vast Crash experience was just flimsy Pulp Fiction. And yet when he showed me the pics of blood-soaked instrument panels, the seatbelts smeared with piss & shit, the sun-visors lined with brains... He was a connoisseur of Crash Victim memorabilia—stuff he couldn’t drag home he took a cellphone pic of.
The complex metallic geometries—of bent dented fenders. The unexpected pleasures of crushed radiator grills—leaving perfect black & blue tattoos on the chests & stomachs of impact victims. The grotesque of a short, stubby sports car gear shaft—forced deep into the crotch of a delirious driver. As if it were some weird act—of human-car intercourse.
Or the intimate inches it takes—to stuff a shiny piece of chrome bumper down a crash victim’s throat in an act of Cadillac fellatio. After that first Cadillac crash—I wasn’t timid any longer. In my idle moments between accidents—imaginary car crash deaths filled my mind. Trying to exhaust myself—I devised a shocking X-rated almanac of car crash photos & insane highway homicide wounds. The cars were out to get humans.
Elderly gentlemen—their gasping, wheezing lungs punctured by door handles, the chests of bankers & businessmen impaled by steering-columns, the cheeks of handsome, blushing young high school athletes pierced by the hot cigarette lighters glowing red-hot outta crushed dashboard panels.
For me these horrible automobile wounds got me off more intensely and even better than the real thing. They were for me the keys to a new Car Crash sexuality born from a perverse Trick or Treat technology.
“A car crash harnesses elements
of eroticism, aggression, desire,
speed, drama, kinesthetic factors,
the stylizing of motion, consumer
goods, status — all these in one
event. I myself see the car crash
as a tremendous sexual event
really: a liberation of human
and machine libido (if there is
such a thing)."
—J. G. Ballard, Crash
Looking back on Coughenour, drowning in his own blood under the police spot-lights—I begin to remember countless other not-so-pretty disasters he described to me, as we cruised together along the streets and seedy back alleys of the city.
There was that Argentine ambassadorial limousine he crashed into, the jack-knifing butane tankers exploding in the lonely night, the taxis filled with celebrating New Year’s drunks colliding head-on below the bright shiny marquees of Cineplexes stuffed in lonely ghost malls in the suburbs.
There were the weird, karmic chance meetings of alienated brothers & sisters on collision courses—out in the lonely back roads of some dumpy town going to the same funeral. Suddenly meeting in death’s final heavy metal embrace—catching a brief flash of their dying long lost hated relatives.
Such unwanted deadly incest making explicitly apparent—the hemorrhaging, flowering possibilities of aluminized guilt & last-minute lust still available in that last heartbeat of shame & bad seed love of the American dream.
“Everything is becoming
science fiction. From
the margins of an
almost invisible literature
has sprung the intact
reality of the 20th century."
—J. G. Ballard
Coughenour—he’d seen it all. He knew what everybody had done that last summer of decadence & desire. Because he’d rehearsed it—and done it a thousand times before. He’d become an intimate Mickey Spillane detective of death—a Philippe Marlowe private dick of massive rear-end collisions between sworn hoodlum enemies and gang members.
He’d become a Mike Hammer private eye voyeur—investigating hate-deaths celebrated in the burning wreckages of gangsters and nice people down in the wayside ditches. He visualized sick, arcane, specialized crashes—of escaping criminals driving off cliffs. Off-duty motel receptionists—pinned at their reception desks by tractor-trailers smashing thru the front windows late at a Saturday night.
Lovers in Snake Pit drive-ins & lonely couples in Lover’s Lanes—caught unawares by insane murderers with hooks for right arms.
He thought of the famous Hollywood director F. W. Murnau—driving off a cliff into the Pacific Ocean. While giving his young cute teenage Philippino chauffeur—a blowjob in their Packard convertible.
Honeymoon couples, gay couples, lover’s lane couples, drive-in couples—they all would get it in the end. He told me about the crashes of hair stylists & interior decorators—the way they screamed better than any of the fuckin’ straights.
He regaled me with the demises & denouements—of promiscuous Beltway lobbyists and Wall Street ponzi artists
“Sooner or later,
everything turns
into television."
