Ghosts of the Coke Zero 400 – Act V (finis)

July 4, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Tim Richmond at the Atlanta race in 1986.

Friday, July 3

Hot and sunny this afternoon, with a good chance of rain: essential summer weather for here. Forecast tomorrow at Daytona is partly cloudy with a 20 percent chance of isolated afternoon thunderstorms and highs in the lower 90s. Saturday night: still cloudy, lows in the mid-70’s.

Perfect … in that strangely holy-evil way which isthe nature of summer in the swamps. Taking the day off from work, I haven’t done much of anything except suffer a big migraine and watching events over at Daytona on Speed (with qualifying washed out by a thunderstorm, the lineup for the 400 will be according to points position, with Smoke on the pole). All the while I tap tap tap away on this laptop, luxuriating in a day of writing and research without the usual restrictions of work and home duties, throwing nets off into the blue waters of cyberspace and hauling in these bones and fins of racin’s present and past.

Migraines, for all of the anvil-in-the-forehead agony, are also strange creative stimulants. They creep up from the lower brain-stem, like seizures (which I also suffer), flooding the head with pain but the brain with desire and dreaminess, like a waking dream. The same soporifics which used to send me out drinking still engage my consciousness; instead of going out to drink and chase pussy, I write.

What was that old Cheech and Chong routine? Tommy Chong, playing one of those Jesus freaks from the 1970’s, goes, “once I got high on drugs; now I get high on Jesus!” What has changed, all the years since I stopped drinking, in 1987, the year Tim Richmond died? I used to have killer hangovers; now I have deathly migraines.

Cracks of thunder above, the piss-pour of rain pattering on our tin roof and lavishing the garden with an ocean’s receipt—for that is where our rain comes from, evaporates of sea-water called skyward by a hot, hot sun—and then, somewhere in the neighborhood, a string of firecrackers going off, like a toy Gatlin gun, some joker getting started early with the celebrations. And as soon as it arrives the storm is past, the windows bleary again with steamy sunlight, the towers of cloud moving on in their restless assault on the state.

God, I’ll be glad to be done with this piece (for any of you who have bothered to read along—if there is one or two of you—I’m sure you’re just as exhausted and ready, too. I used to write a lot of poetry, whose main virtue was that you get in and out in the length of a page, maybe two or three. I’m about 35 pages and closing in on 20,000 words now, explicating and exhuming the Ghosts of the Coke Zero 400. I’m always grateful when the muse drops her blue haltertop and squeezes milk on my mind, but this has been hard, compulsive work, fun in the most perverse sort of way.

I used to get high on writing, now I get high on its underground, oval roar.

(Saturday)

Everything outside chirring and humid and black – it’s 4:48 a.m. A nearly-full moon gleams like a pearl at the bottom of the sea, obscured now and then by clouds which wing slowly by, like manta. A lush, virile stillness which invokes in its cauldron the summer day to come.

Attending the race tonight has several meanings for me. I edit a NASCAR blog called NASCAR This Week which is written by veteran motorsports reporter Monte Dutton—a consummate pro, he gets read by the real racin’ fans. I soak into the season through his reportage, and try to summon the nature of the races he covers by means of layout and toys: picking out photos and writing cutlines, adding videos of the race from Youtube, providing trackside eye candy with a selection of cheesecake photos we call Octane. Trying to provide the best trackside experience without being there. So going to the race tonight is a chance to blood that effort with real sound, real track, real cars, real Octane. I mean, races come to this neck of the country only twice a year. And racin’ in this summer is a very different sort of thing than racin’ in Florida’s winter, a season for vacationing millionaires and occasional bouts of frost.

I’m going over to Daytona today too because who knows if I’ll get the chance again under my company’s auspices (they’re picking up the tab). Two of us—an editor and a programmer—have been working the working the NASCAR This Week blog for two years without making much money at it (we’ve always hoped for advertising revenue). The revenue stream has been thin and shallow, so I’m not sure we’ll stay committed to it after this season. I hope so, but business is business.

Coming over to Daytona today will be odd, though, because my wife is driving up past Atlanta this morningg with her parents to attend the funeral of her 86-year-old aunt. Rachel died peacefully enough after a string of strokes and down-winding, succumbing days. My wife isn’t looking forward to it at all; she hardly knows that branch of the famil. She’s going mostly to keep an eye on her parents. Coming home to an empty house (OK, there will be four hungry cats) late early Sunday morning will seem strange. The life fathered by that old one is very much a home.

