'The Asphalt Debut of Jayne Mansfield’s Last Child ', by Bart Plantenga

“A lot of people think that a girl who shows her bosom and wears tight dresses 
can’t be close to god. But god has always been very close to me.”

• Jayne Mansfield (RIP)

The window was open just enough to let in the cool night air. Just enough to keep Percy, tonight’s chauffeur, almost awake, almost sober.

I loved mom. And if you believe memory begins prior to birth then you can certainly understand how someone can love prior to birth.1 I hear it’s sometimes called “eros in utero.”  

Something about jump-starting the soul in preparation for its grand entrance into the spinning world. I believe my soul to be an organ of weightless and ephemeral incorruptibility. Not sponge, not diamond but more the idea of a diamond ... 

WARNING: There is cause and effect, no doubt. But sometimes things just happen and these things, these events, sometimes get called accidents. A case can be made for my umbilical cord being not so much attached to the placenta of my mother as to an accident. There’s luck and there’s humans seemingly capable of manipulating chance – and then, of course, there’s unluck. 

The pre-historical data concerning the eve of my birth, June 29, 1967 as nameless child #6 (I was eventually named Jaylen)2 consist of sharp details of me kicking up a storm inside my womb, my room. I remember twitches of wayward precognition and percussive punts to her uterine lining. I remember her doubling up in pain in the naugahyde interior of the Electra.3 I remember her aimless spirit, shorn of keel, not knowing which way to turn, about to run aground. 

I remember her as the awry love-interest of way too many men in crimped jungle briefs, swinging dumbbells, aping the selves they were famous for being: discount Tarzans, flattering grifters, and a bonehead Hercules who knew how to make a proper Stinger and fix pool filters. I remember them battering her with blunt objects and testicles twice the size of their brains. I remember their haste, their gaping urethras, their lack of foreplay; impatiently wrestling with her bra clasps as if she were the earth’s last stubborn bag of yummies. 

All this commotion registered seismically inside my cells. I think they called them engrams in Hollywood and a lot of people believed in these cumulative sensory recordings of all that happened in the womb. 

L. Ron Hubbard, in Dianetics, blamed mothers for the development of our neuroses. But I remember being jostled by a male perp posing as a suitor-father type like I’d been tossed into the spin cycle of a washing machine with me that “poor embryo” left for “unconscious by the violent pressure of the sex act.” But, unlike Hubbard, I cannot fault her for being so irresistible to men. That’s just too easy. 

In the beginning my universe was nothing more than a hot, clenched fist, an unfixed thought in a compact sack of organs and expectations in the passenger seat with mom – my slumbering siblings and Chihuahuas in the backseat. 

I remember a vague image of the convergence of billions of agitated and redundant sperm (smelling of chlorine and fructose), their swim forward as inexorable as a swarm of piranhas, heading right toward me. I remember the first bitter hormones of hate already coursing through my floating body. 

I also remember, Seconals, amphetamines, Libriums, triple OJ vodkas, Pink Ladies, amber bourbons straight up. And you wonder why I don’t drink much. 

I remember trying to absorb all of this on mom’s behalf. I remember communicating with her via the umbilical cord as if it were some kind of shared phone line. As if each molecule of oxygen sent from her to me contained messages full of yearning and expectation. My responses, carried in the capsules of carbon dioxide back to her, were filled with swoonish entreaties and my tiny resoluteness to remain inside her, absorbing all the bile and bourbon forever. What’d I know of forever? 

But what’s memory but a blur of occurrence and celluloid. Watching Frank Tashlin’s The Girl Can’t Help It, I usually just gnash my teeth, observing how mom’s effusive abundance mesmerized all men. Sartre once called her a spiritual spit of clay with beauty so awesome it could serve as the ultimate weapon of peace. 

I remember Dad-Suspect #1 slapping mom around in “deserving cheap dame fashion.” Didn’t mom’s films translate the blunt blurred clouts to the face as some kind of graceful slow-motion choreography? Didn’t her films appear to enshrine these gestures as determined or necessary or art, rather than condemn them in convincing fashion? Was she being punished for the provocations her beauty caused? “The 34-year-old sex symbol,” The London Evening News reported that she had “set the House of Commons in London in an uproar with her miniskirt and low neckline,” sounding like they despised how she could disassemble an entire nation’s sense of moral probity. Or was all of this merely a function of my developing six senses as hyper-critical organs (in this regard)? And didn’t she always manage to spin these degradations most graciously, with humorous comments like: “There’s nicer things to do than spank a girl, yuh know?” 

