Ink
© John G. Rodwan, Jr.
I knew the other car was going to hit us. As we entered the intersection, I could see that the car approaching ours to my right was not going to stop. Slamming on the brakes would not have kept us out of the way of the oncoming vehicle; it would have put us dead center before it. I made an instinctive decision to accelerate in the hopes that the stop-sign-disregarding driver speeding toward us would not crash directly into the area where my wife, Nancy, was sitting. When the other car struck ours, connecting just behind the front door on the passenger side, it did so with enough force to spin the car around nearly 360 degrees. When we stopped turning, I noticed that the gear shift lever was twisted on its stem. I must have had my right hand resting on it, tensed my grip on it in anticipation of impact, and wrenched it about when the car starting rocking and revolving in a screeching, clattering circle.
On realizing that I was registering the condition of an off-kilter lever handle – that I could both be aware of such an irrelevant thing and be conscious of that awareness – I knew I was whole and unhurt. I turned to see Nancy’s condition. Jolted sideways, she had hit her head on the car-door window, which was shattered. However, she was conscious and no blood had been spilled.
I know I called a tow truck to haul away the car, which I later learned had been totaled. At the time, in the mid-1990s, I was commuting to a job in Ann Arbor, Michigan, about a 45-minute drive away from our apartment in Detroit’s Cass Corridor area. I had been driving a well-worn Ford Escort until my parents bought themselves a new car and gave me the more substantial, if equally old, German sedan that we were riding in on the day of the crash. In the glove compartment of the aging Escort I’d kept a small notebook with telephone numbers of repair garages along the stretch of Interstate-94 that I regularly traveled in case the raggedy two-door broke down between work and home. When I switched to the hand-me-down, I’d put the booklet in the four-door along with my seldom-used cellular phone. I hadn’t had to call any of the emergency phone numbers until that day.
I don’t remember if I called the ambulance. Someone did. Maybe it was one of the electric company workers who had come out of their nearby building to witness the aftermath of the accident. Perhaps it was one of the police officers who eventually arrived. The emergency medical technicians who responded asked Nancy a series of questions and then persuaded us that she should go to emergency room to be examined and observed.
The physical injuries, a concussion and a sore neck, passed with time. But the incident did have long-lasting effects.
I immediately returned to the road. I had no choice: I had to go to work. In order to do so, I started driving what so far has turned out to be the only new car I’ve ever purchased. Nancy walked to work, and was an automobile passenger only infrequently. Riding in cars became extremely stressful for her. Doing so involved much clutching of the door handle and pressing a phantom passenger-side brake pedal. Although our accident occurred in the city, where roads carrying traffic moving at varying speeds bisect each other, creating ample opportunities for things to go awry, freeway driving was especially hard on Nancy after our accident. Other cars speeding in such close proximity was nerve-disrupting. She hated the experience. I was able to resume car travel without thinking about the accident, but the possibility of another one was always at the forefront of her mind whenever transported by automobile. It would be inaccurate to call her feelings phobic, given the frequency of serious injuries and fatalities from automobile accidents in the United States. In the same year as our wreck, close to 3.5 million people were injured and almost 42,000 were killed in motor vehicle crashes, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
We did not hold on to the new car for long.
***
Jaguars are the pound-for-pound strongest animals. Sportswriters regularly use that phrase, “pound-for-pound,” to compare boxers of different weight classes in efforts to determine who is the compleat pugilist. A superb welterweight might not be able to prevail against a plodding heavyweight who outweighs him by a hundred pounds, but if size could magically be removed from the key factors in a boxing contest – all-around talent, skills, drive, quickness, toughness, conditioning, will – the smaller athlete would be the certain victor if he’s truly the best pound-for-pound. Jaguars might not grow as big as lions or tigers. They might not be able to run as fast as leopards. However, they are more muscular and stronger than leopards, and about twice the size. A male jaguar can grow to be eight feet long and weigh nearly 300 pounds. Additionally, jaguars are decent swimmers and adaptable to various terrains. When all their characteristics are considered, jaguars deserve special notice for their power. And for their fierceness.
