If you live in Austin, you can almost breathe the Lance Armstrong legend in the air. Everybody intimately knows the tale and its grand parameters. Who has such athletic accomplishments; especially after cancer? His greatness and, indeed, humility were made even more manifest when he established a foundation to help in the global quest to end cancer. We have in our midst, many Texans believe, an individual who is exceptional in character and achievement.

The Armstrong profiled by interviews and narrative in the 60 Minutes report on CBS is difficult, if not impossible, for many people in Austin to process. The arc of Lance’s story has been always upward from the time he was pronounced cancer free. He got healthier, faster, fitter, wealthier, and more magnanimous with time. Every chapter of this American tale was written with bold strokes through nothing more than focus and determination.

There are now, however, several of Armstrong’s teammates during the period of his ride to glory, who are sketching out an anti-hero. The young man they describe thinks of regulations and rules as opponents to be defeated. Each of Armstrong’s teammates, meanwhile, is being attacked for a lack of credibility, and, in fact, their own confessions about doping turn them into liars. Tyler Hamilton, Floyd Landis, Stephen Swart, Frankie Andreu, and, if CBS is correct, George Hincapie, were all part of a deception to use performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) to win. The points of attack are pretty easily established for Armstrong’s legal and public relations team.

Tyler Hamilton - The Truth Hurts

But is Lance the only person telling the truth? Are most of his teammates jealous and petty and pathological liars? They seem to have created an alternative reality with their words.

Armstrong is dismissing Hamilton, as he has other accusers, for lacking credibility. The level of detail described by Lance’s former teammate, however, is difficult to ignore even for casual observers of this controversy. Hamilton, who appeared drawn and a bit emotionally tortured during the taping, told of flying in a private jet to Spain with Lance where they were both transfused with their own red blood cells, a process called blood doping, which improves endurance. He also claimed Armstrong shipped him drugs, that they both put drops of testosterone oil into each other’s mouths after a race, and that he was in the room during conversations with a controversial doctor who was teaching them how and when to use PEDs. Lunch bags of goodies, according to Hamilton, were given to riders that had earned their way into the inner circle. He also said he saw Armstrong use EPO and indicated there was a program driven by Armstrong and the team coach Johan Bruyneel. A similar description was provided by Swart to Sports Illustrated. Regardless, Tyler Hamilton either has a very active imagination or he has opened the door to ignominy for an American icon.

In his interview, Hamilton also said that Armstrong had failed a 2001 Tour of Switzerland drug test and that the International Cycling Union (UCI) had worked with Armstrong and Bruyneel to cover up the bad results. UCI has denied the assertion.

The greater revelation in the 60 Minutes‘ story is the inclusion of George Hincapie in the narrative of Lance accusers. Armstrong has described Hincapie as “a brother,” and he was at the Texan’s side through all of his tour victories in France. He is also, by

Big George Hincapie: A Brother

reputation, a man of great charm and one of the nicest guys in sports. Hincapie has never been accused of doping and that has provided reassurances to Lance’s supporters. If he can hammer up the hills with Lance and not come under suspicion, then why can’t Lance be clean? According to CBS, though, Hincapie has testified before the federal grand jury investigating the Armstrong case and has told jurors that Lance and he used PEDs. Hincapie declined CBS‘s request for an interview but appears to have parsed his language carefully when asked about the report by answering, “I don’t know where they got their information.” He did not say that CBS was wrong or inaccurate, only that he didn’t speak with them and he had no idea where their claims originated. Wouldn’t he have denounced their reporting as incorrect, if it were? There seems no simpler way to defend his friend Lance.

The people who have been the most consistent and insistent in their claims against Lance Armstrong are Betsy and Frankie Andreu. Frankie rode with Lance on his US Postal team and says his contract was not renewed when he refused an Armstrong request that he meet with Dr. Michaela Ferrari, the Italian physician who reportedly gave the team doping protocols. (Ferrari has been banned from the sport in Italy.) Frankie and Betsy Andreu testified under oath that they were in a hospital room with Lance when he listed for his oncologist the PEDs that he had used in training and racing. Armstrong has vehemently denied their story and also placed them among his growing list of jealous

Frankie and Betsy Andreu: Against the Wind

liars. Frankie, who was a commentator covering the Tour de France for Versus Network, believes he lost his job this year as a consequence of speaking the truth about Armstrong. Work has not been the only casualty in their lives, either. Hincapie, who stood up at their wedding and was once one of their best friends, no longer speaks with the couple.

Armstrong’s attorney Mark Fabiani has energetically attacked 60 Minutes and CBS for taking the word of liars and promoting people trying to sell books. An Austin supporter of Lance even suggested to me that editors sat around and tried to figure out a way to embellish little bits of rumor into a story so they could sell more advertising. CBS, it is important to note, is launching the career of its new anchor, Scott Pelley. By reputation and performance, Pelley’s work is exemplary, and neither he nor his editors are likely to take any chances in the wake of the Dan Rather resignation over the National Guard story involving George W. Bush. The safe assumption is that the Hincapie part of the Lance story was nailed down before producers even brought it up for discussion.

