What’s a girl to do?

She’s young, full of energy and dreams, and has her eyes on adventurous horizons. But even in the 2012 world where she is coming of age, her culture is laying out frilly dresses, shiny pumps, and lip gloss that have the potential to turn her into little more than a support system for a future husband’s ambitions. A lot more doors are open to young women in the post-feminist era but the expectations of gender don’t simply disappear.

And Mary Pauline Lowry will have none of it.

Lowry is a thirty-something Austin writer whose new novel, “The Earthquake Machine,” explores the power of sexism and gender through a teenager’s decision to shed her history, her sex, her friends, and almost everything she is in order to find a different existence. The architecture of Lowry’s story is subtle with symbols that are cast upon a stark and unforgiving landscape, which she renders as both inspiring and frightening with her near perfect choice of words.

Rhonda, the narrative’s main character, has a troubled epiphany during a river trip down the Rio Grande as it passes through the canyons of Big Bend National Park. Like John Grady Cole and Lacey Rawlins of Cormac McCarthy’s “All the Pretty Horses,” Rhonda has arrived at a decision to escape the emotional detritus of war. Cole and Rawlins went off on a teenaged Mexican adventure in order to abandon the wreckage of fathers permanently harmed by combat in World War Two. They were also rejecting the limited lives proscribed by West Texas. Rhonda, though, is running from a domestic conflict, which is no less of a war, where she suspects her pharmacist father is doping up her mother and manipulating her into suicide, Rhonda will not have the boundaries of her life drawn by the same cultural mores that are destroying her timid mother.

Crossing over is not easy in the Big Bend. The landscape announces a kind of human insignificance and boldly states that no one has meaningful troubles or the time for introspection. To the people who know the border, the Rio Grande that Rhonda is floating with her friends unifies two cultures and you don’t change much regardless of the riverbank on which you choose to stand. Rhonda feels something different, though, and after a sexual near miss with the group’s river guide, she slips into the water and lets it carry her away to Mexico where she has no more goal in mind than to find Jésus, her parents’ gardener who taught her perfect Spanish and became her friend. She cannot get far enough away from the tragedy that unfolded at home in Austin.

Lowry’s skills are manifest from the opening pages when she establishes tension but she becomes masterful beyond her years as a storyteller when Rhonda comes up from the river, naked, wet, hungry, and born again as a boy. Rhonda encounters a peyote-eating shop owner that helps her cut her hair, provides clothes that hide her gender, and guides Rhonda to assume the name Angel. By the time she leaves the little border town of Milagros, Angel has added the Virgin of Guadalupe to her initial quest to find her friend Jésus. Strangers might see her as a boy or a girl or an androgynous creature wandering in the desert, but that doesn’t stop the neophyte Angel from searching for answers to questions she can’t even articulate and knows are emotionally and psychologically too profound to ignore.

A lesser writer might be accused of too many contrivances but Lowry peoples the road in front of Angel with characters that inform the soul of the little girl lost that she is not alone in her struggle. An expatriated American, who is suspected of dealing in “product,” empowers his wife to build and remodel and saw and hammer because these are endeavors that make her happy, and when she is joyous the sex is great and the house is in harmony. A woman with calloused hands can love, too.

She Writes like the Wind

After the couple agrees to give Angel a ride to Jésus’ hometown, a gang of banditos confronts them on the highway. Angel slips into the jungle with them where she discovers they are “banditas,” and the sharp edges of sexuality and gender begin to soften for her. These are women that united to defy expectations and the law. They are raising hell instead of children and, in spite of their rebellious approach to life, find liberty in having refused to cook and clean house for a man. Even in the machismo culture of old Mexico, Angel finds females who’ve ignored all the gender clues laid out before them by centuries of marriage and custom.

When Angel finally reunites with the beloved Jésus, she is disappointed yet again by a man who refuses to teach her, as he had promised, a special skill. Her memory of the river guide won’t leave her alone, either, and Angel seeks a physical release that leads her to the earthquake machine. She shares this double D battery fun with an elderly woman who has been living alone and miserable for decades since her husband died. Genevieve doesn’t play the role of the ancient seer, though, and instead slouches sadly among the folds of her own skin and reminds Angel of what awaits a girl who ties her fate too closely to a man.

