Work Text:
James recently developed an interest in pornography.
Or maybe, re-developed as more accurate. Before his crash he had purchased pornographic magazines relatively frequently. He had been glancing at some of them in the moments before his crash, in fact. Maybe that was why the interest had re-emerged after months of nothing but police photographs of collisions, crash test footage, photos of crashes snapped by Vaughan out of a car window, and whatever else Vaughan produced out of his piles of binders in the Seagraves’s garage.
He’d started cruising up to pornographic bookstores and asking for anything “with cars”. The cashiers at the counter – invariably bored-seeming by his request, perhaps genuinely, or perhaps they were trained to show no response to anything a customer asked for – would typically hand him magazines with women plastering themselves on vehicles on the cover.
They were the sort of thing he used to love, before his crash. They looked so tame to him now. Busty bimbos bent over the hoods of big throbbing trucks or sleek shining muscle cars, baring their buttocks and vulvas. Sometimes they sat on the hood, or in the driver’s seat, door open, legs out and splayed.
“The problem,” Vaughan said, one day, flipping through the pornography James had accumulated in his back seat while James drove, “is there is no sense of progression. The most interaction she can ever have with the car is, what, she might wash it? But otherwise it is just a setting. She never does anything to the car, and the car never does anything to her.”
James didn’t disagree. There was a vague suggestion that these women would fuck these cars if they could, but they never did more than press their high, round breasts against the metal, more a showcase of the women’s flesh than of the cars.
“The genre is pretty popular,” James said, keeping his eyes forward on the road, “Do you think the reason for it is as straightforward as the average male likes cars and likes nude women, so they are combined? Or is there some innate desire to see them ‘interact’, as you put it? Does he yearn for something to happen, but doesn’t know what?”
“He knows,” Vaughan said with finality, “Deep down he knows what that something is, the only possible next step.”
Still, James wondered: was the crash really the only possible next step? Was it so inevitable, or could that same desire lead down a different path?
He went to gay pornography shops, expecting that perhaps in homosexual pornography, he might find a more developed imagination. But he found there to be little deviation from what he found in heterosexual pornography, other than the obvious change in gender, and a slight increased preference for motorcycles.
He started going to smaller, seedier pornographic bookstores. When presented with yet another magazine of a human body pressed suggestively against a vehicle, he would ask, “Do you have anything else?”
Often the answer was no, but occasionally he would be presented with something more specialized: magazines, more cheaply published, featuring men endeavoring various methods of sexual intercourse with their cars; photospreads of men and women receiving a blast of exhaust in the face or onto the feet; mimeographed pen and ink drawings of anthropomorphized cars, headlights heavily lidded with desire, dripping oil in arousal; amateur VHS tapes of women pumping their gas pedal over and over and over as they tried to start a stubborn engine or free their car from mud.
Sometimes what he was offered contained no photographs at all, but fetish stories in which characters picked up a magical object or drank a potion or were cursed by a witch, causing their bodies to transform against their will. Despite inevitably magical openings, they came to brutally mechanical conclusions. The subject’s body would change, arms and legs lengthening and hardening into axles, hands and feet expanding into wheels, chest lowering and spreading into an undercarriage, their body swelling and bubbling to create the car’s body and interior.
Often the stories were accompanied by a series of crude illustrations that started with a person and ended with a car, with one or several intermediate stages. James found himself fascinated by these in-between stages, gruesome to him in a way that slow motion footage of metal puncturing a rib cage no longer was.
He bought everything that was offered.
James brought them back to Vaughan directly, rather than leaving them in his car for Vaughan to find this time. He wondered briefly if this made him seem overeager for Vaughan’s opinions, but then dismissed the flutter of self-consciousness. There was nothing Vaughan loved more than people being eager for his opinions and being the center of their obsession.
He spread the magazines on the table on top of Vaughan’s many crash photo collections and paged through them slowly while he and Vaughan sat pressed side by side so they could examine each page together.
