But it was a big deal to these people, waiting in line with their photos and their official Badger Jenkins souvenirs. Sark thought that it seemed discourteous somehow to be unimpressed by gestures that other people would consider a rare privilege. How disconcerting to meet people who thought that Badger Jenkins was a great and wonderful man, and who would have saved forever a Styrofoam cup he had drunk from. And yet she had his cell phone number on speed dial. People have been killed for less, she supposed.
She wondered how Badger could stay afloat in this tide of adulation. Did celebrities begin to believe that their garbage was valuable, that their lightest word should be embroidered on samplers, that they were better than anybody else? To his credit, Badger didn’t seem to think so. Well, Tuggle would never have let him get away with it for one thing. Perhaps the best favor that one can do for a celebrity friend is to periodically tell them to get over themselves. That, and to resolve to still be just as much of a friend when the luster of celebrity fades and the spotlight shines somewhere else. She saw now why that would be such a hard thing to bear-to go back to being nobody, after this. And Badger was just…well, Badger. In the grand scheme of things, he wasn’t all that famous, and still he had worshippers. What if he were really, most sincerely famous? The thought of being a member of the posse of Dale, Jr. or Jeff Gordon made her shudder.
The signing went on relatively calmly after the large woman went away. As the minutes passed, Sark found herself classifying the different types of admirers who stood in Badger’s autograph line. Most of the people were just nice (if misguidedly starstruck) folks who were thrilled to be in the actual presence of a NASCAR driver. They wanted to shake his hand, to wish him well, to get his name affixed to a piece of paper-so that they could go home and brag to their neighbors that they had met the Badger Jenkins, and that he was just as nice as could be, no airs about him atall.
The line wasn’t just a procession of the faithful, though; it was liberally sprinkled with “dealers.” People who made a living getting minor celebrities to sign photos and other memorabilia that they would then resell in shops or online for a tidy profit. The more unscrupulous ones simply faked the signature-a necessary ruse, perhaps, if the customer wanted, say, Johnny Depp, but hardly necessary in the world of NASCAR. Drivers were nice guys. Most of them would oblige anyone who asked politely for a signature, provided that time was not a factor. In order to get their money’s worth, sponsors saw to it that their drivers made many public appearances, which meant that obtaining their autographs was mostly a matter of perseverance and scheduling.
Dealer types were generally male, brisk, and unimpressed by the experience. Badger’s signature on a photo might mean ten bucks to them, if they were lucky and if a true fan from faraway participated in the online auction. The dealers would attend the race and stand in every possible driver’s autograph line, hoping to get enough signatures to make their speedway visit profitable. Getting an autographed photo from the likes of Badger was all well and good, but the dealers’ greatest wish was to have the good fortune to run into Little E. or Jeff Gordon, the rock stars of Cup racing. A signature from either of them would cover the entire cost of the weekend. But you couldn’t count on the availability of the superstars, so to pass the time the dealers staked out the small fry. They treated Badger with the curt efficiency of a remora preparing to clean the teeth of a very small shark: a necessary process for both parties, but only barely worth the effort.
If the dealers were blasé about the experience of meeting him, the true fans more than made up for it with their unbridled-occasionally semihysterical-enthusiasm. Fandemonium. Sark handed out tissues to more than one woman who burst into tears simply because Badger had touched her hand when he returned the autograph card. She began to wish she’d brought a supply of paper bags along so that she could hand them out to the overwrought and say, “Breathe into this!” (And occasionally when a fan became too saccharine and sloppy in her adoration of Badger, Sark felt like using a paper bag herself, for quite another purpose.)
There ought to be a happy medium, she thought, between the businesslike dealers and the gushing maenads. She thought Badger deserved more respect from the former and a good deal less adulation from the latter.
Who the heck was Badger Jenkins, anyhow? Rock star? Hero? Dream lover? Meal ticket? Favorite son? Star athlete? Big brother? There seemed to be as many answers to that question as there were people in line.