The question most often asked about Lance Armstrong, though, is how can he beat all the doping riders during the doping era if he isn’t doping? The Texan’s focus and determination are a part of his legacy and given the dimensions of his ambition there is always the possibility he might have overcome cheaters. An obsessive man is hard to stop. The larger issue being confronted in Austin and elsewhere, though, is what do we make out of Lance if he becomes a fallen man? Sports analysts often argue he is the greatest athlete to ever live and his foundation has positioned him as a profoundly important humanitarian in raising cancer awareness. If his achievements on the bike are found based, at least in part, on fraud, does that diminish him as a role model in the fight against cancer?

The answer in Austin, at least for now, appears to be an unequivocal and resounding, “No!” The community, publicly at least, embraces its hero and the Lance Armstrong Foundation (LAF). Business and political leaders tend to be eager to sit on the foundation’s board. (LAF’s communications and public relations efforts have lately, though, been stylized to suggest their work is much broader than just being a Lance endeavor). His popularity, enhanced by LAF, has been sufficient enough that many people have suggested he has a bright future in politics and public service.

The people who ponder Lance’s tomorrow want the investigation into Armstrong to be terminated. “It’s a waste of taxpayers’ money,” I keep getting told by my cycling friends. “Why don’t we move those resources where they are needed?” It is not, of course, that simple. The investigation has reportedly broadened to include allegations involving defrauding the federal government and moving illegal substances across state and international boundaries. Prosecutors can hardly turn their heads and say, “It’s just a bicyclist. It’s Lance, his career is over, and he’s fighting cancer.” As Betsy Andreu has suggested, it’s hard to say bad things about a person who in the fight against cancer.

Armstrong, though, has no shortage of detractors in his hometown, but the prevailing sentiment is probably that the investigation needs to come to an end. There is, however, only one thing that will now make the Armstrong case disappear from the news.

And that is for the legal process to make a final determination of the truth.

Because neither international observers nor his family have been able to visit, the cell where Hassan Touray is living can only be imagined. A U.S. citizen from Texas, Touray is being incarcerated in the notorious Mile 2 Prison in The Gambia, Africa. He has told the U.S. Embassy that he is in a 9 x 11 feet cell with 22 other inmates, and their bodily excretions. There is rarely enough room to sit, and sleep is impossible.

“This is like a bad movie for us,” said Abdourahman Touray. “You can’t believe these things happen to civilized people in 2011, but it has, and right now we don’t know what to do.”

There is no evidence Hassan Touray has committed a crime. He is not even a suspect. He is, instead, an apparent victim of The Gambia’s dictator, Yahya AJJ Jammeh, who has ruled the country since a military coup in 1994 overthrew a democratically elected president. Jammeh, who claims to have a cure for AIDS and has made up to a thousand villagers drink a poisonous concoction to rid them of witchcraft, has been busy silencing dissent and finding insidious ways to appropriate private property.

Hassan and Abdourahman Touray were raised on a family farm in Mansajang Kunda in the Upper River Region of The Gambia and went to the U.S. for computer science degrees. Abdourahman was educated at Columbia in New York City while Hassan went further west to the University of North Texas in Denton. They were, almost immediately, successful in their jobs on Wall Street and at Pepsico in Dallas. Hassan married, began raising a family, and became a U.S. citizen. Abdourahman launched a startup technology company in Chicago, and became a permanent legal resident. As their lives and careers flourished, however, the brothers were unable to stop thinking of their impoverished homeland.

“I guess we both felt guilty,” Abdourahman said. “We were both doing very, very well in America and had good lives but thought we should be giving back to the poor country we came from. That’s where this began.”

The business idea that began to form was to try to turn The Gambia into an outsourcing capital like India and train young people to do software and systems support. Family and friends invested and loans were secured after the completion of a business plan. Unfortunately, they were unable to procure customers in their home country.

“It was extremely tough,” Abdourahman explained. “You don’t get contracts unless you bribe someone. We were told we cannot play unless we pay. We put in very good bids on projects but never heard anything.”

Their luck changed when The Gambia’s national government approached the Touray’s company, Pristine Consulting, and asked them to bid with two other firms on a project to modernize the national identification card system. They structured loans from within their country and investors from the U.S. for a total of $2 million USD and won the contract, which was signed in 2009. Immediately, the Touray’s set up a program to identify and teach bright young students from impoverished families. Their foundation funded high school scholarships and then provided training upon graduation.

Pristine Consulting began to produce and deliver a range of ID cards for the Gambian government. By contractual agreement, these included national and alien identity cards, workers’ permits, drivers’ licenses, passports, visas, and birth and marriage certificates. When the first payment of several hundred thousand dollars USD was due, the Tourays issued an invoice to the government. No payment was forthcoming, and their company’s funds were depleting. They turned to phone calls and letters and intermediaries and lawyers but went a year without being paid.

And then Hassan Touray was arrested.

