There is a spot in the road as you top Wild Rose Pass where you can look to the north and see across the Permian Basin and all of Texas looks endlessly [...]
Beer Before Breakfast: The True Story of America’s Love Affair with NASCAR
“Whither thous goest America, in thy big black car into the night. – Jack Kerouac
Out on the prairie in North Texas, the race track spread across the horizon and glowed ephemerally in the haze drifting out from the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. The size of the place was preposterous and as Interstate 35W eased us closer, Texas Motor Speedway took on almost comically outsized proportions. Grandstands, which curled around the banked turns, obscured the setting sun for an hour before darkness and laid out an early shadow that reached from the backstretch to the campgrounds.
One more oval
They weren’t really campgrounds, though; not exactly. As Rod wheeled our motor home into a tilt toward Dale Earnhardt Way, we saw expanding in front of us a temporary city of approximately 100,000 people housed in recreational vehicles, camper-trailers, and tents. Fires and television sets were beginning to glow against the dusk and multi-colored flags bearing random single and double digit numbers rode high on a sticky Gulf breeze blowing up from the coast. Before the arriving NASCAR fans had even started up their generators for electricity or popped the top of another sacred beer, they first planted a numbered flag to announce their allegiance to a specific driver. Three and eight seemed to be the most popular figures. I was thinking, smugly, as we approached the entrance, maybe the numbers were proud statements of assembled IQs or, perhaps, how high that camper could count. As was often the case, however, I was the one in need of an education. I doubted, though, that a weekend exposure to NASCAR would result in a personal transformation.
Rod brought our 38 foot RV to a stop at the entrance to the campgrounds and slid back the driver’s side window to speak to an attendant. A slender, almost frail man with clumps of brown hair sticking out beneath his gimme cap was offering Rod advertising circulars, maps, and informational brochures. If NASCAR had a stereotype fan to portray a low-brow, down market, common man appeal, he was personified in the individual Rod was chatting up. His wiry beard offset droopy eyes and a bent nose and his mouth’s distorted contours indicated he might have had more fingers than teeth. He looked at Rod, though, with an honest compassion and some kind of instant, emotional connection.
“Jah duh ray, mah.”
“Uh, yeah. Okay, thanks, buddy,” Rod answered before he pushed the window back into place and dropped us into gear.
“What did he say?” I asked.
“Jah duh ray, mah.”
“What the hell? Does NASCAR have its own language, too?”
Rod laughed. “Hey, I understood. Not my fault you can’t hear.”
“You understood what? What did he say? Translate, please. I’m NASCAR impaired.”
“Enjoy the race, man. That’s all he said.”
“Well, of course, I should have understood that.”
I did realize, though, what I had seen in that scraggly outlier’s eyes and it was empathy. We were like him and we loved what he loved and even though we were traveling in a one hundred thousand dollar rig, NASCAR had made us all part of one great internal combustion and spiritual constituency. He probably took his shelter nightly beneath the sky and hitchhiked from track to track handing out printed paraphernalia in exchange for bad tickets and warm beers and we rolled in exhibiting possible affluence and education. It didn’t matter, though; we were all cleansed and made equal before the high-octane baptismal font of NASCAR.
I was suddenly determined to “Jah duh ray, mah.”
We rolled down the gravel two-tracks searching for our numbered parking slot and our friends who had driven up from Austin in a separate RV. The NASCAR night was rattled by generator noise and hooting drunks who had, hours ago, gone a few beers beyond self-awareness. Up and down the rows of campers and tents, a celebration of consumption filled the darkness with diesel fumes, beer farts, camp fires, barbecue pits, and engine exhaust. License plates hanging from the pickups and campers and muscle cars revealed NASCAR’s powerful allure seemed to have drawn the devoted from all of the lower 48 states, which failed to explain why most of the people I saw looked like first cousins from Booger Hollow, Arkansas. (Yes, it’s on the map and I’ve been there.)
Demographically, I assumed, our group was an exception. (This was one of the many notions I was to get wrong regarding NASCAR.) Our two RVs included executives, senior consultants, software engineers, and various business managers. Our levels of professional experience and financial resources were all probably above the perceived earnings median of NASCAR fans. If I was right, though, what explained the endless rows of luxury motor homes and the big V-8 engines drinking $3 a gallon gasoline? Who were those people and how in the hell did they lose their way from Lake Tahoe and Scottsdale and Las Vegas and all the shiny zip codes to end up on a dusty suburban plain? Whoever they were, their numbers were legion and because of them each time there was a race at Texas Motor Speedway it became the largest sporting event in the state’s history with almost 200,000 in attendance.
90,000 people jammed together, eating and drinking, mostly drinking
Maybe we were more NASCAR than I realized. Rod, who was captaining our RV, struck me as atypical of the faces and images I saw floating past our windows. Educated, still married, two children, and a successful executive in the financial services industry, I didn’t think his profile fit the NASCAR demographics. He was, however, from Milwaukee and knew a few things about beer, the most critical of which was that he really liked drinking it and the consumption of beer is NASCAR’s fundamental ritual. Rod’s politics were out of the NASCAR handbook, too. International relations were just a grander version of Friday night football; America was the conference leader and perennial champion, and anyone who didn’t cheer the home team needed to attend a Taliban summer camp to acquire some perspective. He was my friend, though, devoted and solid as a limestone ledge, powered with a teenager’s energy, and disturbingly positive. In his mid-40s, Rod’s black hair was finally streaking gray but the part in the middle made his seasoned face look younger.