Another man knocked her about too. Mom yelling, “Get yer big hands offa me, you big APE!” And then later strolling down Sunset with her Great Dane, behind big sunglasses.

It is said my older (half?) sister was caught flirting with mom’s boyfriend (Dad-Suspect #2) in her heart-shaped swimming pool. And when this “swarthy” would-be bullfighter emerged from the pool, it was evident his stiffy had been well attended to for some time by sis. Needless to say, mom flipped. But never outwardly. Always inwardly, through drugs and drink.

On the night of my birth, she made our chauffeur stop in a strange fog, on the soft shoulder of Highway 90 out of Biloxi, heading southwest to New Orleans. 

They were going over her routines, despite her advanced pregnancy, straightening out some bad jokes in prep for a television appearance in conjunction with her New Orleans supper club act, “Shakespeare and The Semi-Nude Siren,” which included reciting Robert Herrick’s “To the Virgins”: “And this same flower that smiles today, / Tomorrow will be dying.”

But, being with a man who pretends to look out for your best interests when they’re just his own interests dressed up as yours, had a way of dousing whatever sparks her soul had left. This led to her sometimes bursting into song of some easy and elegant condescension. Her favorite was “Wo is der Mann,” which she’d sung on German TV. It described her situation perfectly: 
Wo ist der Mann, where is that man, 
für den ich mich erwärmen kann? 
[Where’s the man inside this man who says he’s my husband / Whose going to keep me warm?]

And now, here on the side of this desolate road, she suddenly needed fresh air, the air of another world, of the Alps, the Caspian Sea... I was hoping my kicks might precipitate carsickness and lead her astray, encouraging escape from her life full of nausea, regret, lawsuits, embarrassing celluloid, binging, purging and woe-some longing. She was indeed an hourglass with no sand, but much sadness, passing through the pinched funnel that was her waist.

I remember her holding me in an instant of cosmic trepidation – fight or flight – at the edge of this vast darkness. I balled up my body so tight as to be a bullet, to disappear as burden or pain, to make her more aerodynamic and equipped for flight. “Go Run, Go Then!” My entire bio-electrical net of nerves wanted to scream. But alas, my efforts went unheeded.

The bullfighter’s sharp bark: “Come ON! Get yer sad-assed pathetic bulging-belly self back in here! Let’s go Go GO!” bringing her out of any dreams of flight, and her obedience, alas, was about to become her ultimate undoing and me unable to warn her except with some acrobatic kicks.

He ordered the chauffeur to get going and berated her further: “You and your goddamn Shakespeare, I wish you’d just hemorrhage and have a fuckin’ miscarriage already!” 

She had recently played Vivaldi’s “Concerto No. 6 in A Minor” on violin on The Ed Sullivan Show and had proved her knowledge of history on NBC’s IQ, Intelligence Questions, all to insulate herself with art and erudition from the cruel, barren reality of everyday life and the dumb and vicious stumbling about in it. Few believed her brilliance was authentic because the world insisted on holding onto the inverse chauvinist equation, which insisted that, as x increased, y decreased, with x being her breasts and y her IQ.

She lashed out, putting poutish mouth to dramatic effect, “SHUT UP! You Toad of no acclaim! I have Satan on my side! I have people who worship me!” Her left foot reaching across the floorboard hump, under which spun the driveshaft as an axis, around which all phenomena seemed to revolve, and then pressed the accelerator so that speed could become the dope of motion.

She was about to create her own personal Big Bang Theory: jostle, explosion, pink flash, with the body of the speeding Buick sliding easily, going 60 mph – no one saw it – under the tail-end of the slowed-to-a-crawl tractor-trailer, minus all tail light display.4 

Jane Mansfield Death Car (Original headline): The Johnson Freight truck driver had slowed for an oncoming mosquito spray truck with its lights flashing.5 The car roof, shorn cleanly from its hurtling body, peeled back like the lid of a sardine can. … nothing but twisted metal, no skid marks … victim’s watch stopped at 2:25 AM on June 29.  

My mom, famous for her 14 pink baths, swan-shaped onyx faucets, electric toilets and claims to – yes – an astronomical IQ, gave birth to me at that precise moment of impact. The jolt forced my head and torso out of her womb and into this screaming, dark world as mom herself was thrust from the Buick’s interior, as if the car were giving birth to her too, landing with a thick, nauseating thud on the still-warm asphalt next to the clump of mangled steel. 

My sister J. Marie (16) discovered some wherewithal, dropping to her knees to sever the umbilical cord by gnashing her front teeth across it like one would a dull pair of scissors and then drew me the rest of the way from mom’s be-furred firth, like some glimmering coil of hieroglyphic serpent. And then wiped the afterbirth into her facial features and hair.  [I prefer the “salamander pinched from under a brook stone” image used by John Berryman in a poem he wrote about this tragedy that I read years later at university when a literature professor handed me a small literary magazine that included this poem, the name of which escapes me.]