Government security agents showed up at Pristine Consulting’s office and took him into custody. He was held for 24 days without charge until the family was able to post a bail of $800,000 in property. The Tourays saw no option but to persist in attempts to recover their investment in time and money so they continued to seek remuneration. Finally, they filed a civil suit against the government. A docket date was set for April 19^th of this year but before Hassan Touray made it to the courthouse, government officers once more arrested him. His bail was revoked and he was sent to Mile 2 Prison. The government, eventually, filed four counts claiming Hassan and Abdourahman “converted” $20 million Dalisi (GMD) of Gambian currency after taking payment for the ID cards.

“We’ve yet to receive any money,” Abdourahman explained. “We don’t know what the charges are and every time we approach a court hearing, the case is adjourned. That’s happened eight times now. We don’t know what this ‘converted’ means, either.

Abdourahman, who has not been arrested, has been in the U.S. while his brother has been held at Mile 2 Prison since April 19^th. The media and the International Red Cross have not been granted access to Mile 2, but there is evidence of the great risk being faced by Hassan Touray. A former police commissioner has testified that prisoners in the past have been fed with meat that has resulted in deaths and the director general of the prison services also has told a court that as many as 40 inmates died in 2007 as a result of chronic anemia, abdominal pain, and food poisoning. The U.S. State Department’s Human Rights reports from recent years have indicated that some inmates have been detained in Mile 2 without trial for up to four years.

Hassan Touray, wife Jacob Krubally-Touray, and children Omar and Aisha

Hassan Touray can avoid all of these dangers, prosecutors have informed him, if he will just pay another $800,000 in property and $400,000 in cash for bail. There is no indication his family will be returned the original property or anything else they might surrender for his freedom.

President Jammeh’s apparent greed and idiosyncrasies have proved dangerous to other outside investors in The Gambia. Carnegie Minerals, PLC, an Australian company, was working a zircon mine when it was ordered by Jammeh to halt operations. The president, who is also the Secretary of State for Mineral Resources, accused Carnegie of the economic crime of mining uranium and titanium when it only had a license for mineral sands. Carnegie’s country manager for The Gambia, Charlie Northfield, pointed out that uranium tracings are found in soil around the globe but there was nothing significant in their zircon plot. Carnegie’s license, nonetheless, was cancelled, and Northfield was taken into custody. Jammeh went on TV to announce the amazing new discovery of uranium while bail was set for Northfield at $450,000 AUD. Carnegie bailed out its manager, abandoned the mine, and watched its stock drop almost a quarter in a matter of days. The Gambia does not have uranium resources.

Jammeh also does not countenance a free press or criticism of his government. Less than two years ago, six of his nation’s journalists, including three executive members of the Gambian Press Union, were sentenced to two years in Mile 2 Prison. They were also fined $10,000 USD and informed that failure to pay, an astronomical sum for a Gambian journalist, would result in an additional two years incarceration. The six were charged with sedition for questioning broadcast remarks by the president regarding the unsolved murder of an editor in Banjul.

The president’s intellectual curiosities are equally inexplicable. After his aunt died, he blamed her passing on witches and gathered up about 1000 people, locked them in secret detention centers, and forced them to drink hallucinogenic poison to destroy their power as witches. 300 were taken from the village of Sintet, according to Amnesty International, and were made to imbibe a solution that caused instant vomiting and diarrhea.

“I experienced and witnessed such abuse and humiliation,” a victim told Amnesty International. “I cannot believe that this type of treatment is taking place in Gambia. It is from the dark ages.”

Witches, however, might be safer in The Gambia than homosexuals. The president told the National Assembly that homosexuality was “strange behavior that even god will not tolerate,” and he later ordered police to arrest homosexuals for what he described as their “criminal practice.” Eventually, he told all LGBT persons to leave The Gambia or he would cut off their heads.

The U.S. Embassy in Banjul, obviously, does not have a simple task in dealing with President Jammeh to secure the safety and release of Hassan Touray. A consular for the U.S. State Department had little detail to offer and said only, “Embassy staff have visited Mr. Touray on several occasions and has been in communication with Gambian officials regarding his case” and that they “continue to request regular consular access from Gambian officials.”

Touray’s wife, an American of Gambian descent, is able to visit with him almost daily in a prison meeting room and gives him the latest news on their two small children. She describes her husband as “psychologically strong” but there is undoubtedly a degree of incomprehensible circumstantial absurdity to his situation for Hassan Touray.

Touray went home to help. He raised money for his village’s health care clinic, served on a cancer foundation board, and was creating jobs for a nation where most of the 1.7 million people never see $1000 in their entire lives. His altruism, however, has led to his imprisonment.

And his friends are hopeful that the U.S., his new homeland, will not abandon Hassan Touray to the whims and injustices of an unstable dictator.

(Free Hassan Touray Now Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/freehassantouraynow)

(Sign the petition: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/free-hassan-touray-now/)

“There is no such thing as bravery; only degrees of fear.”  - John Wainwright

I have never stopped wondering what motivates war correspondents.