When the earth finally moves for Angel, it is both orgasmic and tragic. Lowry refuses to give her protagonist an easy time of things and she loses love almost as quickly as it is discovered but she has learned enough to know that she can take charge. Sex might feel like it is the most important thing in the world to a post-pubescent girl, but as Angel undergoes yet another transformation, she realizes that sex, too, is “its own little death.” Nothing is more transitory than beauty and lust.

Lowry may have been writing The Earthquake Machine for the young adult reader, but she has created a story that belongs on bookshelves next to other fine literature. She’s as accomplished with her sentences and character development as a young Jane Smiley or Anne Tyler and often as disturbing as Jim Harrison. In the hands of a writer like Mary Pauline Lowry, the human condition can be as brightly illuminated through the plight of a post-pubescent teen as it can through the travails of the Joad family scratching its way westward during the Great Depression. The Earthquake Machine moves Lowry into an elite group of young female writers who know that the feminist movement is about more than equal pay for equal work and that a girl has a right to be a grrrlllll, if she chooses.

And, boy, (or maybe girl,) does she know how to tell a story.

During my high school years up in Michigan, George W. Romney was our governor. The man who told his son Mitt not to run for public office as long as he had to worry about a mortgage also presided over the booming economy brought about as the result of auto manufacturing. Michigan in the 60s was often at the economic and cultural center of the U.S. The jobs and technology were drawing newcomers from California, the intermountain west, the northeast, and all across Dixie. In Detroit, Motown was beginning to crowd rock and roll off of the stage. Work was available. Neighborhoods were being built overnight. Wages were livable. It was mostly a good time to be governor.

There were, of course, problems. Detroit caught fire in July 1967 in race riots and Governor Romney asked for federal troops. Most of the racist white southerners that had come north to work the factories instead of the fields in the south had managed to set themselves up in segregated communities, regardless of their incomes. The high school I attended, Grand Blanc, between Flint and Detroit, was still all white in 1969. Dr. King’s message was rattling around unheard in the tin ears in much of America.

Governor Romney’s son Mitt was at least partially insulated from the times by his family’s wealth. He was raised in Bloomfield Hills, an affluent suburb of Detroit, where his father had become the CEO of American Motors. Mitt was not to be seen in public schools during his high school years. The family sent him across town to Cranbrook, an exclusive boarding school that offered a better education than the public system. One of his classmates was Daniel Ellsberg, a former Marine who stood up to protest the U.S. political mistakes and deceptions in Vietnam by releasing The Pentagon Papers. There was one black student in Romney’s graduating class.

All the Soft Places to Fall

Mitt’s progress from there was predictable. While the sons of southerners were mostly running to the car plants to fill out applications to work on the assembly lines, he was off to Stanford and Harvard and Brigham Young. In California, when students were staging a sit-in at an administration building to resist draft assessment tests, the future head of Bain Capital took part in a counter protest. The Vietnam War he was supporting was a conflict in which he would not be compelled to participate. Mitt got two student deferments and another one for being a “minister” of the Mormon Church while he was a missionary in France. His luck held when he drew the number 300 in the first ever draft lottery.

What, exactly, makes him presidential?

There is something troubling about the collective American consciousness that enables us to elect persons of privilege to a job whose most basic requirement ought to be a first hand understanding of economic struggle. Like the two Republican Bush presidents, Mitt Romney has always had a soft place to fall. In 1975, when he left Harvard, he went straight to Wall Street with a class of business school graduates who became consultants instead of employees. The mortgage his dad told him to deal with first was probably never a big worry and when Mitt landed at Bain Capital in 1977 he was launched on the business career that is somehow supposed to qualify him for the White House. Please explain how being successful at an investment fund trains an individual for dealing with foreign policy, a stubborn congress, and a lagging economy.