After we found our friends, parked our RV next to theirs, stoked a camp fire, and tapped two large beer kegs, I began to think I understood NASCAR. Growing up in the midst of the automotive manufacturing complexes of Southern Lower Michigan, I figured I was astute in all matters of the car culture. The people gathering around the kegs in Fort Worth had no concept that Michigan had once had the same allure for American dreamers and entrepreneurs as does present day Silicon Valley. Release of new car and truck models were national events and people jabbered excitedly over developments like remote mirror controls and automatic transmissions. What I was seeing take shape in front of me, however, had no relation to automobiles. NASCAR, I reckoned, was an excuse for adults to party.
“Hey, man, what y’all doin? Y’all havin’ a good time?” A shirtless man and two women in cutoff jeans and tee shirts drifted into the rocky space where we had spread nylon chairs around the fire burning between our two motor homes.
“Sure, we’re having a good time,” Jack said. “But we just got here. I don’t think we’re as drunk as you yet.”
“Oh yeah?”
He sounded concerned about our lack of intoxication and seemed interested in how we might go about changing that predicament. The emaciated inquisitor and his two females came closer to our gathering. Jack, a former Marine and businessman who had organized this NASCAR adventure for his friends and clients of his technology company, made them feel invited.
“Where you all staying?” Jack asked.
“We don’t know,” the shirtless one answered. “We just got here.” His brown hair was buzz cut and his bony shoulders and thin arms indicated he needed to consume food as regularly as he did beer.
“You got tickets for the race?”
“No. We’ll get some. Gotta go find somethin’ to eat now, though.”
His women, one dark and the other bleached of color, talked softly near the front of an RV.
“Where y’all stayin’?”
“Don’t know. We’ll camp somewhere. Hey, looka here.”
He spun around and presented his bare back to the firelight and we saw a bluish tattoo spreading across his shoulders and down to his waist. The artwork was a rendering of Dale Earnhardt, Sr.’s face, the NASCAR legend who had died in a horrible crash. Rising over his father’s dark countenance, the smaller profile of Dale Jr. was also needled into the skin of our shirtless friend. Arcing across the top of his back, written in old English lettering, were the words, “Like father, like son.”
After standing still long enough to be certain we had seen his art and had absorbed the glories of memorializing NASCAR’s royalty on his body, he turned around and nodded at us as if we had had just taken part in a blood ceremony. Without speaking, he tottered drunkenly toward his women.
This is the moment I discovered that most NASCAR fans worship a deity named Junior, who was made flesh by Senior before he was killed slamming into a wall at Daytona. The proliferation of this religion is marked by the distribution of Senior and Junior’s race car numbers across the rear windows and bumpers of trucks and cars on the American road from the rocky coast of Maine to the sunny shores of California. If the devoted is driving a pickup truck, Senior’s number 3 will be stuck on the left side of the window and Junior’s leaning 8 is on the right. Sometimes, as the evening grows drunk in the campgrounds outside of NASCAR tracks, you might hear a fan sitting in the back of a pickup as it putters aimlessly through the gathered disciples. Screaming at the top of his voice and overcome with beer or Jack Daniels and emotion, he extols the spiritual value of Senior’s car number as if it symbolized a holy trinity for NASCAR.
Keep to the left, get back in a hurry
“Three, baby!!!! Three, forever!!!!”
Choosing a driver is, in fact, the most profound act of the NASCAR nation. Unlike most sports where a fan cheers for a team, NASCAR is a contest that requires picking an individual driver to support by buying products from his sponsors and learning everything there is to know about the man behind the wheel. Of course, you are also expected to jeer their opponents because they are of lesser character and cannot steer, accelerate, brake, and shift with the same skills as your man. This is why successful drivers like Jeff Gordon and Jimmy Johnson have to constantly deal with Junior’s followers, who have decided Gordon and Johnson are homosexuals. The morning of the Fort Worth race, a pickup making its way toward the parking lot at the track carried a large sign in the back that read, “Tear his ass up, Jimmy! Gays Gone Wild at the Texas Motor Speedway starring Jimmy Johnson and Jeff Gordon.”
Not being born over southern soil seems to be one of Gordon’s public relations failures. NASCAR began in Dixie and its Jerusalem is Mooresville, South Carolina, where Junior lives and runs his shop. His father and the other saints of the oval left blood, oil, and rubber on the banked turns of Bristol, Tennessee, Talladega, Alabama, Daytona, Florida, Charlotte, North Carolina and other towns scattered below the Mason-Dixon. They behaved exactly like their fans and drank beer, squinted into the sun, kept grease under their fingernails, and looked as if they had no more charisma than the stock boy at the local Wal-Mart. The rumbling sound of an American made V-8 engine elevated their testosterone levels and also caused a trickle of joyous tears. These were common men, good with a wrench and a wheel, who might have been your neighbor in Georgia or Alabama and were just as likely as you to have a car up on blocks in the front yard.
Jeff Gordon, unfortunately, is from California and is slowly stealing NASCAR from its roots in the piney woods and red dirt clay of Dixie. He has a square jaw below intense eyes, Hollywood dark hair, and an irritating level of confidence. Gordon drives with a frightening combination of abandonment and skill, as if he just came down out of Appalachia and a decade of outrunning the law for moonshine deliveries. When he wins, which is often, and Jeff Gordon is interviewed, he doesn’t sound like a NASCAR driver and on camera his shimmering white teeth and self-effacing style only further anger Junior’s minions of believers. In the eyes of number 8’s fans, every time Gordon beats Junior the Californian becomes even more effeminate and desperate to be loved by a member of his own sex.