The recent deaths of Tim Hetherington, Sebastian Junger’s colleague in the making of the remarkable Afghanistan documentary, “Restrepo,” as well as Chris Hondros, whose photos of the war in Libya are beyond startling, has me contemplating again the rationale for putting their lives at risk to tell a story. Perhaps, I am a coward; I never thought a story was worth dying for. Or maybe Hetherington and Junger and Hondros believe the story is worth the calculated risks. Dying might be compartmentalized and left out of their calculus but that seems unlikely. You can, of course, only tell the tale if you are living. Hetherington and Hondros died during an assault on the Libyan town of Misrata, and they became a story; a very sad one.

Casualty of War

Journalists in war zones provide invaluable information to cultures in conflict. Political opposition to the Vietnam War reached a level of criticality in part because of network television’s film cameras turning the conflict into history’s first “living room war.” Seymour Hersh’s reporting on My Lai meant that we all had to confront the horrors of what was being done in our name. Pick a war and there are names of journalists associated with its prosecution. They might be small print names in bylines from newspapers or high-profile reporters convinced there is romance and value in writing about our bloody battles. There are also reporters like Judy Miller, late of the New York Times, who did such a shoddy job of gathering information that she helped lead a nation into another bad war.

I wrestle with how a person makes a choice to take the risk of working in a war zone and where they derive personal value from the experience. I see the importance of the public service. I was in the streets of Washington, D.C. for several protest marches against the Vietnam War and I doubt I would have been driven to join the masses were it not for what I had read in the papers and seen on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. But why did the reporters who put their lives in jeopardy to provide me that information willingly endanger themselves? I realize, in one sense, the answer is obvious but in other regards it is less clear, psychologically, why one is willing to risk their chance to live to convey information.

Always in the Midst of Chaos

I was also in Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador for a short time during those civil wars and considered myself barely functional. In the hotel, there were often correspondents and photographers drinking themselves into a stupor for various reasons. There were also more of them that were out in the jungle walking with rebels and government forces to try to acquire a story. The conversation at the bar frequently turned to the disappointment felt when crews returned from a week in the bush without any “bang bang.” The political context never seemed as important to some of these reporters as the drama of the gunfire.

I was particularly distressed by a late thirties TV photographer named Roberto, who worked out of Miami. He said he went from war to war, fight to fight, and could not imagine a different life.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “Why?”

“I can’t explain it,” he answered. “All I know is that the first time a bullet whizzes past your ear it changes your life.”

“Yeah, well, the first time it whizzes into your ear it changes it, too,” I said.

Roberto laughed. “I hear what you’re saying, my friend, but there is something addictive about this. It’s adrenaline and dramatics and everything. It’s like you’re living a movie. Plus, I make a hell of a lot of money.”

In the glory days of TV news, before cable and the Internet, photographers on international assignments and presidential campaigns were able to get their hourly pay scale to a level they referred to as “golden time.” The first 10 hours of overtime were paid at one and a half times the hourly rate, the next 10 at double time, and the subsequent hours were all at quadruple their hour wage, which came to be known as golden time because every hour after a certain total, even when sleeping, was logged at the big dollar tally. There is not, however, enough money at any scale to make such risks viable to those of us who consider ourselves even marginally sane.

Victims of My Lai Massacre

There is, however, no shortage of people willing to testify to the thrill of being a target. In “Restropo,” one of the US soldiers looks at Hetherington’s camera and says, “A firefight. It’s like crack. Bungee jumping or kayaking. Whatever. There’s no rush like being shot at.”

Martin Bell, a long time BBC correspondent, told me in Nicaragua that money had very little to do with the allure of combat reporting; it was a thing he almost could not name. Bell had stood in the streets of Managua as the Sandinistas and the Contras fought for control and the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza unraveled.

Felled on Camera

“It’s just anarchy that I love,” he said. “I know it’s stupid. And it’s dangerous. But the sense of anything goes, that everything is falling apart, is just intoxicating to me.”

I was staring up at a ridgeline on the Nicaraguan border and scrub brush and palm trees were turning into Sandinista rebels in my imagination.

“I don’t know, Martin,” I said. “I think you’re a little crazy.”

“Of course, you have to be. But that doesn’t mean the work isn’t important.”

Unequivocally, Martin was and is right. When Daniel Ortega formed a new government in Nicaragua, Bell became bored and moved onto the next conflict and then the one after that. In Bosnia, Martin Bell made history when he was injured by shrapnel from a grenade while doing a live report on BBC television. Such a thing had never happened before in broadcasting. The empathy for Bell was so great that he rode its crest to an electoral victory and became a Member of Parliament, and subsequently, a UK Ambassador.

The saddest of these war correspondent yarns, for me, is about Margaret Moth. I met her in sedate Austin during a session of the inane Texas legislature. How she came to cover such an undertaking as a state legislature, I will never know. She liked punk music and raves and dyed her hair jet black and chased men half her age, very successfully. Margaret was a New Zealander and had come to Texas to do TV news after hitchhiking around the world with her mother, taking tramp steamers from Third World countries to reach new continents.