We Americans celebrate wealth and business success as if it were a form of religion. Of course, people who work hard and accomplish their goals, financial, material, or even spiritual, ought to be admired because they contribute to the advancement of our culture. But the rich are not necessarily special; they tend to be prepared and lucky. Their money is generally not the consequence of any intellect or insight that can translate to leadership or government. We simply want to believe that is how they earned it.

In Romney’s experience, he has been almost as disconnected from the concerns of the working class as was George W. Bush and his father. W once asked a friend to help him “to understand the poor,” as if the economically disadvantaged had somehow made a decision to not have money. “Why’d they do that?” W seemed to be asking. W’s father loved to tell the tale of leaving Connecticut in an old car with “Bar” and heading out to West Texas to become a wildcatter in the Permian Basin oil patch but he always leaves out the part where his father the senator staked him to a half million dollars to get the oil business rolling. Eventually, H.W. sold the company for millions, set up trust funds for all of his children, and ran for congress.

There isn’t any class warfare in America. We are all participants in the same game and some of us have greater advantages and use them to gain wealth but that doesn’t mean the rich should be president. I’ve often thought the difference between the two political parties was that one was rolling down the highway in a nice new car and ignoring all of those who had fallen into the ditch while the other party was slowing down and pulling over to help get the stranded travelers back on the road. Capitalism is imperfect and x amount of effort does not necessarily produce y amount of results. Some of us end up in the ditch. People fail for many reasons. But almost all of them are trying. Our national discourse is over how we provide assistance.

We’ve had wealthy presidents in the past and some have had greatness. Our greatest president, however, came from a log cabin and understood the common man’s struggle, and it is not about corporate tax cuts. Leadership is a product of intimate understanding, which rarely is a consequence of wealth. But America has only two types of citizens: millionaires and those of us who very shortly expect to be millionaires. The result is we admire money and project onto the wealthy characteristics they often do not possess.

And putting those people into the White House tends to be a grave mistake.

There is really only one person on the planet who can make Karl Rove seem a benign and likable character and that is Donald Trump. In every conceivable manner, Trump epitomizes the traits that so much of the world is beginning to mistake for the character of the rest of America. His ego, of course, is the most off putting. Trump believes lesser humans look at him as the embodiment of miraculous accomplishment and intellect and we are all fortunate to live during the time of his incarnation. Nothing was more enjoyable in recent TV viewing than watching Trump’s smug mug hover behind New Gingrich with a look that suggested Trump had created in his own image the slightly less self-involved Gingrich.

“He’s an American icon, in his own right,” Newt said.

He meant to add, “So am I, and I defeated Communism, invented the microchip and twist off beer caps, and have more convolutions in my gray matter than I do in my political ideology.”

A Pair to Draw To......

But he didn’t say that. Instead, Newt said he would participate in a GOP presidential debate moderated by Trump. More surprisingly, he admitted this without public embarrassment. Donald Trump has demonstrated he knows as much about presidential politics and issues as he does humility. But there are Republican candidates for the White House who intend to show up and let him ask them questions.

Not Ron Paul, though, or Jon Huntsman, the only two truly principled individuals in the GOP race. Huntsman said he refused to “kiss Trump’s” ring, and on her Twitter account, one of his daughter’s added the phrase, “or any other part of Trump’s anatomy.” Paul derided what he described as a “circus atmosphere” beginning to surround the GOP contest. Presumably, he didn’t just notice this and was using Trump’s involvement as an exclamation point on the situation.

In fact, Newt is right about Trump. The developer, reality show host,and walking human satire, is an American icon. So is the former speaker and the pizza king philanderer. They are icons of what is wrong with the Republican Party, and increasingly, America. Each has a degree of presumptuousness that is threatening to any hopes of solving what ails the United States. Herman Cain seemed to have never given any thought to an issue beyond selling books when he decided to run for president and operated under the premise, as do many candidates for high office, that if I can run a business I can sure as hell run a country, which is patent nonsense. His absolute ignorance of issues and geography was an insult to the democratic process and an embarrassment for his party. He may have jumped into the contest for no other reason than to sell books and raise his speaking fees.

