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.
Andretti swerves all over the crowded lanes, roaring down to the grass, zooming up to the wall, blasting ahead, trying to break what superstitious fans and drivers call his “Indy jinx.” Since his 1969 win, he’s started twenty-one times, but never won again. Some malicious genie of speed and metal always seems to thwart him, and today is no exception. After he leads for 177 laps, right up to the closing minutes of the race, his engine backfires, and he slows up to 100 mph and steals into his pit. Wails of disbelief from the outspoken fans. When the next sure-winner stalls his car twice, the race suddenly passes into the veteran grip of Al Unser, whose son is driving the fourth-place car. In car racing, age matters so little that fathers and sons often compete against each other. In this Indy, Mario Andretti’s son, Michael, also races.
Two black-and-white checkered flags swirl above Unser’s car as he finishes first. The cheering fans sound like nonstop detonations. Slowing down, he drives a victory lap while waving ecstatically to the crowd. His son pulls up beside him, salutes, says later, “It gives me goose bumps when I think of Dad winning.” In a blue flame suit, with flaming yellow hair, his wife jogs up beside his glowing, sweating, finally still car and kisses him. The crew yanks off the steering wheel and straps, struggles to pull him out of the cockpit. Like an endorsement of his future, his yellow-and-black knight’s helmet says GOOD-YEAR. The epaulets on his flame suit remind you that for the past few hours he was a pilot. Someone hands him an old-fashioned bottle of milk that looks fresh from a country doorstep, and he tilts his head back and drinks long from the lip of the bottle. Tears well in his eyes as he talks to his brother Bobby, a previous Indy winner and now a race announcer for ABC-TV. “The family’s proud of you,” Bobby says, choking with emotion, and meaning all the menfolk: his own son, Robby, lying in the local hospital with a broken leg from a crash earlier in the month; Al’s son, Al, Jr., only a few yards away; Al and Bobby’s brother Jerry, who died in a crash a few years before.
Long after the race is over and the cars have crept back to their garages, the spectators will linger in the bleachers. It makes you wonder why half a million people—mainly adolescent boys—would choose to celebrate the beginning of summer by picnicking beside the scene of such death-defying drives. The atmosphere of the race may startle, but the terms of the race we know only too well. Who hasn’t referred to someone living life “in the fast lane,” or being “revved up,” or needing “a pit stop,” or being “in the pits,” or “getting into gear,” or “up to speed”? The green flag that means go-for-it is the color of grass, and the red flag that stops everything because of a crash is the color of blood. This is just another Saturday afternoon drive at over 200 mph, by men carrying the advertisements with them instead of passing them on the highways. It is just another blood sport indulged in by men who have always been obsessed with arenas and making things run around in them. The Speedway is more an oval than a circle, but men have always liked to corral things, be it wild animals or ball bearings in roulette wheels or Christians. Bullfighters taunting the brutality of Nature with their cunning do so in a golden circle. Accidents are described as “spectacular” and the “spectators” confirm how gri
pping the element of sheer spectacle is.
I don’t believe most race fans come to see crashes. They come to see their gods parading at speed before them. You can’t really love cars without disowning the preindustrial world. But the scorpion of progress has a wicked sting in its tail. Nature may thwart us at every turn, but the machines we’ve created and endowed with superhuman power sometimes terrify and thwart us even more. When men are injured in crashes, the fans sound truly aggrieved. When men walk away from devastating smashups, the fans shriek with joy. They have come partly to see Man vs. Machine, urgently hoping that man will prevail. An unconscious metaphor works on the reproductive level, too, where men are speed demons, whose souped-up sperm zoom like hot rods.
The last fans to amble out of the Speedway linger in the 500 Museum, talking animatedly about the race and admiring the array of cars. And why not? When we think of “the romance of the automobile,” we forget how much courtship takes place in cars. As John Steinbeck wrote in Cannery Row, “most of America’s children were conceived in Model T Fords and not a few of them were born in them.” Many rites of passage happen in cars, especially for young men (getting drunk, picking up girls, and so on), so it’s not surprising that many men find in cars something closer to transport than transportation: a mythic, animal relationship. Not only have cars changed how we live, they’ve changed the world in which we live, changed the look of cities, changed our health problems, changed our marital and work habits.
