A Natural History of Love (37 page)

Men of any age and state of marital happiness can be counted on to look admiringly if 1) a beautiful woman walks by, or 2) a beautiful car zooms by. Cars arouse men on many levels, so it is not surprising that there is a festival devoted exclusively to cars, men, and masculinity. It is held in the spring, with attendant rites and ceremonies. Drunkenness is preferred. Men race and awards are given to the victor. Fast cars and women’s breasts are worshiped in an orgy of pure decibel and testosterone, a celebration of male sexuality unlike any on earth.

THE INDY 500

Seven drunken, bare-chested teenage boys drape themselves across the windshield of my car as I wait for the light to change. Squirming, they relayer themselves like slabs of bacon, and their mirrored sunglasses send blinding jets of light in a dozen directions. The stoplight probably changed some minutes ago, but all I can see is flesh tanned to the color of walnut oil, cans of beer, hairless chests, and lascivious leers. A rhythmic pounding on the car roof tells me that at least one young man is trying to get in feet first. Out of the back window, I watch six more trying to lift the car by its bumpers and cart it away. Another, with a video camera perched like a falcon on his shoulder, zooms in for a close-up of my chest. Just as I begin wondering if this can possibly be for real, I decipher what they have been chanting maniacally for the past few minutes: “Show us your tits! Show us your tits! Show us your tits!”

When the light changes, they melt off the car and surge around a young woman reckless enough to take a stroll in a bikini through what appears to be the largest fraternity party on earth, a party that began miles from the Speedway in all directions and now, the day before the race, is building to a crescendo that only tomorrow morning’s auto-eroticism will satisfy.

Sixteenth Street, the main drag that leads to the Speedway, looks like a war zone. Swarming around an armada of recreational vehicles and pickup trucks, half-clad young men guzzle beer, grill hamburgers, compare their muscles, preen themselves. Some carry brown bags of hard liquor. Some carry placards that say
WE NEED GIRLS
. At the doorway to one trailer, a large papier-mâche sculpture of a woman, naked from the waist up, wears a sign that says
OFFICIAL INSPECTION STATION
. Unhinged by the sight of females of all ages, body types, or dress, they chant until they’re hoarse, and then make breast-juggling motions with their hands. At odd moments, a girl will leap atop a trailer and pose with her blouse held open like the Ark of the Covenant, turn so that binocular-slung oglers in each direction will get an eyeful, then button up and disappear into the rowdy mob hanging out by the thousand around the souvenir kiosks and the drive-ins that line the sprawling mid-American strip. Monstrous inflatable cans of Bud-weiser and Miller beer, Valvoline motor oil, and Champion spark plugs float above the ruckus like patron deities. Radios blare, people caterwaul, car engines rev, and the combined smear of low drama and teeth-rattling noise becomes fiercer the closer you get to the Speedway itself, that sacred arena of male sexuality, the still center of the carnival. Carnival, from the Latin
carnis
, “flesh,” and
levo
, “to take away.” A tub-thumping, earthy, hell-for-leather orgy of male puberty before life’s fun has to stop.

By 6:00
A.M
., when the gates open on race day, people are already in line to find the seats they purchased right after last year’s race. Next to them stand fans from all over the country and the world: shoe salesmen from Switzerland, computer distributors from Germany looking for “atmosphere and action,” bartenders from Detroit, auto body workers from Phoenix, carloads of young men, a few women dressed in brightly colored flame suits that hug the body tightly and suggest they might, at any moment, be called upon to leap into the pits and take charge.

People begin buying hot dogs and relish at about 8:00
A.M
., and washing them down with lukewarm beer. Fire trucks choose their spots just off the raceway. Television stations set up camera booms on a spiderweb of wires. Souvenir stands are already hawking Indy 500 air fresheners, place mats, Frisbees, coffee mugs, miniature cars, black-and-white checkered victory flags, pot holders, and T-shirts. I can’t resist buying a turquoise-and-pink T-shirt with an Indy car zooming off the chest, which vows
LIFE BEGINS AT
220
MPH. AS
I slip it on over my sundress to check the size, and then off again, a TV announcer doing a remote nearby pauses to comment on my body, a platoon of men yell from their girl-watching spot on the top row of the bleachers, and a large, dusky man wearing a black Harley-Davidson T-shirt walks straight up to me, ogles my breasts, and groans, ‘Oh, mercy.” By now this is old news, and I’ve learned that the men don’t actually touch you; their assaults (or compliments, depending on your point of view) are strictly verbal.