An essential part of having a driver is the act of wearing clothing adorned with his number and the names of his sponsors. A fan’s allegiance must be announced. You are also expected to buy trinkets and souvenirs you do not need in order to send more money to companies that already have ridiculous profit margins. NASCAR probably has a cash flow equivalent to the European Union. There are no reliable numbers on total revenues but the anecdotal clues are staggering. A primary sponsor, who wants to land their logo or brand on the hood or roof of a car, can expect to spend $10-$20 million annually. Jack, the tech executive who was hosting our adventure, had made inquiries about having his company’s logo slapped on a fender. A badge sponsorship, which is slightly smaller than a sheet of typing paper, costs about a half million dollars.
Jack didn’t do it.
He also forgot to wear any item of clothing to indicate his preferred driver. As his friends and associates began to arrive and get drawn to the fire lit conversation and beer kegs, Jack wandered over toward the gravel lane running down the rows of RVs. After dark, one of the most popular activities of NASCAR (not including drinking beer) is to cruise up and down the rows of campers and look for parties and new friends. While he was watching the passing parade, the driver of a pickup stopped and scanned Jack’s appearance almost in a state of shock. In a moment, he asked the essential NASCAR question.
“Who’s yer driver?”
Immediately realizing he was not wearing either a gimme cap with a number or a tee shirt or jacket, Jack smiled at the question.
“Oh, sorry. I’m with Junior. I forgot.”
“Good, good. Y’all have a good time at the race tomorrow. And get yerself one a them hats with Junior’s number on it.”
“Sure,” Jack offered. “I’ll do that.”
Before the race, Junior’s followers seemed to be out protecting their support base and evangelizing in an effort to make sure no one else was drawn into the homosexual “lifestyle” of Jeff Gordon.
NASCAR, in recent years, has begun to produce drivers handsome enough for TV soap operas and it has been bothering Junior’s disciples. The same thing that had happened to country music, with its glistening-lipped blondes and movie star smooth cowboys, was also transforming the sport of the working class. Kevin Harvick, Casey Kahne, Tony Stewart, and Carl Edwards all have stiletto-heeled, cleavage-swinging groupies drafting behind them through the pits and back to their hotels. Junior, who has the look of a NASCAR version of Justin Timberlake, could pack Turn 3 with supermodels-in-waiting all wanting to go for a ride with him. His fans, however, forgive him his cuteness because he speaks with a Southern accent, lives in the Carolinas, and, most importantly, was risen from the DNA of Senior, which is automatic redemption of any possible transgressions.
Inside of Jack’s RV, several of his friends were being entertained by a college student that had stopped by from a nearby camp site to say hello. Jeremy, a program developer for Jack’s company, had discovered that our neighbor Brad had a unique talent. Although only in his early 20s, Brad had developed the ability to chew the tops off of beer cans. This was precociousness.
“Jack, Jack,” Jeremy said excitedly. “Watch this. You gotta see this.”
“Okay.”
His high and tight Marine haircut was outlined by the campfire behind him and Jack’s eyes got as wide as his toothsome smile when Brad, his University of Texas baseball cap turned backwards on his head, inserted the can in the corner of his mouth. There was a slight hiss as the Bud Light container was depressurized and Brad adroitly spun the aluminum cylinder against his teeth, chopping with a couple of incisors. In about ten seconds, he peeled the top back to show a ragged metal edge carved out of the can. Tipping his head, he drained all the beer down his long throat, an accomplishment that was met with great applause by Jeremy, Jack, Spike, Stephen, Tracy, Rod, David, Ben, Gary, John, Kyle, Mark, and me.
“That is way cool,” Jeremy announced. “How in the heck did you learn to do that?”
“I don’t know,” Brad said. “I guess I just did it once and have been doing it ever since.”
If Brad were only able to take the stage in front of the crowd prior to the race and perform his beer can chewing act, he would quickly become as wealthy and legendary as Junior by following the circuit and performing as a human can opener. His performance for us, we later learned, was also part of a strategy to impress us and help him to get hired by Jack. Resume’s apparently aren’t the only approach to landing a job.
“Hey, look, we’ve got company.”
Spike, an executive with one of the country’s largest food distributors, was leaning over and pointing out the RV’s window. Two women, both noticeably inebriated, were almost stumbling around our abandoned lawn chairs and unprotected beer kegs.
“Hey, y’all want a drink?” Tracy asked. “Here. Here. Have a seat. Let’s just visit some.”
“Sure, we’ll have a drink.”
Tracy, an Arkansas boy whose demeanor is as gentle as a summer breeze, quickly pumped two large plastic cups full of Miller Lite.
“What y’all been doin’ tonight?” he asked.
“Drinkin’.”
“Now momma.”
Momma was word-slurring, tube-top-slipping-down drunk and fascinated with the flames dancing in front of her. The only time she seemed to look away from the fire was when she glanced over at me on a camp chair near the edge of the firelight. Her daughter, whose nylon stretch top kept falling off of her shoulders in its effort to contain her cumbersome breasts, was the immediate center of attention. No one bothered with introductions.
“We’re just goin’ around and meetin’ people like y’all,” Daughter explained. “Where y’all from?”
“Austin. And San Diego, California,” David answered.
“Wow, California.” She spoke the word as if it were a concept she barely understood or a movie set she had seen on television. Daughter held out her glass for a refill and was quickly served.
“We can’t really stay,” she said before drinking off half of her beer. “Momma just needed to sit down for a bit.”
“Sure. We understand.”
Daughter flipped her chemically altered hair off of her shoulder and made an uncoordinated effort to cross her legs, which she gave up after a couple of attempts.
“Don’t you think it’s a shame,” I whispered to John, one of Jack’s program developers, “when a girl with such pretty blonde hair goes and dyes her roots black?”