As for why humans crave speed, and are obsessed with watching people achieve it on land, air, and water—that would take more time to contemplate. Longer than the Indy 500 itself, the last of whose rowdy spectators have now gushed into the streets for a post-race party every bit as out-of-hand as the pre-race one.
Al Unser and his team will be heading for a victory dinner in downtown Indianapolis, with the purse in his pocket. The winner doesn’t get to keep the huge gleaming silver trophy on display at the Speedway. But a three-dimensional bas-relief of him will be added, Mount Rushmore style, to the hat-wearing, bespectacled, detailed caricatures of all the previous winners. The Indy 500 is so much a celebration of male sexuality that the male figure atop the trophy is naked—no coy drape or fig leaf hide his realistic genitals. At the ticket windows, long lines begin forming so speed-zealots can buy their tickets for next year’s Indy 500. Mainly bare-chested teenage boys, wearing mirrored sunglasses that look like rearview mirrors. They seem the sort who might agree with Walt Whitman’s “Oh, highway … you express me better than I can express myself.”
*It was James Watt, an eighteenth-century engineer, who decided to compare the power of his new invention—the steam engine—to a team of horses. Measuring how much weight a single brewery horse could pull, he concluded that, in one minute, one horse could move 33,000 pounds one foot.
THE LIGHTEST LONGING: SEX AND FLYING
The remarkable thing about St. Joseph of Cupertino, a mentally and physically retarded seventeenth-century monk, whose infirmities drew him the name of “Open Mouth,” is that he could fly. “With approximately one hundred lévitations ascribed to him,” one scholar writes, “Joseph is the most aerial of the saints.” When Joseph’s ecstasies made his blood leap in his veins and his whole body soar, he supposedly carried the sick, fellow monks, startled civilians, an eighteen-foot cross, and even animals aloft with him. According to legend, he once even sailed around the refectory while waving a sea urchin. Other times, he contented himself with hovering above the treetops while he prayed, oblivious of amazed spectators below. The patron saint of fliers, Joseph believed his ability to fly his great defect; but hagiographies discreetly suggest that his real temptations were sexual, stemming from an excessively carnal response to Mary.
Flight is one of the oldest themes in myth, religion, and art, one of the first words ever spoken, a relentless longing in earthbound creatures. And it’s often linked to sensuality. There is something erotic about flight, the dreamy abandonment of all sorts of gravity, including physical and moral law, while one is simply “swept off one’s feet.” Roman matrons collected bronze amulets shaped like erect penises with bird or bat wings, which they sometimes wore as brooches, or hung around the house and garden as charms. Reproductions of first-century winged penises show bizarre hybrids that can walk or fly, having both wings and legs. In the sixteenth century, when church elders declared the idea of flying females to be Satan’s doing, Jacob van Amsterdam painted King Saul and the Witch of Endor, in which a naked woman straddles a fiery, rocket-driven goat that zooms across the sky. Throughout the ages, witches have been portrayed as aerial evil (they applied hallucinogens to their vaginal mucosa with a broom handle, which is how witches came to be associated with flying broomsticks).