—J. G. Ballard
I think back on the other crashes—we visualized late at night. Especially the Netflix horror flicks—the crashes of the wounded, the maimed and the dearly beloved distraught. The seemingly fitting & justified crashes of whacko psychopaths—implausible accidents carried out in cold blood without venom or self-disgust.
Vicious multiple car crashes & collisions—contrived in stolen cars on freeways glutted with tired office workers. The absurd crashes of desperate suburban housewives—along with their kept boy gardeners & lawn boys. Running away from their mean husbands—one last fuckin’ time.
The neurasthenic faculty club wives—returning from their VD clinics. Crashing into parked cars—in the dormitory parking lots. The crashes of overly excited schizophrenics colliding head-on—with stalled ice-cream trucks in suburban abandoned streets.
Manic-depressives crushed—while making illegal U-turns on freeway entrances. Luckless paranoids—driving full speed to Las Vegas. Ending up at the ends—of cul-de-sac brick walls flatter than pancakes.
Sadistic emergency room nurses—decapitated in back alley accidents with garbage trucks gone amok. Lesbian supermarket manageresses—crushed in their midget cars. By Humvies driven by stoical eyed middle-aged fat homophobic midgets—suffering from PTSD & ADHD problems from the war.
"I suspect that many
of the great cultural
shifts that prepare
the way for political
change are largely
aesthetic" —J. G. Ballard
Long before Coughenour died—I began to think about the Aesthetics of my own Crash Dive into the Death Highway rush-hour or a collision inThanatos Alley or wherever the Heavy Metal petal hits the floor. What style would I kick the proverbial bucket with—the usual psychopathic, neurasthenic, homicidal criminal way?
Or would it be one of those classy Bad & Beautiful Movie Star crashes—like James Dean or Albert Camus or Jayne Mansfield? Or maybe one of those louche political farewell smash-ups—like a dictator down in the bunker with his mistress or getting it by my fellow senators like some luckless Caesar or would it be a slow Alzheimer fade-out like Ronnie Reagan?
In my mind’s eye—I saw the final Automobile Apocalypse coming down & taking care of all the lovely crummy details for me. I’d hire a luxurious long-stretch limousine—for my boring final American Terminal Car Crash Show. One Last Dying Head-On Simultaneous Car Show and Car Disaster—with millions of vehicles crashing together in a terminal Rush Hour of the Gods Smash-Up with lots of bloody spurting loins & green engine coolant…
on suburban walls."
—J. G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibit
How can I describe it? For a moment I felt like we were the principal actors—at the climax of some grim melodrama in an unrehearsed theatre of sports car technology. He phoned me up weeks earlier—told me I’d never get the insurance money from the accident.
He didn’t care about his crushed body—or even his Corvette destroyed in the collision. That image of us standing there at the scene of the crime—with hundreds of drivers waiting in line behind the wreck with their headlights blazing. I couldn’t get him outta my head—the distraught young jock pissing down the side of his leg. I had to be around him at the end—to get to know the true inner secret of his hatred for me.
To get my eyes on the anger, the sense of betrayal, the insolence of his knowing me deep-down inside himself—that I was indeed the perp. The perp who had perpetuated the sick, psychopathic crime against him—against him & his beloved, sleek Corvette. There on the cold cynical cement overpass—leading down into the busy airport where he was supposed to pick up his girlfriend back home from New York.
I bribed my way into his apartment—with a check I knew would bounce. I wanted to know if his greed—would overcome his hatred of me. At least as long as it took to cash it—while I had the whole weekend to seduce him. And get to know him better—better than he ever wanted to be known.
He was even more awkward in bed—than he was after the fuckin’ crash. His angular movements—hardly seemed streamlined in any way. How can you fuck up an orgasm—even with a stupid jock empty of any brains?
Repeating the climax I felt after the accident—wanting to complete the circle of love & revenge that I started. When I swerved into the kid’s Corvette—slicing thru that narrow angle, splitting the plastic fender deeper & deeper, until he sideswiped the culvert & steel railing of the bridge. Carefully steering my Cadillac—making sure the Corvette would never ever be drivable again.
It was reassuring to me—the strength of his awkward male beauty. How he let me have it all—down to the last spastic dribble and twisted, sprained neck over the edge of the bed. A thin stream of semen—dripping down the same muscular leg that I admired so much that evening of the Crash. I hugged him then—reassuring him that the $10,000 check would perhaps make up for my homicidal homo stupidity.