Jaguars have a distinctive style of killing their prey, which can include virtually any other creature, since jaguars eat mammals, reptiles and fish. While other large cats rely on throat holds to strangle other beasts, jaguars can kill with a single bite through the neck – or right through the skull. One theory of the etymology of their name is that it derives from the word used by the Guarani Indians of the Amazon Basin in Brazil: yaguara, meaning an animal that can kill with one leap.
In his memoir Somebody’s Gotta Tell It, Jack Newfield outlines what he calls the “Joe Frazier method” of journalism. For him, the boxer “represented discipline, tenacity, courage, and maximizing whatever talent God gives you.” These qualities can be used as the foundation for an approach to writing: “keep coming forward. Don’t get discouraged. Be relentless. Don’t stop moving your hands. Break the others guy’s will.” Such an approach could also be seen as jaguar-like, since the cats display all the qualities Newfield describes.
Jaguars “must be among the most nocturnal of all felines” and “are more likely to be heard than seen,” say the photographers Edwin and Peggy Bauer, who did manage to see a few and capture their images on film. For a long period, jaguars’ invisibility in the United States had less to do with their stealth or preference for moving at night than with their actual absence. However, after a long period of not being seen in the country, jaguars were sighted in the Southwest in the early years of the twenty-first century. Apparently, some male cats wander back and forth between northern Mexico and places such as Arizona, possibly using the same routes frequented by smugglers and drug traffickers.
A man who glimpsed one of the rarely seen cats said he could tell that it was not afraid of anything.
Thus, in addition to embodying strength, determination, relentlessness, elusiveness and cunning, jaguars also represent resilience and fearlessness.
***
The women in the 007 movies – the so-called Bond girls – may be widely regarded as eye candy or as accessories to the dashing masculine spy character created by Ian Fleming, but some of the movies, even early ones, do have some strong female characters. It’s not necessary to argue for a feminist interpretation of the films to see that not all the women in them were demure or subservient. Certainly, there are damsel-in-distress scenarios in the films, but there are also women who are James Bond’s quick-thinking equivalents. In The Spy Who Loved Me, Anya Amasova, codename XXX, is the Russian counterpart to Bond and the KGB’s best agent. In Thunderball, it’s Domino who kills the arch-villain (who also had been her lover-turned-tormentor). The title character of Octopussy runs an all-female band of smugglers, which joins with Bond to destroy his foe, who had also betrayed the character played by Maud Adams. Earlier, in Goldfinger, a woman leads an all-female group of pilots. Regarding her role in Die Another Day, actress Halle Berry says, “She was very intelligent. She was Bond’s equal… She had to save him a few times in the movie. Bond and Jinx had a great partnership.”
Some people, including another former Bond girl, do regard the female characters as embodiments of admirable qualities that make them symbols of strength worth claiming for feminism. The Bond women are “lasting icons of feminine strength, beauty and resilience,” writes Maryam D’Abo in Bond Girls Are Forever, a coffee-table book she co-authored. D’Abo also produced a documentary of the same name and co-starred in the 1987 Bond film The Living Daylights.
***
Not long after our car wreck, we left Detroit and lived in cities where owning an automobile would not only be unnecessary but would also be an expensive hassle rather than a convenience. I got an editing job with a specialized agency of the United Nations and we moved Geneva, Switzerland. Someone I met there described the country as one full-size train set, and it is easy to move through the mountains and valleys without driving. We found Geneva to have an easy-to-use, reliable system of trams and buses that made it simple to get around (unless it was late at night, when there was no service). From there, we moved to New York, where we quickly adapted to subway travel from our apartment in Brooklyn to our offices in Manhattan. Once we determined that we would not return to Detroit, we arranged to sell our long-garaged car.