Inside Gasoline Alley, wide boulevards of combed cement separate rows of garages, and life is serious as a bank balance. The winner will zoom off with half a million dollars. Just being in the race guarantees about $30,000. Companies donate dozens of miscellaneous awards, from $5,000 to $75,000 for being the oldest driver, youngest driver, fastest qualifier, leader of the first ten laps, best chief mechanic, driver with the least pit time, and so on. Champion spark plugs awards the winner a cool $68,000 provided he uses that brand during the race. You can guess which plugs all the cars start with.

Bustling around the tense streets of Gasoline Alley, young men dressed in Flash Gordon jumpsuits make sure their cars are fit. They tow each one up to the fuel pump with a long blue ribbon. Some of them carry helmets. Others have grimy gloves sticking out from their knee pads. A high-wing Cessna airplane flies overhead, towing a banner that reads:
OLD INDIANA FUN PARK—ZOW
!” (It recalls the Kenneth Fearing poem in which he describes a man’s brief, highspeed, cartoon life as “Zowie he lived, and zowie he died.”) Newsmen patrol the garage area, balancing cameras like small children on their shoulders. More cars emerge from their garages, towed by long blue canvas ribbons that look like the lunge lines trainers use when exercising thoroughbreds. Parts of the cars are often covered with black blankets, as well, to keep their flanks warm. A low-slung sulfur-yellow car belongs to Al Unser, whose son will be racing against him today, and it contains the power of over 700 horses, though it’s only fifteen feet long and weighs only about 1,500 pounds.
^*
Unser climbs inside the cramped car, which has been molded to the eccentricities of his bottom and back, and stretches his legs far into the nose. He will drive the race lying down.

Enclosed entirely in armor, with only a narrow visor open across their eyes, the drivers are all modern knights, riding horsepower. Speed is their lance. Despite the comradeship of the crews, this is not a team sport. Everyone else out on the track will be an opponent. Medieval knights had allegorical names like Sir Good Heart or Lancelot, and these latter-day knights walk around the grounds and drive cars plastered with slogans. (Some call them the fastest billboards on earth.) How eerie it is to see a man with
LIVING WELL
emblazoned on his helmet and
DIE HARD
stamped on his back. On his shoulder may be the words
GOODYEAR
or
CHAMPION
or
SOUND DESIGN
or
TRUE VALUE
. What are you to make of the apparition of a glossy red car driving toward you with
SLEEP CHEAP
(the slogan of Red Roof Inns) on both sides of its nose?

Cars, drivers, and pit crews all push through the crowds and take their places on the racetrack. At some point, the crews and officials withdraw a little, and the men are alone with their machines. The steering wheels have been put in
after
them. Sealed now in their narrow cockpits, each adjusts the knitted flameproof Ninja mask over the face, fixes the rub of the helmet strap, checks the buckles that hold helmet and flame suit together so that the neck won’t sprain in the terrible g-forces of the turns. You can see the loneliness in their eyes, the squinting concentration with which they erase every one of the half million people from the raceway. The crowd may cheer, but the drivers hear nothing, see nothing but track.

Unser’s brow, with its accordion of worry lines, shows through his helmet and balaclava. His eyes are dark pyramids of concentration. You cannot see the lids at all, only the creases fanning out beneath them like dunes on the tanned Sahara of his face. Then he slides the Plexiglas visor down and becomes completely entombed. Tightly swaddled in cloth, steel, fiberglass, and foam, he will already be sweating in the 80-degree midwestern heat. Soon he will breathe speed, and he will become a trajectory, a single long rush, a hymn to male sexuality.

The national anthem is followed by a Memorial Day invocation by clergy, and it’s no coincidence that the race takes place on Sunday morning at 11:00
A.M
., church service time, with a somewhat premature prayer for the dead and injured, and then “Taps,” while the stands fall silent. Jim Nabors sings about going back home to Indiana. Thousands of multicolored balloons spiral like DNA into the blue. “Gentlemen,” the frail voice of the Speedway’s chairperson ritualistically intones, “start your engines.”

“The magnificent machines,” the announcer cries, “are ready!”

A heaving and soughing of engines. Pace cars roll away to lead a warm-up lap or two at over 100 mph, as the crews sprint back to their pits to get ready for action. On the electronic scoreboard high above the stands, silhouetted fans leap and cheer and wave small flags. A crowd stretching thickly around the two-and-a-half-mile oval twitches and yells, rising like the prerace balloons as the cars roar into sight again around the far turn. The pace cars peel off and the drivers take flight, with Mario Andretti in the lead.