Tasting him all the way back to my condo in the Bronx—feeling the karmic completion of the climax’s circle all the way back home. The delicate ecstasy of it—the young male crash victim’s hesitant yet humpy ejaculation.
“Do we see, in the car-crash,
the portents of a nightmare
marriage between technology,
and our own sexuality? … Is
there some deviant logic
unfolding here, more powerful
than that provided by reason?”
—J. G. Ballard
I couldn’t help it—once I was the first to reach the site of a car crash one Xmas night next to a louche liquor store. The young stud was sitting there—unsteadily in the crushed front seat of his parent’s station-wagon. Fragments of the tinted windshield—were glued to his forehead like emerald-green jewels.
As the ambulances (more than one) approached—their emergency red swirling red lights & insane sirens were unnaturally exciting me to no end. I got to him before they did—he was still conscious and lying there with his legs spread apart. Such a vulnerable angel of young male despair—with a huge boner going spaz down there.
I barely had time to slip my hand—down past his belt into his shorts. I searched desperately like a distraught wife losing her beloved husband—like Helen of Troy weaving my fingers deep into the pubes of Paris dying in my arms.
He stared at me—without speaking. I watched the blood—irrigate his white T-shirt. Turning it from crisp clean white—to the last crimson blush of his own negligent homicide. I held his face carefully in my hands—whispering sweet nothings in his ear. Together we helped lift him to the ambulance—the emergency personnel & me. He didn't make it to the hospital.
“Through Vaughan I discovered
the true significance of the crash,
the meaning of whiplash injuries
and roll-over, the ecstasies of
head-on collisions.”
It’s all Coughenour’s fault—he’s the one that sucked me into the World of Wounds. I’m sure he lied to me—surely all his obsessions with the mysterious eroticism of wounds & the perverse logic of his vast Crash experience was just flimsy Pulp Fiction. And yet when he showed me the pics of blood-soaked instrument panels, the seatbelts smeared with piss & shit, the sun-visors lined with brains... He was a connoisseur of Crash Victim memorabilia—stuff he couldn’t drag home he took a cellphone pic of.
The complex metallic geometries—of bent dented fenders. The unexpected pleasures of crushed radiator grills—leaving perfect black & blue tattoos on the chests & stomachs of impact victims. The grotesque of a short, stubby sports car gear shaft—forced deep into the crotch of a delirious driver. As if it were some weird act—of human-car intercourse.
Or the intimate inches it takes—to stuff a shiny piece of chrome bumper down a crash victim’s throat in an act of Cadillac fellatio. After that first Cadillac crash—I wasn’t timid any longer. In my idle moments between accidents—imaginary car crash deaths filled my mind. Trying to exhaust myself—I devised a shocking X-rated almanac of car crash photos & insane highway homicide wounds. The cars were out to get humans.
Elderly gentlemen—their gasping, wheezing lungs punctured by door handles, the chests of bankers & businessmen impaled by steering-columns, the cheeks of handsome, blushing young high school athletes pierced by the hot cigarette lighters glowing red-hot outta crushed dashboard panels.
For me these horrible automobile wounds got me off more intensely and even better than the real thing. They were for me the keys to a new Car Crash sexuality born from a perverse Trick or Treat technology.
“A car crash harnesses elements
of eroticism, aggression, desire,
speed, drama, kinesthetic factors,
the stylizing of motion, consumer
goods, status — all these in one
event. I myself see the car crash
as a tremendous sexual event
really: a liberation of human
and machine libido (if there is
such a thing)."
—J. G. Ballard, Crash
Looking back on Coughenour, drowning in his own blood under the police spot-lights—I begin to remember countless other not-so-pretty disasters he described to me, as we cruised together along the streets and seedy back alleys of the city.
There was that Argentine ambassadorial limousine he crashed into, the jack-knifing butane tankers exploding in the lonely night, the taxis filled with celebrating New Year’s drunks colliding head-on below the bright shiny marquees of Cineplexes stuffed in lonely ghost malls in the suburbs.