“Yeah. Yeah. Whatever.”
John did not want anything redirecting his attention away from the long seam of flesh between Daughter’s two breasts and he clearly anticipated that the overstressed material of the top she was wearing was certain to shortly lose its battle with pressure.
“Hey, what’s his deal?” Momma was pointing at me and yelling across the top of the fire. Everyone turned in my direction as though I had pulled out a gun.
“I don’t think I have a deal,” I suggested.
Momma did not look at me but continued pointing and addressing her bumbling words to her daughter and her new admirers.
“What the fuck is he doing here?”
No one spoke. There did not seem to be an answer and it was a question I had already confronted myself: what the fuck am I doing at a NASCAR event? Jack and his friends were uncertain whether to laugh or be concerned about an outburst of anger. John, though, was not to be distracted. Daughter, meanwhile, who fell a few dental appointments short of being pretty, tried to calm her momma.
“Just relax, Momma. It’s okay. We need to get going here in a minute.”
The conversation, with Daughter at its center, continued, mostly, it appeared, to sustain time to gaze at the pitch and yaw of her bosom while she chattered. As Momma stared again at the blaze, I stole a look or two and saw that she had the yellow pallor of a chain smoker, a pointed chin, and was about six months this side of becoming jowly. Gary, a looming monolith of a man who was Jack’s VP of software development and lived perpetually attired in Texas A and M maroon, let loose one of his booming laughs at something. In the momentary stillness that followed, Momma turned her attention back to me.
“Who the fuck is that?” she said in a volume near what had to be her peak decibel level. “What the fuck is he doing here?”
I pulled down on the bill of my Detroit Tigers cap in an attempt to hide and thought about getting up and going inside the RV to watch television.
“Come on, Momma. We need to get goin’.” Daughter rose and stepped toward her mother, offering her hand. Momma continued staring at me but without speaking.
“Okay. Okay.” She stood slowly and struggled to discover her equilibrium. Momma backed away carefully, leaving me the impression she thought I might attack if she turned her back.
“Momma, let’s go.”
“Okay. Okay.” She wagged a droopy finger at me. “But that is one fine motherfucker. He is one fine motherfucker.”
“Okay, Momma. That’s great. Let’s go.”
Daughter assisted her mother in leaving but she turned around one more time and repeated her accusation. “I mean it; that is one fine motherfucker.”
They disappeared around the corner of an RV as everyone around the fire laughed.
“She just had to get that out,” Jack insisted. “Even drunk, she would have hated herself if she’d never told you that.”
“Jesus,” I said. “That was strange.”
While Momma’s declaration was a profound testament to alcohol’s ability to distort perceptive powers, it did provide a recurring amusement for my friends.
“Come on, Hollywood. Let’s go,” Jack said.
“Hollywood now, eh?”
“We can refer to you by your new acronym, OFMF, or we can use your full title or just call you Hollywood.”
“Yeah, yeah. Where we going?”
“The boys want to go to Titty Alley.”
“Titty Alley?”
“Yeah. You’ll see. Get something stronger to drink than beer, though. You might need it.”
When we eventually approached Titty Alley with 30 ounce tumblers of Kentucky Bourbon slightly diluted by Coke, (official NASCAR sponsor but not as relevant as beer) we saw all sizes of flashlight beams making a twisted lattice of illumination in the night sky. Hundreds of males, most of them armed with some type of battery-powered light, were lining the main entrance into the RV city.
“Wait’ll you see this, Hollywood.” Stephen had placed his hand on my shoulder to make a point, a sacrifice, I knew, since his bourbon and Coke required a firm two-handed grip to keep from falling to the ground. “This little display is reason enough to come to NASCAR.”
Man and boy, and even a few women, stood three to five deep for more than a quarter mile along both sides of the gravel two-track as vehicles, mostly pickups, moved slowly through the gauntlet. When a driver approached, the flashlight beams were raised to shine inside the cab or the bed of the truck, searching for women. They did not need to meet any particular standard of beauty; the only requirement was that they have breasts. The unspoken question when the lights had finally settled on a target was: “Excuse me, mam. Would you mind raising your shirt or blouse and showing us drunken fellas yer titties? We’d sure appreciate the consideration.”
“Woo hoo, look at this one comin’ here,” Stephen said. “The boys are gonna love her.”
“Where?” I asked.
“She’s in the middle of that black F-150.”
In an instant, the light sabers fell upon her and the tittyspottarzi began to howl.
“Come on now sweet lady. Junior always says you gotta let them puppies breathe,” someone yelled.
“She can’t do this, can she?” another disembodied voice wanted to know. “She can’t go by and not share that beauty. Come on, girl, ya gotta give it up to the boys. That’s what they’re for.”
The twenty something woman, whose elegance was apparent in the harsh glare, seemed to have taken a wrong turn coming from a cocktail party at a Dallas country club. She wore what appeared to be a peach-colored silk blouse and had a choker of fat pearls around her neck. She attempted to cover her face with her slender hands but occasionally lowered them to look at the strange world she had mistakenly entered. She smiled, turned away, looked back, and then carefully began to undo the row of buttons up the front of her blouse. Behind the wheel, her boyfriend gave her a look that asked, “You aren’t really going to do this, are you?”
She shrugged, indicating she saw no real reason to demur and when the truck in front of them came to a stop she was given more time to savor the act of undressing in front of hordes of intoxicated strangers.
“Here we go boys.”
“Yee haw. Happy days.”
“Don’t miss this.”
With the buttons undone, her bright, lacquered nails played at the hasp between her bra’s two cups.
“All right,” I heard someone say. “It’s a front loader. I love front loaders.”