Occasionally, a giggling woman would thrust a cell phone under his nose and order him to say hello to her friend back home. “Donna’s your biggest fan. Just say hello to her. She’ll die, Badger. I swear she will.”
Badger always managed to say a cordial sentence or two into the phone, and the response was a sometimes audible shriek. He usually concluded the conversation with, “Yes, ma’am, I’m really him. Thanks for being a loyal fan.” He called them all ma’am, which Sark thought might be more an estimate of age than a term of respect. There were more requests for a hug, but he managed to evade them.
Sark began to feel sorry for the driver. Being loved can be more of a burden than a blessing. People have built you a soul, and if you run afoul of their expectations, they will turn on you with the ferocity of wild dogs. Dealing with one’s public was harder than it looked, she concluded. Being handsome helped, because it meant you didn’t have to say much to win them over, but a calm temperament and a seeming openness with strangers would prove invaluable also. She began to regard Badger with increasing admiration. There was more to being a race car driver than skill behind the wheel. Badger was damned good. He sent everyone away happy.
The line wound on, one gushing fan after another.
Often besotted maidens wanted to give him things-a photo of their cat whose name was Badger, or perhaps an amateur portrait of him they’d done themselves, which generally looked more like Bela Lugosi than like Badger himself. Other admirers embroidered pillows with his number and team colors; they brought him hand-tied fishing flies “for the lake” and homemade soap. They presented him with pots of raspberry jam, which they’d personally prepared in little jars affixed with handwritten labels, often including the telephone number of the giver. Some hope, thought Sark. Others wrote worshipful, badly rhymed poems about him, which they bestowed on him on parchment with carefully lettered calligraphy and a Dollar Store frame.
Badger accepted all these earnest offerings with solemn thanks, and with a few words of admiration for anyone so talented as to be able to produce such a thing, because he sure as heck couldn’t do anything as original as that…thank you so much… and the givers went away happy. After a while Sark began to detect a particular tone of voice in his expressions of gratitude. When he said “Thank ya so-ooo mu-ucch” in a particular drawling way, she decided that it meant he was being given something he didn’t want. That was useful to know. She filed the information away to see when she would hear it next. Mostly, though, he was kind and polite to people who meant well, and they felt that they had made a real connection with their hero with their gifts of soap and poems and homemade jam. Sark wondered what became of those things afterward, and she resolved never to try to find out.
And then there were the kids. Badger loved kids. He’d peer down at a bright-eyed eight-year-old clutching anything from a napkin to a lug nut, and he’d strike up an animated conversation with the child while he scribbled his name on the proffered item.
“How you doin’, buddy? You a big race fan?” Man to man, as if they were both the same age, which in some ways, thought Sark, they were.
Sometimes the child was too shy even to mumble a response, but Badger never seemed to mind. He went on being friendly and charming until the child stopped looking terrified.
Then near the end of the line a little tow-headed kid in a Dupont tee shirt set down a Jeff Gordon hat in front of Badger and waited for him to sign it.
Sark held her breath. As far as she could tell, Cup drivers wholeheartedly agreed with the Supreme Being that
the number one commandment was Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods before Me. She’d heard discouraging tales of drivers refusing to sign even their own team-themed merchandise if it was an unlicensed product-because drivers received no royalties from homemade fan items. And here was a kid expecting Badger to sign a product honoring another driver? She pictured an ensuing tantrum, and wondered if she ought to snatch the Gordon hat off the table and hustle the kid away before he precipitated a public relations nightmare.
Before she could decide what to do, Badger picked up the Gordon hat and scribbled across the brim with his black Sharpie. “There you go, buddy,” he said with a smile, handing the item back to its delighted owner.
When the child had walked away, Sark leaned in close again to Badger’s ear. “Wow,” she said softly. “You signed a Jeff Gordon hat. I cannot believe it.”
