The Flamethrowers (4 page)

When I was twelve, Flip came through Reno and gave out autographs at a casino. I didn’t have a glossy photo for him to sign, so I had him sign my hand. For weeks I took a shower with a plastic bag over that hand, rubber-banded at the wrist. It wasn’t quite a romantic infatuation. There are levels of readiness. Young girls don’t entertain the idea of sex, their body and another’s together. That comes later, but there isn’t nothing before it. There’s an innocent displacement, a dreaming, and idols are perfect for a little girl’s dreaming. They aren’t real. They aren’t the gas station attendant trying to lure you into the back of the service station, a paperboy trying to lure you into a toolshed, a friend’s father trying to lure you into his car. They don’t lure. They beckon, but like desert mirages. Flip Farmer was safely unreachable. He was something special. I chose him from among all the men in the world, and he signed the back of my hand and smiled with very white, straight teeth. He gave us each that same smile, the children and adults who lined up at Harrah’s. We weren’t individuals but a surface he moved over, smiling and remote. The thing was, if he had returned my gaze, I probably would have washed his autograph from my hand.

The year he came through Reno, Flip had barely escaped death as he’d made his land speed record on the salt. Just after he hit 522 miles per hour, his rear chute prematurely released. It blew out the back of the
Victory
and snapped off, sending the car veering to and fro between mile markers. He recovered, but with no chute, he had no way to slow down. He was still going five hundred miles an hour. He knew that if he even so much as tapped the brakes they would melt and burn out, and then he’d have no brakes. They were designed for speeds of less than 150 miles an hour. He would have to let the car slow itself, but it wasn’t slowing. He realized, as he flew across the salt, almost friction-lessly,
that it was all going to be over anyhow. Whether he used the brakes or not, it was all about to end. So he used them. He tapped ever so slightly on the pedal with his left driving shoe. It sank to the floor. The car sailed onward, its speed unchecked. He pumped the brake, and nothing. Just the thunk of the pedal hitting the floor, the flat world running liquid beyond the clear plastic bubble-canopy.

He flew past mile zero, the end of the official racecourse. His crew and several teams of newsmen looked on. He was going four hundred miles an hour. The surface, here, was ungraded. The engine was off, and all he heard was the knocking and slamming of the
Victory
’s suspension as it thudded over the rough salt. He had time to think, as he sat in the cockpit, soon to be tomb, time to notice how small and familiar a space it was. How intimate and calm. The car was filled with a white smoke. As he waited for death, having given up pumping his nonbrakes, it occurred to him that the smoke was salt, aspirated to an airborne powder, having been ground by the wheels and forced up through the axles into the cramped cockpit of the car.

Through a mist of white, softening his view out the canopy, a row of electricity poles reared up. He tried to steer between them but ended up mowing down several. Then he was riding straight into the shallow salt lake, water spraying high on both sides of the
Victory
. The car finally began to slow—to three hundred, to two hundred. But then he was shot up a ten-foot-high salt dike, which had been built when a drainage ditch was dug across the southern edge of the flats. The world went vertical. A quadrangle of plain, cloudless sky. A forced contemplation of the heavens, crisp and angelic blue, a classic prelude to death. If there had been just one puffy trawler, a little tugboat of a cloud, even so much as a cotton ball of vapor against the blue, he would have hoped. There was only blue. He was headed for the drainage ditch on the other side of the dike. It was filled with rainwater. The
Victory
slammed into it. As it sank, nose first, Flip desperately popped the canopy. There was no way he’d get the canopy open once the car was underwater. He tore off his oxygen mask and tried to unfold himself from the driver’s seat. He was caught. He could not get himself out from behind the steering
wheel. The car was sinking. His fireproof suit was snagged on the afterburner levers. The
Victory
was deep underwater, and he was still trying to unhook the fabric of his suit-sleeve from the levers. Just as his brain was losing its last bit of oxygen he untangled himself and swam toward the wavering brightness above him, where sun penetrated the water. He emerged in a slick of hydrazine fuel that was collecting on the surface. Emergency workers came running. They dragged him to safety just before the hydrazine ignited, sending a boom, and then a far bigger boom, followed by a violent bubbling, as the
Victory of Samothrace
exploded underwater like fuel rods in a reactor pool.