Released, she slowly opened her bra as if she were delivering a precious, unexpected gift, which, of course, she was. Her boyfriend turned his head away and it was impossible to tell if he was disgusted by her behavior or overcome by her beauty. There wasn’t any doubt about what the tittyspottarazzi thought.
“Oh my god. Look at her. She’s perfect.”
“Jesus Christ, come look at her, Joe Don. She ain’t even real, is she?” (If she’d not closed up her bra in another minute or two, I suspected someone would have run up and slapped a number 8 on one of her breasts or offered her a corporate sponsorship.)
Actually, none of it seemed real to me. The truck began to inch forward again but the girl still made no move to button up and she turned herself from side to side, holding one in each hand, to make certain none of the drunken low-intellects would be denied a view. What I couldn’t figure out was how in the hell did Titty Alley even happen. Was it a product of spontaneous generation from the lecherous minds of NASCAR men or was there some campsite coordinating committee that met before each race weekend and looked at a map and designated a location for Titty Alley. I can see them nodding their heads sagely at a choice spot and then sending forth word that the boys were all to report for duty with their flashlights at oh nine hundred hours.
According to what one of the tittyspottarazi told me, there was a Titty Alley at every NASCAR track and he had proudly wielded his MagLight at each location.
“Uh oh,” someone next to me mumbled.
“Let’s let this ol’ gal pass.”
“Hell no,” one of the tittyspottarzi yelled. “She’s got ‘em, too. She can show ‘em.”
Sitting in a four wheel drive pickup with tires the size of a Honda Civic and a knocking diesel engine, the woman’s hair was a color not found in nature’s palette. She was on the passenger side and smiling at the potential of this magic moment. No one had probably asked her to do this in three or four decades. The boys leaned forward as the truck approached, studied her linebacker’s shoulders and the pendulous mounds beneath her pink tank top. They were unrestrained by either device or morality and when she exposed them to the tittyspottarazi they wailed in both abject horror and joy.
“Aw gawd, don’t look at them. Don’t look, damnit, or she’ll keep ‘em out there.” The man yelling this actually turned his back as the truck drew closer.
“I already looked,” one witness admitted. “It was like looking into the sun.”
Her femininity had been distorted and distended by the years and she seemed determined to show the arrayed drunken and lusty men that this was what awaited them on the far side of a long marriage. She refused to cover up and pressed herself against the window as the truck pulled even with where I was standing.
“You know,” I said to Stephen, “It’s not time that kills us, pal. It’s gravity, constantly pulling at us, sucking us down, just being stuck here on the ground.”
“Very philosophical, Hollywood,” Stephen said. “How ‘bout just shuttin’ up and lookin’ at the titties?”
Stephen has always been a wise counselor but I took a big gulp of bourbon and slipped away toward the RV, only marginally concerned about sex devolving into spectator sport. NASCAR, of course, has always been about spectacle: fast cars, fast women, (some slowing in their homestretch) dramatic crashes, bright colors, oversized crowds and grandstands, and excessive consumption of food, fuel, and various other natural resources to put together the traveling circus of NASCAR. The sport of racing stock cars seems to be an extension of the American desire to experience extremes like great speeds, eating to excess, getting too drunk to fish, and buying things we don’t need. We are America, after all, and we can do whatever in the hell we want whenever in the hell we want, can’t we? Maybe Stephen was right; I ought to just shut up, look at the titties, and watch the pretty, colorful cars go very, very fast, round and round and round, and don’t, for god’s sake, think about it all.
I’d give that a try tomorrow, assuming I hadn’t burned up my retinas along Titty Alley.
* * *
A NASCAR weekend is actually a series of races. On Friday nights, trucks compete on a smaller banked oval in a contest purists believe may be truer racing than what is done by the stock car drivers. The minor league of NASCAR is a Saturday race sponsored by Anheuser-Busch, although the Busch Series is only a slightly smaller cash and sponsor tornado than the Nextel Cup, which is the premier race run on Sunday afternoons. A number of teams put cars in both competitions as a way of increasing the experience and public relations profile of ascending drivers. Of course, it also makes the cash register ring twice instead of just once.
Jack had purchased pit passes to the Busch race for the group of colleagues and customers he was hosting. We were to get a tour of the Team Rensi Motorsport’s facilities, meet their driver, and experience a bit of inspiration from their sponsors, which were McDonald’s and the U.S. Marines. The access also allowed us to watch the race from the pits. I didn’t have sufficient amazement or wonder at this privilege but later learned that most NASCAR fans believe if they live a good life and drink enough Bud Light (Junior’s sponsor) that when they die and go heaven they will get an eternal pit pass to the Nextel Cup races.
The indication that these passes were not of minor consequence was the fact that Jack’s first client showed up before our smoldering fire a little after the gray sunrise. An executive with a Fortune 10 corporation, Suzannah was the first female to join our group and she and her boyfriend were making no attempt to keep their conversation hushed; this was race day and not to be spent sleeping. By the time I had finished my cereal bowl full of aspirin with milk and sugar and had stumbled out the door of the RV, I was able to step into the middle of an American morning that made me think someone had slipped a little LSD or peyote into last night’s adult beverages.
“Good morning,” Rod chirped.
If I had taken a second to examine the scene more closely I might have understood his annoying pleasantness. In his right hand, Rod was holding his 40 ounce blue plastic pitcher and it was foaming over with his breakfast serving of Miller Lite. During the course of the next 72 hours that pitcher only left Rod’s grip when he went to the restroom or to sleep, and I secretly suspected him of cuddling with it like a teddy bear to help him go nighty-night.