Immediately, three cars collide, metal parts arcing high into the air, and the race stops briefly. The cars pause at speed, and aren’t allowed to change position relative to one another until debris is cleared from the track and the yellow flag is lifted. Suddenly the race restarts, with Andretti still leading. His new Chevy engine is fast, but is it as reliable as the Cosworth engines that have won so many races? Not until lap fifteen do the fans sit down in their seats. Andretti’s a sentimental favorite, and they’re berserk with excitement.

The speed at which the cars pass the onlooker is sense-bludgeoning. Whining, they catapult around a corner and into the straightaway, while their engines growl and gnaw in a thirty-megaton buzz. You need peripheral vision to see the cars arrive, flash past, vanish around the next turn. They move so fast that unless you fix on one car and track it, a loud blur of color whizzes past. Fans seem to shake their heads no, no, no, no, thirty-three times as the field rushes by. People dropping empty beer cans into the jungle of scaffolding underneath the bleachers make a constant drizzle of tin. When cars pull into the pits at speed, the crews come alive, changing treadless tires (“skins”), pumping methanol into the forty-gallon well, tinkering, adjusting, putting out small fires, handing the driver a drink, then shoving him back onto the track—all within ten or twenty seconds.

Not only mechanics and engineers, but aerodynamic specialists work with each driver. As the orange wind sock atop the tower reminds you, this is really an air race. How do you keep a light piece of metal going over 200 mph on the ground? Though the men inside are called drivers, they sit in a
cockpit
, they worry about the cars’
wings
, and they are obsessed with
wake turbulence
. Small canard fins at the
nosecone
up front pay homage to Burt Rutan’s Challenger and all the other canard designs he’s made famous over the years. The rear wing functions like an upside-down airplane wing. An airplane wing is rounded on top, but car wings are rounded on the bottom instead. Air whooshes all around the wing, but has farther to travel across the bottom, becomes thinner, and produces an area of low pressure. On top, the higher pressure presses down and the car holds the ground. The car’s curved underside holds the ground, too. But the combined ground effects churn up small tornadoes, and the swirling whirlpools of wind that each car trails behind it puts the next car in peril.

When the drivers talk about the air being “dirty” or “squirrelly,” turbulence is what they mean. Just as an airplane’s controls become almost useless in such a wake, so do a winged car’s. The car was “loose,” they say, meaning that for a few hair-raising seconds at colossal speed in a turn they had no control over the car at all; its bronco horsepower had broken loose. So they search for clean air, smoother lanes to travel. Andretti spends most of the race low down the track, almost off it, in a less-traveled lane where the air is sweeter. At over 200 mph, they are driving faster than most commuter airplanes fly, in severe turbulence, in blast-furnace heat of about 110 degrees in the cockpit, with their heads jiggling unstoppably and their bodies thrust hard against the side of the car in the g-force-pulling turns, in constant fear of hitting a brick wall head-on, or bouncing off another car and splintering as they cartwheel. Two-time Indy winner Bill Vukovich once said cavalierly, “All you have to do to win at Indy is keep your foot on the throttle and turn left.” But as Indy driver Dennis Firestone describes the feel of turbulence: “The effect on you is violent. You’re shaking around in the cockpit. Your vision is blurred. It feels as if the air could rip your helmet off.” Sometimes the pressure jams the helmet up over the eyes so its owner can barely see. And concentration is crucial. If your mind wanders for one second, the car will travel the length of a football field.

Beating, banging, fighting the steering wheel, pulling g’s, the furious cars slide in and out of corners. Drivers need to be aggressive, but at a controlled pace. They must be mentally relaxed, but there is constant battering to their neck and muscles. Few sports stay right on the edge of life from start to finish. Not just speed, but a passion for the extreme must be what fuels drivers and fans alike: a dizzying, all-out, pedal-to-the-metal, death-defying effort for as long as life allows. Exhaust pours from the cars and, from the drivers,
exhaustion
. The fumes and the bone-shaking noise rattle them. Spectators in the front rows have the most sensory spot to watch from, but also the loudest and most dangerous. Cars have been known to leap into the stands like frightened deer. Today a wheel will spiral off one of the cars, bounce into the stands, and kill a spectator. At such gigantic speeds, a projectile acts like a shotgun blast, so when anything falls onto the track the race stops momentarily, then the drivers resume, occasionally farting a bouquet of sparks as if a blast furnace were melting the metal of their concentration. Weaving a little under the brake pressure, and actually out of control at times, when dirty air vexes them, they stagger on.