“The reshaping of the human body by modern technology, indeed,” Vaughan remarked while looking at one of the transformation illustrations.
James wondered if he heard a hint of derision in Vaughan’s voice, as if the authors of these works had misinterpreted their own desires. What they really desired was a crash, Vaughan’s tone suggested to James, but instead they channeled that desire into having intercourse with the car, or turning into a car, or watching a woman press her feet helplessly against her gas pedal.
“Have you ever thought about doing other things with cars?” James asked, not looking up, “Interacting with them in a different way, I mean.”
“A crash is the most common interaction between human bodies and cars; the most memorable and natural way. I haven’t been motivated to enforce my will on the car by inventing new methods or altering the car in some way.”
James was slightly embarrassed by the exchange, as if his suggesting that Vaughan might have ever fucked a car or masturbated against it or revved it impotently was crude and psychologically underdeveloped.
He dropped this line of exploration for a while, at least with regards to Vaughan. Instead, one day he carefully drove Catherine out to an empty lot in her little silver car, found somewhere private to park, and knelt on the cracked asphalt while she revved her car in neutral with the driver side door thrown wide open, smoking a cigarette. He masturbated himself under the car, face pressed against her lap, feeling the muscle of her thigh flex again and again as it pressed against the gas, the engine roaring endlessly in his ear. After, she rotated her body out the door towards him so that he could perform oral sex on her while still kneeling in the oily asphalt. He heard her light a new cigarette as he did.
Vaughan must have sensed some distance or disconnect between the two of them, because a few weeks later he pulled up in front of James’s apartment building in a new car – or at least, one that James had never seen before – a large, sturdy looking white truck. It had obviously seen better days, but James could not see any obvious evidence of it having been crashed. Perhaps it had experienced a fender-bender at some point – it was certainly variously scratched and scuffed – but it bore no dramatic scars.
As James approached the truck, but before he had a chance to open the door, Vaughan said, “Get your car. Let’s go get stuck.”
Vaughan must have been waiting for the perfect moment to ask, James realized. It had rained the past several days. As usual, the rain had kept them busy. There were always more crashes when it rained. It had finally let up, but James knew that the dirt lots and unpaved roads on the edge of the city must be completely turned into mud.
They drove further out of town than they usually did, James trailing behind Vaughan’s truck. The smaller roads and less dense traffic made for less opportunities for crashes, so they rarely drove out this way, though sometimes they would go out at night, whipping around the curves of the small roads at high speeds in hopes of encountering a drunk driver.
They found what they were looking for: a dirt road, already furrowed into deep tracks of mud. Vaughan parked ahead of James, preemptively assuming the position to tow.
James started the work of getting himself stuck. He aimed his car into the deepest, wettest section of mud, then paused to let the wheels sink in a bit and for the water to flood around them, before starting to gently spin them in the hopes that his car would stay put.
He was met with near instant success. He spun his wheels faster and faster, whining with a mechanical desperation that he knew only dug them further into the mud. He heard Vaughan’s car door open and shut.
“Having some trouble?” Vaughan asked as he approached, with a smirk that had an undeniable suggestion of traffic cop. Usually, Vaughan brought a serious, obsessive intensity to their interactions, but this was flirtatious, borderline playful from him.
James had never acted, but he’d been directing commercials for over a decade. Vaughan orchestrated and dramatically narrated his celebrity car crash recreations. So neither of them were unfamiliar with performance, and they fell into the role-play easily.
“Yeah, I think my car is stuck,” James said.
“Show me what you are doing.”
James pressed the gas again, harder than before. The engine roared, the power palpable through the sound and vibration, that nonetheless failed to put the car in motion. He pushed over and over, like the women in the videos did, keeping eye contact with Vaughan as he did.
“Could you give me a tow?” he asked, passing up the obvious innuendo of asking for a tug or a pull. In the videos, the girls’ voices were always dripping with self aware sexuality that James suspected that Vaughan found tasteless.