“Hey man.”
John, who was broad and formed more by his consistent beer consumption than his genetics, was standing next to Rod and gripping his own drinking vessel filled to the rim. John always had happy eyes but this morning they were sleepy and happy and probably a touch intoxicated. None of us had had the time to sober up from the previous night and John and Rod had no interest in letting their blood levels pollute their alcohol streams. Neither of them allowed the beer kegs to get too far out of their sightlines all weekend; except during events of traditional importance like a race or Titty Alley.
The smell of coffee was coming from somewhere but I didn’t see anyone holding a cup. Spike, David, and Tracy, were leaning over a propane grill cooking bacon and sausage because nothing fights hangover molecules or smells like a NASCAR recommended daily allowance of nutrition than frying animal fat. After introducing myself to Suzannah and her boyfriend, I plopped into a sagging camp chair next to Mark, Jack’s business partner and a co-founder of their company. Mark was an MIT boy genius from Canada who had developed the patented technology that was driving revenues and he was unable to abide stupidity in any form. Books rarely sustained his interest but the internet and Google were created for guys like him. A natural born contrarian, he needed information immediately in order to stay focused on whatever he was arguing about and to keep him from wandering around and messing with each day’s comforting inertia.
“Looks like rain, folks,” I suggested.
The sky was darkening to the west and a blanket of gray reached to the eastern horizon.
“Do they run NASCAR races in the rain?” Mark asked.
“Nope.”
David did not look up from the bacon but he was our resident expert and had been fascinated with the sport since he had come of age in Michigan.
“What’ll we do if we get rained out?”
The question was asked of no one in particular but John, whose back was turned to us as he pulled the handle of the keg’s tap and refilled his beer cup, had the obvious answer.
“I wonder,” he grunted.
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Suzannah said.
Rain appeared almost certain, though. I looked at Suzannah, puzzled. There was something faintly androgynous about her and her boyfriend, whose name I either didn’t get or couldn’t recall. Suzannah had a friendly expression on her face and a relatively feminine mouth but she was blocky and appeared as stout as a longshoreman. Her eyes, cheeks, and lips showed no trace of makeup and before I had interrupted with my meteorological observations she had been relating a story about getting stuck on her Harley after riding down to the big NASCAR weekend at Daytona. If she was shapely, Suzannah’s curves were concealed by a loose pair of jeans and a NASCAR jacket spotted with product brand logos. Boyfriend, oddly, was perceptibly girly and not very adept at faking masculinity. There were clearly things going on between the two of them that were unusual enough to make me forget the smell of bacon.
“The vortex will take care of it,” Suzannah explained. “We’ll be fine.”
“The vortex?” I repeated.
“Sure.”
When I looked over at Mark his eyeballs rolled up almost beneath the floppy brown hair falling over his forehead. His hands were on the arms of his chair and his legs were bent back so he could quickly get his weight onto his toes. This was a predator closing on prey.
“What, exactly, is the vortex?” I asked Suzannah.
There was some reason to believe she might know things Mark and I didn’t. She had been to numerous NASCAR races, had an advanced degree or two in some discipline, and was a senior executive at a gigantic corporation in only her mid-thirties.
“Well, it’s pretty simple. The vortex is a column of air that comes up from the track as the cars race around at high speed. It rises into the sky and spins out air pressure and pushes away clouds and thunderstorms. That’s why it never rains at NASCAR.”
One of her degrees was apparently not in meteorology.
Mark pounced. “Okay, let me get this straight………”
He stood so quickly his feet rose a few inches off the ground. Before he started to assail Suzannah and her science, though, he glanced in my direction and we both had the same thought. Explaining Suzannah’s stupidity to her was not a good business tactic. She had championed the services of Jack and Mark’s company inside her vast organization and was responsible for shepherding lucrative contracts. In a rare show of restraint, Mark corrected his course.
“Huh. So it’s the vortex, eh?” he said. “I always wondered why it never rained at NASCAR.”
“Yeah, me too,” I added, clearly amazed by her insights. Of course, it never rained at NASCAR because they did not conduct races when it was raining or the track was wet; it’s just too dangerous. The sport of high speed left turns was only played in the sunshine.
“Are y’all drunk already this early in the morning?” The accusatory voice was Ashlee’s, who managed finance and human resources for Jack and Mark’s operation.
“Yep, we’re drunk, Ash,” Jack answered. “It’s NASCAR, remember?”
“Well, yeah, but I told y’all about the only time I ever got arrested. Y’all oughta be careful. A cop thought I was drunk just walkin’ down 6th street and tossed me in the jail and I got strip searched, y’all. Strip searched.”
“Did they check your holes, too?” Jack was obviously doing some searching of his own through his alcohol-addled vocabulary for a proper term but it was lost in the beer fog.
“Hey Jack.” I was laughing. “Did you mean ‘cavity search’ instead of ‘checking her holes?’”
“Yeah, that.”
“No, Jack, they didn’t.”
Suzannah, who had been listening intently to the conversation and appraising Ashlee, looked almost longingly at Jack.
“I’ve got some holes you can check, Jack,” she said.
Although it was far too early in the morning for me to process these witticisms, Suzannah’s comment did resolve a few questions I had regarding the roles played by her and Boyfriend. He was sitting beside her, his skinny legs comfortably folded over each other and his knees turned to the side while a cigarette dangled loosely from his fingertips. He betrayed no reaction to Suzannah’s offer to Jack.