“Well, he’s a kid. I couldn’t disappoint him,” said Badger. “I can’t sign any Earnhardt stuff, though.”
“Why? You don’t like the Earnhardts?” asked Sark.
“Naw, that’s not it,” said Badger sadly. “I just can’t spell it.”
The little boy had put on his signed cap and was waving good-bye from a few feet away. Sark peered closely at the hat, and sure enough, scribbled on the brim were the words “Jeff Gordon” in Badger’s unmistakable rounded scrawl.
Sark could never decide if Badger was a complete innocent or the shrewdest person she knew.
She glanced at her watch. Time was nearly up, and the last two fans in line looked like trouble. They were young enough and skinny enough not to look completely ridiculous in their skimpy halter tops and barely-there shorts, but dyed-blond hair and ferret faces heavy with mascara and glitter blush weren’t Sark’s idea of sexy. She doubted if it was Badger’s, either, but since he had done all right on his own today, she decided to wait and see how he handled the confrontation-Sark was sure there was going to be one.
Sure enough, the one wearing the most eyeliner sashayed up to the desk and leaned over it, giving him the full effect of her cleavage.
Sark wrinkled her nose in distaste. Pit lizards. The term, which she herself had only learned this week, had probably been coined before these two little newts had even been born, but they were quite representative of the species: slithery and predatory. Like the rest of their kind, they lurked around drivers’ habitats in hopes of ensnaring one. Wives loathed them, and the crew either pitied or ridiculed them, according to the nature of the crew member and perhaps to the attractiveness of the individual lizard. It was universally acknowledged, though, that their appreciation of motorsports was similar to lions’ fondness for the watering holes of zebras: voyeurism disguising darker motives. Today this pair of lizards had apparently decided to prey on Badger.
Repelled more than fascinated, Sark backed away toward the Porta-John, hoping that when she’d finished, the two creatures would be gone. She heard more giggles as the girls took out cameras and whispered in each other’s ear. What were they offering him, anyway: a choice or a twofer?
And it happens to him all the time, she thought. How many times a day? A dozen? A hundred? How could such avid attention not go to his head? How could he not think himself God’s gift to mattresses? How could he sustain a relationship with anybody in the face of such temptation?
She hurried toward the Porta-John, out of earshot of the arch conversation taking place at the signing table, acutely aware of her own embarrassment. Somebody, she thought, ought to be ashamed at what was taking place; odd that she, the innocent bystander, should be the one who felt it. The other thing she felt was a bizarre, almost maternal protectiveness toward Badger. She wanted to yell, “Leave him alone! He’s not a piece of meat.” But surely that was a feminine impulse. Surely it was the essence of the male gender not to mind such an arrangement, even to revel in it. A free roll in the hay offered by a reasonably pretty girl who wanted nothing more? Why else would you want to be famous if not for perks like this? Did he feel like that, she wondered, or did the endless propositions make him feel slimed by the fetid desires of so many strangers? She wished she could think of a polite way to ask him.
Sark lingered in the toilet until the smell inside it was fractionally more distasteful to her than the sight of two attacking pit lizards in heat; then she stumbled out again into the sunshine, thinking that perhaps Badger would be expecting her to run interference for him, to get him out of an awkward situation with no hard feelings on the part of the lizards, assuming, of course, that they were capable of such niceties. Oh please let him not be succumbing to their attentions, she thought, and that notion almost sent her reeling back to the toilet.
Well, at least Badger wasn’t married anymore, she told herself. Not that it would have mattered to his stalkers if he had been.
As she approached the table again, she noticed that Badger had his head tilted back and appeared to be listening attentively to one of the girls. Now he was nodding, with a mournful look in his dark eyes.
Uh-oh, thought Sark, hurrying back to her post.
“And she won’t get her prescription filled,” said the blonde. “She says it costs too much, and that taking it doesn’t change the way she feels one bit. She says blood pressure is just a number. But she has to work standing up for hours at a time on her shift at the mill. I tell her that can’t be good for her, but she won’t listen.”