“Of course. I have everything I need in my truck,” Vaughan said, walking away to get out a chain which he proceeded to connect from the back of his car to the front of James’s.
Vaughan started his car. James felt a jolt when the end of the chain's slack was reached, and his car heaved and vibrated as Vaughan attempted to accelerate forward. The chain between them strained, but James’s car was too firmly deep in the mud even for Vaughan’s wheels, which had the benefit of traction.
Staring at the taught chain, James reached down and stroked himself over his pants. He couldn’t see clearly into the cabin of the truck, so he had to infer the motions of Vaughan’s body from the motions of his car, and how they transmitted into James’s own.
“Maybe if we both try at once, it will be enough,” James yelled out his window. Vaughan leaned slightly out of his window and looked back at James in his side mirror before saying, “OK, whenever you are ready.”
This time, when he felt the pull from Vaughan’s car, he pressed the gas, timing his pumps of the pedal with Vaughan’s so that their cars screamed in unison. James’s car began to rock slightly in time with the mutual pulses of energy through both cars. The motion caused James to rock in his seat and he found himself thrusting slightly against nothing but the tightness of his own jeans over his erection.
James moaned and wondered if Vaughan could hear his arousal transmitted through the seductive whine of their revving engines and spinning wheels, if could somehow feel the James’s thrusts through the rocking of their cars.
Suddenly, something connected. The power of the car overpowered the slick mud and James lurched forward, too suddenly to react, rear ending Vaughan.
There had been plenty of force, but not much time to accelerate to a very high speed. James felt an immediate soreness in his shoulders and neck that he identified as the now familiar feeling of whiplash. He also felt the beginning of bruising, but no sharp or intense pain blossoming anywhere on his body, probably no big, severe injuries that would require a hospital visit.
James got out of his car to inspect the damage, and Vaughan did the same. James’s car came out worse, of the two of them. Vaughan wordlessly inspected the damage, running his hand over James’s crumpled front bumper, his bucked hood, his shattered headlights.
Vaughan smoothly moved his hand from the car to James’s body, running it over him with the same air of assessment, checking for damage. When he ran his hand over James’s erection, he quickly indicated for him to get in the truck with him. Vaughan hurried in after him and immediately began kissing him. Tilting his head, James could feel stiffness already starting to set in in his neck, and could imagine the bruise from the seat-belt forming across his chest.
“The suspense was amazing, different from being on the road. I could hear you revving over and over behind me, feel you rocking back and forth against my chain,” Vaughan panted into James’s ear.
Vaughan pushed himself up and removed his jeans. James was slightly surprised, since usually Vaughan removed as little clothing as possible when having sex. James wasn’t sure he had ever seen Vaughan fully remove his filthy jeans, preferring to unbutton them just enough to get his penis out or expose his buttocks for James.
Undressed from the waist down, Vaughan straddled the console between the two seats. He pushed James into doing the same so that they were face to face. He didn’t indicate for James to undress, but James unzipped his pants anyway, relieving some pressure on his erection.
James stroked himself as he watched Vaughan press himself back against the gear shift, the polished handle meeting the resistance against his anus, before sinking into him.
Vaughan groaned and leaned forward against James’s chest. James wrapped one arm around Vaughan to keep him close as he thrust himself up and down. He slid his other hand down between them, alternating between stroking his own penis and Vaughan’s and reaching back between Vaughan’s thighs to feel where the car entered him.
James rocked his body hard against the console, shoving his feet against the floor of the car on either side, causing the whole car to rock back and forth with increasing vigor, thrusting into Vaughan. He fucked Vaughan with the car in this manner until both of them climaxed, getting semen on the console, Vaughan’s shirt, and James’s clothing.
He and Vaughan had driven out separately, but they had to drive back together; James’s car had been too damaged to drive home. James felt happy, warm almost, as he sat in the passenger seat. He had the sense that they were two explorers returning home from discovering new endpoints: of cars, of sex, of bodies, or modern society.