“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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh son, just look at you.”

“What?”

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

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

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

“I love you, son.”

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

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

A Southside Girl and Her Soldier Boy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking for a way home

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

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

“What do you mean, Ma?”

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

“Ma, how would you ever get there?”

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

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

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

“But Ma, you’re…….”

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

“I know, Ma.  I’m sorry.”

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

“There were other lonely singers in a world turned deaf and blind who were crucified for what they tried to show. And their voices have been scattered by the swirling winds of time but the truth remains and someone wants to know.” – Kristofferson

In the morning dark, he stood in a cold corner at the entrance to the train station up in Michigan.  A young blind man was sitting on a vinyl chair across from him and they had in common their guitar cases.

“Looks like a narrow case ya got there, Dave,” he said.  “Must be electric, huh?”

“Yeah, yeah, it is.”

Dave pulled his white cane closer and tilted his head toward the voice.  A cab driver had dropped him at the station, referred to him by name at the end of his daily routine, and said Dave’s ride to work would be along momentarily.

“How long you been playin’?”

“About ten years.”  Dave had turned his head to face the speaker.

“Yeah, I’ve been at it about 40, myself,” he said.  “I play acoustic.  All I seem to do.  Hours and hours on end.”

When I looked at the guitar man, I was reminded of the fictional conversation between the young Kris Kristofferson and the grayed and wrinkled musician in a Nashville bar.  He sized up Kristofferson and his guitar and said, “It’s a rough life, ain’t it?”  The answer was, “Yeah, I guess so.”  “You ain’t makin’ any money are ya?”  “You been readin’ my mail.”

But this bard was no longer a boy and his chances of becoming Kristofferson had long ago expired.  His hair was strung in tangles from a bald spot on the top rear of his head and a pair of outsized glasses teetered crookedly on his nose.  The profile lacked a chin and his overbite almost hid the lower row of teeth.  A small shoulder pack was on the floor between his feet and it was covered with the kind of dirt and grease smears that come from years of sleeping under bridges and an open sky.  A frayed blue pullover sweatshirt was all that kept him from the cold and I noticed his canvas shoes were an unidentifiable color after the miles and the music.

It's Snowin' on Raton

“What do you play?” Dave asked.

“Only my stuff.  All original.”

“Oh wow.  Hours and hours?”

“Yep.”

When the agent opened the door to the station, he seemed relieved to be indoors and sat quickly on a chair.  He pulled out a thick book from his backpack and it had the kind of clear plastic cover that protects library loaners from wear.  I watched him read and thought that he was consuming words like food but it was only a novel by an unknown author.  He turned away from the pages after a while and kept looking around at people until finally he stood and went to the ticket window.  I was a few feet distant

“Yes, I called on the 800 number last night and made a reservation?”

“What was the name?”

I did not hear the rest of the conversation but the ticket agent stood motionless and patient as he reached into his pocket and delicately removed several twenty-dollar bills.  He held them in front of him for what felt like a long time but I did not know if it was because they were so rare and precious to him or he wanted others in that room to see that he was in possession of money.  I watched him slowly count them off and then slide cash in a neat pile under the window in exchange for a ticket.

Westbound on the Southwest Chief

“I’m going to New Mexico,” he said.  I realized that he had been aware I was watching him make his ticket purchase.

“What’s out there?” I asked.

“Something different than here and it’s warmer.”

His tee shirt was thin and had the name of a painting company in black letters across his chest.  “Meyer Painting, LLC.”  I thought that maybe he had done some work for them to buy his ticket.

“Are you going to sing and play out there?”

“Mister, I’m going to sing and play wherever I am.”

“Yeah, I reckon so.”

He took up his book when he sat down and read for 30 minutes or so and then dug in his pack and took out a pencil stub and a note card.  I thought he might be making notes for lyrics but he quickly finished a scribble and walked back to the ticket window and slid the paper beneath the glass.

“Mam,” he said.  “You were very helpful to me and I just thought I’d give you this web site address.  In case you’re interested, all my music is there.”