Trump, though, is much worse. He thinks people care what he thinks. The egoist used the early part of the presidential selection process to promote himself and his silly TV show while suggesting he was going to be a candidate. Trump, though, is a coward. He will never run for president or any other high office because he realizes no one buys into his absurd view of himself as having anything valuable to contribute. He cannot win any type of election. Although he appears to have an innate skill for judging who can do the best job of selling trinkets or vendor food on the sidewalks of New York City, this does not qualify him to be more than a broadcast bully. The Republican candidates that would sit or stand before Trump and take his questions seriously will not be taken seriously by voters. When Donald Trump has influence over the future of America, the democracy is doomed. Everything that is unappealing about our country is manifested in his ego, personality, and arrogant countenance.

Kind of like Newt.

And unlike Huntsman.

Gingrich acted like he was willing to kiss whatever body part Trump thought needed affection. They met for more than an hour, which was certainly not enough time to talk about each other’s greatness, but TV cameras were waiting on the street. The Republican Party was swirling in a circle at the bottom of the toilet, given a quick flush by Newt’s hypocrisy and Trump’s unbridled greed.

“New York hasn’t ended up a dream world for the poor,” Gingrich pointed out in 1989. “It has become a place where Donald Trump manipulates the game.”

Which Newt clearly thinks is okay if it’s being manipulated for him. And not the poor. They need to take a shower.

And get a job.

Tiger Woods is getting more stupid advice.  Instead of easing the scrutiny he has been enduring, the athletic superstar is about to increase public antipathy for his situation.  Sympathy and forgiveness are not likely to be the outcome of his Friday “news conference.”

Man of the Moment

Tiger’s advisers have him convinced that he is different from other fallen public figures.  Maybe they know he doesn’t want to answer questions and because he pays them so well they aren’t going to force the issue.  Who wants to lose a gig working with Tiger Woods? Tiger has done things greater than most mortals and even other astounding athletes and his counselors appear to be testing a notion that he can play by different rules.  He can’t.  Just because he took golf away from the plaid pants and martini crowd and turned it into a disciplined endeavor doesn’t mean he’s going to get a pass on his behavior.

The idea that he only has to read a written statement to a solitary live camera, a room full of friends and colleagues, and a few wire service reporters that have agreed not to ask questions, is certain to anger journalists and the public that has adored Tiger but still wants answers.  Nobody wants to know how many women and how long this went on and whether his wife is considering taking him back into her life.  But Tiger has to respond to reasonable inquiries from practicing journalists before he can expect to get another clean start with the public.  He doesn’t have to provide details but he does need to deliver honesty.  He isn’t likely to be given a second chance unless he gives some answers.

The first question to be asked, however, is about journalism.  What kind of wire service goes to a “news conference” where no questions are allowed?  Are they present simply to write about Tiger’s facial expressions and how much he sweats?  There probably aren’t many reporters at Bloomberg, Reuters, or the Associated Press that want to attend this event and be ridiculed for sitting silently and playing by Tiger’s rules.  And if they don’t ask questions, they are likely to endure a bit of their own ridicule from peers.

This appearance has the potential for Tiger’s friends and colleagues gathered in the room to turn into a bit of a Greek chorus as he reads his statement.  Politicians often try this public relations scam when they are beleaguered.  Dealing with a controversy or a faux pas, the pol doesn’t want to face journalists alone so he or she invites supporters to encircle the podium and populate the audience and applaud at responses and hiss at questions.  It never works and only further angers reporters and they redouble their efforts to do critical reporting on the politician.  Tiger risks cranking up the tabloids and TMZs of the world to go out and find more of his paramours.

Tiger is likely to endure the same treatment as the evasive politician.  If he isn’t going to answer questions, why not just videotape his statement and stream it on his web site?  A cutaway camera could show all of the supporters in the room with him as he read and he wouldn’t risk angering sports reporters.  Regardless of how much contrition is in Tiger’s statement Friday, it will not be enough unless he takes a few questions and provides honest, difficult answers.  Someone ought to ask, first, why do this at the Accenture Match Play Tournament and distract from the golf?  Is it because they were the first major sponsor to drop you?  Are you being petty?  Isn’t there a better time and location?