Well, I’ll manage. I’m not going anywhere. For all of the guiltier pleasures available on race day, I’m sticking to the surface ones. I’ll wander around a lot and take pictures. Listen to Buckcherry’s 4-song, pre-race set as if catching radio waves from distant space. (If I were still playing rock n roll, I would probably include some of their nastier hits imy my repertoire.) Sit high up in Depalma Tower and watch for it all go round. July 4, 2009, Independence Day, the country deep in recession, the sport in strange doldrums, still waters in which I see so many ghosts. I will observe like a reporter, I will exuberate to the thrill like the fan I am.

Buckcherry will perform in the pre-race festivities.

And then I’ll drive home, at some hour I used to drive home at, migraine perhaps replacing blackout.

I’ll keep the home fires burning with all my heart so that when she gets back, it will feel like open arms. History has taught me something about life in and outside the farmhouse in the wooly wild .

I used to get high on a night’s future bed. Now I get high thinking about the one I married, the one in my heart, the one which I’ll tend carefully til my wife gets home.

Typically on Sunday mornings, my wife and I go out for a walk.

* * *

In his July 4, 1986 Independence Day address, President Ronald Reagan – who may then have been beginning to suffer the onset of Alzheimer’s – addressed the country from the grounds of the newly-refurbished Statue of Liberty in New York City. In his address, he said that the greatest danger America faced was not from any threat from beyond its borders, but from within:

… Two of our greatest Founding Fathers, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, once learned this lesson late in life. They’d worked so closely together in Philadelphia for independence. But once that was gained and a government was formed, something called partisan politics began to get in the way. After a bitter and divisive campaign, Jefferson defeated Adams for the Presidency in 1800. And the night before Jefferson’s inauguration, Adams slipped away to Boston, disappointed, brokenhearted, and bitter.

For years their estrangement lasted. But then when both had retired, Jefferson at 68 to Monticello and Adams at 76 to Quincy, they began through their letters to speak again to each other. Letters that discussed almost every conceivable subject: gardening, horseback riding, even sneezing as a cure for hiccups; but other subjects as well: the loss of loved ones, the mystery of grief and sorrow, the importance of religion, and of course the last thoughts, the final hopes of two old men, two great patriarchs, for the country that they had helped to found and loved so deeply. “It carries me back,” Jefferson wrote about correspondence with his cosigner of the Declaration of Independence, “to the times when, beset with difficulties and dangers, we were fellow laborers in the same cause, struggling for what is most valuable to man, his right to self-government. Laboring always at the same oar, with some wave ever ahead threatening to overwhelm us and yet passing harmless . . . we rowed through the storm with heart and hand . . . .” It was their last gift to us, this lesson in brotherhood, in tolerance for each other, this insight into America’s strength as a nation. And when both died on the same day within hours of each other, that date was July 4th, 50 years exactly after that first gift to us, the Declaration of Independence.”

The scriptwriter’s purport here is odd, since Reagan and his cronies more than a little aware of tthreats from without, standing up to the Evil Empire of a moderating Russia, initiating Star Wars, muscling down the Berlin Wall. Yet in their own specie of executive priviledge, begun by Richard Nixon and continued in their hands as a manner of getting things done without official notice, Reagan’s cowboys were also covertly selling arms to Iran and using the proceeds to fund anti-communist Contra rebels in Nicaraugua. The speech apparently included this homage to non-partisan spirit along the principle that the best defense is a muscular offense; the shadowy Powers behind the writing of this speech, handed to Reagan the actor, the Great Communicator, knew that trouble would soon brew over in Congress over the Iran-Contra affair and were stumping for popular support of their extra-legal cowboy tactics in the name of Democracy. Lines engraved, like the Ten Commandments sent to Moses from Heaven, into the playbook of the Bush-Cheney administration to come fourteen years later.

And the effect of Reaganomics–especially financial deregulation and steep tax cuts for the wealthiest–casts a hard, iron shadow into this financially shattered present, where the richest Americans have 40 percent and more of the country’s wealth, where middle class families like this one are sinking down under the tide, and where entitlement programs—the broad safety nets of Medicare and Social Security—are going bankrup trying to manage the growing tide of have-nots. What we desperately need in Washington is that spirit of brotherhood and tolerance and partnership in order to get laws going which will save us from the ill effects (and worst intents) of Reaganomics, but that just isn’t likely to happen, not with the contentious, contemptuous bunch now in office up there. The attacks on the Obama administration by Fox News, the GOP’s PR-agency, is brewed of such vitriol that open warfare between partisans seems increasingly likely.

Not that the Democrats are any better at this. Sometimes it seems that the White House is always resided over by a rogue of on or the other stripe. And the paralysis in Washington dealing with the recession in a strong enough way doesn’t give me hope that the life my wife and I have enjoyed for these past thirteen years has a chance of lasting into the last third of our life.

