Lifemobile

by Jonathan Rintels

  While Kenny renewed old friendships, we headed to the office to register for the race. Before we could enter, our way was blocked by one of the race officials, wearing a long black robe, an Olde English powdered wig, and a monocle, who demanded to see Benjy’s driver’s license. “I say,” he intoned in a hopelessly phony English accent, “you’re a tad young, are you not? Render your license! Forthwith!” Startled, Benjy nervously handed over the temporary paper license he’d received from the DMV. “I say!” cried the official again, his eyes widening and his monocle dropping to his chest. “You’ve had a license to drive for one day! Twenty-four hours! Odds bodkins!” He lifted his monocle back to his eye and peered accusingly through it at Benjy. Four other judges, all wearing powdered wigs, robes, and monocles, promenaded over as if they were royalty. Each inspected the license closely, as if it might be a fake, while murmuring “odds bodkins!”—they looked and sounded like a waddle of penguins.

  Alarmed, Benjy asked, “What does ‘odds bodkins’ mean? Is it bad?”

  Reverting to his native Texas accent, the first judge said, “I have no idea what it means, kid. But are you sure you know how to drive?”

  “Yes. I’m a very good driver.” Even with the judge’s fake accent gone, betraying the joke, Benjy was anxious.

  “Have you ever raced?” the judge haughtily demanded, back in his hammy English accent.

  “Yes,” Benjy answered. “In video games.”

  “Do not be clever or evasive with the Almightiest Judge of the Grand Prix du Garbage,” the judge chastised him. “You have never raced, is the true testimony! What kind of car are you driving?”

  “A Chevrolet Corvair.” The judge gasped, staggered, and grabbed his chest as if having a heart attack, so Benjy quickly added, “But it’s a Late Model. Which is not the kind that Ralph Nader—”

  “SILENCE!” cried the judge, raising his hand, suddenly fully recovered from his cardiac troubles. And Benjy silenced—instantly. “I know it well,” the judge growled. “You’re really making it hard for me, the Almightiest Judge of the Grand Prix du Garbage, to let you race, when you are a new driver who has never raced and who is driving a car that is”—he then bitterly spit out the hated words—“UNSAFE AT ANY SPEED!”

  “That is not true!” Benjy protested.

  “You will at all times address the Almightiest Judge of the Grand Prix du Garbage as Your Honor!”

  “Yes, sir,” said Benjy.

  “YES, YOUR HONOR!” bellowed the judge.

  Benjy turned pale and looked to me for help. That this judge’s performance was all part of the silliness of the race had eluded him. So I winked to clue him in on the joke, but that may have eluded him as well.

  “What were you sputtering about this unworthy car?” His Honor continued. “This Exhibit A of American corporate irresponsibility? This DEATHMOBILE?!”

  “It’s not, Your Honor,” Benjy managed, still uncertain if this inquisition was real.

  “Yet you name it ‘The Deathmobile’ right here in your racing application!” cried His Honor, punching his clipboard with a list of entries. “An admission of guilt! I rest my case!”

  Benjy was on the verge of tears. “But that’s a joke, Your Honor. That is called ‘irony.’ Because it’s not really a Death—”

  “SILENCE!” His Honor again demanded. He brought his face close to Benjy’s so that their noses nearly touched. “Do I look like I’m laughing at this so-called irony? You may have come a long way for nothing, Young Whippersnapper!”

  Benjy went mute. He feared his racing career was over before it started. Then His Honor leaned down and quietly whispered, “Young Man, this is all a pose I must adopt in order to protect my true identity. You see, I too am a Friend of Ed. As in Edward N. Cole.”

  Benjy brightened at the mention of the name of the Father of the Corvair.

  “Mine is a 1969 Monza, serial number 5977,” His Honor hissed.

  Benjy’s eyes widened. “Out of only six thousand built in 1969?!”

  “Manufactured at the Willow Run, Michigan, plant on May 13, 1969, the day before production of the Greatest Car officially and permanently ended.”

  “Really?!” Benjy exclaimed. Then he quickly added, “Your Honor!”

  “I’d have driven it here, but it broke a fan belt last night. Didn’t feel like fixing it.”