"Completely, utterly, fearless"

She ended up at CNN and was in Bosnia when a sniper shot her through the window of a car that was clearly marked as conveying journalists. The round took off her lower jaw and all of her teeth. The network moved worlds to keep her alive and get her out of the country. Margaret underwent dozens of operations to reconstruct her face but she survived and could hardly wait to get back to Bosnia. The compromise with her editors was that she return to the Paris Bureau and take intermittent, instead of full-time assignments in the war zone. A bullet didn’t take her, though; Margaret was dropped by cancer.

I have worked around many war correspondents like Margaret. I know them and yet I don’t understand them. But I am grateful for their courage.

It has obviously changed the world.

“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 6^th 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.”

When I rolled past Picacho Peak just before sunset I smiled at a surrendered dream. Tommy and I were going to make our fortunes off of that mountain. We were radio announcers in those days and we had an idea to put a broadcast tower on top of Pichacho Peak.

The mountain rises in jags and slabs out of the Sonoran Desert almost halfway between Phoenix and Tucson. If we were smart, Tom said, we would save our money, buy an FM radio tower, put it on Picacho, get a frequency license, and capture the listening markets in both cities.

“How much does a tower cost?” I asked.

“How the hell am I supposed to know? You’re the one who went to college.”

“Gotta be a lot, I reckon. A couple hundred thousand maybe. So, you’re earning the same thing I am, which is $176.43 take home every two weeks. How smart was my idea to go to college four years?

“Yeah, so what’s your point?”

“Oh, just that we’d have to eat Ramen and popcorn for about three decades to get enough to buy the tower and then there’s the money for the lawyers to get the license and we’d have to build a studio, which won’t be cheap.”

“Okay. To hell with it.”

Pichacho Peak, Arizona

We were sitting in a pizza joint next to the radio station in Clifton, Arizona, and drinking beer. We were unable to afford a pizza. Whenever we had to choose between pizza and beer, beer always won. Tom had just finished his on air shift at KCUZ-AM, “Music fooooorrrrrr (melodramatic pause) all of Greenlee County, Eastern Arizona, and Western New Mexico.this is (another melodramatic pause, as if the audience could not wait to know) K-CUZ, 1490 on your AM dial.”

FM radio stations and signals were just beginning to proliferate and I did not have the soft mellow sound that was required to introduce album cuts, which is why I ended up in a copper mining town playing Juice Newton and Mickey Gilley records to miners taking too hard to drink after a day in the hole. Tom had a throaty sound of gravel in his vocal chords and I did not know how he came to be in that cinderblock studio down below the highway that led up to the mines.

Instead of practicing my ability to be clever while introducing songs by Mel Tillis, I was trying to bring news to the greater Clifton-Morenci metroplex. Roy, who was our general manager, had told me I could produce a newscast for the mornings using wire copy and whatever I might learn by calling the police department.

“But I can’t pay you for it,” he said. “So, don’t even ask. You want to be a reporter, this is where you start learning.”

Roy wore a powder blue cardigan to the station almost every day and the grease he used on the hair at his temples also seemed to have been smeared over the top of his head where he was bald. His pate shined brightly in the Arizona sun.

“So, if I want,” I asked, “I can work extra hours for free?”

“Yep, and people will hear you for miles around.”

“One thousand red hot watts of mellow country for drunken miners and their angry wives.”

“Pays your check, doesn’t it, smartass?”

“Yes, sir. Sorry.”

There was more to it than the big money, though. Steve and I did sports broadcasts for the Morenci Wildcats and shared color and play-by-play duties. We went to the little towns in the White Mountains on Friday nights when the air was cool and sweet and there was color in the trees and people were happy for their silly games. I did not care about sports except to play them and there were times I thought people were absurdly attached to the identity of the high school football team and its performance but I grew to love the drama and the energy even though it often felt contrived. During the games, unknown spots like Show Low and Sierra Vista and Superior became hopeful and optimistic and that was enough reason to love football.

The Wildcats were always diminutive athletes for genetic reasons I never was able to discern but they were fearless and won many games they ought to have lost to bigger teams. In basketball, they were fast and moved the ball adroitly as if they had been playing together since kindergarten but I do not know when they might have found time to practice. Most of them were poor and had to work jobs after school but their hands were fast and they caught passes almost without looking at the ball. One year they went to the state championship and Steve and I drove his yellow convertible Cutlass down to Tempe to do the broadcast from Arizona State’s arena. On the drive, Steve kept practicing his intro and saying in his deepest voice, “Live from the big house on the campus of Arizona State University, it’s Wildcat basketball.”

They lost, though, and then things got even grimmer than just a basketball score. Ira, the station owner, found his four announcers sitting in the lobby on the vinyl-upholstered furniture while a particularly long record was spinning. We were planning our bright futures when the man with the kind eyes and sagging cheeks introduced us to misfortune.

The greater Clifton-Morenci Metroplex in Eastern Arizona

“Well, the mines are going to be laying off, which means the restaurants and the jewelry store and the motel and all of them other businesses such as we got around here won’t be advertising because the miners won’t be spending money.”

“And you can’t pay us any more.” Tom finished Ira’s thought.