There were the weird, karmic chance meetings of alienated brothers & sisters on collision courses—out in the lonely back roads of some dumpy town going to the same funeral. Suddenly meeting in death’s final heavy metal embrace—catching a brief flash of their dying long lost hated relatives.
Such unwanted deadly incest making explicitly apparent—the hemorrhaging, flowering possibilities of aluminized guilt & last-minute lust still available in that last heartbeat of shame & bad seed love of the American dream.
“Everything is becoming
science fiction. From
the margins of an
almost invisible literature
has sprung the intact
reality of the 20th century."
—J. G. Ballard
Coughenour—he’d seen it all. He knew what everybody had done that last summer of decadence & desire. Because he’d rehearsed it—and done it a thousand times before. He’d become an intimate Mickey Spillane detective of death—a Philippe Marlowe private dick of massive rear-end collisions between sworn hoodlum enemies and gang members.
He’d become a Mike Hammer private eye voyeur—investigating hate-deaths celebrated in the burning wreckages of gangsters and nice people down in the wayside ditches. He visualized sick, arcane, specialized crashes—of escaping criminals driving off cliffs. Off-duty motel receptionists—pinned at their reception desks by tractor-trailers smashing thru the front windows late at a Saturday night.
Lovers in Snake Pit drive-ins & lonely couples in Lover’s Lanes—caught unawares by insane murderers with hooks for right arms.
He thought of the famous Hollywood director F. W. Murnau—driving off a cliff into the Pacific Ocean. While giving his young cute teenage Philippino chauffeur—a blowjob in their Packard convertible.
Honeymoon couples, gay couples, lover’s lane couples, drive-in couples—they all would get it in the end. He told me about the crashes of hair stylists & interior decorators—the way they screamed better than any of the fuckin’ straights.
He regaled me with the demises & denouements—of promiscuous Beltway lobbyists and Wall Street ponzi artists
“Sooner or later,
everything turns
into television."
—J. G. Ballard
I think back on the other crashes—we visualized late at night. Especially the Netflix horror flicks—the crashes of the wounded, the maimed and the dearly beloved distraught. The seemingly fitting & justified crashes of whacko psychopaths—implausible accidents carried out in cold blood without venom or self-disgust.
Vicious multiple car crashes & collisions—contrived in stolen cars on freeways glutted with tired office workers. The absurd crashes of desperate suburban housewives—along with their kept boy gardeners & lawn boys. Running away from their mean husbands—one last fuckin’ time.
The neurasthenic faculty club wives—returning from their VD clinics. Crashing into parked cars—in the dormitory parking lots. The crashes of overly excited schizophrenics colliding head-on—with stalled ice-cream trucks in suburban abandoned streets.
Manic-depressives crushed—while making illegal U-turns on freeway entrances. Luckless paranoids—driving full speed to Las Vegas. Ending up at the ends—of cul-de-sac brick walls flatter than pancakes.
Sadistic emergency room nurses—decapitated in back alley accidents with garbage trucks gone amok. Lesbian supermarket manageresses—crushed in their midget cars. By Humvies driven by stoical eyed middle-aged fat homophobic midgets—suffering from PTSD & ADHD problems from the war.
"I suspect that many
of the great cultural
shifts that prepare
the way for political
change are largely
aesthetic" —J. G. Ballard
Long before Coughenour died—I began to think about the Aesthetics of my own Crash Dive into the Death Highway rush-hour or a collision inThanatos Alley or wherever the Heavy Metal petal hits the floor. What style would I kick the proverbial bucket with—the usual psychopathic, neurasthenic, homicidal criminal way?
Or would it be one of those classy Bad & Beautiful Movie Star crashes—like James Dean or Albert Camus or Jayne Mansfield? Or maybe one of those louche political farewell smash-ups—like a dictator down in the bunker with his mistress or getting it by my fellow senators like some luckless Caesar or would it be a slow Alzheimer fade-out like Ronnie Reagan?
In my mind’s eye—I saw the final Automobile Apocalypse coming down & taking care of all the lovely crummy details for me. I’d hire a luxurious long-stretch limousine—for my boring final American Terminal Car Crash Show. One Last Dying Head-On Simultaneous Car Show and Car Disaster—with millions of vehicles crashing together in a terminal Rush Hour of the Gods Smash-Up with lots of bloody spurting loins & green engine coolant…
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