  “Wow!” Benjy looked at me—the Champion Fan Belt Breaker—in a new light.

  “You are among friends,” His Honor quietly purred. “Now give me your hand so you too may be a Friend of Ed’s in the Corvair Brotherhood.” His Honor took Benjy’s hand in his and solemnly intoned: “From this day to the ending of the world, But we in it shall be remembered. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”

  “Shakespeare wrote that,” recognized Benjy.

  “SILENCE! IMPUDENT SWINE!” cried His Honor. “I composed it!”

  “It’s from Henry the Fifth,” added Benjy, determined to set the record straight.

  The Almighty Judge again peered through his monocle at Benjy, then hissed, “Now, you impertinent young lad, listen carefully as I tell you the parable of the Tortoise and the Hare. You will be the tortoise in this race. You will drive carefully and safely. You will not go off the course. You will preserve your Corvair and finish the race. You will not permit your Corvair to come in contact with any of the second-rate automotive riff-raff cluttering up the track. Your mission is not to win the race, so do not try to win the race. Your mission is to finish in the top third—a very respectable finish for your first time—which will only be possible if you preserve your Corvair and drive it safely. Remember, at least half of those boring water pumpers out there will break down before the race ends, so, if you finish, you, the tortoise, will beat all those hares. This shall be your challenge and your quest. This shall be your triumph. As a new Friend of Ed, you will bring honor to the Corvair and those who cherish it. The Almightiest Judge of the Grand Prix du Garbage has decreed it. Do you understand my charge to you, My Brother?”

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  “Do you agree to obey my charge to you at all times and in all ways? So help you, God?”

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  “And you will ensure that Kenny and this old man and this delightful young maiden with the purple, orange, and lime hair will also obey?”

  “Yes, Your Honor!”

  “Do not risk my wrath by failing me. Do not speed excessively or spin out or drive too aggressively or otherwise try any funny business. I will personally black flag you and put you in our Bad Driver Dungeon. Believe me, you do not want to go there. You do not want to risk my wrath!”

  “No, Your Honor!”

  “My Brother—Young Man—Godspeed to you. Go out there and make us proud.” The Almightiest Judge of the Grand Prix du Garbage offered his hand to Benjy.

  “Yes, Your Honor!” Benjy swore, firmly shaking His Honor’s hand.

  Dismissing his new charge, the Almightiest Judge turned and winked to me.

  Meanwhile, Benjy stood transfixed, eyes wide.

  He had heard a calling.

  CHAPTER 19

  After Benjy strapped himself into the Deathmobile’s safety seat, I gave his shoulder harness an extra strong yank just to be certain it was secure.

  “Dad, I can’t breathe,” he gasped. “Too tight.”

  “Tortoise,” I insisted as I slightly loosened the belt. “You’re a tortoise, not a hare!”

  “Dad?”

  “What?”

  “It’s practice laps. There are only a few other cars out there.”

  I sighed. Seeing the giddy goofiness of the cars, drivers, and crews, I thought I had relaxed. But now Benjy was strapped into the race car, the race would soon become real, and all my worries and fears were back in spades. “Just be careful out there,” I finally said.

  “I will.”

  I handed him the radio headset and he attached it to his helmet. “We’ll call you on the radio if we want you to slow do
wn or come into the pit, okay? And whatever the pit says is law. Period.”

  “We practiced that, Dad.”

  “If the radio doesn’t work, we’ve got the signs and flags to communicate. Right? And you’ll watch the track officials for their flags too. Right?”

  “We learned all that at the drivers meeting, Dad.”

  “And you’ll talk to us on the radio if anything goes wrong. Right?”

  “Dad,” Benjy sighed, “I want to practice and we’ve talked about this ten billion times.”

  He was exaggerating wildly, of course; we’d actually gone over it only about nine billion times. “Just be careful out there,” I repeated. “I love you. I don’t want anything to happen.”

  “I know,” Benjy said. He turned the key and the Corvair’s engine came to life, ringing and whining. Under his breath, he repeated to himself his checklist. He scanned his mirrors, dropped the Powerglide transmission lever into Drive, released the parking brake, glanced back over his shoulder, pulled out onto pit road, stopped at the exit to get clearance from the official, and then merged onto the racetrack. Like he’d done it a thousand times.