Where we decided to live in Brooklyn, a person can easily walk to shops or restaurants. Bookstores, the bank, the grocery store, the dry cleaner, the hardware store – all are down the block, around the corner, just a few minutes away. After relocating to New York, we would turn down rides occasionally offered by friends who happened to drive. In most cases, we judged, it was easier, and probably quicker, to take the train. We’ve never minded walking, so when we’ve traveled to other cities, we tended to explore on foot as much as possible.
While yellow cabs crowd the streets of Manhattan, car-less Brooklyn residents typically turn to dispatched car services on those occasions when they need a ride. For us, such a need does not arise very often. Most likely, arranging to be picked up for such a trip meant heading to an airport. About once a year or so that would mean a trip to see my parents back in Detroit, where car travel is unavoidable.
Getting from the airport to my parents’ house and then going from there to anywhere else we might visit while in town – every move involves car trips. In northwestern Detroit, where my family lives, and in much of the city, the sort of pedestrianism we knew in Geneva and grew to take for granted in Brooklyn simply is not an option. Even after many of the factories where Fords and Chevrolets and Chryslers were once manufactured closed down, the Motor City remained all about the automobile.
Nancy dreaded these trips. If she were ever to make a movie in which a character had to endure her every conceivable aversion simultaneously, Nancy could draw on recollections of being wedged between my sister and my mother in the backseat, and every uncomfortable ride would involve both freeway travel and traversing Detroit’s rough, pot-holed roads.
Cinema of a different sort gave us an idea of how to stop the ceaseless repetition of the unpleasant vehicular scenes flickering on her mental movie screen. In the Bond movies, women put up with exceptionally trying car trips. They might not be trapped between in-laws, but they do have high-speed chases, ride in cars that operate under water, have giants with sharp metal teeth rip their vehicle apart when they try to escape and ride motorcycles over roof tops. And they handle it all with aplomb.
Before one of our annual trips to Detroit, Nancy decided to approach matters like one of the poised and resourceful Bond characters. She would not be made miserable by contemplation of possible catastrophes. She would be fearless. In a moment of simultaneous seriousness and silliness, we tried to come up with a Bond-girl-style name (for private use by the two of us) to go with the new outlook. Porn-star-like monikers such as Honey Ryder, Pussy Galore, Holly Goodhead, and Xenia Onatopp obviously would not serve our purpose. They did not provide the model to follow. Nancy’s real name does not lend itself to a nickname the way Dominique can be made into Domino. We wanted one that not only suggested the cinematic source of inspiration but also reflected the characteristics she wanted to cultivate. Eventually we came up with one: Jaguar.
The idea worked. As it turned out, the first trip to Michigan after we’d selected the name involved more driving that usual. But with her new attitude, the time in cars was not nearly as difficult as it had been previously. Driving doesn’t ruffle Bond girls, and no longer would it aggravate Nancy.
***
The nickname, however, did not stick. I could never bring myself to call her Jaguar; Nancy never used the name for herself. While neither of us ever used it as a proper name, we did start employing jaguar to designate an attitude and those who embody it. Much like the journalist Newfield found in the boxer Frazier a representative for the qualities he prized and wanted to develop in himself, Nancy and I came to think of the jaguar as our symbol of ideal characteristics.
Around the time I was developing an appreciation for jaguars, I was also reconsidering and writing about the punk-rock period of my high school years, and finding some parallels between the do-it-yourself dynamism of punk and jaguars’ determination. “We got that attitude,” the Bad Brains proclaim in a track from the 1983 album Rock for Light. “Hey we got the P.M.A.,” or Positive Mental Attitude they explain in what must be one of the very few instances of hardcore song lyrics printed complete with explanatory footnote. “Attitude” also appeared a year before on a cassette-only, self-titled release that achieved something like legendary status subsequently. However, it was the Rock for Light version – not the one from the so-called Reachout International Records, or ROIR, tape – that I remembered. After my leather-jacket-and-combat-boots period of teenage rebellion, for which bands like the Bad Brains provided the soundtrack, I branched out and started listening to other sorts of music. Thus, for about a decade, I was unaware of another Bad Brains recording, dubbed Black Dots, which documents a session from 1979 but went unreleased until 1996. It also contained a version of the song. Appreciation of one style of music does not preclude sustained interest in or openness to others. The Bad Brains, who combined punk rock with reggae, demonstrate this, and I thought they’d be a good group to revisit decades later. I found that their work, particularly the multiple takes of “Attitude,” still resonated with me.
