The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby

by Tom Wolfe

  Kids keep coming up for Junior’s autograph and others are just hanging around and one little old boy comes up, he is about thirteen, and Junior says: “This boy here goes coon hunting with me.”

  One of the sportswriters is standing around, saying: “What do you shoot a coon with?”

  “Don’t shoot ’em. The dogs tree ’em and then you flush ’em out and the dogs fight ’em.”

  “Flush ’em out?”

  “Yeah. This boy right here can flush ’em out better than anybody you ever did see. You go out at night with the dogs, and soon as they get the scent, they start barking. They go on out ahead of you and when they tree a coon, you can tell it, by the way they sound. They all start baying up at that coon—h’it sounds like, I don’t know, you hear it once and you not likely to forget it. Then you send a little old boy up to flush him out and he jumps down and the dogs fight him.”

  “How does a boy flush him out?”

  “Aw, he just climbs up there to the limb he’s on arid starts shaking h’it and the coon’ll jump.”

  “What happens if the coon decides he’d rather come back after the boy instead of jumping down to a bunch of dogs?”

  “He won’t do that. A coon’s afraid of a person, but he can kill a dog. A coon can take any dog you set against him if they’s just the two of them fighting. The coon jumps down on the ground and he rolls right over on his back with his feet up, and he’s got claws about like this. All he has to do is get a dog once in the throat or in the belly, and he can kill him, cut him wide open just like you took a knife and did it. Won’t any dog even fight a coon except a coon dog.”

  “What kind of dogs are they?”

  “Coon dogs, I guess. Black and tans they call ’em sometimes. They’s bred for it. If his mammy and pappy wasn’t coon dogs, he ain’t likely to be one either. After you got one, you got to train him. You trap a coon, live, and then you put him in a pen and tie him to a post with a rope on him and then you put your dog in there and he has to fight him. Sometimes you get a dog just don’t have any fight in him and he ain’t no good to you.”

  Junior is in the pit area, standing around with his brother Fred, who is part of his crew, and Ray Fox and some other good old boys, in a general atmosphere of big stock car money, a big ramp truck for his car, a white Dodge, number 3, a big crew in white coveralls, huge stacks of racing tires, a Dodge P.R. man, big portable cans of gasoline, compressed air hoses, compressed water hoses, the whole business. Herb Nab, Freddie Lorenzen’s chief mechanic, comes over and sits down on his haunches and Junior sits down on his haunches and Nab says:

  “So Junior Johnson’s going to drive a Ford.”

  Junior is switching from Dodge to Ford mainly because he hasn’t been winning with the Dodge. Lorenzen drives a Ford, too, and the last year, when Junior was driving the Chevrolet, their duels were the biggest excitement in stock car racing.

  “Well,” says Nab, “I’ll tell you, Junior. My ambition is going to be to outrun your ass every goddamned time we go out.”

  “That was your ambition last year,” says Junior.

  “I know it was,” says Nab, “and you took all the money, didn’t you? You know what my strategy was. I was going to outrun everybody else and outlast Junior, that was my strategy.”

  Setting off his California modern sport shirt and white ducks Junior has on a pair of twenty-dollar rimless sunglasses and a big gold Timex watch, and Flossie, his fiancée, is out there in the infield somewhere with the white Pontiac, and the white Dodge that Dodge gave Junior is parked up near the pit area—and then a little thing happens that brings the whole thing right back there to Wilkes County, North Carolina, to Ingle Hollow and to hard muscle in the clay gulches. A couple of good old boys come down to the front of the stands with the screen and the width of the track between them and Junior, and one of the good old boys comes down and yells out in the age-old baritone raw-curdle yell of the Southern hills:

  “Hey! Hog jaw!”

  Everybody gets quiet. They know he’s yelling at Junior, but nobody says a thing. Junior doesn’t even turn around.

  “Hey, hog jaw! …”

  Junior, he does nothing.

  “Hey, hog jaw, I’m gonna get me one of them fastback roosters, too, and come down there and get you!”