The statement he will read, unfortunately, is fairly predictable.

“First, I want to apologize to the public and the fans and supporters of golf.  I’ve been dishonest with my fans, myself, and most importantly, my family.  I didn’t know I had an addiction.  I’ve entered treatment and believe I’m recovering.  I am also trying to work things out with my family.  I love my children and I am also working to save my marriage.   This has been, and continues to be, a difficult time for my family and me.  I realize I’ve dishonored all of the things I claimed were important.  But I want to try again.  I deserve a chance to try again.  I ask for your forgiveness and understanding.  But I am also a golfer.  Golf is my life.  It is who I am.  And I cannot fully regain my life unless I am playing golf.  So, I want to announce today that I am returning to the tour.  Thank you.”

Does that cover everything?  Does the public have a right to know more?  Should Tiger Woods answer the question of whether he was having extra-marital sex while his wife was pregnant?  How long has he behaved this way?  Where did he get the idea this way okay?  If he didn’t have that idea, why was he cheating when he knew he was one of the most high profile people on the planet?  Where in the hell does the fan’s right to know end and Tiger’s privacy begin?  He might need to denounce some of the stories about porn stars and having sex with someone other than his wife on the night his dad died. Don’t these issues go to the heart of a man’s character and help golf fans decide whether they can separate the man from his game, his life from his swing?  Who the hell knows?  But a five-minute statement in a completely controlled environment isn’t going to end Tiger’s woes.

And it may even make matters worse.

We might be powerless.

The oil flowing out from the seabed in the Gulf of Mexico may be under such great pressure that we do not possess technology to stop the tragedy.  Chances are quite good we have no true sense of the dire nature of the situation.  The facts that have been ascertained, however, lead to a dark scenario.

We know that the blowout preventers did not work but we do not know why.  There are theories, though.  The Deepwater Horizon rig was floating on pontoons about 5000 feet above the floor of the Gulf.  When drillers struck an oil deposit, the bit was reported to be at about 18,000 feet, which is approximately three and a half miles beneath the platform.  Does science even know what kind of pressure can be encountered at that depth, under almost a mile of water and two and half miles of rock?

BP and Transocean, which owns the rig, has said there was a maximum working pressure of 20,000 PSI but the system was able to handle a kickback pressure from gasses of about 60,000 PSI.  The breakdown of the blowout preventers can be interpreted to mean the pressure coming up from the hole exceeded 60,000 PSI.  Generally, various mixtures of mud circulate up and down the drill pipe to act as lubricants and equalize pressures encountered at great depth, and this process was said to be working at the time of the accident.  Does this mean it’s possible, even likely, that the Deepwater Horizon encountered pressures current technology are not equipped to handle?

Although BP and Washington are trying very hard to convince the public that everything possible is being done to stem the flow of crude, there is seemingly little that might be accomplished.  5000 feet below the surface of the water with oil blasting out at tens of thousands of PSI, and wreckage from the giant rig scattered about, fixes are not easy to find.  The latest plan is for a special funnel to be placed over the spout, which will then force the flow into a pumping channel.  But how does a funnel get placed over the top of anything pushing at that kind of pressure?  Consider that story to be an unrealistic solution.

A well blowout in 1979 offers a bit of context; except the Deepwater Horizon horror show is already about to transcend what happened in the Bay of Campeche off the coast of Mexico.  The Ixtoc 1 rig blew and began to spew crude that flowed uninterrupted for nine months.  Before the well was capped, 3,000,000 barrels of crude had drifted north to Texas and the northern coast of Mexico.  The endangered Kemps-Ridley turtle, which nests along the border beaches, had to be airlifted to safety and has only begun in recent years to recover in population.

