by Burt Levy
I can't say as I remember going home, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if Julie drove us. All I know is that she was there the next morning in my apartment—still in her pink satin bridesmaid's dress—handing me a couple aspirin and a glass of Bromo-Seltzer almost as soon as I started moaning. I could see getting used to service like that. "I gotta run," she said, and gave me a peck on the forehead.
"Jeez, isn't your mom gonna be sore?"
"Nah. I called her and told her I was staying at one of my girlfriend's house."
"So you were here all night?"
Julie nodded, a secret sort of smile spreading across her face.
"What did we, I mean, um, what did you do? "
"Not much," she answered with a helpless little laugh. "Mostly, I just watched you sleep."
"Watched me sleep?"
"Yeah. It was nice." She gave me another peck on the forehead, only slower and softer this time. "Not as nice as T.V., or a show, but nice anyway." She straightened up and brushed haphazardly at the wrinkles on her dress. "Listen, I gotta run. I'm supposed to be over at work by nine."
I looked at her standing there in her bridesmaid's dress. She looked pretty damn great for somebody who'd been up all night. "Say, you want me to drive you or something?"
"Nah. You sleep it off. I'll take the car and bring it by later on."
"The car?"
"Yeah. We stopped by the station and swapped the tow truck for some guy's Jaguar convertible so's we could go for a little spin after the wedding last night."
"We did? I don't remember that."
"Well, you probably wouldn't. You were pretty out of it."
"Oh. Where'd we go, anyway?"
"Just down along the Jersey shore. It was nice. We had the top down and you even talked a couple times, I think."
"And you drove?"
"Why not? That passenger-side seat gets pretty dull after awhile."
That Julie Finzio was one hell of a girl, no two ways about it.
I guess all the racers had themselves a pretty good time down in Georgia. Big Ed actually got to run a few practice laps and even started the race before he got a little overexcited and clouted the hay bales with his ex-Skippy Welcher, ex-everything XK120M. Fortunately, it wasn't much of a dent, and, seeing as how that poor Jag had been crunched just about everywhere at one time or another, it wasn't like he was breaking its cherry or anything. But it pushed the fender down into the tire and so Big Ed had to drop out. On the very first corner of the very first lap of the race, in fact. Oh well, at least it was an improvement.
My buddy Cal got to drive that Ford-powered TC again, and from what I heard, the beast was very much improved from Elkhart. Like this time the brakes held up for a whole six laps before the pedal started going mushy and he sank back through the field to finish just outside the top ten. But he ran right up near the front for those first six laps, even harassing Creighton Pendleton's Ferrari for third overall and holding off the best of the standard-issue XK120s until the car wouldn't slow down anymore. Johnny Fitch won again in the C4R Cunningham—nobody could stay with him—and both he and Creighton's Ferrari were clocked at over 170 down the long main runway at the Turner bomber base. Skippy Welcher went down in spite of the stupid one-race suspension he got for causing the accident at Watkins Glen (they should have banned him for life!) and after all attempts at getting his suspension lifted fell on deaf ears, he handed the green C-type over to another longtime S.C.M.A. racer named George Huntoon of West Palm Beach, Florida, for the 4-liter and under contest. Which he won going away, proving beyond any doubt that the C-type was a car to be reckoned with anywhere.
But the big news was how well the event was run and how incredibly safe it was. General LeMay drove all the way down from his headquarters in Omaha in his Cad-Allard (along with his wife, who must've been one tough, durable sort of lady) to keep an eye on things, and his Strategic Air Command boys did a job that made the regular, all-volunteer S.C.M.A. armband crew look pretty lame by comparison. All the races started exactly on time (except for one that ran some thirty seconds late, and you can bet the poor enlisted man responsible heard plenty about it afterward) and everybody except the drivers and crews was kept far enough away from the action that a guy named Ned Dearborn from the National Safety Council said: "I have never seen anything comparable to the safety measures taken by this meet to ensure safe crowd control and I want to compliment everyone who had a part in it."
That was pretty darn impressive, no question about it.
Of course, the bad part was that none of the estimated 60,000 people who turned out could see much of anything, since it was like watching a bunch of loud, brightly colored toys running up and down some flat concrete runways way off in the distance. But I guess smaller thrills and less red-blooded excitement will always be the price of guaranteed security, in racing and everywhere else in life.
By far the highlight of the entire weekend (at least for those of us on the Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge) was the surprising performance of Carson Flegley and his newly hotted-up MG TD, which, thanks to the undeniable engine-tuning genius of one Buddy Palumbo, Esq., finished way up near the middle of the MG herd duking it out tooth and nail about halfway between Jim Simpson's winning OSCA and the last-place Crosley Hotshot. Better yet, Carson finished at least seven or eight sets of bumpers ahead of where he'd run at the Glen. As you can well imagine, he was ecstatic. In fact, Carson decided to host a big season-ending race party at his place of business just as soon as he got back to Jersey. And that was a really perfect fit (considering Carson Flegley's line of work, anyway) since the very next available Friday night after the races in Georgia was ... Halloween!
