The Ferrari in the Bedroom (21 page)

“Joe Thorne just turned a fantastic practice lap.”

“Billy DeVore has got a gut ache.”

“Chet Gardner’s having valve trouble.”

The Old Man already had the admission tickets for the Infield. Everything was set now for action. The trunk was locked. Every movable thing was battened down. Final instructions were issued.

“Now look…” The Old Man tossed the car keys into the air, with his skull and crossbones keyring that he won at a raffle at the American Legion Hall.

“…Now look, when that Dago bomb goes off I want all of you to be ready. I don’t want anybody wandering off, because when that bomb goes off, I’m
going!
If you’re out in the bushes takin’ a leak or something, that’s your hard luck. Any questions?”

Uncle Carl pried the top off another bottle of Atlas Prager.

“Could I help it last year ’cause I got a weak bladder?”

“It’s all that goddamn beer.” The Old Man scratched his rump.

“If you would hold off on the beer till we got into the Infield we’d make it easy.”

“I always get nervous just before the bomb goes off. Then I gotta go.” Uncle Carl was a truthful man.

“Well then, goddammit, take a milk bottle and pee in the car!” Being a 500 fan, like driving in the race itself, puts a severe test to the physical side of man. More than one driver has lost a couple of laps, and the race itself, because of a weak bladder. There is no point in mentioning names, but among the true
aficionados
there is a story of a famous driver pushing a seventy-five thousand dollar Offenhauser-powered Kurtis roadster for an owner who had his last cent invested in the car, when all of a sudden, eight laps to go and in the lead, Nature not only beckoned but began to press so insistently that he came into a turn too fast, trying to hold it back, and almost flipped over the wall. He whistled
into the pit and tore off for the john. By the time he got back and into the cockpit, it was all over but the shouting. He had dropped back to third, and there was no chance to make it up.

“Fer Chrissake, why the hell didn’t you go in yer pants? We just booted seventy grand right out the window!”

The owner could see his wife packing for the Poorhouse, and his kids selling the dog to raise carfare to get to the Orphan Home. The driver came back with what has now become a classic and is often quoted in the inner circles: “Gee, I never thought of
that
!”

All that night I didn’t sleep a wink, and I guess nobody else did either. At 6:00
AM
with the sun just coming up good, we sat around the Olds chewing on hot dog buns for breakfast and passing around a quart of lukewarm milk. The tension was getting unbearable. Up and down the line guys started their engines. You could hear them revving up again and again. The Old Man pulled out his Ingersoll.

“Seven minutes.” He gunned the Olds. Time ticked on. 6:29:30 … BOOOOOM! KA-BOOOOOOOOOMMMMM!

The aerial bombs exploded high overhead, the same sound that had marked the opening of the first 500 back in the ancient primordial days of Ray Harroun and
The Wasp.
The line of cars roared forward in a great crunch of excitement and aggression. We lurched out. I got hit on the back of the neck by a loose thermos. The pain roared down my shoulderblades. I would feel that knock for years to come, although I didn’t know it at the time. In a mad maelstrom of crashing metal, flailing fenders and swearing drivers we finally got through the gate and into the blessed historical Infield. Already it seemed to be mostly filled with families who had parked in the same spot since the days when cars
carried mechanics and they had balloon races before the start of the 500.

It was now about nine o’clock and the sun was getting hot. All around me the great tapestry of Infield life began to take shape. Guys put together platforms made out of threaded pipe, with canvas canopies on the more elegant. They sat and teetered high above the earth like some strange race of stilted birds. Blankets were spread and the party began. The first pinochle games broke out here and there.

I stood on top of the roof of the Olds, peering through the spyglass I had bought from an ad in the Johnson/Smith catalog. A flash of yellow down near the grandstand. Holy Christ, it was a race car! I could see it clearly through the lens, bright yellow, low, with jet-black tires. Some guys in white coveralls were pushing it. Suddenly I heard from somewhere off to my right a low rumble. It grew louder. Just like on the radio! A red streak hurtled through my lens, past the yellow car.

Anyone who has heard the sound of an Offenhauser engine at speed will never forget it. The great crowd in the Infield eddied and surged with a life of its own. The sun grew hotter and hotter as the time for the race drew closer. From where we were, only a tiny sliver of track could be seen, but that was enough. I could see the heat waves rising from the surface of the track, and from time to time a car would streak through, leaving a blue haze behind it. That sound of
oooooaaaannnngggg, oooo
when he decelerated in the turns and then wwwwooooooMP coming out made the air vibrate.

From somewhere a PA system kept squawking incessantly. My Uncle Carl sat on the running board and strummed his banjo.

Yessir, that’s my baby
No sir, don’t mean maybe…

He sang between sucks at a beer bottle. The old man had out his race program and was writing things as they announced last-minute changes over the PA. A band struck up somewhere; some High School band paraded down the track. The pace car, a big white convertible, rolled out. The people cheered. I could hardly stand it. At last all thirty-three cars were lined up in that long, wild mosaic that is the traditional 500 start.

“Now listen careful, they’re gonna say it pretty soon.” The Old Man listened for the magic words that had been spoken in Indianapolis from the very beginning.

The PA system echoed the immortal words. I never thought I actually would hear them in person. A great roar spread out over the Infield as car after car revved over. Blue-grey smoke and the smell of burning exotic fuel made me almost pass out with excitement.

The pace car started to roll and the great parade roared by on the classical Pace Lap. They moved out of our sight. Balloons floated high up over the stands. Guys stood on hoods, fenders, rickety platforms, everything, to see the start, and when it came it was more than even I had imagined it to be.