The next year, Flip built another car,
Samothrace II,
with a bigger jet engine and beefy rear disc brakes, at his shop in the Watts area of Los Angeles. It was 1965. The riots came and his warehouse caught fire, or maybe it was torched. The
Victory of Samothrace II
was badly damaged. He couldn’t rebuild in time for the season at the salt flats, which only lasts from August to September or October, before the rains come and turn the ancient lake bed into a huge shallow bowl. That year the rains came early, and the
Samothrace
was not yet ready. I read about all this in his autobiography,
Winning
. Riots and rain were presented in the book as misfortunes of the same order: one and then another. Riots in Watts, rain at the flats. Smiling, suburban Flip talking about how he and the crew had entertained themselves with an improvised version of miniature golf, barricaded inside their workshop as marauders flung homemade bombs. “Golly,” Flip or his ghost author wrote, “what a year of random bad luck.”

Flip recaptured the world record the season after the Watts riots and kept it until last year, 1975, when an Italian stole it away in a rocket-fueled vehicle and Flip officially retired. Now he does television commercials for after-market shocks. The Italian, Didi Bombonato, is sponsored by Valera Tires, which is where the lines begin to cross. Didi Bombonato would be at the Bonneville Salt Flats to set a record. Sandro is Sandro Valera, of Valera Tires and Moto Valera motorcycles.

*  *  *

At the flats, the sun conspired with the salt to make a gas of brightness and heat pouring in from all directions, its reflected rays bouncing up from the hammered-white ground and burning the backs of my thighs right through my leathers.

I parked and walked along the open pits. People were wheeling race cars and motorcycles from flatbed trailers and up onto workbenches, unlooping cable to plug into power generators, transferring gasoline from larger canisters to plastic jugs with funnel dispensers. Pink gasoline and synthetic red engine oil soaked into the salt like butcher shop residue. The salt itself, up close, was the color of unbleached sugar, but the sunlight used it as if it were the brightest white. It was only when a cloud momentarily shifted over the sun and recast the earth in a different mood, cool and appealingly somber, that the salt revealed its true self as a light shade of beige. When the cloud moved away, everything blanched to the white sheen of molybdenum grease.

I heard the silky glide of toolbox drawers, the tink of wrenches dropped on the hard salt. Tanned little boys darted past me on bicycles, wearing mesh baseball caps propped high on their heads, in mimicry of the fathers and uncles who crowded around workbenches, bent over vehicles, their belts buckled off center to avoid scratching the paint. Beyond the workbenches, large women fanned themselves and guarded the Igloo coolers. Each pit site had one of these women, seated in a frail aluminum lawn chair, her weight distending the woven plaid seat, legs splayed, monstrous calves like big, blank faces. Opening and shutting the Igloo cooler to retrieve or simply monitor the soft drinks and sandwiches, as their husbands opened and shut the red metal drawers of stacked and rolling toolboxes. The women seemed deeply bored but proudly so, as veterans of this event.

Cars were being rolled from the test area, salt piled in a ring around the tread of each tire like unmelting snow. I filled out my registration form and waited to have the bike inspected. The Valera motorcade arrived, a convoy of trucks, trailers, and air-conditioned buses with tinted windows and industrial-grade generators. They parked in
their own separate area of the salt. It was roped and off-limits. I turned in my form. I had a couple of hours before they would run my class. I walked over to the start line. The men who clocked the start were like the men I’d seen in the Mexican restaurant the night before, big mustaches, wearing sunglasses and ear protection headphones, walkie-talkies strapped to their chests, over their officials’ jackets.

For land speed records, each driver has the course to himself. You race by yourself, but your time is relative to whatever class you race in—in my case, unmodified 650 cc twins. No one else shares the course, so vehicles run endlessly throughout the day, a coming and going in the bright white heat, each calamity or success on the scale of individuals. There were two long lines, short course and long course. In the lines were every kind of car and bike, dragster cycles with eight-cylinder motors, streamliners like warheads put on wheels, the drivers coffined flat on their backs in tiny horizontal compartments, inches above the salt, and the elegant lakesters in polished aluminum, rounded and smooth like worn bars of soap, their fender skirts almost grazing the road. There were old-fashioned roadsters with gleaming new paint, roll bars, and big stenciled numbers on the doors. Vintage American muscle cars. A pink-and-yellow 1953 Chrysler Town & Country, a Technicolor mirage bouncing along on shot springs.