A few hours later as we began moving toward the track to meet the Team Rensi’s public relations chaperone, we were mostly under the influence. I tried to decide if we were hilarious or simply pathetic but my deductive powers were impaired. There was evidence all around us, however, that we weren’t overly strange. Just as I was about to conclude we were on the edge of America’s cultural cracker and everyone else at the track was reasonably sane, a middle-aged man walked past wearing an inflatable fat suit with a bikini-clad woman painted onto the plastic surface. While the mass migration ensued from the campground to the race track, I thought of the H.G. Wells’ wailing siren in The Time Machine and how it unwillingly summoned the surface-dwelling Eloi to join the Moorlocks in their complex, machine-driven underground world. Then I remembered I was at NASCAR and literary analogies were probably more of my unnecessary thinking. (Shut up and watch the titties, Hollywood.)
Our Rensi escort, Rob, met us at the main gate and took us to a box lunch and an informational session on the hierarchy of stock car racing. Another former Marine, Rob’s enthusiasm for NASCAR was uncontrollable and manifested itself in a relentless smile and a fascination with the mundane. Touring the team’s trailer next to the pits, he pulled out drawers to show us where lug wrenches were neatly arranged.
“Huh,” I said. “So that’s where they keep the lug wrenches.”
“Yep.”
Rob smiled even more intensely. I refrained from asking him where they stored the lug nuts because I am certain he would have shown me and then energetically explained their strategic location. After we met Team Rensi’s diminutive driver, Bobby Hamilton, who had the personality of a dial tone, smiling Rob led us to the pits and showed us where their crew was to work. There were many things to see in the pits but the race was not one of them; it is better viewed from the stands. At track side, there is little to experience beyond the streaking rooftops of hurtling race cars and the thunderous roar of assembled horsepower, which has been known to affect the libido.
Before the start, drivers and their cars come out of the pits to reach the track for practice runs to check conditions. Engines are revved loudly as they move through throngs of fans. Suzannah’s joy at the passage of color and the rumbling of the concrete beneath her feet became a physical arousal and she looked at John to see if he shared her ecstasy.
“Hey, are you gettin’ a hard-on?” she asked. “’Cause I sure am getting’ wet.”
Boyfriend was standing next to Suzannah but didn’t appear to have heard her description of happiness because he was stuck in a concentrated gaze at known homosexual driver Jeff Gordon as the star waited for one of his team’s drivers to arrive.
Horsepower, it turns out, and not political power as Henry Kissinger had suggested, was the ultimate aphrodisiac. Up and down pit row all types of pretty girls teetered on their impossibly tall heels, struggling to maintain balance under the weight of over-endowments of flesh, silicone, jewelry, and makeup. Two of them paraded endlessly along the homestretch in dominatrix boots and leather halter tops, holding hands and kissing, suggesting the sexual conventions at NASCAR might be slightly less conservative than the political thinking.
For an hour, I hung around the Rensi pit crew and watched them prepare by stacking tires, readying gas tubes, and arranging lug nuts. Bored by that excitement, I began to wander and was next to Kasey Kahne’s stop as he came in for a change of two tires. The power wrenches whined and the nuts flew off but the crew member lost control briefly and one of the lugs arced backwards over the concrete retaining wall into the pit’s work space. Obviously, the mechanic had an extra one in his pocket and it was ready to go by the time the old tires were off and the fresh ones were ready to be seated against the wheels. As Kahne accelerated back into the flow of the race, the tire crewman jumped back into the pit and spotted the wayward lug nut. He picked it up, stared at it as if it were a crazed criminal, and then looked up to see a beautiful blonde woman staring at him and his prize. He lifted his hand as if to offer her the lug nut as a souvenir; she smiled broadly, took a few quick steps and grabbed it before he had a chance to change his mind.
“Oh my god,” she squealed at her two friends. “I’ve got Kasey Kahne’s lug nut. Oh my god. Can you believe it?”
“You are so lucky. I can’t believe you always have all the luck.”
“Let me see it. Let me see it.”
The three young women, less provocatively attired than most of those walking pit row, focused on the lug nut as if it were a 20 carat diamond.
Kahne may have won the Busch race but I don’t remember. In fact, I recall little of the entire evening, I suspect, because I’d never in my life had alcohol flowing into my brain without pause for two consecutive days. One incident from the night, however, stands out in graphic detail.
After dinner at the campsite, Jeremy, Gary, John, Stephen and I went wandering (of course, we had beers with us) to see what kind of oddities we might encounter in the NASCAR nation. In less than an hour, we heard a kind of mumbling and grunting between a couple of campers. Jeremy stopped walking.
“We oughta go back there and make sure nobody’s hurt,” he suggested.
“Of course, somebody’s hurt,” Gary said. “It’s NASCAR, dude. Getting hurt’s the weekend activity.”
“Nah, come on. There’s somebody back in there. We need to check on them.”
“Oh man, Jeremy. Whatever.”
In the light coming from a Coleman lantern at a nearby camp site, we found a capsized wheelchair and a man lying on the ground. It was too dark to determine immediately if he was injured but he was emitting odd sounds.
Jeremy knelt over him. “Hey man, you okay? You all right?”
The man barely raised his head from the dirt to acknowledge Jeremy’s presence.
“Gell dopp fee garoom.”
“What did he say,” Jeremy looked up at us.
“I think he said, ‘Gell dopp fee garoom,’Jeremy,” Stephen explained. “I don’t think I’m drunk enough to translate.”
Returning his attention to the fallen man, Jeremy tried hard to offer assistance. “Mister, are you okay? Can we get you back into your chair?”
For a minute, there was no response. He lay motionless with his greasy and sweaty head resting on an extended arm. The side of his face we could see was smeared with dirt and his ragged shirt had ridden up to his chest.
“Galluh fuh dee poo,” he said without even trying to look up.
