“‘The thing is, I started in life as a stunt driver.’
“Anne Marie, surprised, said, ‘Really?’
“‘You may have seen the one,’ Chester said, ‘where the guy’s escaping in the car, they’re after him, the street becomes an alleyway, too narrow for the car, he angles sharp right, bumps the right wheels up on the curb, spins sharp left, the car’s up on two left wheels, he goes down the alley at a diagonal, drops onto four wheels where it widens out again, ta-ran-ta-rah.’
“‘Wow,’ Anne Marie said.
“‘That was me,’ Chester told her. ‘We gotta do it in one take, otherwise I’m gonna cream the car against some very stone buildings. I liked that life.’
“John said, ‘Was it you in the rest of the picture?’
“‘Nah,’ Chester said, ‘that was some movie star. They even had to bring in somebody else to do his swimming. Anyway, the problem was, that career dried up. They don’t need the guys like me now, they got computers to do the stunts.’ He shrugged, but looked disgusted. ‘People wanna look at a cartoon, a car on a diagonal down the alley, nobody at the wheel, nobody’s life at stake, what I say is, it isn’t the pictures got worse, it’s the audience.'”
Donald E. Westlake, The Road to Ruin