It was decided by general consensus that the Friday-night gathering at the Flegley Memorial Chapels in East Orange should properly be a costume party (what else?) so I put a cheesy beard on my face with greasepaint and blacked out a tooth to go along with the rest of my halfhearted pirate outfit (a bandanna around my head, a black eye patch, and a six-inch plastic cutlass from Woolworth's five-and-dime) before I went to pick Julie up in the Old Man's tow truck. There just weren't any decent cars running over by the Sinclair that night. Julie was all done up as a gypsy, what with her hair all frizzed out and these big gold hoop earrings and a lot of bright crimson lipstick. She was wearing a white men's shirt with the sleeves cut off and about three buttons undone (which quickly turned into four once we were safely out of eyeshot from her mother) and a flared red skirt with a wide black patent-leather belt and matching shoes. She actually looked more like a hot streetwalker than a gypsy (if you want my personal opinion, anyway) and no question it was hard to keep my eyes off of her. Or my hands for that matter.
"Hey!" she squealed. "Knock it off, Palumbo. You'll mess up my costume."
"It's destined to happen sooner or later, wench," I told her in my best pirate voice. "So why not sooner?"
"Just keep yer frickin' hands to yourself, Palumbo," she laughed, her eyes dancing. "Don't let the look fool you. I'm not one a'those girls who goes around handing out free samples. . . ." And she wasn't, either.
We got to Carson's funeral parlor about nine, and you could tell the party was already going on account of all the MGs and Jags and such parked out in the lot. Naturally, the building looked all somber and dreary the way mortuaries always do, what with thick velvet drapes drawn over all the windows and just a weary, golden-yellow glow coming from the small brass coach lights on either side of the front entrance. All things considered, it was the kind of place that made you feel like talking in whispers before you ever even knocked on the door.
At least until that door swung open with Carson Flegley behind it, all done up as Count Dracula with a satin-lined cape, plastic fangs, and a pint of fake blood running down his chin. "Gooot eeeveningggg," he said in a truly decent Bela Lugosi imitation, "and vellcommm to my castle. . . ." This was a side of Carson Flegley I'd never seen before. Then again, he had all the working credentials for the part, d
idn't he?
We came in and Carson quickly closed the door behind us. I guess he didn't want any past, current, or potential future customers to get a whiff of what was going on inside Flegley Memorial Chapels this particular Halloween night. After all, it wasn't very dignified, and families trying to find a properly delicate way to dispose of their deceased loved ones are always real big on dignity. Although I personally don't think it matters much one way or the other. Anyhow, Carson had all the racing people jammed into a long, sad-looking chapel room at the far end of the hall, and you should've seen the getups some of them were wearing. Of course, a lot of them were rich—in fact, some of them were very rich—and rich people just love to show off by taking frivolous things like Halloween costume parties to ridiculous extremes. It's part of the basic responsibility package that goes along with being wealthy. Charlie Priddle had on this incredible Dead Aristocrat outfit from the French Revolution, complete with a satin vest, a powdered wig, and this nifty fake guillotine blade embedded in the back of his neck. If they'd been giving out a prize for best costume, no question Charlie would've won it. In fact, I'll bet that's exactly what he had in mind.
Big Ed came as a gorilla—another perfect fit!—but the head part was real hot and he couldn't smoke his cigar, so he spent most of the evening walking around without it, and it was amazing how natural he looked with his real head sitting on top of that huge, hairy gorilla suit. He was with some girl in a German milkmaid outfit complete with waist-length blond braids, and she kept one of those little Lone Ranger masks over her eyes all night long. Fact is, I don't believe she was the current Mrs. Big Ed (if you catch my drift). Barry Spline just turned his white shop coat around backward so it looked sort of like a straitjacket and wore a pair of those goofy eyeballs-out-on-springs glasses you can pick up at any trick store (or even at Woolworth's around Halloween) and topped it off with some goofy plastic teeth. "Say, you supposed t'be an escaped lunatic or something?" Big Ed asked.
"Certainly bloody not," Barry told him, trying his best to talk around those stupid teeth, "I'm supposed ter be Milton Fitting!" But he had to whisper it, on account of Milton and Skippy (or was it Skippy and Milton?) were standing right behind him in a rented horse outfit. As you can imagine, there was a lot of conjecture all evening about the fight they must've had over who got the back end.
Tommy showed up wearing his old R.A.F. uniform, and you could see he was working hard at keeping a stiff upper lip and putting together a major hangover. Truth is, things were going pretty lousy for Tommy at the time. He still hadn't recovered from the accident at Watkins Glen, and even though he knew in his head it wasn't his fault, he was having a hard time getting his guts to agree. Plus he was having what looked like the end of his troubles with the wife, and the rumors circulating around the room hinted that she'd already seen a top divorce lawyer. Not to mention that the S.C.M.A. wasn't looking real likely to reverse itself about his suspension, even though everybody you talked to privately (including that tight-ass Charlie Priddle) thought it was a crock of shit. It seems the problem had nothing to do with making the proper decision in the case, but rather with reversing a decision that had already been made by the stewards of the meet and admitting that there had been a screwup in the first place. That was a hard thing for a group like the S.C.M.A. armband squad to face up to.