The Bad Brains have the P.M.A.; Nancy and I have the jaguar attitude. A jaguar doesn’t let the bastards get him down. A jaguar doesn’t expect others to provide for him; he goes out and gets what he wants. A jaguar is relentless and strong-willed. Rather than dwelling on the ways people will inevitably disappoint you, the inevitability of plans not working out, the certainty that things will go wrong or the predictably unpleasant aspects of daily life (including certain modes of transportation), we opted for the jaguar outlook.
Whether labeled P.M.A. or the Frazier method, it’s the sort of mindset the narrator of Albert Camus’s The Plague displays. Confined to a town beset by a deadly epidemic, Dr. Bernard Rieux continues to administer to his patients. He does not give up and he does not give in. “If you refuse to be beaten,” Rieux says, “you have some pleasant surprises.” (The fictional physician’s creator, who frequently declared that nothing was more absurd than to die in a car accident, died in a car accident.)
It’s the sort of preparedness for difficulties and willingness to confront them that the title character of Lawrence of Arabia exhibits. In an early scene, one that foreshadows thematic elements explored throughout the film, someone asks how a person can extinguish a lighted match with his fingers without hurting himself. The trick, Peter O’Toole’s T.E. Lawrence explains, is to not mind the pain. Pain and hardship, he suggests, cannot be avoided, but they can be faced and they can be handled. Individuals can train themselves to endure without complaining. (The film opens with the motorcycle accident that killed Lawrence.)
Trepidation about car travel may not be a monumental difficulty comparable with potentially deadly contagion and the oppressive regulations of quarantine (or occupation, if The Plague is read as an allegory of the Resistance) or an arduous trek across a fiery desert on camelback. That is not the point. A jaguar deals with whatever needs to be dealt with, and maintains its fierce P.M.A. at all times.
Our jaguar approach to challenges big and small has proven useful in ways beyond what first spurred its conceptualization. In addition to getting over a particular fear following a car crash, the jaguar perspective has proven helpful in getting into better physical condition (jaguars like to move) and in being more disciplined and productive with regard to our various creative pursuits (jaguars have a champion’s work ethic), to provide just a couple examples of its application.
***
I am interested here in jaguars’ representative potential, not coincidences. While the expensive cars that take their name from the animal do indeed figure in several of the Bond films, the vehicles are not what bind together the people mentioned above. The car services that ferry travelers to New York area airports usually maintain fleets of black Lincoln Town Cars or other similar American models. Our accident occurred in an Audi. Camus’s last journey did not take place in a Jaguar (it was a Facel-Vega). While the British car-maker traces its origins back to a company founded by motorcycle enthusiasts who first built sidecars, Lawrence’s fatal ride was on one of his several bikes manufactured by George Brough. However, seeing jaguar-like characteristics in both Camus and Lawrence is not purely accidental. The author of The Stranger and the Myth of Sisyphus fondly invoked Lawrence’s line about the aim of revolution, which, as Camus put in the Resistance newspaper Combat, is to “give human life a chance.”
Giving life a chance and struggling to improve it – that’s what jaguars are all about.
***
In Octopussy, a Bond girl reveals a tattoo of an octopus, the symbol of the group to which she belongs. It’s on her lower back.
Nancy and I both have jaguar tattoos. Mine leaps across my left arm; hers stands – composed, calm and confident – on her lower back.