“That’s about the size of it. You boys ought to go down to Tucson and see about work.”

“Well, hell, Ira,” Tom was getting indignant very quickly. “Do you think if I could’ve gotten hired in Tucson in the first place I’d be up here?”

“I don’t know. But now’s a good time to try your luck again.”

Tom was not worried about our situation nor did he think it was particularly tragic that all of Greenlee County might not be able to hear “Swap Shop” every day from ten to two. The majority of our broadcast time was consumed by people calling in and saying, “I’ve got a used John Deere portable generator for sale for a real good price and if anyone wants it they can just call me at…..”

We did not go to Tucson because we knew we were not likely to get hired. My voice had not completely reached any kind of post-pubescent timbre and Tom did not want to deal with more rejection. Instead, Tom called his friend Earl, who lived down in Eloy, and got him to join us in an adventure on the road. Tom had a 1964 Ford Falcon, a kind of miniature pickup with a stick shift on the floor and two bucket seats. One of us was forced to ride in the bed of the truck so we put a lawn chair and a cooler back there and ended up arguing over whose turn it was to drink beer and stare backwards at where we had already traveled.

Bright Angel Trail, Grand Canyon

On our way to pick up Earl, Tom started back on his yapping about becoming broadcast giants once we took over the top of Picacho Peak. I did not listen much because Tom talked a lot. I liked to hear him rattle but not when he was stuck on a topic. Earle took first shift in the back of the truck but not before we made a decision about where we were going. I suggested Florida because it was March and I had been down there a few times during spring break. We had no need of goals other than to go look at girls.

Earl had dark eyes and thick curly hair and when he sat in the back of the Falcon he waved at every girl in every passing vehicle. Most of them waved back and a few wanted us to pull over and talk but Tom and I knew that had nothing to do with us. Earl banged on the roof of the truck and shouted at us for not stopping and when we went for gas he jumped out and accused us of being stupid, a singular truth that had long been unavoidable.

“Why didn’t you guys pull over? Damnit. Those girls wanted to talk to us.”

“No they didn’t, Earl,” Tom said. “They wanted to talk to you.”

“Well, so what, you could’ve talked too.”

“Yeah, but it would have been a waste of my time. I’d love just sitting in a Texaco station in this heat and waiting for you to make time with some girl. But I’ll be happy to drop you off.”

“Oh shut the hell up. It’s your turn in the back.”

“Good. You leave any beer?”

Mogollon Rim

I did not want to leave Arizona and we had no way of knowing if we were ever returning. The first time I had hitchhiked out from Michigan I loved the Kaibab Plateau and Coconino Forest and the Painted Desert in a manner that seemed almost inexplicable and without connection to my youth in the Midwest. The Grand Canyon has not yet let go of me and just last year I walked it rim-to-rim for the third or fourth time. The years when my leg muscles were supple and my lungs were big and efficient I had run across the canyon, down the Kaibab and up Bright Angel, distracted sufficiently by the beauty to endure the pain. I had also ridden a motorcycle down the Mogollon Rim south of Winslow and loved how the ponderosa pines thinned and the cool air curled back as the switchbacks wound around and lowered you to the desert floor. I thought about all of this as I was driving past Picacho Peak in a rental car.

And I smiled when I looked off into the distance and saw a red light flickering on a broadcast tower, fortunately, nowhere near Picacho Peak State Park.

“None but a blockhead writes for a living.” – Mark Twain

There has not been a moment since it launched when I have not wondered about Huffington Post and its impact on journalism. I was one of Arianna’s early adopters. My second book had been released and she was creating a community that was likely to attract readers. There was no money involved but, if things went well, there were likely to be people getting exposure to what I thought and wrote. And that draws writers almost as much as money. I have been writing since I was in high school but I have never been read as widely as I have from the moment I began putting pieces up on Huffington Post, and that includes having a New York Times best-selling book. But I am still uncomfortable about the relationship and what I am doing with my work.

I became even more confounded when I read about the sale of Huffington Post to AOL. First, much of the original appeal, for me, of Huffpo was its renegade nature. The blog was about writers, thinkers, and other smart people coming together and going directly to the audience without corporate influence. The goal was to draw readers, I assumed, and then to create revenue through ads and syndication. Money was always one of the essential motivators but does it become the prime mover with AOL corporate ownership? Arianna is issuing assurances to everyone that things are the same and there’s just more of it. Still, skepticism abounds.

The second reason I struggle with Huffington Post is because of my friends working in journalism. Their work is their currency, how they pay the bills. And much of Arianna’s model is built around the concept of getting people to work for free. Free does not keep the lights on or gas in the tank. I write for free for Huffington Post. I have never been paid, which means, in some regards, I am working for free in front of a big audience and competing with my friends who get paid by newspapers to reach a smaller crowd. If enough people act like me, my friends will not have jobs very long. (And yes, I know there are other economic issues for newspapers but that is not what I am discussing just now.) If I write for free, they are not in a fair fight for survival.