The earth trembled. Tires screamed. The crowd actually
did
roar! Just like the movie! I squinted through my glass as car after car streaked past the tiny sliver of track I could see. Blue, yellow, red, and a white blur that was Wilbur Shaw’s
Maserati. The race was on. And for ever and ever no one would be able to convince me that there is any more exciting a happening, and that’s what it is, than the 500.

I’ve sipped chablis on an elegant balcony overlooking the harbor at Monaco, and watched the finish from in the stands, right on the line, but somehow the whole spectacle is different. There is an animal, primitive thing about the 500.

The Infield was swinging into full action. Lunch baskets were opened, tablecloths spread, pickle jars spilled, pork and beans, fat ladies, skinny kids, old men in baseball caps, all sort of jammed up in one big compost heap of humanity.

The race droned on and on in the heat. Unless you’re really damn lucky you don’t see much of the race from the Infield. You hear it; you feel it; you eat it; you smell it. The PA system kept up a running tattoo of trivia and information. Jimmy Snyder in the Sparks Special, Lou Meyer in the Bowes Special and Wilbur Shaw were battling it out. Suddenly, from somewhere off in the distance, a dull
whuuummp
broke the steady drone. Instantly card games stopped; people leaped to the tops of cars. The yellow flag was out. For a while no one knew what happened, and finally the story reached even the ladies sitting in the shade eating ham sandwiches: Floyd Roberts had tangled with another car and had gone over the wall, and was dead.

The race began again. Finally, just about the time I thought I’d pass out from heat and too much rootbeer, Wilbur Shaw took the checkered flag, and the ballgame was over. You couldn’t have told it from where we were parked, but that’s what the PA system said. Wilbur Shaw had done it again.

Guys began taking down their racks and packing away the baskets and card tables. It was getting late, and a lot of
them had a long way to go before they got home, places like Olathe, Kansas; Red Cloud, Minnesota; and Turtle Creek, Iowa.

We finally got back out on 41, after dark and after the biggest traffic jam I ever saw in my life. I would, from that day on, always associate races with agonizing traffic jams. We droned northward between the same cornfields.

“Too bad about Roberts,” my Uncle Al said in the dark. He never talked much, but when he did it wasn’t often about cars.

“Yep,” the Old Man answered, lighting up a cigarette as he hunched over the wheel.

“He won last year, but I guess his number come up. I always figure if your number comes up there’s nothing you can do.”

After making this Folk observation he drove on in silence. I opened a Baby Ruth bar in the dark and chewed on it, thinking about what a great thing the 500 is, and how I’d tell everybody back home how I saw Floyd Roberts’ car flip over the wall even though it was a lie.

“Wilbur Shaw in that goddamn Maserati.” The Old Man said it as though he couldn’t quite get over it.

“You know, I come to a conclusion…” He paused dramatically.

“…Them damn Spaghetti-Eaters can really build fast cars!” The great race was over, and my Old Man had foretold the future.

YOU
MUST
BE SATISFIED OR DOUBLE YOUR MONEY BACK! Ah, what a comfortable, reassuring, warming, cuddly phrase that is, a phrase probably more ubiquitous than any single slogan, motto, epithet, punchline; anything on the scene today. Whole political philosophies and theologies are based on one permutation of that line or another. It may be couched in cloudy Idealistic phrases such as:

“The right of all free men to live in harmony and peace, etc. etc., blah, blah, in hoc agricola conc…” or it may come in its more fragrant forms, such as an advertisement inviting you to live forever in Marlboro Country, which seems to have only strong, healthy, hungry-eyed, bronzed people of indeterminate Springtime youth existing forever in a land where there appear to be no buildings at all, only endless beautiful canyons and rugged, picturesque riding trails—certainly no used car lots or hospitals with cancer wards.

Or maybe you prefer Thunderbird Country, where no fenders are ever banged, no differentials ever fall out, and no greasy kids scratch:

on the beautiful iridescent bronze rear deck.

The Double-Your-Money-Back, You-Must-Be-Satisfied, Guaranteed Syndrome is now galloping full blown through the great, vast empty spaces of the mind’s vacuum of today’s resolute Dreamer. He blames the rotten American system, a sick, decadent Society, for the fact that every girl he tries to make puts him down as a pimply-faced weed. No wonder he becomes a militant New Left zealot in the full blush of the Double Your Money Back Hangup. He believes that any planned, Totalitarian, guaranteed forever beautiful, lovely, Forever Singing Folksongs In The Wheatfields society must be preferable to the old Every-Man-For-Himself-And-Let-The-Weeds-Fall-Where-They-May Fordham Road world.

One knothead recently sued a local university here in New York indignantly proclaiming that after four years of toil he was still a notable lout at graduation time, a perfect example of the Satisfaction Guaranteed myth at its best.

“Four years at NYU and we guarantee that you will be wise, profound, brimming with wisdom and totally With It or double your money back!”

No wonder he became a Buddhist monk when after graduation he found that his lips still moved when he read the Want Ads in the
Daily News.

The framers of our much-maligned Constitution were men of sterner stuff, and knew a hell of a lot more about Life as she is lived than the average graduate student today at CCNY, who gains much of his “knowledge” of existence from reading various items from the stacks and then filling out multiple choice questions on philosophical concepts of Cosmic complexity. You will note that line at the very beginning of the Constitution which guarantees you the right to
pursue
happiness. Nowhere is it even implied that you will ever catch up with that particular electric rabbit, or even glimpse it in the distance amid a cloud of dust.

Great numbers of parents today who have faithfully followed innumerable texts guaranteed in one way or another to produce model offspring are dully throbbing in lonely living rooms while Barbie or Kenny slowly volplane around the chandelier at a pot party down the block.

“Where have we failed?” they moan. “We followed every word to the letter in Dr. Spock’s golden book!”