The Ixtoc disaster, however, is spit in the ocean compared to the potential damage of the British Petroleum apocalypse.  If estimates are correct and the current blowout is putting 200,000 gallons or 5000 barrels of crude per day into the waters of the Gulf.  Ixtoc’s blowout was not capped until two relief wells were drilled and completed at the end of those nine months, and regardless of optimistic scenarios from the federal government or BP, relieving the pressure on the current flow is probably the only way to stop the polluting release of oil. The only way to relieve that pressure is with additional wells. No one is going to honestly say how much time is needed to drill such wells but consider the scope of environmental damage we are confronting if it requires at least as long as Ixtoc?  Nine months of 5000 barrels of crude per day ought to turn the Gulf of Mexico into a lifeless spill pond and set toxins on currents that will carry them to deadly business around the globe. And there is no way to know with any certainty if nine months will be sufficient time for capping.

Nor are there guarantees relief wells are the fix. What do we do, in that case?  Humans cannot function at 5000 feet of ocean depth and the mitigation efforts currently are being handled by robotic remotes.  What is left to us as a solution other than an explosive device, which is often what is deployed during above ground blowouts.  Given the pressures reported and the amount of flow, we may need a bunker-buster nuke to be placed over the wellhead.  We can then begin to talk about the water pressures caused by burst at detonation and residual radiation.  Is that a better or worse situation?  Certainly, aquatic life in the Gulf of Mexico is doomed unless there is a reclusive genius to step forward and save us from our great failure.

The attorney general of Texas, Greg Abbot, informed reporters that it appears Texas will escape harm.  Abbot’s visionary powers must exceed his legal skills since there is no way to know when and even if the well will ever be capped.  In fact, if there is no plug placed in the hole, it is not inconceivable that no part of the planet’s oceans will escape harm.  According to the non-profit, non-partisan, Air and Waste Management Association, a quart of crude oil will make 150,000 gallons of water toxic to aquatic life.  BP, which has been marketing itself as an energy company “beyond petroleum,” is setting loose upon the planet what is quickly turning into humankind’s worst environmental disaster.

Tone-deaf politicians, especially from Texas, are trying to manage public fears, which is exactly what the state’s former governor attempted in 1979.  Bill Clements, who was one of the founders of SEDCO and owned the Ixtoc platform, originally described concerns as “much ado about nothing.”  As oil moved toward the pristine beaches of the Padre Island National Seashore, his advice was to “pray for a hurricane.”  I confronted Clements on his lack of concern and he stuck his finger in my chest and told me the state was not hurt.  Thirty years later the tar balls still roll in with shifts of tide and wind and oil was everywhere on the beach for years.

Anyone who thinks this tragedy is not going to result in massive kills of marine life is either blind, ignorant, or in denial.  The one scenario that we all refuse to confront is the possibility that it is beyond our capabilities to stop this undersea blast of oil.  If that is the case, the flow continues until the pressure eases, which might be years.  How much ecological injury will that cause our planet?

Nobody knows.

There are many people hoping the GOP chooses Sarah Palin to run against President Obama and we can finally get a definitive answer to this nagging question of national self-immolation.  I do not believe we will be able to make that choice.  The electorate tends to dance with radicals and buy them drinks but generally lets them go home alone to have more scary dreams. Well, here is another frightening notion to all y’all from your friends down here in Texas: President Rick Perry.

Perry painted the state an even brighter red, in part, because his democratic opponent, former Houston Mayor Bill White, suffered from the heartbreak of ineffectuality.  Nothing he tried inspired and his strongest messages were, “I’m not Rick Perry,” and “Rick Perry has been governor long enough.”  Coyote-killer Rick, however, was taking credit for the state’s geography and climate, which have been essential to job and business growth.  Regardless of what the governor argues, no one is coming here as a result of his or his party’s policies.  Property taxes are the worst in the country and the schools that are funded with that money are overwhelmingly mediocre, which has led to a scandalous charter school program.  Roads are falling apart, state parks are suffering decaying infrastructure, our air is the dirtiest in the country, mass transit is resisted by leadership, and we are ranked 48th or 49th in every government consideration other than raising up unqualified presidential candidates.