She smiled, pleased that he had thought of her and maybe because she felt for a moment like she was doing something more than just the prescribed duties of her job.  When he got back to his seat he put down his pack and his book and picked up the guitar case and held it against his chest with his hands locked by intertwined fingers.

I thought the guitar was the only thing he had ever owned or maybe it was the only thing that had never slipped away.

And now there is Contador.

The Tour de France winner has apparently failed a drug test that was conducted during one of the days he was riding to victory in July.  Contador is reported to have tested positive for a minute amount of a substance named clenbuterol, which is said to reduce fat, increase muscle mass, and assist breathing.  (Where does one apply for a prescription?)

Everything this drug does would be an advantage to someone trying to not only survive but also win the most difficult endurance contest humans have ever devised.  Clenbuterol, given to cattle, also improves the quality of beef.  In a news conference, that’s actually how Contador said he got the banned substance in his blood.  He claims a friend brought steaks over from Spain when the team chef complained about meat at the hotel where the riders were staying.  According to Contador, the clenbuterol must have been in his food.

That would be good if it were true.  But recent Tour history indicates we are heading for another disappointment and a fallen hero.  The names of the deniers are too many to list but they range from Floyd Landis to Tyler Hamilton and the lesser riders that are compelled to seek an advantage to either maintain the 34 mile-per-hour pace or fall behind; hit 70 homers or be just another slugger.

And then there is Lance.

Armstrong’s supporters believe he never, not once, never ever, cheated.  Unfortunately, the behavior of others during Lance’s ascent to the top of the cycling world has made his achievements even more improbable in the rarified world of endurance sports.  The peak of the doping era was from the late 90s into the middle part of the current decade and Lance excelled at a time when cheating was widespread.  Is it fair to question his success?  Can a non-doper beat all of those dope heads?

There is some evidence to suggest Armstrong is a bit of a genetic mutant.  Several reports indicate that his ability to ingest and process oxygen, which is measured through a test called VO2 uptake, is far beyond normal.  His work ethic is also legendary.  Lesser athletes miss workouts, take an unscheduled day off, stay up late, have one beer too many; Armstrong did not have that reputation.  His story is one of singular focus and the science of conditioning.  He and his trainers, especially the e stimable Chris Carmichael, understood exertion, recovery, food, and peaking.  Armstrong’s was the most calculated training program possibly ever designed for an endurance sport.

But is he really so gifted that he is able to outperform other talented and dedicated cyclists even as they are fortifying their own cardiovascular systems with pharmaceuticals?  That is the question that turns Lance Armstrong into a suspect for investigators like Jeff Novitzky, the federal agent who built the case against baseball slugger Barry Bonds.  Whatever his motivation, Novitzky appears good at his job and that is undoubtedly unsettling for Team Livestrong.

The Dogged Investigator Novitzky

Novitzky, a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) investigator, is concentrating partially on an event that is alleged to have occurred in the hospital when Lance was being treated for cancer.  An Armstrong teammate, Frankie Andreu, who does commentary on the Tour de France for the Versus Network, and his wife, Betsy, supposedly heard Lance tell a doctor that he used performance-enhancing drugs.  The question is one that likely would have had to be asked during the course of developing a chemotherapy protocol for a recovering cancer patient.  Armstrong has denied the allegations but Andreu later acknowledged that he doped up when he was riding with Lance on the U.S. Postal Service team. Stories have also recently been published to suggest that there was widespread doping on the Postal team and bikes were sold to pay for drugs, which, if true, turns into the kind of fraud and federal crime that could destroy the reputation and career of Armstrong.  Novitzky also has audiotapes of phone calls made to Betsy Andreu by an Armstrong friend that worked for Oakley sunglasses.  They are surprisingly vitriolic and might have an impact on grand jurors hearing the case in Los Angeles.