  Fastback rooster refers to the Ford—it has a “fastback” design—Junior is switching to.

  “Hey, hog jaw, I’m gonna get me one of them fastback roosters and run you right out of here, you hear me, hog jaw!”

  One of the good old boys alongside Junior says, “Junior, go on up there and clear out those stands.”

  Then everybody stares at Junior to see what hes gonna do. Junior, he don’t even look around. He just looks a bit dead serious.

  “Hey, hog jaw, you got six cases of whiskey in the back of that car you want to let me have?”

  “What you hauling in that car, hog jaw!”

  “Tell him you’re out of that business, Junior,” one of the good old boys says.

  “Go on up there and clean house, Junior,” says another good old boy.

  Then Junior looks up, without looking at the stands, and smiles a little and says, “You flush him down here out of that tree—and I’ll take keer of him.”

  Such a howl goes up from the good old boys! It is almost a blood curdle—

  “Goddam, he will, too!”

  “Lord, he better know how to do an about-face hissef if he comes down here!”

  “Goddam, get him, Junior!”

  “Whooeeee!”

  “Mother dog!”

  —a kind of orgy of reminiscence of the old Junior before the Detroit money started flowing, wild combats d’honneur uphollow—and, suddenly, when he heard that unearthly baying coming up from the good old boys in the pits, the good old boy retreated from the edge of the stands and never came back.

  Later on Junior told me, sort of apologetically, “H’it used to be, if a fellow crowded me just a little bit, I was ready to crawl him. I reckon that was one good thing about Chillicothe.

  “I don’t want to pull any more time,” Junior tells me, “but I wouldn’t take anything in the world for the experience I had in prison. If a man needed to change, that was the place to change. H’it’s not a waste of time there, h’it’s good experience.

  “H’it’s that they’s so many people in the world that feel that nobody is going to tell them what to do. I had quite a temper, I reckon. I always had the idea that I had as much sense as the other person and I didn’t want them to tell me what to do. In the penitentiary there I found out that I could listen to another fellow and be told what to do and h’it wouldn’t kill me.”

  Starting time! Linda Vaughn, with the big blonde hair and blossomy breasts, puts down her Coca-Cola and the potato chips and slips off her red stretch pants and her white blouse and walks out of the officials’ booth in her Rake-a-cheek red show-girl’s costume with her long honeydew legs in net stockings and climbs up on the red Firebird float. The Life Symbol of stock car racing! Yes! Linda, every luscious morsel of Linda, is a good old girl from Atlanta who was made Miss Atlanta International Raceway one year and was paraded around the track on a float and she liked it so much and all the good old boys liked it so much, Linda’s flowing hair and blossomy breasts and honeydew legs, that she became the permanent glamor symbol of stock car racing, and never mind this other modeling she was doing … this, she liked it. Right before practically every race on the Grand National circuit Linda Vaughn puts down her Coca-Cola and potato chips. Her momma is there, she generally comes around to see Linda go around the track on the float, it’s such a nice spectacle seeing Linda looking so lovely, and the applause and all. “Linda, I’m thirstin’, would you bring me a Coca-Cola?” “A lot of them think I’m Freddie Lorenzen’s girl friend, but I’m not any of ‘em’s girl friend, I’m real good friends with ’em all, even Wendell,” he being Wendell Scott, the only Negro in big-league stock-car racing. Linda gets up on the Firebird float. This is a
n extraordinary object, made of wood, about twenty feet tall, in the shape of a huge bird, an eagle or something, blazing red, and Linda, with her red show-girl’s suit on, gets up on the seat, which is up between the wings, like a saddle, high enough so her long honeydew legs stretch down, and a new car pulls her—Miss Firebird!—slowly once around the track just before the race. It is more of a ceremony by now than the national anthem. Miss Firebird sails slowly in front of the stands and the good old boys let out some real curdle Rebel yells, “Yaaaaaaaaaaaaghhhhoooooo! Let me at that car!” “Honey, you sure do start my motor, I swear to God!” “Great God and Poonadingdong, I mean!”

