Slippery When Whetted
The car slid down the embankment, sideswiped a few trees, rolled over and landed on its roof in an implosion of glass that did rather stop the conversation. Schwitters had been driving. Van Doesbug was in the back with me. I don’t know where Duchamp had been sitting, but he ended up half in and half out of the back window – and he was laughing.
We had been on our way to the 1923 Dada Conference. Kurt Schwitters, Theo van Doesburg, Marcel Duchamp and me. I don’t know whose idea it was to hold it in the Catskills during the off season. You couldn’t see the road for the sheeting rain. And no one knew where Brown’s Hotel was. Schwitters said he remembered it being mentioned in the old Bing Crosby song ‘On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe’ and started singing it in the hope that it would contain some directions. It might have been of help, but Schwitters’ accent was impenetrable. What we needed was a map. The one he’d left on the desk back at the Hertz office would have been ideal.
The rain had been getting worse. You couldn’t see a hand in front of your face; a fact that was proved when I punched Schwitters in the mouth to stop him singing. And why was it raining in the car, anyway? No one knew. Van Doesburg suggested we put the roof up. Duchamp wanted to press the buttons, and was in the process of clambering over the bench seat when Schwitters lost control of the vehicle (I’d hit him again) and we crashed through the guardrail.
I asked Duchamp why he was laughing. His legs were pinned and he couldn’t move. His face was pressed up against a road sign outside that we’d collected on the way down. It was one of those ‘Slippery When Wet’ ones.
What had amused him about the sign was something that always irritated me. It was the way the right tyre of the silhouetted car was on the left tyre’s skid mark – and vice versa. It didn’t make any sense, but of course this delighted Duchamp.
As we all waited to be rescued, we fell to talking. Perhaps, suggested Schwitters, the car on the sign had spun around and we were now looking at the front of it. There were murmurs of assent – but the trouble with this interpretation, I argued, was that because there were no headlights depicted on the silhouette, it must, ipso facto, be the rear end of the car we were looking at. Van Doesburg, suffering from a head injury and drifting in and out of consciousness, accepted this explanation but then added his own two francs. Maybe it was driving in reverse to begin with, he reasoned, had spun around 180 degrees and was now travelling in the right direction. Again, murmurs of assent swirled around the car like petrol fumes. But, when you thought about it, this didn’t make any sense either because it would have meant that the sign was designed to caution people who were travelling not only at speed but also backwards up a mountain road. Who drives like that – Renny Harlin? French Hell Drivers were beyond cautioning, surely. Plus, if they were driving backwards, they wouldn’t be able to see the sign until they’d gone past it (and even then, only the back of it). More murmurs but then Schwitters pointed out that reversing drivers could, in fact, see the front of the sign in their rear-view mirrors as they approached. I was strangling Schwitters when the rescue team arrived (led by Renny Harlin).
We arrived at Brown’s Hotel just in time for an encore by Jackie Mason. Duchamp didn’t get it.
Shaun Micallef, we know about. (‘His Generation’, his debut album, is out now.) Mark O'Loughlin is a bon vivant from Adelaide and has been a sometime contributor to ‘The Micallef P(r)ogram(me)’ and ‘Micallef Tonight’. His solo musings can be found here.
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