The Kitchen Table

This was originally written in January of 2000. I must admit, I was pretty skeptical about NASCAR in general. A trip to Sears Point shut me up good.

Our Dreyer’s client, Tyler Johnston, took us to the Nascar SaveMart/Kragen 350 road race at Sears Point yesterday. It was an eye opener.

I was prepared for the carnival atmosphere, the townie yahoo camaraderie, the Southern roots (the sport purportedly began amongst moonshine runners in dry counties), the screaming, and the Bud T-shirts tied up at the midriff. What I wasn’t prepared for was the intoxicating effect of the commercialization, the close-up allure of the cars, and the subtlety of the sport.

We waited almost an hour in traffic to reach the crest of the hill, with its pointed hospitality tents on the horizon. All the while, helicopters droned in overhead, dropping off paint and soda salespeople like wasps returning to a hive. As we got closer, there was excitement in the simple sight of that many people, an encamped NASCAR army on the hills above the battlefield.   In the distance, sausage fires burned and the smell of brewing coffee flew in on the damp wind of Sonoma.

After some oblique parking on a treacherously steep hillside, we went immediately to the “garage.” Here, 35 or so semi-trailer trucks are lined side by side, each with its back doors open and the team’s car stationed immediately to the rear. There is always a big metal toolbox, over six feet high.

Approaching the area, the appeal of the sport is immediately apparent in the awe inspired by these fearsome, unpredictable cars. The feeling around them is nothing short of religious, numinous, holy. There is a kind of furious retribution they promise, a reckoning, but why and to what end? Are they friends or enemies? Certainly, we know instinctively that they are agents of speed, exhilaration, and death. Out of nowhere, one would roar deafeningly, shuddering and thundering the earth beneath it. Petulant, angry, impatient, they are the evil queen bees we all must serve! Swarm them with our oblations and attention!

It is a feeling I associate with walking into the cathedral at Chartres, with seeing Michael Jordan up close, with hearing lions outside our tent in Botswana. It must feel this way as the bulls are prepare for their run in Barcelona. You are near a significant and awe-inspiring force, one that is additionally humbling because, in this case, we will risk our most promising young flesh inside in a fiery sacrificial rite.

Upon, around, and about the ominous cars is an equally spooky collection of signs and talismans: the tapestry of corporate logos that covers every inch of the man-made landscape. Each logo has its own history of intensely thought-out design and millions of dollars of imbued meaning. Each brings with it a kind of tribal sanctioning of the events, a feeling that what’s happening here is widely watched. And yet, in this cacophonous landscape, the effect is somehow greater than the sum of the parts. This is logo cancer, a seemingly out-of-control replication of these blotches and spots, and its message is unmistakable: This place and what happens here today is seriously important. Look how it has reduced the world’s most powerful tribes to mere details of the holy fabric.

We go into Jeff Gordon’s trailer, where he receives people with a faltering familiarity: “How y’all doin’ today?” The words are less important than the tone. It’s that Chuck Yeager voice that Tom Wolfe wrote of, the one that does not flinch in the face of the most frightening of possibility. I’m coming around one more time, Bobby, and I want you to tell me whether those are real flames or just for decoration. Gordon is compact, light, the way you imagine matadors to be up close. Nothing here you don’t really need. As we exit the trailer, a mechanic guns the engine of #24, Gordon’s famous car, doubling my son Nathaniel over, arms covering his ears and head as if he’s been shot.

There’s a church service being held. A minister travels with the drivers and holds this service for them every Sunday out on the road. Today, he’s unsettlingly standing in front of plate glass windows that look out onto the big straightaway going into Turn One. A blonde woman is singing, revival style. I hear the lyric: “As we race today…”

Meanwhile, just outside the door, heathen mechanics are running the machines through their final inspections. Measurements are taken with crude, arcane aluminum equipment. Men with crew cuts and uniforms that seem too small for them circle the cars, bending to look beneath.

When the service breaks up, the drivers burst out with purpose, heading one last time over to the garage, then down to the pits. They hardly notice the cries of the well wishers, scrawling autographs on shirts and programs they don’t even seem to see. Dale Earnhardt politely excuses himself as he passes by us. In a little more than a decade, he will be dead.

Beside many of the drivers as they approach the pits is The Wife. There are women here who have the aimless familiarity with everyone one associates with groupies, but most of the drivers seem married–or at least attached. The women with them tend to be short (the drivers are already short, the women are even shorter) and expressly blonde. They walk unsmilingly, some holding hands with their husbands, some not. About half of them are absolutely silent. They hug and part with the drivers down at the pits, then assume a position somewhere just behind the driver’s pit crew. Some sit under tarp tents with TV sets in front of them. Others just sit on the tires. Their eyes don’t wander from the race. They seem to see no one, to talk to no one, until the race is over.

 

There is a quiet that descends over the pits just before the race pageantry sets in. Suddenly, no one’s talking. Everyone’s focused on the cars, the equipment. Pit crews set gas cans and wrenches just so. Hats are adjusted and readjusted. Eyes are cast down to the pavement. Greetings are a little more forced, more perfunctory.

Fear.

We stood out at the second turn where the track takes a bank left, then climbs a steep hill to a sharp left and right. A minister, the same one who ran the service for the drivers, intones an invocation over the big PA (“Hats off! Hats off, you fuckers!” the people scream). A country singer does the national anthem and we start a seemingly endless series of pace laps. The cars roar their roars and swerve back and forth menacingly like angry stingrays (I am told they’re warming up the tires). Suddenly, the pace car’s lights snap off, a frisson of glee bubbles from the crowd. We’re going on the next lap.