These yarns, however, are either little more than internecine squabbles among gifted and jealous athletes or they are the unraveling of one of the greatest sports frauds since the Black Sox baseball scandal in 1919.  No one even seems willing to contemplate the notion that Lance Armstrong might be a fraud.  And what if he is?  Is it necessary, at this point, to take him down and is it worth the tax dollars expended in this investigation?  There ought to be some way to balance the good done by the Livestrong Foundation against whatever might be the outcome of an investigation and a trial.  No one is suggesting we let a cheater be a hero or get away with a sham but where is this taking our culture?

Former Armstrong Teammate Andreu

I met Lance once when I did an interview with him after his first Tour de France win.  He was abrupt and seemed not to want to be bothered with a TV crew, as he got ready to take off on a training ride.  Cordiality and small talk did not seem to be a part of his portfolio.  His answers were matter of fact and he did not appear to have any sense of wonder about what he had just accomplished.  The man was all business.  Lance wanted to ride and we were in his way so we stepped aside

But Jeff Novitzky will not.

“People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball.  I’ll tell you what I do.  I stare out the window and wait for spring.”  ~Rogers Hornsby
When I got the news that Ernie Harwell had died, I was, appropriately, at a baseball game.  I looked at the message on my phone and then heard the distracting crack of a bat.  A five foot, ten inch, 215 pound, left-handed, designated hitter for a university team had just gotten the better part of a high and outside fastball.  The baseball appeared to rise into the cloudless evening sky of Central Texas and hang there in the light that shimmers between the ending of a day and the arrival of night. Momentarily, though, the ball rose on a gentle breeze before spinning to the ground in a bullpen beyond the fence in left field. I had no other thought than to contemplate how Mr. Harwell might have described that home run.

Ernie Harwell

If America had a voice, it would sound like Ernie Harwell.  He was resonant and reassuring without being intrusive. Listeners heard confidence and kindliness as a subtext to his descriptions of baseball games. We thought we knew Mr. Harwell but he definitely knew us.  Harwell understood that there was an almost sacred connection between fans and their teams and he always gave us reason to believe in happy outcomes.  If only we got one more runner on and the tying run came to the plate, who knew what might happen?  This was the optimism with which he lived his life and it is narrative he told so well in Michigan, a place where hope can be a transient thing.  He spoke the story of America in the metaphor of baseball.  Learn to lose with grace and win with humility and never stop trying.

Mostly, though, the Tiger’s legendary broadcaster sounded like summer and when I heard him describe a bounding ball to second there were visions of watermelons and picnics and the lake in front of my eyes, almost dancing over the melting Michigan snow banks.  Mr. Harwell’s voice on the radio meant that the sun was moving northward across the equator and all the rhythms of the world were swinging sweetly to a song of vacation and ninth inning walk off homeruns. As soon as I heard him broadcasting each spring, I became convinced I had seen my last snowfall of the winter.  Mr. Harwell was the boy eternal who never quit loving his childhood game and refused to think there was anything more important than being a kid excited about stolen bases and strikeouts and the beautiful line made by a well-struck ball.  Who can say he was wrong?

We lived among the southern families come up from Dixie to work in Michigan’s car plants and there was an overgrown field on the edge of our neighborhood we turned into a diamond.  Our worn out baseball was covered with electrician’s tape and our wooden bats were usually taped and tacked where the handles had been broken. We shared a few gloves and when we played the game we dreamed of making the clutch hit or the diving catch in the big leagues, usually for the Tigers, and always with Ernie Harwell describing our great achievements.  On days that there were little league games, we would play catch near the radio, which had been placed next to a back door, and we listened to Mr. Harwell call the Tiger games until it was time to leave for our own contest.

Ernie Harwell’s voice was the mood music to those lovely Michigan days when cottony clouds drifted overhead, dandelions bloomed on lawns, and almost anyone who wanted to work had a job.  He was the texture to a world where cars were coming off of assembly lines and families were buying homes and people from California were trying to get to the Midwest to be a part of Motown.  The jobs and the technology and the music were all being made in that magical place and the Tigers were leading the Yankees in the chase for the pennant.  Al Kaline and Norm Cash were giants but Ernie Harwell sent them out to live in our houses and cars and made us feel a part of a rush to greatness.