Perry might be a little light in his Lucchese’s but he has shown a great facility for ignoring standards and even the law without enduring penalty.  On the same day his reelection filled the column inches and the web site of the Austin paper, there was also a report that the governor was refusing to release a copy of a $4.5 million contract with the state.  The money went to a startup technology company founded by one of Perry’s major donors.  The American Statesman filed a Freedom of Information request but Perry’s office said no and ignored the fact that those millions are tax dollars and the manner in which they are spent is subject to public disclosure.  How money is used and where it comes from makes the kid from Paint Rock a bit nervous, unless, of course, he is the beneficiary.  He has become inexplicably wealthy during his term while earning less than $200,000 annually.

Conversely, he has turned down hundreds of millions in education dollars from the federal government that would have provided improvements to Texas schools because he claimed there were “strings attached.”  There were: good grades.

The red run of Election Day does more good for Perry’s opaque ambition than it does Sarah Palin’s.  As he brags about having the best job in America, the governor begins a national tour for his slim book about being fed up with the feds.  Answers to softball questions will saturate the airwaves from friendly media over the next few weeks and there will be talk of his Texas mandate and it how it compares to the whopping win George W. Bush earned in his race against former Texas Land Commissioner Garry Mauro.  The pretext to begin circulating Perry’s name for a presidential run will be easily established and the Tea Partiers that he energized with his irresponsible talk of secession will slowly turn pragmatic and confront the question of who can win in 2012.

Palin may not have been the personality who sent those Tea Partiers to the polls but she loves them and they have affection for her.  That attraction, however, cannot be consummated because there will never be enough Tea Partiers to elect a president. A compromise is inevitable since the GOP cannot field an electable candidate without energizing the party’s Diaspora, which has tipped way right.  What’s a bad speller to do?  Palin will do well in several early primary states and if the GOP wants to have any chance against President Obama it will have to engineer a ticket.

No matter what either party suggests, American presidential politics is more about viscera than intellect and issues.  Uncertain voters tend to make decisions based upon charisma and aesthetics.  Few people trust political ads and when they are busy trying to pay down credit card debt or keep the mortgage banker at bay they do not have time to read party platforms or study issues on candidate web pages.  Party activists are the only people paying attention to campaigns until the last few weeks.  Which leads us back to Rick Perry.

The GOP is already spending time trying to find a prospect to get Sarah to act a bit more politically demure.  Their options are limited.  Haley Barbour, the well-wired governor of Mississippi (State motto: Thank god for Texas) has the round face and weary drawl of an old school southern pol.  As connected as he is to governors’ mansions and DC insiders, he would have a tough task against Obama if for no other reason than aesthetics.  Mitt Romney is arguably too polished and too Mormon.  Whether they will acknowledge it or not there are millions of Christians in the US that still view Mormonism as a cult and it hurts Romney’s chances.  (The John Kennedy and first Catholic president analogy is not relevant.) Jeb Bush will not be able to help himself and will pursue the White House because he wants to prove he is the “smart one” in his family but there are no more than two dozen voters that want to see another Bush or Clinton on a national ticket.  New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg will likely enter the picture as an independent and burn enough money to make E-Bay’s big bucks Meg Whitman look fiscally prudent but he will not travel well in the south; except for Florida.

The compromise ticket will be Perry and Palin.  They will make a lovely camera-ready couple from the union’s two biggest states.  (The Hair Pair?) Team Tea Party has fondness for both of them and the mainstream party machine can convince donors that Sarah will never get her hands on the nuclear launch codes but that she is necessary to elect the ticket.  The only complication is Karl Rove’s role.  He is still ginning up cash and running a big fund-raising operation and he has offended Palin and the Tea Party.  Karl, who does not seem to be able to keep friends, led Perry’s campaign when he won his first statewide office in Texas but there has been an alienation of affection.  Rove supported Sen. Kay Hutchison in her race for governor against Perry in the Republican primary.  Karl will need to be taught to heel but that should not be a problem since he has proven in the past that victory and money are more important than any principle.

So, there you go, America; since you are too busy to get informed we will just turn this into American Idol or maybe Dancing with the Stars.  Nothing to read.  Just use your cell phone or your remote to vote.  Have fun!!!

And we will go ahead and start grooming you another goofball down here in Texas.

“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.