“What?”
“Galluh fuh dee.”
“Apparently,” Stephen suggested, “the ‘poo’ part of his message isn’t critical.”
“I hope not,” John laughed.
This was an historic level of drunkenness I had never experienced in either the able-bodied or the handicapped. Jeremy was the only one of us not uncontrollably amused. He noticed the man’s cell phone on the ground near one of the chair’s wheels.
“Hey mister, is there anybody we can call for you?”
“Fugu.”
“Well, that’s pretty clear,” John said. “He obviously wants to sleep it off right here.”
“Fugu.”
“You sure you don’t want us to call anybody?”
“Fugu. Fugu.”
“Come on, Jeremy. This ain’t the first time this has happened. He’s been to this rodeo before and he’s been thrown before.”
“I don’t know, man. He looks in pretty bad shape.”
“Yep.”
“Fugu. Fugu.”
“Okay, man. Fugu too.”
Jeremy picked up the cell phone to scroll for numbers in the directory. The only number listed was recorded with the words, “Fuck you.” Jeremy laughed and pressed the button to call and heard a voice answer.
“Hey. Fuck you?”
“Yeah, well fuck you, too, man.”
Whoever had answered, hung up. Jeremy, undaunted, redialed and the same male answered.
“Wait. Don’t hang up. Do you have a friend in a wheelchair?”
“Yeah, but why you callin’ me up and just telling me to get fucked? I din’t do nothin’ to you. I don’ even know who you are.”
“Listen, fuck you, I’m with…”
“Don’t start with that shit again, man, or I’m hangin’ up on ya.”
“Well, what’s your name? It’s on here as ‘Fuck you.’”
“That ain’t my name. My name’s Billy. And fuck you.”
“Okay, man. Okay. But you said you have a friend in a wheelchair.”
“Yeah, but I don’t know where he is. He was with us earlier but just disappeared. He’s drunk and we’re drunk and we can’t keep up with each other much.”
“He’s here with me. My friends and I found him tumped over in his chair and too drunk to talk.”
“Yeah, that’s him.”
“Tell us where y’all are and we’ll get him to you.”
“Okay, I guess.”
Jeremy listened to what certainly could not have been detailed or accurate directions for about a minute.
“Thanks a lot, fuck you, uh, I mean Billy.”
“Yeah, well, fuck you, too.”
By the time we had gotten the drunken paraplegic back into the care of his friend Fuck You, there was little left of the night. The Nextel Cup Race the next afternoon became almost a distraction to the tortured and celebrating humanity in the RV and tent city surrounding Texas Motor Speedway. There was more action and intrigue among the campers than on the big oval track.
The sky was overcast and drizzle had been falling but NASCAR was running the jet turbine driers around the track and the surface was ready for a race. After less than twenty laps the sky began to clear and an autumnal sun poked through and warmed the cheering masses. The vortex had done its job, I thought. I sat next to a handsome couple from Waco who had Igloo coolers and a duffel bag at their feet and when the race started they reached down and took out a pair of carefully folded leather jackets. They elaborately slipped their arms into the sleeves and patted down the front to make sure everyone saw Junior’s number 8 and the insignia of his sponsors. In a minute, they opened their bologna sandwiches, popped a couple of Bud Lights, and lit cigarettes, which they puffed between bites of bologna and sips of beer.
Below me, people were screaming to be heard above the roar of engines as the cars rose into the turn. On every lap, Jeremy stood and raised his beer to Jimmy Johnson and pointed him down the track. This was an important exercise for every fan; they gestured down the track with one arm and whirled their other like a spinning hand of a clock to indicate the direction the driver needed to go and that he ought to go in that direction faster. Apparently, they did not trust their drivers to know this critical information.
“Go faster. That way, Junior. That way.”
“Oh. So that’s the deal. Counterclockwise really fast? Faster than the other guys? Now I get it. It’s a competition deal.”
On the way back down to Austin the next morning, I was unable to stop smiling and a few times just burst out laughing. Rod, still driving the RV, understood and did not ask for an explanation. Maybe, I admitted to myself, NASCAR had taught me a few things. I was in danger of becoming a bore (okay, I might have already been one) who wasted too much time trying to understand and explain. We all needed to just live and enjoy ourselves and accept that we are limited in what we get to know. Cold beer tastes good. Pretty cars go fast. Pretty girls go faster. Friends are nice.
Approaching Austin I saw the Hill Country’s crooked horizon to the west and felt the universal comfort of coming home. I thought I might have also acquired a new philosophy on life that was certain to work for anyone willing to adopt it. Fundamentally, it was to just stop fretting and contemplating and let the good times happen. Stephen’s advice crassly articulated my new attitude but I couldn’t put, “Just shutup and look at the titties,” on beer mugs and coffee cups (or maybe I could.) Instead, if I ever got invited back to NASCAR, I intended to see that we all got tee shirts with this revolutionary, simplistic wisdom printed in bold letters across our backs. It’s the oldest secret of life that Zen masters and Tibetan monks and drunken NASCAR fans have been talking about down through the ages.
“Jah duh ray, mah.”
April 18th, 2011 on 10:38 am
Hilarious adventure! “Jah duh ray, mah.”…. Great piece Jim.
April 19th, 2011 on 11:21 am
I used to do PR for Flyan’ Bryan Germone. Yeah, he actually spelled it that way. He was also a Busch Leaguer (you wish you had written that).
Great story man. I also used to write about my friends. Back before they dumped me for writing about them.
April 26th, 2011 on 5:40 am
One of the better written pieces on that wacky sub-culture. Thanks for putting this out there, Jim.
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