The Ferrari in the Bedroom (20 page)

My Old Man, my Drunken Uncle Carl and my Sneaky Uncle Al, although I doubt whether they suspected it, were part of a vast historical panoply. And the end is not yet in sight. The Old Man and his buddies were not religious men. I never heard my father use the Lord’s name except in vain. God has been dead a lot longer than the editorialists in the
Time/Life
building would ever suspect. Like most of the Eastern Establishment, they are markedly and curiously behind the times. Long before Malcolm Boyd began his lucrative LP-cutting and Late Show Norman Vincent
Pealeing, the Old Man and practically everybody else in the vast underbelly of what had been the Bible Belt were already worshipping another God.

Like all religions, there were many sects, subdivisions, heretics, and, naturally, the Orthodox. My father believed all the way with the fervent, unselfconscious, total, honest commitment. He believed so thoroughly that he didn’t even know he believed. It was as natural to him and his crowd as breathing. He believed in Oldsmobiles. The current Buick ad line:
Something to believe in—your Buick
would have sounded perfectly logical and honest to my father, except that he would have split a gut laughing because he hated Buicks, which he always associated with “Sunday drivers.”

“Christ, look at the fat-assed Buick wallowin’ around!” is the way he handled that sect.

Every serious religion has its Vatican, and from the earliest time I can remember the Vatican of the Indiana car nuts was that fateful, beautiful, violent brick rectangle known formally as the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. They always say you’ve got to be Italian to be a true Catholic. There is a great body of evidence that says you’ve got to be from Indiana to truly know and understand the 500. This is no mere bit of chauvinism. It is the literal truth. Indiana as the wellspring of creative Automobile genius will one day be, no doubt, the subject of a Ph.D. thesis. Fred and Augie Dusenberg’s masterpiece, the magnificent Auburns, were not just cars, they were
Indiana
cars. The racing Studebakers out of South Bend were part of it too. Even today the Hoosier landscape is dotted with grizzled old codgers who actually built, with their own hands, boat-tailed speedsters and monster SJs. So it is natural that the track, which was originally conceived as a testing ground for these fire-eaters, would be—and is—more than just another race course. As Churchill
Downs was once a track where elegant men competed in an effort to actually improve the breed, so the Indianapolis Motor Speedway was one of the few places on earth where manufacturers who made motor cars for ordinary driving-around people pitted them against their rivals in an effort to improve their breed. Howard Marmon was personally tangling with Fred and Augie when their cars boomed away for the start of the first 500 in 1911. His laconic chief engineer, who had helped design the car, Ray Harroun, tooled the big yellow Marmon, No. 32 painted on its vertical fin and called
The Wasp,
to victory in the first 500. He averaged just under 75 mph for the distance, and after it was over, said “I’ll never drive another race again. Not for twice the money.” He pocketed the fourteen grand and went back to his drawing board. Try to top that for cool, Andretti.

The air of Indiana is somehow permeated with the slit-eyed nonchalance of guys like Harroun. Wilbur Shaw, Bill Vukovich, Fred Frame, Jimmy Murphy, Howdy Wilcox, Doc Myers, Duke Nalon, Mauri Rose, the whole lot. It’s like they all strode off a Republic Picture back lot in their coveralls, their goggles pushed up high on their cloth helmets, chewing tobacco and using short four-letter words liberally. Let’s face it, the Indy—and by the way, no one who really knows the classic ever calls it the Indy: that phrase itself denotes profound ignorance of the tradition—the 500 is all you have to say. There
is
no other 500. It would be as if you called the Kentucky Derby the “Churchie” in your sad ignorance.

My Old Man, Uncle Carl and Uncle Al as they struggled south on U.S. 41 were only doing the natural thing. They never thought of it as a chic sporting event. They were heading for another 500, as naturally and as inevitably as a Catholic goes to church on Easter. It wasn’t for a few years that I was allowed to come along, because it was one hell
of a rough weekend. For three days or more the Old Man and his gang parked in line, a long serpentine procession of dust-covered hairy vehicles, waiting for the big shot at the Infield parking lot. Some guys had been in that line for two weeks. They planned their whole year around this moment, scheduling their two week vacation in order to coincide with the 500. Ten days of their vacation they spent sitting on the running board of their Chevy, drinking beer, telling dirty stories, kicking the kids around, and waiting.