After my one year in New York I had practically forgotten there was a world of elsewheres, people who lived outside the city and recreated in their own style. There were a lot of family-based teams, and in a few cases, the mother was the driver. Not many, but I was not the only female, though I may have been the only woman on a motorcycle. There was the joke of the bump-start vehicle, which gave the racers a boost from the start line. Anything on wheels and that ran could work: A school bus. A just-married jalopy, trailing cans. An ice cream truck. The more elaborate and professional the race car, the more ridiculous and lavishly impractical its bump-start vehicle seemed to be. Although I was wrong about the ice cream truck. It pulled up and opened for business, pencil-necked boys lining up at the window. An ambulance came, and I wondered what happened, and how serious the injury was.
But the ambulance was a bump vehicle, pushing a lakester off the start line, the ambulance driver wearing a white medic’s shirt and costume bandages soaked in fake blood.

Every few minutes an engine screamed as a vehicle flew off the line, spewing a rooster tail of salt from under each rear tire. A few seconds into its run the vehicle began to float, its lower half warbled. Then the whole thing went liquid and blurry and was lost to the horizon.

One after another I watched the scream, the careen, the rooster tail, the float, and then the shimmer and wink off the edge of horizon, gone.

Careen, rooster tail, float, gone.

Careen, float, gone.

There were lots of us watching. Drivers, kids, wives, technicians. All we had, to track the action, after the vehicle twinkled and melted into nothing, was a crackle on the timing officials’ two-way radios. I felt myself bracing for bad news after the crackle. Anticipation was structured into the logic of the place. We weren’t waiting to hear the run was routine, that it was solid, that there were no problems. Standing behind the start line, there was nothing to see as a car entered the measured mile. We weren’t there to see. We were waiting on news of some kind of event, one that could pierce this blank and impassive and giant place. What else could do that but a stupendous wipeout? We were waiting on death.

*  *  *

My final project in art school was a film about Flip Farmer. I’d contacted him at his shop in Las Vegas to request an interview, but he wouldn’t agree to it unless I paid him five thousand dollars. He seemed to make no distinction between an impoverished art student and
Look
magazine. I took a risk and knocked on his door. He lived on the bluffs above the strip. A curtain was pulled aside and quickly shut. No one was going to answer. I had a super-8 camera that I panned around the premises, past a tire swing, unmoving in the breezeless day, broken toys, lawn chairs that someone was stripping of upholstery and bending into scrap aluminum. Several project cars up on blocks—shade tree
work, as Scott and Andy called it. “Hey, you can’t film here! Hey!” It was a woman’s voice, from beyond a window screen. I figured I’d better go.

A friend of mine from school named Chris Kelly had tried to make a documentary about the singer Nina Simone, a similar scenario of knocking on her door. He had tracked her down to the South of France. Nina Simone opened her front door in a bathrobe, saw that the visitor was holding a camera, lifted a gun from the pocket of her robe and shot at him. She wasn’t a good shot. Chris Kelly, who had turned and run, was only hit once, a graze to the shoulder, as he tore through the high, wet grass beyond her farmhouse. He got no footage of Nina Simone but I somehow saw this robe from which she had produced her gun. Flowy and feminine, pink and yellow flowers with greenish flourishes, semi-abstract leaves. Nina Simone’s brown legs. Her flat, calloused feet in a pair of those unisex leather slippers that Europeans like Sandro wore around the house. She shot Chris Kelly, after which he became a legend at UNR. Or at least he was a legend to me. Being fired at with a gun made an impression; it elevated what he did from a student project to actual art. It was somehow better than if he’d filmed her in a typical documentary style. Chris Kelly moved to New York City a year later and became doubly a legend to me, the guy shot by the singer and also the one who moved to New York.