  “Take it easy, Aunt Mildred,” Kenny said to me. “He’ll be fine.”

  “Look, I can’t help it,” I vented, talking way too fast. “I’m his father, he’s my son. So quit calling me Aunt Mildred and quit telling me to stop worrying. It makes me worry even more.”

  “Just chill out, man!” said Kenny, raising his hands in surrender. “It’s not like you’re sendin’ him off to war. Let’s just have some fun, okay?”

  “I definitely vote for fun,” Lydia seconded.

  “Don’t encourage either Kenny or Benjy,” I replied to her pointedly. When she thought I wasn’t looking, she eyed Kenny and threw up her hands in bewilderment.

  I moved away from both of them to the other end of our pit stall and trained my binoculars on Benjy. He was up to speed and maneuvering through Summit Point’s S-curves. On my practice laps, I’d slowed the Deathmobile to a crawl and still managed to bounce it over the track’s raised curbs. But on each S-curve, Benjy smoothly handled the entry and exit.

  “He’s done half a lap, and I can already see he’s a better driver than you,” Kenny shouted at me over the roar of the practice cars passing by. “We won’t measure his lap times in hours.”

  “I set a good example for him! And you!” I shouted back.

  I saw Kenny call Benjy on the radio headset. Whatever Benjy said in reply, it made Kenny cackle.

  I came back over. “What?”

  “He said, ‘For every rookie driver, there’s a first time for everything,’” Kenny reported. “What the heck does that mean?”

  I knew that phrase by heart, and my knees got rubbery. He was reciting his NASCAR racing video game monologue. Reciting was one thing, but what if he really started racing that way, fender to fender with Denny Hamlin, while trying to keep from dying at Talladega? That settled it. The heck with what Kenny and Lydia and even Benjy thought of me; I had to watch him like a hawk. If his tortoise turned into a hare for even a second, I was pulling the plug.

  As the pace car—a Pleistocene-era tow truck—pulled off into the pit lane, the 66 cars that managed to drag themselves onto the asphalt track took the green flag, and the Grand Prix du Garbage was underway. The crowd of nearly a hundred cheered wildly as the cheap racers accelerated in an ear-splitting roar, thanks to dozens of broken mufflers. The lead car, courtesy of a lucky pick in the lottery, was supposed to be the Smoking Butt, a vintage Volkswagen microbus transformed by paint and plastic into a rolling cigarette. But before it even reached the starting line it was in fact smoking from its butt; coughing badly, the Butt pulled into the infield. Stop Childhood Obesity—a Plymouth minivan transformed into a giant rolling Twinkie that had been riddled with machine gun fire—took the lead.

  In our pit, waiting for Kenny to drive the Deathmobile across the starting line, Benjy quickly did some math. “Eighty cars were entered. Fourteen never made it to the starting line. That means we can’t finish worse than sixty-sixth place!”

  “The Smoking Butt’s out!” Lydia shouted gleefully. Indeed, the Pleistocene wrecker was already preparing to haul the stricken VW back to the garage. “Don’t you know smoking is bad for you?!” she jeered at the Butt’s pit crew, a few stalls away from us. She was ecstatic—until she saw Benjy’s ashen face. “What’s the matter?” she cried. “We haven’t even started and we’re already up to sixty-fifth!”

  “The Volkswagen is the only other car in the race besides ours with an air-cooled rear-mounted engine,” Benjy fretted. “And it broke down before it even started.”

  Just then, after drawing a dismal 77th starting position in the lottery, Kenny urged our Corvair across the start. A round of cheers rose up from the grandstands and pits as the fans recognized him. He waved, and gave us a thumbs up while passing our pit stall.

  “GO, KENNY!” Lydia screamed, jumping and kicking. “GO!”

  Benjy stuck his fingers in his ears. “You’re louder than the cars!” he complained to her.

  “I can’t help it!” Lydia giggled, punching him playfully. “I always wanted to be a cheerleader! Don’t tell anyone!”

  Fifty minutes later, Benjy held up our pit sign signaling Kenny to come into the pits to change drivers. But Kenny flew past, ignoring him, just as he’d ignored him for the past 10 laps. “He won’t come in!” Benjy shouted at me. “The schedule says we were supposed to change drivers twenty minutes ago!”