I guess this all means that a combination of my stupidity and Arianna’s ingenuity have created a $315 million business. There are numerous professionals that write for her without compensation because she owns a packed auditorium of readers. But if I give away my work for free isn’t that its true value in the marketplace? How, exactly, do young reporters sell their skills when guys who have accumulated my years and beers are saying, “Here, take this; it’s yours. I hope somebody reads it.” I read in the announcement of the sale that Huffpo employs about 200 people and many of them, like Howard Fineman and Roy Sekoff, among many others, are quite talented. My sense, however, is that the majority of the content on the site is generated by bloggers like me who want to insert ourselves into the national discourse and post our material free for the taking.

Lucky Lady?

I do get something out of my work product on Huffpo. As I mentioned, people around the globe read my writing. The emails and comments that are a consequence of that are an indication that the site has significant influence on editorial decisions around the world. As an example, an editor in London read a piece I had posted and then called to offer a commission on a related topic. My work, I am pleased to say, tends to be posted on the front page of Huffpo and, as a consequence, enjoys wide circulation. Cable news and talk show producers often read my blogs and call to ask me to come on their programs. That does not, however, turn into monetization. Expecting people to see the title of your book under your name on the screen, and then go buy your book online or elsewhere, is expressing faith in a series of acts that increase in improbability with each step. Huffpo simply becomes a platform to build a reputation. Monetizing that is the legerdemain.

The publicity of the sale to AOL, however, struck me as a bit unseemly. I guess it ought to be assumed there is a nice profit margin when your work force is largely unpaid. In an email she sent to bloggers on her site, Arianna announced that “nothing will change except for the fact that you will have more readers.” Well, yeah, I was not running out to the mailbox to look for my dividend check. However, I would like to suggest in the spirit of the progressivism Huffpo promotes, Arianna might want to share a bit of the wealth and begin paying a little to writers who are not on staff.

I am ready to begin negotiations.

“This is America, where a white Catholic male Republican judge was murdered on his way to greet a Democratic Jewish woman member of Congress, who was his friend. Her life was saved initially by a 20-year old Mexican-American gay college student, and eventually by a Korean-American combat surgeon, all eulogized by our African American President.” –Mark Shields

“Your children are not your children.  They come not from you but through you for they are but the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself.” – Gibran

Ma worried.  The majority of her energy was consumed by this endeavor.  I often thought her anxieties were her finest possessions.  They were frequently justified. I was a teenager but understood very clearly that every important decision Ma had made had led her closer to a kind of ruin.  She seemed to be uncanny at making bad choices and when destiny presented her with options she usually picked the course to do her the most harm.  My mother’s great ability, though, has always been her capacity to love.

We were standing at the edge of the June sun during a Michigan morning. There was hardly room for Ma and me on a narrow slab of concrete that served as a modest porch to our tiny tract house. A shadow kept us chill and I saw where the light was already hitting the corn and squash in the garden.  We did not grow things for pleasure; we planted seeds and waited for them to become food.  We also went to neighbors and tried to sell them the extra corn or tomatoes for money to buy other food or school clothes. But I was trying not to think about these things because I was 17 and leaving home after high school. In fact, a part of me was already gone through the split in the hedgerow that lined our neighbor’s yard and across the weedy baseball diamond where I had chased fly balls.  I was already seeing myself hitching down Hill Road to where it intersected with the recently completed stretch of Interstate 75.  I had not chosen a destination but was thinking vaguely of California and Colorado. There was nothing more important to me than adventure and I wanted to see the country and sleep under the sky.  I suppose I was sufficiently smart to feel an obligation to my youth but not intelligent enough to be afraid.

“Son, I just don’t understand.” Ma looked up at me as I lifted my pack and slipped my arms through the shoulder straps.  “Where are you gonna sleep?  What happens when you run out of money?”

She was squeezing her fingers and alternately pinching them together with the opposite hand.  This was a habit she had acquired years earlier when she feared an unexpressed rage of Daddy’s that she sensed might become violence.

“I’ve got my sleeping bag, Ma,” I told her as I patted the cotton bedroll hanging from the bottom of my backpack.  “And when I run out of money, I’ll do odd jobs.  There’s always some kind of work.”

“I don’t see why you can’t just stay around Flint,” she said.  “There’s lots of good jobs for young men your age.  You could make some real money on the line or a road crew or something.”

She was right.  It was 1969 and the Chevrolet truck plant, Buick Motor Division of General Motors, Fisher Body, and every other business associated with the automotive industry in Flint, Michigan was hiring.  They did not mind taking on college students for a few months because they were desperate for laborers to build the cars America had become fascinated with in the decades after World War Two.  I had friends who were making over $400 a week with overtime by hanging doors as car and truck frames rolled past them on the assembly line.  But I had always believed the factory had done something to my father that was not worth the wages.

“We’ve been through this, Ma.  We can’t keep having this conversation.  This is what I am going to do.  I don’t need that much money.  I’ve got the grants and scholarships I need for college.  I’ve got to go now.  I want to go see Lake Michigan before dark.”

“Oh son, just look at you.”

“What?”