Today, I hold up the skull of that man who played the role of the President while serving greater power–and stare into those hollowed-out eyeholes, searching for some word of our future: economic recovery and jobs for all; or flat-out war, between partisans, between religious and secular cultures, between red and blue states, between neighbors on this very street … But the skull just smells, is empty, and grins without humor.

And then, like a conch rescued from a morning’s sea-tide, there is a sound in that skull, a distant murmuring … what is it? I hold it to my ear and I hear, faintly but surely, the pack rounding Turn 4 a Daytona in the next incarnation of the old Firecracker 400, a sound which is unearthly quiet for a moment—like an angel’s bated breath—and then erupts into a roar down the frontstretch. And the pack is brimming with the ghosts of victors past – Pearson, Petty, Richmond, Earhhardt, Jarrett, Waltrip, Gordon, Biffle, Earhnhardt Jr., Burton, McMurray, Busch – and is urgent with the latency of the next win, which always comes down to the finish line at 200 miles an hour, sometimes just one lucky car in front, many times more in a pair, and sometimes, sometimes, an entire cloistered pack of five or ten or even 20 800-horsepower cars jockeying this way and then that seeking that tiny opening which allows one car break free just enough to break the plane of the finish line first by a microsecond as somewhere further back in the pack someone’s veering, spinning, crashing hard, engaging a fistful of peripheral cars, doom and victory all happening at the same moment.

The scene at the finish of the 1987 Pespi 400, when Jamie McMurray beat Kyle Busch by a shorthair.

* * *

In his book, Tim Richmond: The Fast Life and Remarkable Times of NASCAR’s Top Gun, David Poole (who joined the ghosts of NASCAR this year after a heart attack), relates this story about Richmond:

“Tim shows up about a half-hour late. He walks in and he’s got on this big old fur coat and after-ski boots with fur around the tops, ugly looking things. He takes the fur coat off and throws it across the table. Under that, he had on a T-shirt that said something like “Eat More Posse” and a pair of jogging shorts that were cut up the side. Tim goes and sits at the head of the table and throws his leg up on the table. Everything just fell out. Rick and Harry and I were saying, ‘Oh my God!’”

Was there ever a driver who willing to let it all hang out, on or off the track? It’s no wonder the man—or his legend—would work its way into a Hollywood legend. “Days of Thunder” (1990), starring Tom Cruise and Robert Duvall and directed by Tony Scott, tells the story of hot-shot rookie Cole Trickle (Cruise), who, after trying his hand in the American open wheel ranks, seeks to win on the NASCAR circuit. His mechanic mentor, Harry Hogge (Duvall), acts as his crew chief. He also develops a romantic relationship with Dr. Claire Lewicki (Nicole Kidman), a young brain surgeon who tries to tame him after tending his racing injuries. (Ha ha, Tom).

Kidman and Cruise on the “Days of Thunder” set.

Complicating things is the arrival of arrogant and dangerous newcomer by the name of Russ Wheeler (Cary Elwes) who picks on Cole because he knows he can get away with it. Wheeler not only substitute-drove Trickle’s pink Superflo car while Cole was in the hospital, but now he is teammates with Cole under the selfish, bullheaded leadership of car owner Tim Daland (Randy Quaid). Cole slowly tolerates Russ’s arrogance until, after a race in which Russ cheats to win the race, Cole has his tires changed, and violently rams Wheeler from the side after the race, a response to their growing rivalry. Cole also gets into it with veteran driver “Rowdy” Burns (Michael Booker), who doesn’t take to the rivalry well at first and then, out of growing respect, warms to him.

Cruise and Duvall as Trickle and Hodge after a win.

The plot was loosely based on NASCAR’s late-80s realties: Cruise plays Tim Richmod, and Duvall’s character was based on crew chief Harry Hyde. Randy Quaid’s on a composite of several owners, one of whom was Rowdy Burns’ part is reflective of Dale Earnhardt and Russ Wheeler (Cary Elwes) of Rusty Wallace. Hendrick also provided the movie cars, driven by then-NASCAR drivers Greg Sacks, Tommy Ellis, Bobby Hamilton, and Hut Stricklin, with Hamilton making his Cup debut at Phoenix in 1989 in a movie car. (Hamilton died of cancer a couple years back, but his son Bobby Jr. now races in Nationwide competition.)