I do not recall a summer day of my youth where I did not hear the voice of that good and gentle man.  I never knew Mr. Harwell but I had heard that he was moral and humble and always had time for the fans that loved him as much as they loved the players.  On my visits back to Michigan as an adult, when I heard him on the radio, I was able to close my eyes and go back instantly to the days when I dreamed of replacing Rocky Colavito in left field for Detroit.  I believed in the place that was implicit in the sound of Ernie Harwell’s voice and it was hopeful and responded to effort and led to success.  As a homesick professional broadcaster living on the Texas border, I once wrote a letter to Mr. Harwell and told him how I aspired to become the Tiger play-by-play man when he retired.  Predictably, he sent back a gracious note wishing me well and thanking me for being an unfaltering fan.

The year Detroit caught fire with race and riots the only voice that I thought was informed by reason was Mr. Harwell’s.  In 1967, when Americans were fighting with each other over differences in skin pigmentation, I hid in baseball and was comforted by the constancy of the game.  Tiger baseball brought us back together and Mr. Harwell’s voice stitched us into a single city.  The next year we triumphed when the hometown team won the pennant and the World Series in the last year of division play.  I was beside a radio and can still recall the description by Mr. Harwell.  “Swung on and there’s a line drive base hit to left field.  Wert is rounding third; he’ll score and the Tigers will win the pennant.  Let’s listen to the bedlam in Tiger Stadium.”

I choose to believe there is a place where baseball is always being played; the sun shines perpetually, there is a gentle breeze to left field, and the players are eternally young and strong.  The stadium is filled with fans and excitement and there is a gentle voice on the radio telling everyone who is not there to, “Come on out to the ballpark.  There’s still a lot of great baseball to be enjoyed.” Those of us who have not made it to the game yet can still hear Ernie Harwell describing how wondrous things will be as soon as we arrive and look out on that perfect green diamond.

We are still listening, Mr. Harwell.  We always will.

“They say I killed six or seven men for just snorin’.  That ain’t true.  I only killed one man for snorin’.” – John Wesley Hardin, Texas outlaw

The governor of Texas is a weinie.  I can’t reach any other conclusion after reading the report about him shooting a coyote that threatened his daughter’s puppy.  Rick Perry said that he was jogging on a hill country trail near where he lives in a rented home and the animal came out and threatened his little dawgie.  Governor Gun pulled out a Ruger and sent the coyote to the big lonesome and empty prairie coyotes go to when governors gun them down.

But I’ve got some questions, your governorship.

First, I can say I’ve run thousands of miles on trails in Texas and I have never once thought of carrying a gun.  Well, yeah, a squirt gun.  I used to have a Doberman that came after me on a dirt road and I solved that by mixing some ammonia into water and putting it into a little squirt gun.  Got the big dog in the eyeballs next time he came barking after me and when he saw me pass by a few days later he ran away more like a chicken than a dog.  No shot fired in anger.

Perry said he carried the gun because he was afraid of snakes and that a number of people living in that area have lost pets to wild animals.  Well, Governor Gun, that’s the way nature is ordered.  Big fish eat little fish.  Wild animal eat domestic animal.  You don’t want your cat turned into a coyote hairball, keep it in the house.  But afraid of snakes and you carry a gun?  I don’t know any trail runner under the Lone Star sky that hasn’t come across a rattler or seven.  And not one of them ever said, “Hey, I think I’ll carry a gun and kill rattlers the next time.”  Unless you surprise a rattler, it’s going to slither away real danged fast.  And governor, I’ve seen you run; you aren’t going to surprise a snake or a turtle.

A Texas rattler to be fearful of.....

Too much of yer yarn just doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense.  Whenever I see you plodding around Lady Bird Lake, you generally have two DPS guys, but always at least one trailing you. Sometimes they run.  Often they are on bikes.  And they have guns.  What the hell do you need a gun on a running trail for when you’ve got, according to the AP story, two DPS security guys running with you?  Three guns and one coyote?  That’s just not an honorable way to handle these things governor, and not the way we do it in Texas.