  Not only was Kenny staying out on the track, ignoring our agreed schedule of driver changes, but he was also racing like the Hare from Hell when we’d all agreed to drive like a tortoise. The Almightiest Judge of the Grand Prix du Garbage delivered the official standings to our pit, and they showed Kenny now in 24th place. In less than an hour, he’d moved the Deathmobile up 42 places. “What if a Corvair actually won one of these fiascos?” asked His Honor giddily, suddenly forgetting all his cautionary talk about being a tortoise.

  It was mind-boggling. With the Corvair’s small engine and an automatic transmission, Kenny gave up ground to nearly every other car on the straightaways. But in the corners, he reeled every other car back in and then left many in his dust. Entering a turn, he ducked inside the other cars, tight to the inside, barely twitching the wheel and sacrificing no speed. Exiting, with the Corvair’s heavy rear end anchoring the car to the pavement, he punched the accelerator while everyone else was still braking, exploding past cars that had no idea he was even in the same corner. The Corvair was riding on rails, effortlessly working its way toward the lead.

  In other words, he was setting the worst possible example for Benjy. Turning my back on Benjy and Lydia so they couldn’t hear me, I called up Kenny over the radio. “What are you doing out there?!” I demanded.

  “I’m racin’,” he said. “What’re you doin’?” Real snarky.

  “We agreed to change drivers every half hour.”

  “Dang, my watch stopped,” he drawled. “Eat some Corvair dust, Twinkie!” he cackled as he passed the Stop Childhood Obesity minivan. “It’s low-fat!” With its front-wheel drive and front engine layout, the Twinkie waddled obesely into the corners and had fallen out of the lead.

  “You left your mike open and I heard that,” I fumed. “You’re setting a fine example for Benjy. What about driving like a tortoise? What about switching drivers after half an hour?”

  “Damn mike keeps sticking open,” Kenny said, flicking his talk button on and off to unstick it; static sizzled in my ear like machine gun fire. He waved to us as he passed the pit, yet again ignoring Benjy’s sign ordering a pit stop, then came back on the radio. “Look, I’m thinkin’ Benjy should drive next.”

  “No,” I said, then slowly repeated our pre-agreed plan. “I will drive the second shift to see what it’s like before he goes out.”

  “Yeah, well, like they said in Iraq, the battle plan is always excellent—until the first shot’s fired.” With the mike st
uck open again, I could again hear his cackle. “Look, for him, it’ll be a piece of cake,” Kenny continued. “You, on the other hand—I’m afraid you’ll wreck the car. Or break it. Then he wouldn’t get his chance to drive today and that would just kill him.”

  “I’m not going to wreck or break the car,” I protested.

  “All I’m sayin’ is, he and I got the talent for drivin’ this Corvair, and you don’t, and we all know it. He races next, then you.”

  I was silent. I didn’t know for certain if Benjy was that talented a driver; he hadn’t yet turned a lap in a real race. But as much as it hurt to admit it, I did know for certain that I was not a talented driver. The racer’s instincts of when to press hard into a turn, what line to take, where to start and stop braking: I had none of them. Just watching our practice laps, Kenny had seen that Benjy had the monopoly on racing talent in our family. Now he was calling me on it.

  “Well?” Kenny asked, setting up the Saab Story for a pass through the S-curves. He swung wide around the last S-curve and left the Vikings in the Fred Flintstone-mobile behind. “You drive like Betty Rubble!” he mocked.

  “Benjy won’t want to change the order,” I argued. “He can be pretty rigid.”

  “Tell him it’s captain’s orders. He’ll understand.”

  The Alien-bearing hearse from Area 51 had just pulled into the pits with steam billowing up from underneath. That moved the Deathmobile up to almost 20th position. More than 30 cars had dropped out, and traffic had thinned out considerably. The racing looked a lot easier.

  “Kenny,” I said. “He will be a tortoise. He will not be trying to win this race. Right?”

  “Whatever,” moaned Kenny. “We could win it. Piece of cake.”

  “This is important to me, Kenny. It’s not a joke. He’s not trying to win.”