  And suddenly there’s a big roar from behind, down in the infield, and then I see one of the great sights in stock car racing. That infield! The cars have been piling into the infield by the hundreds, parking in there on the clay and the grass, every which way, angled down and angled up, this way and that, where the ground is uneven, these beautiful blazing brand-new cars with the sun exploding off the windshields and the baked enamel and the glassy lacquer, hundreds, thousands of cars stacked this way and that in the infield with the sun bolting down and no shade, none at all, just a couple of Coca-Cola stands out there. And al-ready the good old boys and girls are out beside the cars, with all these beautiful little buds in short shorts already spread-eagled out on top of the car roofs, pressing down on good hard slick automobile sheet metal, their little cupcake bottoms aimed up at the sun. The good old boys are lollygagging around with their shirts off and straw hats on that have miniature beer cans on the brims and buttons that read, “Girls Wanted—No Experience Required.” And everybody, good old boys and girls of all ages, are out there with portable charcoal barbecue ovens set up, and folding tubular steel terrace furniture, deck chairs and things, and Thermos jugs and coolers full of beer—and suddenly it is not the up-country South at all but a concentration of the modern suburbs, all jammed into that one space, from all over America, with blazing cars and instant goodies, all cooking under the bare blaze—inside a strange bowl. The infield is like the bottom of a bowl. The track around it is banked so steeply at the corners and even on the straightaways, it is like the steep sides of a bowl. The wall around the track, and the stands and the bleachers are like the rim of a bowl. And from the infield, in this great incredible press of blazing new cars, there is no horizon but the bowl, up above only that cobalt-blue North Carolina sky. And then suddenly, on a signal, thirty stock car engines start up where they are lined up in front of the stands. The roar of these engines is impossible to describe. They have a simultaneous rasp, thunder and rumble that goes right through a body and fills the whole bowl with a noise of internal combustion. Then they start around on two build-up runs, just to build up speed, and then they come around the fourth turn and onto the straightaway in front of the stands at—here, 130 miles an hour, in Atlanta, 160 miles an hour, at Daytona, 180 miles an hour—and the flag goes down and everybody in the infield and in the stands is up on their feet going mad, and suddenly here is a bowl that is one great orgy of everything in the way of excitement and liberation the automobile has meant to Americans. An orgy!

  The first lap of a stock car race is a horrendous, a wildly horrendous spectacle such as no other sport approaches. Twenty, thirty, forty automobiles, each of them weighing almost two tons, 3700 pounds, with 427-cubic-inch engines, 600 horsepower, are practically locked together, side to side and tail to nose, on a narrow band of asphalt at 130, 160, 180 miles an hour, hitting the curves so hard the rubber burns off the tires in front of your eyes. To the driver, it is like being inside a car going down the West Side Highway in New York City at rush hour, only with everybody going literally three to four times as fast, at speeds a man who has gone eighty-five miles an hour down a highway cannot conceive of, and with every other driver an enemy who is willing to cut inside of you, around you or in front of you, or ricochet off your side in the battle to get into a curve first.

  The speeds are faster than those in the Indianapolis 500 race, the cars are more powerful and much heavier. The prize money in Southern stock car racing is far greater than that in Indianapolis-style or European Grand Prix racing, but few Indianapolis or Grand Prix drivers have the raw nerve required to succeed at it.

  Although they will deny it, it is still true that stock car drivers will put each other “up against the wall”—cut inside on the left of another car and ram it into a spin—if they get mad enough. Crashes are not the only danger, however. The cars are now literally too fast for their own parts, especially the tires. Firestone and Goodyear have poured millions into stock car racing, but neither they nor anybody so far have been able to come up with a tire for this kind of racing at the current speeds. Three well-known stock car drivers were killed last year, two of them champion drivers, Joe Weatherly and Fireball Roberts, and another, one of the best new drivers, Jimmy Pardue, from Junior Johnson’s own home territory, Wilkes County, North Carolina. Roberts was the only one killed in a crash. Junior Johnson was in the crash but was not injured. Weatherly and Pardue both lost control on curves. Pardue’s death came during a tire test. In a tire test, engineers from Firestone or Goodyear try out various tires on a car, and the driver, always one of the top competitors, tests them at top speed, usually on the Atlanta track. The drivers are paid three dollars a mile and may drive as much as five or six hundred miles in a single day. At 145 miles an hour average that does not take very long. Anyway, these drivers are going at speeds that, on curves, can tear tires off their casings or break axles. They practically run off from over their own wheels.