And, although I’ve never done it, seems to me like running and carrying a gun has to be kind of uncomfortable.  I read you were packing your pistol in a holster.  I just find it odd that you put on the running shorts, the Nike shoes, a tee shirt, and a ball cap, and then strapped on your coyote widow maker.  Who the hell does such a thing? And not just a regular ol’ 380 Ruger.  This baby has a laser sight.  You’re really scared, aren’t you?  Those nasty slithering, phallic things on the ground don’t have a chance, do they? Seriously, you are so afraid of snakes that you armed yourself to go for a run?  Aren’t there some other unsettled issues that you aren’t talking about here?  Let me also add that you ought to be thankful for your Anglo-Saxon heritage.  Being ethnic and running with a gun in Texas, on a trail or a road, might end up with a different living creature other than an animal being shot.

There’s something else.  If this happened in February, why are you just now sharing this?  It seems to me that you would have been a little excited the day you turned coyote killer and you might have mentioned it to a reporter or a political pal that could have let it slip to someone, somewhere.  But nothing until two months later?  Sorry, sounds a little too neat.  And if you were trying for the tough guy image, whacking a coyote isn’t really gonna do that for you.  Nor is packin’ heat cuz you are afraid of things that go slither in the sun.  I guess I have to say I don’t believe your story.  I need testimony or signed witness statements from your two backup gunmen in the DPS.  That might convince me.

Or let’s just do this by the books.  The law books.  If you were accused of being a coyote killer, the law would have to respond to habeas corpus and bring up the body to prove someone had been killed.  Or you’d have to be cut loose to deal with more snakes.  But let me turn that around on you.  Prove you killed a coyote.  Habeas coyote corpus.  Ah, but you can’t produce a body because the critter has been gone for two months.  You said he’s “mulch.”

So’s your story, governor gun.

“The promise of America is that something is going to happen, but after a while you grow tired of waiting because nothing ever does happen to people in America; except they grow old.  And nothing ever happens to American art, either, because the story of America is the story of the moon that never rose.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Time wrinkles a man’s memory as much as it does his skin.  There is also a chance that a few dozen electroshock sessions had ruined my father’s recall.  In his final years Daddy was unable to remember ever striking his wife or children or how his whirling fists had terrorized the people he had said he loved.  His children saw this loss of memory as a kind of grace, though Ma’s anger had not greatly lessened and she thought Daddy needed to be reminded of the pain he had wrought on his family.  Instead, his hazy reminiscences carried him back to when he was a boy in the South and they created for him a pair of attentive loving parents and a bountiful farm he shared with his siblings.  Often, I saw him staring into a blank distance and smiling and I thought I knew what he was seeing.

Although I had not been responsible for the breakage, I wanted to fix what might be repaired between my father and me.  I was never going to be the son who hunted and fished and took joy from the sound of a gun in the woods but there was a chance we might be comfortable with each other, if not close, and maybe he could come to understand his eldest son.  We were given some extra time when Daddy’s broad chest was split for a heart bypass and his life extended after he had retired to Mississippi.  All his years of hard work on the assembly line and the exercise he did on a weight bench in the back yard did not much reduce the damage caused by the decades he spent loving fried eggs, ham, bacon, steak, butter, ice cream; or anything he might eat that could be deep-fried, grilled, buttered, or sugared.

Living on the Line

On one of my last visits to Mississippi, I sat on the steps of Daddy’s back porch as he sipped a tumbler of whiskey flavored by a peppermint candy he had dropped into the bottom of the glass.  When he was young he rarely drank but a friend from the factory had told him that a spot of whiskey now and then had the power to soften the arthritic pain in his joints.  He put the glass between his feet on the porch and then looked at me as if he were going to make a profound confession.

“You know, when I was a boy, horses could still fly, Jimmy.”

I do not know if he thought I had an education that might confirm what he had just said but he looked at me in anticipation of my response.

“Daddy, I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Hell, I mean what I said, that’s what I mean.  Horses could still fly.”

He ground his lower teeth against his uppers and pursed his lips like he was expecting me to provide evidence he was wrong.

