Ghosts of the Coke Zero 400 – Act I

Tim  Richmond won the second Pepsi Firecracker 400 on July 4, 1986.

It was  not the second running of the race, just the second year under its first corporate sponsorship. It actually began as an open-wheel race in April of 1959, but there were so many crashes in that race that it evolved into a 250-mile stock-car race on July 4 of that year, nicknamed the Firecracker 250. In 1963 the race was lengthened to 400 miles – thus becoming the Firecracker 400. In 1985 Pepsi became the race’s official sponsor and remained so until 2008 when Coke Zero took over as the latest corporate squatter.

It was a rather inglorious race, frequently rained upon – even though the races usually began at 10 or 11 a.m. to avoid the rain, it was one of those summer days in Florida—and cautions up the ying-yang. Dale Earnhardt, Richmand’s chief rival that year, had led the race for 69 laps before blowing an engine and going into the wall of turn one. Smoke from the crash giving momentarily blinded Buddy Baker, allowing Richmond to slip past in his Folger’s No. 25 Hendrick Chevrolet and lead the final 8 laps. The top five was rounded out by Sterling Martin, Bobby Hillin Jr., Darrell Waltrip and Kyle Petty.

It took Richmond 3 hours and nearly two minutes to win the race, giving him the slowest race time ever of 131.916 mph. On the other end, Cale Yarborough had won the pole at a speed so dizzying and dangerously fast – 203.519 mph – that it was one of the reasons that NASCAR decided to fit its Winston Cup cars with restrictor plates at the humungous superspeedway tracks.

The purse for Richmond’s win was $58,655—less than what last-place finisher P.J. Jones earned  ($72,130) at the Toyota/Save-Mart 350 in Sonoma on June 21 of  this year.. The pot of gold to be won is vastly larger —even for the losers – but as in every other walk of life, such enrichment somehow cheapens endeavor. Maybe it has to do with identification with our drivers. When a guy like Dale Earnhardt Jr. earns more than 30 million bucks a year, how can I feel he’s a guy like me, no matter how many jeans commercials try to connvice me so?

Richmond was on a roll in 1986. Winning the Pespsi 400 at Daytona was just part of the march, but it was an essential one, his third of the season (he’d also won at Richmond and Pocono.) Taking Daytona’s crown was like taking ownership of the fierce summer sun which burned up and over it every day. That year, on that day, Richmond was King of Florida, and having it under his belt was essentially the magic and tragedy of his story. And mine …

* * *

June 21 – Sunday

I can’t remember it staying so hot overnight. The themostat read 82 when I came downstairs this morning at 5 a.m., and  outside as I fed Mamacita our black stray cat (“our stray,” now there’s an oxymoron, but it’s true, she lives within the care of food but is flighty in all other matters) the dregs of the night were just as thick and heavy with heat, a pall which seemed to cause the entire garden to sag. The upstairs bedroom cooled down long after we fell asleep – drifting off was like boating on molasses, fretful and slow. I dreamt oddly too—some truly erotic dream waking me at 1:30 a.m. with the viscous sense of a woman’s mouth lavishing my sex, then some court trial I was in for a crime I was innocent of, the guilty verdict waking me just before the alarm went off. Today it’s supposed to go up to 98 with a heat index of around 115—a corker.

I should have the a/c cranked up, but I like writing these early mornings with the windows open to the night and it’s nocturne of sounds. Right now it’s somewhat breezy– a wet sort of breeze, fanning  the sweat – auspicious of something I can’t name. Not rain – no chance of that really – but a foretelling of something ghostly, as if a spirit of something had returned or soon will, insistently knocking at the gates of my memory.

Today is Father’s Day. I expect my wife will give me a card from the cats with a gift card to Borders inside. (Actually, it was to Barnes and Noble—Borders is going bankrupt, closing stores, so their gift cards are risky.)  I sent my father, who is still with the living at 82, a volume of varied prose—a first, I usually send him poetry, and since I’ve been collating essays, posts, reviews, memoir, criticism and that sort of thing, I thought to put some of it together in a collection.  Included in that volume are a number of these Ovalscreamin’ posts, which represent the freshest direction of my writing. Almost all of my writing was fathered by conversations I’ve had with him over the years. We think along many of the same deep-cortical veins, or like to think we do. So the ghost of Tim Richmond’s ghost walking in the stands of Daytona International Speedway at this hour seems shadowed by something other, thank my father.

That image makes me think of The Ghost in Hamlet, the drama Shakespeare kept working and re-working for most of his career as a playwright in Renaissance England. You know the tale – Hamlet, a young university intellectual, comes home to  Denmark after his father dies suddenly. His mother Gertrude has remarried his father’s uncle rather too quickly to Hamlet’s taste. Hamlet is told of a Ghost who walks the castle’s ramparts in the witchiest hours of latest night, and goes up there to see for himself . There  encounters the Ghost of his own father, who whispers that he did not die naturally but was poisoned by his brother so the brother could claim his crown and wife. Revenge is what the father wants, and fidelity to that fading ghost sets up the conceits of Hamlet which ink the unfolding tragedy with blood.

OK, old history, but consider this: in Shakespeare’s play, the name of Hamlet’s father was changed from Horwendil of the original tale to Hamlet. Son and father share the same name, though they couldn’t be more different, as Harold Bloom pointed out in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998). One is a pagan warlord of Icelandic saga, the other is a Renaissance man trying to think his way out of the old ways. Prehistory and future are represented by the two men. To have them both share the same name creates the Doppler not just of drama without but also of a divided consciousness – and Hamlet will prove to be one of the most ambivalent leads in drama:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep:
No more: and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ‘tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die: to sleep:
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the  rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause … (III.i)

Et cetera. OK, lots of sons carry their father’s names, and bear the awkward ambivalence of their inheritance, unsure where they begin and their father leaves off. My brother is William Harvey the Third, the third successive generation first-born to take that name. But it’s odd in literature – an odd, unnecessary redundancy. Horwendil becomes Hamlet for a purpose. But what?