She leaned in my direction with her short arms and reached around to hug me in a way that had always made me feel safe as a boy but just then I was starting to feel trapped.  Ma pressed her head against a spot near my lower chest.  She was only 4’ 10” tall.  I felt her hands grab the metal frame of my backpack and take a grip that was tight enough to prevent me from leaving.

“I’m so sorry, Ma,” I said.  “But this is what I have to do.  What I need to do.  Please don’t cry.”

I shifted the pack slightly on my hips and thought she might ease her grasp.  The nylon and aluminum frame rig was loaded with all of my clothes and some camping gear.  When the $18.95 item had come in the mail I had felt the kind of excitement that kept me from sleeping at night.  I had leaned the frame against the foot of my bed and lay awake looking at the tan fabric and contemplating myself wearing the pack in the midst of rugged scenes in national parks and great deserts.

“I love you, son.”

“I know that, Ma.  I love you, too.  But I’ve got to go now.”

She released me and I kissed the top of her head.  No matter how many times she washed my mother always had the faint scent of fried food in her hair.  She worked for eighty cents an hour at a short order restaurant just off the Dixie Highway and every night when she came home, her white, seersucker uniform and her hair gave off the aroma of fried fish and grilled burgers.  Ma had come to America for both love and money and had ended with a job that provided nickel and dime tips from truckers and factory workers.

A Southside Girl and Her Soldier Boy

I quickly stepped back off the porch and said good-bye again and I was unable to avoid seeing her tears. I had never hurt my mother before and I did not like the feeling.  She had so little and now one of her most cherished things, her eldest son, was simply walking away into the distance. She had no idea where I was to sleep that night or any other night nor when she might get a call or a post card.  Ma must have thought she had no control over any events in her life and suddenly even her children were becoming losses.

I turned around at the hedgerow.  She had both hands over her mouth and was crying.  None of my four sisters nor my brother were anywhere in the vicinity.  My departure was of little consequence to them.  Maybe they simply did not believe I was going anywhere beyond the neighborhood grocery store.  But Ma knew.  And it was painful for her. There had been many times when the boys I ran with had urged me to join them in law-breaking schemes like break-ins or theft and I had backed out.  There was no good reason for it except that I knew there was a risk of getting caught and I did not want to shame or hurt my mother. She worked to hard too give me chances. But I had to leave and travel regardless of her hurt and fears.

I turned back again on Westdale and saw her short profile outlined against the white doorframe.  She was determined to watch me until I disappeared because I am sure she did not believe I was truly going.  Our house appeared even smaller than the 850 square feet of space where Ma was raising her six children.  The faded cedar shake shingles had been painted black a few years previously and she had planted a few flowers and bushes around the property. I had decided she was trying to suggest to neighbors that we were moving in the direction of respectability and that no more police cars or emergency vehicles were going to disturb their nights.  Daddy had been sent to an institution down in Pontiac and Ma had gotten a divorce before he was released.  He did not live any more in our house.

My only view of Lake Michigan that day was from the back of a pickup as patches of blue water flashed between factory buildings in Gary, Indiana. I slept my first night on the road beneath a highway overpass along an Illinois cornfield and listened to a soft rain.  Ma was likely sitting at the small table in her kitchen and chewing on the nails she had long ago bitten to nubs. Her stubby fingers had never appeared feminine and her hands were coarsened by years of restaurant work but her children did not go hungry or stay too cold.  I wondered if she had ever felt as hopeful and excited as I did lying there in the rainy darkness.

Ma still lives up in Michigan in a house where people care for her but she wishes she were back in Newfoundland.  She complains that the people around her are all old and the woman who walks all day and takes tiny steps annoys her.  Ma and I were in the living room and I watched the walking woman with the frail neck and papery skin until she stood next to my chair.

“I just came here to see if I could get someone to help me,” she said.  “Can you help me?”

“I would if I knew how,” I answered.  “But I don’t.”

Looking for a way home

Ma was staring at the front door.  She spends much of her day now looking in that direction and I think she is convinced her youth and health are on the other side of that house’s wall.  In her mind she continues to come and go as she pleases but her body is still and failing.

“Son?” She touched my forearm.  “If you can just get me out that door and down to the border, I’ll be okay.”

“What do you mean, Ma?”

“Just get me to Canada.  I’ll get back to St. John’s as soon as you get me over the bridge.”

“Ma, how would you ever get there?”

“I’ll just use my walker and I’ll walk and walk and walk until I flop over and then I’ll start again and I’ll keep doing that until I get there.”

“Even if you do get there, Ma, who will take care of you?”

“What do you mean who will take care of me?”  She raised her voice.  “I’ll take care of me that’s who will take care of me.  I always have haven’t I?”

“But Ma, you’re…….”

“Don’t tell me anything, son.  I’ll get me a job at one of those restaurants down on the harbor and rent me a room off of Water Street.  I just need you to get me to the border.  Don’t you worry about how I’ll get home.  You never let me worry about you.”

“I know, Ma.  I’m sorry.”

Ma’s turn had finally come to say good-bye.  And I did not want her to go.