“Daddy, horses could never fly.  That’s silly and you know it.”

“Aw hell, Jimmy, don’t tell me.  Horses could fly when I was boy.”

“Why in the world would you say such a thing?  Can you imagine a horse flying””

“I don’t have to imagine it,” he growled.  “I done seen it, buddy boy.  And so did Poppa.  He seen it all the time when he was a boy, too.  They was just getting’ to where they couldn’t fly no more when I was little.  They did what you call evolve a way from it, is what you call it.  But we saw ‘em flying every mornin’ when we went to chop cotton.”

“You saw a horse fly?”

“I done told you that already, damnit.”

Daddy reached for his tumbler of whiskey and ice and turned his head away, disgusted by my unwillingness to accept such an idea.

“Well, I’m telling you, horses can’t fly,” I said, softly.  “They never could, Daddy.  There are horses in mythology that have wings and flew but there has never been any such animal that has lived on earth.”

“Aw, go to the devil; you don’t know what in the hell you’re talkin’ about.  What do you think Poppa and I saw then?  He seen ‘em before 1900 and I seen ‘em when I was comin’ up in the 20s.”

“I don’t know,” I said.  “I have no idea.”

“You damn sure don’t have no idea,” Daddy told me.  “’Cause I know what I know and I know horses used to be able to fly.  Cain’t nobody tell me what I seen with my own two damned eyes.”

He threw back his head and swallowed a gulp of whiskey and looked at me again.  He knew who I was but my father never understood what I was.  Often, he referred to my career in television journalism as “that TV doin’s’.”  The business left him unimpressed because, while visiting a broadcast newsroom where I was working, he had been able to read as quickly as the AP wire clicked out copy onto a paper spool.

“You know, maybe you are right,” I told my father.  “I guess I need to do some more research.  I never heard of horses flying but I suppose that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.  I’ll check it out.”

“You do that, buddy boy,” Daddy said, victorious in his persuasion.  “You’ll find out what I already know.”

The pecans were falling from the trees early that year and we went out behind Daddy’s house and gathered a large bag.  He walked me through his garden and explained what he grew in each crop row that summer and told me about the boy who came and chopped the weeds because Daddy was no longer able to swing a hoe.  A healthy garden with good tomatoes and corn was always a matter of pride to my father and to be able to grow things well was an important measure of a man.

“You shoulda tasted my tamaters, buddy boy,” he said.  “They was as big as my fist and the sweetest you ever did see.  I had more corn than I could put back.  I got a freezer full of it and gave the rest to some colored folks.”

Back inside, we cracked the pecans and spread their fruit across a cookie tin.  Daddy got out a stick of butter and sliced thin pats to place on each pecan half and then he used a shaker to sprinkle salt across the top.  As they heated in his oven, we shared the whiskey and he told me more stories of being a boy during the Great Depression.  The one he had been repeating since I was little was about a headless horseman my grandfather and he had come across one morning while taking a buckboard wagon loaded with hay into town.

“He had his hands up just like this,” Daddy said, holding his arms out.  “But they wasn’t no hands and the reins was just floatin’ in the air at the ends of his sleeves.  And right where his neck shoulda started and his head oughta been there wasn’t nothin’ but space and a big ole top hat was ridin’ in the air above the empty place where his head was supposed to be and he was ridin’ a big, ole painted mare in circles around a oak tree in front of a farmhouse.  Poppa said, ‘Son, do you see what I see?’  And I told him, ‘I sure do, Poppa.’  He told me, ‘Don’t you ever talk about this to no one, son, ‘cause all they’ll do is think you’re crazy.’  I never did tell a soul until Poppa died and then I told all y’all kids.”

After eating the pecans, Daddy asked me to draw him bathwater and pour into it a bottle of vinegar and a half box of Epsom salts.  Hot water and vinegar when combined with the salts, he had heard from someone in Starkville, was a cure for arthritis.  His bones and all their connective tissue had grown creaky and aching from the uncountable hours he spent lifting bumpers out of a General Motors metal press and stacking them on wooden pallets.  While he soaked, I wandered around Daddy’s cluttered and disorganized house and wondered how he made it alone, what value or purpose did he see in his isolated existence in the far woods, a thousand miles from his children.