I was just lying there, on the pavement, still warm from the day, glistening, dazed, curled up in a greasy amniotic mist of viscera, metallic particulates, petroleum, burning rubber, glass crystals and wafting aroma of sweet-scented insecticide. Me of blurry vision observing the truck driver removing my three siblings from the backseat – all OK – while mom and the two adult males in the frontseat had all died upon impact with the dashboard, proving the third law of physics as applied to luck: when two objects meet, they apply forces to each other of equal magnitude in opposite directions – one’s luck is another’s unluck. 

The truck driver, a seven-foot ghost with the skin of a just-finished glass of milk, dragged mom’s body by her boots off to the shoulder, enveloped in an eerie, deathly quiet that so many who’ve experienced tragedy have described. How the silence generates an echo that we swear we heard at the time. A silence except for the crying of a single child – me! 

Mom, white sheet covering her body except for her right ankle and foot still wearing her shiny pink boot, almost peacefully, perfectly frozen like a movie still, her final role as an actress.6 Flashing lights, at the rate of my heartbeat, illuminating the white lines marking the shoulder of the road. And then the winding two-lane road suddenly filled with police cars and officers with flashlights.

The roof lights of the Louisiana State Police cruiser, flashing at 24 tics per second, animated the debris that lay hurled outward forever across the dark pavement, glass crystals like scattered stars in a new universe. 

I’ve remained mum to this very day, never mentioning mom’s foot reaching across the interior for the accelerator and never describing it as an attempt at suicide.

_____

1 Author Ray Bradbury remembered every detail, every “camera angle” of his birth, noting the painful crushing of his head upon exiting the pink darkness into a sudden burst of bright light. They say the brain’s amygdala, which processes emotional memory, is already mature at birth, so that emotionally significant events – traumas and such – may have an effect on memory and behavior. 

2 As Jayne was seven-eighths English-Cornish and one-eighth German, surviving family members decided on the Cornish girl name, Jaylen.

3 “My view as a past life therapist (PLT) is shaped by my research into (self) hypnosis as a method for recovering memories of my birth. Although a controversial therapy, my personal experiences with the intentional recall of experiences from pre-birth have strengthened my beliefs in the efficacy of this therapy. Since my time in grad school in the 1960s, I’ve been driven to remembering back to the transitional moment of birth. I identify key sensory experiences, retreat into memory time, milestone by milestone until I reach my destination – the thrashing and squeezing of the birth passage.  It’s a place both large and small, somewhere nondimensional, beyond my mother’s body and me, more a sensory body than a physical body, a vibrating mass, already listening, observing  ...” Dr. Charles Morrow, PLT, psychiatric-hypnotherapist, Immersed in Memory: Regressing Forward, ErgoOrgo Publishers, 1984.

4 It was not a pink Lincoln Continental, like so many seemed to misremember it. But that’s the nature of memories: in this case, conflating the pink of the womb with the pink of a car’s interior. Pink was her color, afterall: pink bags, pink vulva, pink lipstick, pink boudoir, pink mansion ... The borrowed 1966 Buick Electra 225 was gray.

5 The eighteen-wheeler had come to a near-halt to accommodate a county vehicle spraying the Louisiana swamps with insecticide to control the mosquito population.

6 Jayne Mansfield was not decapitated, although it was easy to understand why people thought this. She had been wearing a blonde wig. She was scalped, however, with the death certificate noting: “crushed skull with avulsion [forcible detachment] of cranium and brain.” The scalp or clump of blood, bone, hair and brain plus her blond wig was found pasted to the fender and could easily have been mistaken for a head to the untrained eye.

bart plantenga is the author of novels Beer Mystic, Radio Activity Kills, & Ocean GroOve, story collection Wiggling Wishbone, novella Spermatagonia: The Isle of Man & memoirs: Paris Scratch & NY Sin Phoney in Face Flat Minor. He’s one of the founding members of the NYC agit-prankster-writer group, The Unbearables. His books YODEL-AY-EE-OOOO: The Secret History of Yodeling Around the World & Yodel in HiFi & the CD Rough Guide to Yodel have created the misunderstanding that he’s the world’s foremost yodel expert. He produces 2 monthly podcasts: Dig•Scape & iMMERSE!. He’s also a DJ & has produced Wreck This Mess in NYC, Paris, Amsterdam, Rotterdam since forever. He lives in Amsterdam.