The first time the cars come up the hill at speed the cars are going so fast you can’t follow them with your eyes. You can feel yourself wanting to see them, to take them in. But you just can’t. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, I think. Moving objects cannot be observed because they’re gone before we can see them. And in seeing them, we change them. While it’s hard to see the cars, however, and just about impossible to see the drivers, you have a distinct feeling about each car as it passes, evinced by its sound and agitation. Confident. Confident. Confident. Maintaining. Maintaining. Desperate. Desperate. Desperate. Dangerously desperate. Broken.          .

Jeff Gordon, the guy we visited in his trailer, evokes strong feelings among the members of the crowd. A lot of people are more partial to the older drivers like Darrel Waltrip and Rusty Warren, and think of Gordon as a guy to whom it all came a little too easily. Jeff is far and away the most successful driver of the past few years, though he’s only having a mediocre year at present. I notice on the card that he’s won $33 million over his entire career, yet he is curiously unpopular despite his success. Wearing the hat he gave me garners a lot of jeers and catcalls as we make our way up to watch the start. After a few laps, we decide to find another vantage, and a guy yells out: “WHAT’RE Y’ALL LEAVING ALREADY? YOU THINK HE’S ALREADY GOT THE THING WON?!!!”

Relocated to the first turn, which comes at the end of a long straightaway, the cars burst upon you even faster, making them virtually invisible. You see them coming, but can only hear them as they pass. They outrun the transit of your eyeballs. They are faster than you can turn your head. Nathaniel nudges me and says that they’re coming off the ground and, sure enough, at the apogee of their turn, the left front wheel is a few inches off the ground now and then. They scream down the Out Of Control line, always leaning a little to the far side.

What is it about the pits? They have a Greco-Roman feeling to them, guys waiting for big things in funny costumes. The area is much less pit-like than I anticipated. It’s more of a kneewall, with the track on one side. Most of the time, there’s nothing going on. A few people watching the race on TV; one or two sitting on the gigantic toolboxes, smoking. Here and there, though, you see the edgy anxiety behind it all. A fireman stands in full headgear, riveted to a monitor. A guy in a Texaco jumpsuit is talking on his headset while he stretches like a runner. Big guys with hairy forearms and cowboy hats are lining up the funnel-shaped refueling units.

I learned to identify the crew that would go to work next by the appearance of the ESPN camera crew.   That, and the fact that the tire guys would start holding the big slicks at the top of the wall.   There’s no effort made to hide the upcoming stop, from what I could see. Perhaps it doesn’t matter all that much, telegraphing it, because the other pit crews can’t see you very well anyway. When the moment comes, the car roars in at such speed that it almost seems like an accident is occurring right before your eyes. They come in about as fast as you possibly could without squealing the tires. Even before they’ve rolled to a halt, the crew has swarmed the car. Hands wipe it down, snake Gordon a drink through a tube, straighten a piece of loose fiberglass trim (the lights and chrome are not only fakes, they’re faded, badly printed stickers). The fuel guy upends the gas can, throws it to a waiting “catcher,” and goes to work on a second can. Each side of the car is violently jacked up and two men with pneumatic drills go to work on the lugnuts. Zeet!   Zeet! Zeet! Zeet! Zeet! They’ve been practicing like field goal kickers on a sample rim mounted on the big toolbox. Up, boom, down. Other side. Up, boom, down. The wheels spin at the tips of the crew’s toes, and the car lurches angrily back out into the slipstream. The whole process has taken 14 seconds. After the car’s gone, you expect the crew to be congratulating each other, slapping high fives. Instead, they shrink back from the frenzy into their pensive poses. Wasn’t nothin’.

The headsets are connected to Gordon’s own. I had a shortwave monitor that allowed you to listen in. The silences were long and seemed meaningful, though I knew they were not. Gordon had his hands full. It was interesting to hear what little perspective he had on the race as a whole, stuck there as he was in that screaming blinder of a car. At one point, he became upset because he noted on the leader board that someone had passed him.

“I’m looking up and seeing someone ahead of me,” he said without emotion. “You see that?”

“We do. He hasn’t pitted yet. We still see you as the leader.”

“I didn’t even see him go by.”

“We still see you as the leader.”

“I didn’t even see him.”

“You’re the best car out there, buddy. Stay focused.”

He does. Gordon wins. Somewhere in the crowd, Richard Petty passes, riding the back of a golf cart. He has that black cowboy hat and a hand that scrawled autographs without even looking, every time the vehicle slowed. Less than a month ago, his grandson had been killed at the time trials for one of these events. He smiles and scrawls through the throng, like the grand patriarch of the Flying Wallendas. It was part of the deal. Death was there, sitting next to him, but just try telling that to all these people.

We went through the crowd one more time on the way out, people who were going to stay on through the weekend in trailers and tents. Gordon’s win didn’t seem important. The big thing was that this guy had gotten his T-shirt or that that woman had a navel ring we all admired or where the porta-potties were. We had all gotten together here to care about the lives of these drivers, and yet not care about them a bit. How could we care about people we didn’t know, who were in line to make a million dollars today? How could we give a shit about their tawdry elevation of car lore and their simplistic elevation of raw speed?

We cared. And it was the damnedest thing.