The next morning, he drove me around in his used Lincoln Town Car and showed me where my grandparents were buried.  I had never met my grandfather and have only a vague early childhood memory of a brief encounter with my grandmother.   Daddy went past a high school and pointed out the window.

“That’s where I ‘quituated,’” he said.  “Poppa needed me to help on the farm during the Depression.”

As hard as I tried while staring at his old school, I was unable to imagine my father sitting at a desk and learning from teachers and books. During the course of his entire life, I had never seen Daddy with an open book in his hands and that seems to have had much to do with his economic destiny.  In over three decades of working the line and the metal presses, his gross annual income had rarely topped $10,000.

Because most of his children and grandchildren were living around Flint, Daddy gave up on Mississippi and moved back to Michigan for his final years.  He had hoped to have constant visitors to his little house in Sturgis, Mississippi but his children had busy lives and were inclined to spend vacation time in locations slightly more appealing than rural Mississippi.  Daddy lived frugally when he returned to Michigan, as he always had, in a house less than a mile from Ma’s old restaurant up by the Chevrolet plant, Joyce’s Coffee Shop, and he was only a few more miles from the assembly lines where he had bent his back to the hard work he had endured to provide for his family.  When he needed clothes, he often went to the Goodwill Store and bought brown paper bags full of unidentified articles of clothing for $1.50 and then took them home and picked through them for anything that might fit.

Before I left him that last time in Mississippi, I asked my father what he thought of the way his life had turned out.

“I just never had me a chaynch, Jimmy,” he answered.  “The crops was never good enough down here to be a farmer and I never did make enough money on the line up north.  I never got me a chaynch to do what I wanted.”

“I guess that was to be farmer?”

“That’s what I wanted when I come home from the war.  But when I was up north if I’d of had me some money I’d a bought some land around them factories and gotten rich.  I wanted to buy that lot on the corner of Hill and Fenton Roads years before they’s anything there and now they’s a big ol’ McDonald’s and grocery store there.  I’d a made a million dollars, buddy boy.”

“Did you hate working in the factory and building cars you couldn’t afford to own?”

“I hated a lot of stuff.  But in them days we did what we had to do.  The Buick job made the house payment and fed you kids.  But that’s about all it ever did.”

“Do you regret going up there, Daddy?”

“Naw.  I don’t think about it much.  Wasn’t no point.  I did what I had to do to provide.  I had yer mumma and three of y’all kids and it was all the work I could get so I took it.  That’s all.  When there was six of y’all, I had more kids than I could afford.  I never had time to look up and think about anything else.  Besides, I didn’t have nothing to sell but my arms and my back.”

“You think things might have been different for you if you would’ve stayed in Mississippi and married a girl from down home?”

“I don’t know.  I don’t think I was ever gonna have too much just ‘cuz a the way I come up, Jimmy.  We was raised to grow crops and take care a animals and they just wasn’t much use for that after a while.  I reckon I was lucky I got one a them factory jobs in Michigan.  I know it wudn’t a hell of a lot a money but I did what I could, that’s all.  I don’t know that I’d of had me any better chaynch.”

While his heart began marking its final beats, Daddy lay in the hospital and accorded me a kind of acknowledgement that would have meant nothing to most sons.  My brother Tim, who was handling Daddy’s finances, had also been asked to take care of our father’s old Lincoln.  While I was visiting Michigan from Texas, Daddy urged Tim to let me into his automotive fraternity.

“Why don’t you give Jim the keys to my car so he can take it for a drive and see the kinda ride I like?” Daddy asked.

Tim smiled and we later drove the aging brown Lincoln around Flint.  This seemed to be as close as my father was able to draw me until his failing heart required that his leg be amputated.  I was at his bedside while the drugs were still massaging his nerves and he reached up and pulled me down toward his chest.

“I love you, son,” he whispered.