Over the years a whole tradition had built up around these waiting cars. Some of the cars were used only for this purpose, being kept in the back yard throughout the year like a flat-top in mothballs waiting for the next War. The Old Man, Uncle Carl and silent Al never gave a damn about being first in line. The important thing was just to
be
in line. The 500, unlike European races, is genuinely Masculine. Even the movie star who hands out the traditional victory kiss always looks a little embarrassed. The 500 is as remote from the Grand Prix de Monaco as a beer bust at Gus’ Tavern on a Friday night is from a Sunday afternoon brunch at George Plimpton’s. Plimpton will never quite understand it, and the vague sense of being intruders on a secret rite always plagues the Eastern writers as they try to “capture the elusive essence of the 500,” as one so delicately put it recently.

All through the weekend of the race I read all the stuff in the papers and looked at the pictures of the cars. For at least a month before Memorial Day every newspaper ran stories on the drivers and their magnificent racers with the great names: The Blue Crown Special, Zink Special, Maserati, and the fantastic Novi Specials. The night before the race the home town paper had a full section, eight or nine pages, devoted to nothing but individual pictures of the 33
drivers seated in the car each would take the pace lap in the next day. Next to his picture was the number of his starting position. A lot of these guys had raced at County Fairs, on dirt tracks all over the state, so they were more than just celebrities.

Hour after hour the race droned out of the radio. I knew that somewhere in that muttering mob, that cauldron of roars, the Old Man and Uncle Al were trying to keep Carl sober enough to watch the race. A couple of days after it was over they came roaring up the driveway, trailing blue smoke and slamming doors.

“Holy Christ, what a race!” was all the Old Man said as he plopped down at the kitchen table, his beet-red sunburned face somehow different from when he had left. It was over for another year.

   “How’d you like to help with the driving down to Indianapolis this year?” my father casually remarked at supper one night late in April. In Indiana kids begin to drive at just about the time they can see over the steering wheel. They begin dreaming of getting their drivers’ license at about the moment they learn the first four letters of the alphabet. Getting a driver’s license in the Midwest was a little like being Confirmed, or maybe a Bar Mitzvah. At the age of ten I already had three solid years of driving behind me, naturally with the Old Man sitting next to me, and hollering all the while.

“Uh…y’ mean the Race?”

My kid brother put down his fork with its impaled piece of meatloaf and began turning green.

“Yeah. We’re takin’ the Olds this year. Uncle Al has a bad back, so I thought you might help with the driving.”

My mother, hanging over the stove in the background, said nothing, although her hair curlers rattled slightly. Going to the 500 was not something you did casually.

“I’m grindin’ the valves on the Olds this weekend and I gotta go down to Sears and get some gaskets. Y’ wanna go?”

All that weekend we ground the valves on the Cleveland Street Special, a second-hand Olds with worn kingpins.

“Yep, I figure this is Lou Meyer’s year.”

The Old Man rattled on as he mixed the valve-grinding compound, dripping sweat onto the back porch steps.

“That Bowes Special is really a pisser.” He thought about this for a moment. “…Read about it in
Popular Mechanics.
Straight eight.”

I said nothing, since I was in the novice class and I didn’t want to rock the boat. All I wanted to do was
go!

Every day this thing grew bigger and bigger, like some distant mushroom poking up out of the earth. I was going to the 500! Ever since I could remember I had been a real Indianapolis fanatic. I went to see
The Crowd Roars
at least forty times. Wherever it was playing, I was there. Contrast the insipid artiness of
Grand Prix
with that hairy classic and you’ll see how far down the pike Western Civilization has gone. All that jazzy camerawork and Yves Montand mooning around Eva Marie Saint would probably make Kelly Pettillo want to puke. Jimmy Cagney, his oil-stained goggles, the rubber stripping off his rear wheels, his car in flames, was what Indianapolis was about, and if you think that’s Fiction you don’t know a damn thing about the race. Somehow I just can’t see Jackie Stewart pushing his car down the straightaway after a flaming accident just to
finish.
Mario Andretti, possibly, but just possibly.

Day after day I scrounged through the papers, reading every tiny notice of what was going to happen at that
Memorial Day’s classic. Wilbur Shaw had a new Maserati, 183 inches. Chet Millers, Rex Mays and Floyd Roberts were all making fantastic predictions about how little chance the other drivers had. I ate up this stuff like a piranha breaking Lent. Every night at supper I’d bring it up, something I’d read in the
Chicago Tribune.

