At JFK, stepping forward again in time, I climb aboard the fastest metal horse commuters ride, and in minutes leap straight up into the sky, bank briefly, and head east. We pass quickly through “Indian land”—what pilots call the altitudes where Sénecas, Navajos, and other light twin-engined planes fly—and before long leave everything, even the weather, beneath us as we enter a purple sky. At cruising speed—1,000 miles an hour—we are traveling almost as fast as the earth turns. The sea below looks black, and the sun showers glitter onto the waves. Although the water appears flat, still, and silent, I think of all the dramas unfolding in every direction, and how the whole sea is sloshing up and down, like a pen inking across a chart, while the land moves, too. When they move in concert, a reef forms. Through the small porthole, I can see the curvature of the earth. Somewhere below and far away, hidden from view, is everything I’ve ever known, everyone I’ve ever loved.
In time, the purple sky gives way to blue, and we land at Orly Airport, outside Paris. There I change planes and head south, to Périgord in the Dordogne, a region famous for its truffles, goose-liver pâté, and ancient history. From Périgord’s small airport, a taxi drives me for nearly an hour through small towns, past rambling châteaux, and around jagged hillsides, to a simple forest of sycamores and limestone caves. Heading back 30,000 years, I can feel the old bones of my longing to know who and what we were millennia ago. Sometimes the past is more knowable than the present, and it’s easier to glimpse what we were than what we have become. This valley once burgeoned with junipers and hazels, limes, walnuts, and oaks; flowers coated its grassy prairies; strawberries, blackberries, and currants grew on its bushes; salmon filled its rivers, along whose banks wading birds fished. Bison, aurochs (ancestors of the Spanish fighting bulls), wild boars, deer, rabbits, horses, ibex, lions, bears, and rhinoceros roamed the valley. Reindeer herds poured across the grasslands, and the Magdalenian hunters feasted on their flesh, wore their hide for warmth, and used their fat to make smokeless lamps of a kind still used by the Inuit. The so-called cavemen didn’t live in caves, but in hide tents close to running water, and sometimes outside a cave, using its overhang as a protective porte cochere. Journeying far into the caves, on magical expeditions to the Unknown, they began smearing the damp walls with ocher, manganese, and charcoal, organizing the dreamlike chaos of their experience into what we have come to call art.
For the past twenty-four hours, thanks to supersonic horsepower, I have been rushing eastward into the dawn-stalking earth, following a trail backward in time to see the cathedral-like walls of the Lascaux cave. There, depicted more often than any other animal (including humans) is the horse. The horse-worshipers of Lascaux most likely lived about 17,500 years ago, in a world climate similar to ours today. The mild weather filled the living larder of the hills. We picture the people as crude, but they already had perforated sewing needles, were masterful hunters, fishers, and spelunkers. They sang and danced, beat drums made of hide, and played music on bone flutes and whistles. Seminomadic, tribal, few in number, they visited the cave often, presumably for religious and initiation rites. We are the heirs of such folk. In the attic of our genes lie curios and costumes, uniforms that no longer fit, envelopes filled with photographs of relatives we have never met. They bequeathed to us much of our personality as a species—not just the blunt fury of our moods, blood lust, and territoriality, but our curiosity and awe and feeling for family. If there is a crevasse of understanding between us, it’s partly bridged by art—that need to create works of numbing beauty—which speaks to us just as powerfully today. They felt a voluptuous passion for horses, along with a thirst to celebrate and praise nature. We have inherited their sense of worship.
The original Lascaux cave is sealed and protected, because the irreplaceable artworks, since their discovery, have been disturbed by air, moisture, and human exhalations. Realizing that a fungus had begun to devour some of the drawings, the French government wisely closed Lascaux to the public and built a replica cave nearby (the drawings are laser-perfect). But for many years I’ve longed to stand where the cavemen stood, to touch their brush strokes with my eyes. Five researchers a day may enter the original cave, very briefly, following strict rules; and I have the privilege of being one of them.
In a small office aboveground, five of us gather to be briefed by an official guide; then we set off. Walking down the swollen belly of a hillside, down a flight of steps, and through a thin vent, we enter an anteroom where a shallow basin of disinfectant waits for us to dip our feet. That completes the purification ceremony. Then, passing through a steel door, we climb down another flight of stairs to a womblike opening, through which we creep in darkness. The guide groups us together, by feel and flashlight, in the perfect blackness. The damp tastes gritty and salt-sweet. No one speaks. A quiet fan blurs the sounds of breathing. In this group of five initiates, four of us are women.
Then a whisper breaks my reverie; I return to the present in the black womb of the cave, to hear the faint sound of footsteps. Suddenly an explosion of light hits the ceiling and walls, and brightly colored animals leap out at us. I flinch, blink hard, then find myself in motion. Everywhere I turn the animals are stampeding around and over us in a great galloping helter-skelter array of flashing hooves and horns. There are bison and aurochs and ibex galore. But dwarfing them all are the horses, a floodtide of horses drawn over and around and underneath one another, horses leaping into alcoves, galloping through stone valleys, kicking and rearing and fighting and grazing. They are round-bellied, pear-hooved horses with stiff, bristly manes. Keenly observed horses, with pale bellies and swarthy flanks, sometimes in shaggy winter coats, sometimes snorting breathy clouds. On one wall, a stallion nuzzles the nether petals of a mare. On another, a russet-flanked mare is grazing, her belly round as an apple. But every horse is flowing, full of rhythmic strokes, wild and dynamic. They’re not just pictures, but breathing beasts in motion. Many appear to be pregnant, so their bellies are wild with motion, too.
Drifting slowly through the rooms, we seem too well behaved, watching the pageantry as if it were a static mural in a museum. The horses were not meant to be seen like this, but at speed, fleetingly, at a run, while tribal elders held lamps. In the flickering light, our pupils would be jumping, the horses would be crashing down through our dreams, and our sacred hearts would be wild as tinder.
MEN AND CARS
What horses do for girls, horsepower does for boys. Was there ever a love affair as loyal or obsessive as that between a sixteen-year-old and his first shiny car, even if it’s an old rattletrap? Something about the quivering power of the car excites him. Something about the rounded curves of its flanks, and its headlights, which protrude like bosoms. Something about the grumbling moan of the engine, which responds to his touch when he “turns it on.” He spends hours rubbing, grooming, and polishing it. And even more time cruising around town, slow enough to ogle girls and be ogled back, loud enough to impress other males, or fast enough to slay the more pedestrian of life’s demons. In both senses of the word, cars express a young man, by rushing him through time and space at the sexual high speed he feels gushing through his mind and limbs. Cars are fast and furious, dangerous and alive, ready to spin out at a tight curve or a hairpin. It’s how he feels sometimes—all revved up and ready to explode. Many teenage boys find in cars the embodiment of their surging sexuality. Older men are so often seen trading in sensible, affordable family cars for brightly colored sports cars that it’s become a cliché. They leave their wives for sexy young women, and they leave their station wagons for sexy new cars with loud mufflers and only room enough for two. Cars are hot, fast, hard, phallic objects that hurtle through space. Cartoons sometimes show a middle-aged man riding on a steel-plated erection. The caption restates the obvious.
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 surp
rising 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.