Sunday Money: Speed! Lust! Madness! Death! A Hot Lap Around America with Nascar (P.S.)

390 Pages·2006·1.29 MB·English

by  Jeff Macgregor

SUNDAY
MONEY
SPEED! LUST!
MADNESS! DEATH!
A Hot Lap Around America
with NASCAR
J M G
EFF AC REGOR
PHOTOGRAPHS BY OLYA EVANITSKY
For Olya, without whom none of this would have been possible;
and to Polly, without whom none of this would have been necessary
Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends . . .
—EMERSON, LAKE AND PALMER

Contents
EPIGRAPH iii
BEGINNING vii
ONE
This is a book about our year on the road,… 3
TWO
The first time I drive the car it feels like… 35
THREE
We arrive at Daytona late the same afternoon,
fantasy and… 59
FOUR
The Cup garages at Daytona midweek: cars
and men and… 85
FIVE
“Does that ever work?” 127
SIX
Jackpot! Tits and tats everywhere! Easy money
and showgirl sex… 149
SEVEN
Suddenly we have no place to go. The Beep reminds… 173
EIGHT
We live at the Wal-Mart. I do not mean by… 203
NINE
It begins and ends in winter, but it carries summer… 233
TEN
Imagine this sad world as it ought to be, not… 255
ELEVEN
At the Dover track this week you can buy a… 275
TWELVE
There’s a woman up in Michigan with a NASCAR
garden. 305
THIRTEEN
Back to modest Rockingham and boil p-nut country. 329
EPILOGUE
The Beep and I left the South and sold the motorhome. 351
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PRAISE
CREDITS
COVER
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
BEGINNING
Might be he was dead. There was no way to tell from the grandstands. It hap-
pened too far away and everyone up there was too tired or too drunk to squint
away the glare from that thin indifferent sun. Even on television, the Numi-
nous Absolute, where everything is known and everything is seen and every-
thing spoken and shown and everything is by God under control, they
didn’t know. They didn’t know what to say or how to say it, so they just
kept talking.
The whole thing happened too fast, too slow, and after that day you’d
watch the replays again and again, for months, not believing. Even in real
time it still played out lazy and deliberate, the car yawing slow left, then cor-
recting, swerving slow motion right, up the banking, tires feathering smoke,
into the wall, then the impact, a sharp sound inside a dull one, and you
thought—maybe—it wasn’t bad, he wasn’t going very fast, he didn’t hit very
hard. Maybe you thought, okay, it happens every year, every weekend, over
and over, they crash but they all just walk away. Don’t they all? To this day,
years gone and the whole world spun another billion miles through the void,
you don’t believe it. But when the car finally slid to rest the netting never came
down and the first man up to the window seemed frantic, waving like mad for
the others to get there, C’mon! Sweet Christ! C’mon! and for a long time after
that every gesture was panicked, emphatic, and then they pulled him out of
the car and all at once the adrenaline was gone and it didn’t seem urgent any-
more, and even if you couldn’t see it you could feel it somehow, that absence,
that stillness, and the twilight quiet descended across the ridiculous immen-
sity of that place, and it was like something being pulled out of you, too, and
the celebration in Victory Lane was small and fretful and wrong in the fore-
ground, and way out there below the loneliest reach of the far turn, so steep
vii
you can barely walk it, that black car sat empty and if you were still in your
seat that’s when you knew. You just knew.
The rest of it—the ambulance, the lights and the sirens and the hurry, the
hospital—was wishful ceremony. A prayer.
By the time they got back to their hotels or made it to the airport, most of
the others knew too, the scores of thousands who’d headed for the gates to
beat the traffic. They heard it on the radio or their cell phones or saw it up on
the screen behind the concourse bar. In every airport from Miami back to Jack-
sonville and out to Orlando men and women stood crying, and in hotel rooms
and motel rooms and in the endless stream of cars moving up or down the
great vein of the I-95 people sat abject and sobbing, and the news flew out
from Daytona in fast concentric circles, across the country, swift rings of
grief, until everything in America sat within the blast radius of that elaborate
sadness, because Dale Earnhardt was dead. That was February 18th, 2001.
America dreams driving. In these dreams you are alone. Flying low
and loud and fast down a long, straightrazor stretch of Nebraska in-
terstate, perhaps in late autumn, headed west, sharp cold just coming
on, the desolate geometry of those golden stubble fields strobing past
you, the sun wobbling low and weak on the horizon, your windshield
embroidered with the glare of it, and in your rearview mirror the sky
behind you as blue and deep as a bruise. You are cupped in the heated
seat. The earth spins beneath you. All the shining instrumentality of
uncomplicated power falls easily to hand. Your body dissolves into the
machine until you are no more and no less than acceleration itself.
The brute music of the engine rises up through the floorboards and
the soles of your feet and into your blood until your heart pounds
with it, the world blurs and the vast web of human complication dis-
solves somewhere far behind you and there is no past and no future
and nothing bad can ever catch you. Nothing can touch you. That’s
the American dream. That’s freedom.
Junior got him sideways then T-boned him coming out of the first
turn, that awkward radius where the track doubles back on you and
viii BEGINNING