  JUNIOR JOHNSON WAS over in the garden by the house some years ago, plowing the garden barefooted, behind a mule, just wearing an old pair of overalls, when a couple of good old boys drove up and told him to come on up to the speedway and get in a stock car race. They wanted some local boys to race, as a preliminary to the main race, “as a kind of side show,” as Junior remembers it.

  “So I just put the reins down,” Junior is telling me, “and rode on over ’ere with them. They didn’t give us seat belts or nothing, they just roped us in. H’it was a dirt track then. I come in second.”

  Junior was a sensation in dirt-track racing right from the start. Instead of going into the curves and just sliding and holding on for dear life like the other drivers, Junior developed the technique of throwing himself into a slide about seventy-five feet before the curve by cocking the wheel to the left slightly and gunning it, using the slide, not the brake, to slow down, so that he could pick up speed again halfway through the curve and come out of it like a shot. This was known as his “power slide,” and—yes! of course!—every good old boy in North Carolina started saying Junior Johnson had learned that stunt doing those goddamned about-faces running away from the Alcohol Tax agents. Junior put on such a show one night on a dirt track in Charlotte that he broke two axles, and he thought he was out of the race because he didn’t have any more axles, when a good old boy came running up out of the infield and said, “Goddamn it, Junior Johnson, you take the axle off my car here, I got a Pontiac just like yours,” and Junior took it off and put it on his and went out and broke it too. Mother dog! To this day Junior Johnson loves dirt-track racing like nothing else in this world, even though there is not much money in it. Every year he sets new dirt-track speed records, such as at Hickory, North Carolina, one of the most popular dirt tracks, last spring. As far as Junior is concerned, dirt-track racing is not so much of a mechanical test for the car as those long five- and six-hundred-mile races on asphalt are. Gasoline, tire and engine wear aren’t so much of a problem. It is all the driver, his skill, his courage—his willingness to mix it up with the other cars, smash and carom off of them at a hundred miles an hour or so to get into the curves first. Junior has a lot of fond recollections of mixing it up at places like Bowman Gray Stadium in Winston-Salem, one of the minor league tracks, a very narrow track, hardly wide enough for two cars. “You could always figure Bowman Gray was gonna cost you two fenders, two do
ors and two quarter panels,” Junior tells me with nostalgia.

  Anyway, at Hickory, which was a Saturday night race, all the good old boys started pouring into the stands before sundown, so they wouldn’t miss anything, the practice runs or the qualifying or anything. And pretty soon, the dew hasn’t even started falling before Junior Johnson and David Pearson, one of Dodge’s best drivers, are out there on practice runs, just warming up, and they happen to come up alongside each other on the second curve, and—the thing is, here are two men, each of them driving $15,000 automobiles, each of them standing to make $50,000 to $100,000 for the season if they don’t get themselves killed, and they meet on a curve on a goddamned practice run on a dirt track, and neither of them can resist it. Coming out of the turn they go into a wild-ass race down the backstretch, both of them trying to get into the third turn first, and all the way across the infield you can hear them ricocheting off each other and bouncing at a hundred miles an hour on loose dirt, and then they go into, ferocious power slides, red dust all over the goddamned place, and then out of this goddamned red-dust cloud, out of the fourth turn, here comes Junior Johnson first, like a shot, with Pearson right on his tail, and the good old boys in the stands going wild, and the qualifying runs haven’t started yet, let alone the race.