The words seemed so simple to say.  I wish I had heard them frequently as a boy but here they were, and no matter how much wrong he had done, I loved the sound of that sentence from my father.  What son would not?

“I love you, buddy boy.”

In his dreams as he tilted slowly toward his end, Daddy had begun to be visited by his Uncle Horace, who had taken him hunting and fishing as a boy and who he had loved the way he would have liked to have loved his father.  Horace was constantly gliding through Daddy’s sleep and telling him he was waiting for him and where they were going to find abundant deer and catfish and bass and the kinds of horses they were going to ride across eternity.

“I don’t know if I’m gonna see Momma and Poppa after I’m gone,” Daddy told me.  “I hope I do.  But I’m damned sure gonna be with Uncle Horace.  Ain’t no doubt in my mind, buddy boy.  He’s waitin’ on me right now.”

Before he was transferred to a nursing home for rehabilitation after the removal of his leg, Daddy pleaded with doctors to freeze the excised limb so it could be buried with him when he died.  He was insistent that he go to the next place with all of his limbs, the whole and robust man he had been when he walked through the world.  The doctors convinced him they were not allowed to preserve severed limbs and that God would make him complete again after he was gone.

Leaving the nursing home, Daddy was transferred to a group housing facility where he lived in a private residence with other people dealing with infirmities.  My sister Becky visited him often and he asked her to order him an inflatable raft because he intended to go fishing as soon as he recovered his health.  Daddy had focused his contemporary dreams on an area north of Las Vegas, which he had decided was crossed by streams overcrowded with fish and there was rich soil to grow all the crops he needed to feed himself.  No one was able to convince him that this spot on the map was a desert.  Becky asked him how he might get himself into the blow up raft with just one leg and he said that he would “damn sure figure it out by himself and he didn’t need nobody, no way, no how to tell him how to do nothin’.”

Exasperated by what he viewed as near imprisonment, Daddy managed to slip away from the care facility in his wheelchair.  No one knew where he had gone but Daddy had always had strength and independence and he was having difficulty relying on other people.  He was discovered many hours later a few miles distant from where he was living when someone had called to inquire about his identity.  Not too long after he was returned to his group home, a caregiver found my father lying motionless on his side.  His angry heart had stopped and all of the fierce blood that had flowed through him for so long had pooled along one side of his body.

The muscles of Daddy’s arms had atrophied and shriveled and when he died he had the same skinny bird-like appendages that he had carried around as a teenager.  I still thought he looked large, though, even in his final repose, just as he did when he was standing upright and daring the world to test him with whatever it wanted.  The part of his life that I was proudest of was his time serving his country during World War II and I arranged for his casket to be draped in a United States flag.  Daddy was buried off of Hill Road not far from the factory where he had worked and the house that he and Ma had purchased when they were young and hopeful.  Becky and her husband Skip take a blanket to lay upon his grave once each year and I have Daddy’s flag in a triangle box above my writing desk down in Austin.  He belongs to the soil of Mississippi but even in death he wanted to be near his children in Michigan because he had at last come to know and love them and he wanted whatever there was to have of us even after he was gone.  Daddy kept an empty space in the graveyard beside him for Ma, just in case the girl he never stopped loving chooses, in the end, to come back to him.

“I don’t have no regrets about nothin’,” was one of the last things my father had said to me.  “I lived in the best times they was to live in.  I seen human bein’s go from ridin’ in buckboard wagons to walkin’ on the moon.  You cain’t see much more ‘n that, buddy boy.”

I think of him that way now, as a man who did not waste time second guessing himself, and who did not see the Buick car plant as a place that killed him but as the source of his livelihood and the method he used to care for his family.  Daddy and Ma scraped by on small collections of ten dollar bills to make their 62 dollar a month mortgage payment but I once had a new bike and a baseball glove and a bed to sleep in and fairly regular meals.  We were not privileged but the rise of the automotive industry almost certainly saved us from dirt poor farms down in Dixie.  There was more to our lives than there would have ever been if Daddy had stayed in the South busting the soil with his muscled back.

I hope he knows he made a good choice.

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