“Days of Thunder” was one of the early classics from the producing franchise of Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer. In an Entertainment Weekly review, Owen Glieberman said the two

… are capitalist speed freaks: Their films are self-referential commercials consisting of one peak moment after another. The protagonists of ‘Flashdance’ and ‘Top Gun’ aren’t just winners; before our eyes, they face down their demons and turn into pop-Olympian superstars, the Best of the Best. With their state- of-the-art soundtracks, their layered fantasies of success, their glowing cascades of rock-video imagery, Simpson-Bruckheimer movies provide such an intense dose of surface pleasure that it’s no wonder young viewers who have grown up on them have little concept of what a real movie is. Even for adults, a Simpson-Bruckheimer product is like cotton candy spun from pure sugar — you can’t stop eating, even though you know it’s bad for you.

Just like over-indulgence in infield-mania, full-roar, bourbon-poured NASCAR. A guilty pleasure we can’t much afford any more, but what is vice anyway but exceeding the measure of heaven on earth? I mean, I can’t stay away from Daytona, can you? (Tom Cruise showed up at the Daytona 500 this year, taking a spin around the track in a replica of the car he drove in Days of Thunder.) Not with fantasias like Tim Richmond’s still looming in the summer sky, bigger than any life you or I will ever aspire to, much less reach, though we all dream of it.

If the heavens are populated with celebrity dreams, they’re also clotted with falling stars. In the last restrictor-plate race of this season, Carl Edwards went airbone close to the finish line at Talladega, almost clearing the catch-fence before tumbling earthward and wrecking in a thunderous explosion of metal. Somehow Edwards emerged from that wreck unharmed and jogged to the finish line.

Carl Edwards flies into the catchfence at the closing moments of the Aaron’s 312 in Talladega earlier this year.

The catchfence at Daytona looks durable enough, but the same sort of thing is possible at this track. (Speedway officials won’t give out the actual height of the Daytona catchfence due to “company policy,” but an Orlando Sentinel reporter measured it near the end of the tri-oval—coming out of Turn 4—as just short of ten feet, with a concrete wall at the bottom extending down some ways to the track.) There was a mighty wreck in the ARCA race prior to the Bud Shootout last February, coming out of Turn 4, nearly taking off the head of Florida racer Patrick Sheltra. Rick and I walked down to the end of the grandstands by Turn 4 before the shootout and the detritus of racing and wrecking was everywhere – tire dust and car parts. Some day a car will go airborne and clear that fence. Then it will be a different story for NASCAR, with different victims and heroes.

It’s possible. But as Monte says, we come to the races to see the near-misses, not the fatalities. We want to see our drivers be much better than us at beating Death. It’s part of the big fantasy and privilege of going to the track to watch the race rather than catching it in sterilized, two-dimensional, commercial-plagued TV.

Still, I’ll be sitting a good ways above the catchfence on Saturday night. If anything flies as high as I’ll be tonight, then surely Daytona’s Ghosts will have a part. Except for the fireworks. They can shoot as high as angels dive, for all I care. They can write our country’s declaration with jots of jolly fire. At race’s end, there will be a celebration of so many things–winning, attending, being a patriot of this country and this sport. Let ‘em rip.

* * *

OK, folks, wake up, time to go, it’s The End of this racin’ drama whose stage is a great oval and whose soliloquies took place from a chair in a quite house in a quiet neighborhood on quiet mornings before a soul was awake. I write at about the same hour of my witchiest nights, tapping on this laptop instead of driving blackout miles home. I used to drive at this hour, now I write about drives. It’s the hour of the Ghost, and mine has been full of ‘em, but especially Tim Richmond’s, winner of the Coke Zero 400 in 1986, ascending NASCAR’s heights the very year I reached the zenith of my rock-n-roll ambitions—not a very great height, by comparison—and began to fall in sync with Tim, though our fates, our ends, were different. (He died, I sobered up.)

Daytona Beach cam, 6:03 a.m., July 4, 2009.

Light is slowly creeping into the dawn, houses and cars beginning to take shape. Darkness, like the Ghost, fades. It’s time now to go wake my wife—she has to shower and get ready for her trip for a funeral. Time to get this post online and begin my own preparations to drive East. I’m planning to get to the track early enough to make a day of it, come hell or high cumulus. Maybe stop at the beach first and listen a while to the ocean’s tidal murmur, and gloss a bit of it’s gleam, the sort of summer sunlight which stirs the libido of storm, which makes tracks slick in the summertime and 3-wide racin’ at Daytona a dangerous, delightful thing. I hope Tim Richmond and Dale Earnhardt Sr. will be there as I imagine, walking on the track as cars roar through their shades, staring up at the stands at me, bidding this post Adieu.

Kyle Busch won the 2008 Coke Zero 400.