This: Shakespeare wrote an earlier version of Hamlet in the early 1590’s and shelved it. That version is now lost. Then this: Shakespeare’s only son was named Hamnet and the boy died around 8 or 9 years old in the late 1590’s. And this: Shakespeare, himself an actor, played The Ghost in the first stagings of the later drama.

And finally this: Some critics argue that the Ghost of the earlier Hamlet was much the more hoary old-school, and the son written written around the figure of Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare’s principal rival at the time, a rhetorical genius who could think his way out of most any trap.  Marlowe was supposedly, in his off-hours, a government spy, reporting on matters seditious and heretical, but it seems he was just trying to covering his own seditious, heretical ass (read his plays Tamburlaine and Doctor  Faustus and you’ll see his wide literary thumb aimed at the nose of God)—he was also perditiously gay—well, his benefit to the Crown obviously was outrun by the presence of his person in the world and onstage.

Marlowe was dead when Shakespeare took up the play again in the early years of the first decade of 1600 (stabbed in above the eye in a barroom brawl, incited, some believe, by thugs dispensed by the government.) Shakespeare’s own son Hament, born around the staging of the first play, was also dead by then. With neither rival nor son to create or pass on a legacy, Shakespeare interiorized the outer drama into the mind of his protagonist, a son adrift, with the Ghost of his dead father demanding that he clear the stage in the Jacobean fashion, strewing bodies with all the malice of  a Marlowe, including that of fair Ophelia, the love interest, dead of madness and suicide after being spurned by the now revenge-addled Hamlet who murders her father Polonious.

That’s my father, standing before the chapel he built in 1980, with Photoshopped Hubble heavens above. He’s still alive, though a Ghost in my thought ….

My humid Ghost bears the presence of so many fathers, not the least my own. As Shakespeare’s first Hamlet play was the ghost of the latter one, my own  history is the ghost of the present, selves which meet here on the page, bearing mystery of a life,  the history of things great and small, so many tributaries of cupidity, venality and license eddying together to arise from the grave I laid ‘em in and coming in through the opened windows of this morning like a lover’s moist breath on my neck,  whispering “Remember,” which is the only way you can truly bid a ghost Adieu …

Of course, he may actually be whispering “Who’s yer daddy?” And it’s a good one. For me here, is it William Cohea or William Shakespeare?  Bill of deeds, or words thereof?

Who’s yer daddy? What are you the son of? What do you instill in your kids? And if you don’t have children – what will you leave for the world? And who will remember our Ghost, much less recognize it?

And to edge finally toward my Theme, for racin’ fans it’s an equally important question. Who’s your daddy: Fireball Roberts or Joe Weatherley?  Richard Petty or David Pearson? Dale Earnhardt or Tim Richmond? Our present tastes and distates are shaped by these legacies.

The choices are important, for they speak to the divisions between us as well as within us. Dale Earnhardt and Tim Richmond couldn’t more different from each other, the former a true Southern NASCAR driver, a quiet, family man who brought his son Dale Jr. to many races; the other driver was a transplant from open wheel racing, a flamboyant playboy who loved celebrity and partying and women. Yet they raced each other with ferocity, almost to the exclusion of the rest of the field, and cared deeply about each other. “Hollywood” Tim Richmond died early, from off-track excesses (from AIDS, in 1987); Dale “The Intimidator” Earnhardt died 13 years later, on the last lap of the Daytona 500, killed instantly when his No. 3 crashed into the wall of Turn 4 as his son Dale Jr. raced on by.

Richmond would have been far more comfortable, I think, with NASCAR’s monied present than old-school Dale Senior; he would play Hamlet Jr. if such a staging of the play were possible in the Great Oval rather than the Globe Theater. He could easily be a Tony Stewart, played with treble balls and panache, savoring as much the wildness of winning as partying in the celebrity stratosphere of this day. Dale Senior would be the ghost of Hamlet Senior, NASCAR’s Christianized king, a Southern boy who brought his son to the track and marrying, for the second time, a Winston Cup girl.

For our sons, who will Hamlet Senior be? Jimmie Johnson or Tony Stewart? And who represents Hamlet Junior – Kyle Busch or Joey Logano?

I  didn’t father any actual children that I know of – there were three abortions by different girlfriends, and I had many, liaisons of unrubbered sex back in the 1980s, pre-AIDs.  I acted as father to a stepdaughter in my first marriage when she was between eight and eighteen years old, but we haven’t talked in years now, she’s in her 30’s has two kids of her own, mostly abandoned to drug-addled pursuits while she blames the world for her ills. Surely I abandoned her as I remarried, allowing her to go her way; yet as Prospero would say of the native monster Caliban in The Tempest, that thing of darkness I call my own …

Ghosts in the garden this morning—the Bard, Tim Richmond and Dale Earnhardt, my brother, my aborted children, my abortive fatherhood of a stepchild—all of them pacing the garden path in the humid swash of late night swelter. Far different rampart than freezing Dunsinane in Denmark 500 years ago, but the same interface, the same trysting-ground between the ages, between my ages.

Who’s yer daddy? And how will you honor and obey him? With pen or with sword at the ready, to slit the throat of every usurper, to edge past him on Turn Four and race to the checkered flag?