So Tommy had sort of changed, turning from a quick, sly, devil-may-care ex-fighter pilot who could drink all night long and never show a drop of it into a melancholy loner who could drink all night and get stinking, fall-down drunk. I saw him standing over in a corner by himself, sucking up entirely too much of Carson's lethal Halloween punch (served in brown glass embalming fluid bottles that I hope had been properly cleaned for the occasion!) and I decided to bring Julie over and see if I could maybe snap him out of it. "This is Julie," I said, and Julie gave him a little curtsy. "She's kinda, um, my girl. . . ."
"Bloody pleased to meet you," he nodded, raising his fingers over his eyebrow and clumsily flopping his heels together. "I say, Buddy," he grinned, "she's a bit of all right, isn't she?"
"Yeah," I told him, snaking my arm around Julie's waist, "she sure as heck is."
"You're a bloody lucky man," he allowed, raising his glass. "A bloody lucky man indeed. If she's faithful and knows how to cook and is any bloody good in the sack at all, you ought to marry that girl."
I felt the color coming up on my face, and right away Tommy knew he was out of line and started to get all fumbly apologetic about it. "I say," he told Julie, eyeballing the floor, "I'm awfully sorry. Awfully sorry indeed." He stifled a belch. "I'm afraid I've had a bit too much to drink."
I looked over at Julie and saw that everything was OK, so I decided to change the subject. "Hey, don't worry about it, Tommy," I told him, "we've all of us been hittin' the old Halloween punch pretty hard. Haven't we, Julie?"
"Yeah. Sure we have," she said, and there was a nice, soft, understanding quality to her voice.
"So, I heard you went down to that race in Georgia."
"So I did." Tommy took another slug of punch. "But not to race. Can't bloody race for another year, according to those twits on the competition committee. Funny part is, they don't appreciate all the marvelous little ironies, the most basic of which is that you can have another chap's bloody accident for him. Happens all the time." He slowly shook his head and took another snort. "If any of those bastards had any seat time, they'd bloody well understand. But oh, no. My bloody car hit the fence so I'm the one who's bloody responsible!" You could see Tommy was getting pretty worked up about it. "Those idiots on the competition committee need to look up their bloody assholes to see if their hats are on straight." Then he remembered Julie was right next to us. "Oh, um, pardon me, Julie," he said quietly, looking at the carpet. "What I meant to say is that I question their judgment. In fact," he added, starting to seethe again, "I question their bloody ancestry as well."
"So it's no soap with those guys, huh?"
Tommy shook his head. "But I'm thinking of going back to England anyway. Things have fallen apart a bit for me here, and at least I can still race over in England. Besides"—he polished off the last of Carson's embalming fluid—"who the hell wants to hang around here and race on a bunch of bloody airfields?"
"You don't like the airport races?"
"Bloody hell no!"
"But why? Everybody says how safe they are. . . ."
"Well, just look at them! They're just one bloody drag strip after another." He shook his head disgustedly. "And then it's hard on the brakes for another flat, fiddly little second-gear corner, and then another bloody drag strip after that. I mean, where's the bloody penalty? If you go off the bloody road at Elkhart or Watkins Glen, you're in some deep, deep trouble. And believe me, that's as it should be!" Then Tommy Edwards excused himself to get another refill that he hardly needed from around Carson's seemingly bottomless punch bowl.
It was sad to see Tommy like that, and it made me think about how racing could break your spirit just as surely as it could batter your body. But then, that's exactly what Tommy was talking about when he mentioned "the penalty" just seconds before. And I came to realize it was that very penalty—which could rise up at any moment with sudden, ugly finality—that was at the heart of what made racing so consuming and addictive. The good part was it didn't happen very often (if it did, then everybody involved would have to be an idiot) and the odds were that you could most likely race your whole damn life and walk away without a scratch. And many did. But the fact that the danger was out there, lurking in the shadows of the fast curves and high-speed esses, made everything that happened at a racetrack seem more Real and Noble and Urgent and Important than the rest of everyday life. No question Tommy understood it, too. He probably knew deep inside that this was simply his turn to play the victim. And, if he kept at it, most likely not his last.
Creighton Pendleton and Sally Enderle were the very last to appear—fashionably late, of course—and Creighton was just wearing h
is powder blue driving suit with CREIGHTON PENDLETON III embroidered over the pocket and his racing helmet dangling oh-so-casually by his side. He took pains to explain as how "a costume party is where you get to dress up as what you'd really like to be, and I guess there's frankly just no one I'd rather be than who I am." Far as I was concerned, it was amazing he could get that head of his into the damn helmet. Naturally, Sally went the whole nine yards and then some, arriving in a dazzling harem girl outfit with shimmering silk pants you could pretty much see through, plenty of smooth, tan midriff showing, and about six pounds of glistening gold necklaces, waist chains, and earrings. I got kind of embarrassed about being in the same room with both her and Julie at the same time, and I could feel my ears starting to burn when she headed over in our direction. But she swept right past us like we were a couple uncomfortable folding chairs on her way to the punch bowl, so it came out all right after all.