The idea of flight has thrilled, terrified, inspired, and deeply affected people from the beginning of human history. The airplane itself is only ninety years old, still marvelous and puzzling as a pterodactyl, but it’s changed our lives from sunup to forever, especially our love lives. We no longer conduct romances as people did before planes, now that we can date over many time zones. Our relationships with our parents have changed: we see them often; good-bye is not forever; there’s no need to divorce them when we marry someone from a far-flung state or country. We no longer fight wars mainly with our neighbors, and feel each battle on our pulses. Now it’s abstract, global, predicated on aerial surveillance. Because individuals from Australia, Puerto Rico, Japan, or Nome can now easily meet and marry others from California or Peru or China, the gene pool is changing; we won’t look the way we do now for long. How we earn our living has changed, how we educate our young, how we vacation, how we choose our leaders, how we think of news, how we raise crops, conduct police work, and give emergency aid. All because of flight. It’s changed our notions of privacy, observation, and pollution. Stonehenge was first deciphered from the air, as were many other prehistoric dwellings and artifacts. Flying has changed how we imagine our planet, whose most exotic barrios are now as close as a Maupintour, and which we have seen whole from space, so that even the farthest nations are political and ecological neighbors. It’s changed our ideas about time. When you can gird the earth at 1,000 mph, how can you endure the tardiness of a postman or delivery truck? Most of all, it’s changed how we picture our bodies, the personal space in which we live, now elastic and swift. If I wished, I could leave Manhattan and be in Calcutta for afternoon tea. My body isn’t limited by its own weaknesses when it comes to moving rapidly through space. Lovers can fly to a romantic city just for atmosphere. It has changed our notion of a pilgrimage. It has redefined “the date.”
People often fly in their dreams. In my nightmares, when I am being chased by villains, I escape at the last excruciating second by suddenly lifting off the earth and flying just out of reach. I don’t flap my arms or assume a Superman pose, I just become lighter than air, my chest arches like the bow of an antique sailing ship, and I float up with a buoyancy both powerful and safe. In these dreams, my fright is so palpable that I awake with my pulse running and the relief of a getaway by mere inches. Freud felt that flying was dream code for sex, and for all I know my nightmares, with their flying escapes “inches” away from harm, might give a dream analyst a good old-fashioned smirk.
Flying in airplanes fills up one’s senses, massages the body with low-level vibrations, sometimes scares one enough to keep adrenaline flowing, and at its most peaceful and serene can feel like a soft, voluptuous dance among the clouds, even if you are seated in a hard metal “cockpit.” But sex and flying have more in common than exhilarating sensations—they’re both taboo. Flagrant sex is socially taboo. Flying is the biological taboo of our species. Humans are land creatures who can walk, run, swim, but cannot fly. Except in our dreams, we are forbidden from entering that Eden. So it’s small wonder that we long for the forbidden gift, that we crave flight, and imagine our gods waltzing across the sky. The grave is where we will end, and we feel that gravity tugging us for the length of our
lives. We begin by falling down from our mother’s womb, and we end our years by hunching closer and closer to the ground. But in sexual ecstasy, as powerful chemical rivers gush through our limbs, we become deliriously transcendent, dazed and drunk as shamans, and feel strong enough, exempt enough, to explode right out of the body and fly. Sex is a form of naked flying in open air—you lose touch with the ordinary, let go of all restraints, and release your grip on earth and reality. You do this, paradoxically, through an even more heightened sense of touch. Perhaps this is, in part, why men found a woman pilot like Beryl Markham so irresistible. She was an archetypal siren, woman flying. Her ability to fly seems to have haunted them as much as her beauty. It was not enough for them simply to know or befriend her; they needed to conquer the wilderness (of Africa, and of promiscuity) that she symbolized. Even though she was a femme fatale, a gold digger, a female casanova whom they should not on any account have trusted with life, wallet, or heart, something about her relationship with the forces of wind and weather, desert and danger, clothed her in a sensuality they craved.
WINGS OVER AFRICA
The local bookstores are doing a roaring trade in femmes fatales this season. New tell-all books are emerging by or about Cleopatra, Mata Hari, Marilyn Monroe, Alma Mahler, and other queens of the heart. In our passion to understand their soft weaponry, we pore over their diaries and letters, we stare through the peephole of a camera into their bedroom eyes. We become their swains. But biographies are doomed to fail. If even corsages lose their color pressed between the pages of a book, what hope has a life? Lying in state, in print, a life can look formal, orderly, and planned. But suppose the life was in many ways a mess, albeit a fascinating, courageous, picturesque, and emotionally intense mess?