Badger was nodding sympathetically. “My granddad was stubborn like that,” he said. “We lost him a year ago last spring.”
“Really? Because he wouldn’t take his medicine?” Tears were streaming down the young woman’s face in little black rivulets of dissolved mascara. She dug in her tiny denim purse and fished out a creased snapshot. “This is my nana with her race cap on. See, it’s one of yours, from your old team. I gave it to her for her birthday the year you won Darlington, and she just loved it.”
Solemnly, Badger examined the grainy snapshot of a grinning old lady in a racing hat. “She needs to take her medicine, though,” he said. “What’s her name?”
The girl sniffled. “Dreama. D-R-E-A-M-A.”
Badger took one of the autograph cards and wrote across the top: Dreama, Please Take Your Pills. Badger Jenkins. “There,” he said, handing it back to the tearful pit lizard. “Maybe that will help. You tell her I can’t afford to lose any fans.” He shook hands with the girl and her friend, who now seemed much younger and less worldly than they had seemed before. “I have to go now,” he said, nodding toward Sark. “They need me to do a radio interview or something.”
The two women thanked him with moist smiles and as soon as they turned away, Badger got up from the table and hurried toward the motor home before anyone else could waylay him.
“That was pretty amazing,” said Sark. “You were great.”
Badger shrugged. “You get used to it,” he said.
“No, you were great with everybody. You were kind and sweet. But what impressed me the most was that you made those two pit lizards forget all about hitting on you. How did you do that?”
He shrugged. “I treated them like people,” he said. He ambled off, muttering something about Gatorade in the fridge.
Sark stared after him, wondering for the hundredth time whether Badger Jenkins was an old soul possessing great wisdom or a simpleton who was too dumb to be let out alone.
CHAPTER XVII
The Race Is On
“It’s strange, isn’t it?” said Sigur Nelson, the rear tire carrier. She was watching the thunderous crowd reactions to the driver introductions before the start of the race. “The driver gets all the fame and the glamour, and yet he’s just one member of the team. He gets the private jet and the motor home and his picture on the tee shirts, and what do we get? A cattle car charter flight to the city where the race is being held, and half a cut-rate motel room apiece. And the pay! Don’t even talk about that!”
“But Badger is famous,” said Taran. “He doesn’t even have his own jet and he rents that motor home, but he certainly de
serves all that stuff.”
“You think so?” said Reve. “Take an extra second on the pit stop a few times and see how well he does. Leave the cap off the brake line and see what happens to his points standings after the race. Nobody appreciates us, but we’re important, too.”
“I think Badger appreciates us,” said Taran.
“I don’t,” said Reve, and Sigur nodded in agreement. “I think that to him we’re the spear carriers in the opera of his life. I’d be surprised if he even remembered my name.”
Taran, who had been nervous already, was now on the verge of tears. “Badger is always nice to me. He always smiles when he sees me, and he says, ‘Hey, Sweetie.’”
“That’s because he can’t remember your name,” said Sigur. “You want to think he’s kind. He is a handsome man, and because he is a rural Southerner, he is basically polite, just like Swedes. I think you cut him all kinds of slack on account of that. Pretty people always get extra credit just for winning the genetic lottery. I’ve never seen any evidence that he gives a damn about any of us.”
“I don’t see how he could stay humble with all the money, and the media, and the adulation of the fans. Of course he thinks he’s hot stuff. But we work just as hard as he does to make this team a success.”
Taran shook her head. “Badger deserves all of it.”
Reve sneered. “Why? Because you think he’s handsome?”
“No. Because he’s the one who has to go out there and risk his life.”
They had made it into the Daytona 500, qualifying for the Great American Race despite the predictions of half the motorsports pundits in the business, especially the self-appointed ones on the Internet.
Late Thursday night on the laptop in her motel room, Sark reported on the week’s events to Ed Blair.
Once Around the Track Page 20