“May drives good, but he’s a blowhard,” was a typical pre-race analysis from the Old Man.

“Watch Meyer. He
plans
a race. He doesn’t just get out there and run like hell.”

The Old Man was a Lou Meyer fan the way Madison Avenue junior exectives dig Joe Namath. He could do no wrong. I didn’t argue. After all, he had been going to the 500 since
he
was a kid and there’s no sense arguing with history or City Hall.

Spring hits fast and sudden on the flatlands of Indiana. One day there’s snow and ice up to your posterior, with an icepick wind screaming off Lake Michigan and it feels like it won’t be anything but grey rock ice and miserable-ness forever, and then zap—like some unbelievable miracle one day it’s Spring. Everything melts; the sun is golden and guys start knocking out flies and chasing ground balls. There are usually three or four residual snowstorms, but you don’t really take them seriously, even if they drop forty inches of snow.

It was a spectacular May, where every day was warmer and greater and more golden than the one before. Three days before Memorial Day, Uncle Carl, Al, the Old Man and I nosed out onto Route 41. The trunk was packed with everything from mustard to spare can openers. Inside the car we sat wedged between thermos bottles, blankets, comforters, folding camp chairs, a card table, and God-knows-what.

Ten miles out of town the Olds started to drift hard to the left, pulling toward the center line.

“Son of a
bitch!”
The Old Man banged on the wheel with his fist, blowing cigarette smoke through his nostrils like some really bugged dragon. We pulled off onto the shoulder and for the next fifteen minutes struggled with the jack. The sun hung overhead, beating down on the top of us as if it was trying to make up for all that winter.

“God dammit! It slipped again!” He was trying to line up the wheel nuts.

“Why don’t you pretend it’s a pit stop?” My Uncle Carl laughed and spit hard into the gravel.

“God dammit, if you’re so smart why don’t you help instead of standin’ around cracking wise?”

Eventually we got the jack down, and the spare tire held. We rolled on, through cornfields just beginning to show green, with high-tension wires stretching off into the horizon.

Every time he had a flat the Old Man got moody for a while. He brooded about some Utopia where tires always had rubber. You didn’t talk to him during this period. Uncle Al, however, didn’t know this.

“Well, you should have heeded Barney Oldfield’s advice,” he said in a quiet sarcastic voice from the back seat.

“Who?” I asked. The Old Man remained silent.

“Barney Oldfield, my boy,” said my uncle, exuding superiority. “A famous race driver of the ancient past.”

“Oh,” I said, immediately bored. The ancient past holds no glories for budding youth.

“Okay, I’ll bite,” the Old Man said with a rising note of irritation in his voice. He didn’t like to be interrupted while brooding.

“He had a famous phrase which was emblazoned on his car. It dealt specifically with the problem of flat tires.”

“All right, wise guy, let’s hear it.” My father peered gloomily out of the window at a passing Bull Durham sign.

“My only life insurance is my Firestone tires.”

“Oh fer Chrissake, what a load of crap!” My father snorted in disgust and spit out of the window. He was a Goodyear man.

We had cheeseburgers and rootbeer at a truck stop outside of West Lafayette and pushed on. Ahead of us a big Chrysler with an iron pipe rack on the roof rumbled steadily. Behind us a fenderless Chevy with a cracked windshield contained five blue-jowled 500 fans hurling beer cans at intervals into the cornfields.

Just as the day was ending we pulled into line to begin the Big Wait. It was all I’d heard, and more. Squad cars cruised up and down, watching for trouble. Bonfires broke out. A fat lady squatted on a wooden bench next to a Studebaker and breast fed a kid who looked like it was asleep. Uncle Carl went off to get ice for the beer.

That night I slept in the back seat, propped up in the corner between the card table, a big sack of hot dog rolls and my Uncle Al, who snored like the roars of a primeval beast.

The next morning I wandered up and down the line of cars, looking at the guys who wore jackets covered with patches showing they had been to 500s going back to the days when the Stutzes battled the Marmons. They sat around and played pinochle and sniffed a lot, the way old men do in the morning. Big Harley Davidsons and Indians roared up and down. The day wore on. Rumors floated back and forth.