I had my binoculars still trained on Hooker, and I watched him sail under the checkered flag, a car length behind Bonnano.
“Wahoo, lookit me,” Hooker sang out. “I’m second. I came in second.”
“Very funny,” I told him. “Just try to control yourself and don’t hit anyone in the face when you get out of the car.”
The radio went dead, so I packed up and turned to leave and realized Gobbles was still at the rail.
“You don’t mind if I walk down with you, do you?” Gobbles asked. “I don’t want to go down alone.”
We took the elevator to ground level, and we fought our way through the crowd exiting the stands. Ordinarily I’d cut across the track, but Gobbles wasn’t looking great, so I hitched us a ride on a golf cart that was going back to the infield. I squished Gobbles in as the third man on a two-man rear seat and kept watch to see that he didn’t faint and fall out of the cart.
The track has golf carts, the teams have golf carts, the sponsors have golf carts, and the drivers have golf carts. Some times the golf carts are generic little white jobs and sometimes the golf carts are souped up and custom painted. Hooker’s golf cart matched his motor coach and traveled to each race with the coach. At the start of the season, when I was involved with Hooker, I had had the use of his golf cart. After the salesclerk incident, I didn’t feel comfortable using the cart and gave Hooker back his keys. Looking at it in retrospect, I probably should have kept the keys. Just because you’re no longer sleeping with a guy doesn’t mean you can’t use his golf cart, right?
We took the tunnel under the track and came out into the infield. The deep rumble of stock cars had been replaced with the wup wup wup of helicopters passing overhead, transporting people back to Miami. On race day, helicopters start arriving early in the morning, a new bird touching down every few minutes, dumping celebrities, captains of industry, NASCAR family members, and sometimes sponsors into the infield, repeating the drill throughout the day and reversing the operation late into the night.
“Where are you going now?” Gobbles asked me. “Are you going to Hooker’s hauler?”
“No. I want to watch the sixty-nine go through in spection.”
“You think there’s something fishy about the sixty-nine?”
“Yes. Don’t you?”
“I surely do,” Gobbles said. “And this isn’t the only race where I thought that. And now that I seen them two guys talkin’ to Ray Huevo, I’m getting real bad vibes. I can’t tell you more than that on account of like I said before, I’m in a tight spot. Problem is, they inspected that sixty-nine car before and never found anything.”
The drill was that Spanky would do a burnout for the fans and then drive the 69 into Victory Lane for pictures. When the photo op was over, NASCAR would commandeer the car for inspection and testing, along with the other top five cars and a couple more chosen at random. By the time the 69 got to the garage, NASCAR would already have rolled it through the scales and measured its height and weight. Once it was in the garage, fuel would be drawn, ignition boxes taken out and cut apart, the engine heads removed, gears checked, cylinders measured, and shocks examined.
When you watch a car get stripped down and tested, it’s hard to believe anyone would try to cheat. And even harder to believe they’d get away with it. And yet almost everyone tries at one time or another.
If you’ve got an experienced crew, the entire exercise takes about ninety minutes. The carcass of the car after it’s been picked clean is then loaded into the hauler, along with the backup car, and brought back to the shop in North Carolina where it’ll get rebuilt for another race.
Gobbles stayed glued to my side while I stood at a distance and watched the 69 get taken apart.
“I never watched this whole inspection thing,” Gobbles said. “The team’s always in a hurry to leave. I never got a chance to do this.”
I looked back at the line of haulers. The YumYum car hauler was ready to go, motor running. I didn’t see any of Gobbles’s team.
“You’re looking like a man without a country,” I said to him.
“Yeah, I should have met up with everybody at the van a while ago, but I got business to do. Not that I really want to do it. Anyways, I was hoping to take care of it here, only it don’t seem to be happening. I guess I need to take off.” Gobbles gave me a hug. “I appreciate your being a friend and all.”
“Be careful.”
“I’m trying,” Gobbles said, walking off toward media parking.
Fifteen minutes later, when it was obvious nothing illegal was going to turn up on the 69, I headed for the drivers’ lot.
I found Hooker’s motor coach, opened the door, and yelled to Hooker, “Are you decent?”
“Guess that’s a matter of opinion,” Hooker said.
Hooker was showered and dressed in jeans and a ratty T-shirt and was watching cartoons with Beans, his newly adopted Saint Bernard. Beans gave an excited woof when he saw me, launched himself off the couch, and caught me midchest with his two massive front paws. I went flat on my back with Beans on top, giving me lots of slurpy Saint Bernard kisses.
Hooker pulled Beans off and looked down at me. “Wish I’d had the guts to do that.”
“Don’t start. I’m not in a good mood.”
Hooker yanked me to my feet, I went straight to the refrigerator, and I got a Bud. I put it to my forehead and then I took a long pull. Every driver’s fridge is filled with Bud because first thing in the morning, the Bud beer fairy arrives and leaves a fresh delivery on the motor-coach doorstep. I stayed in an economy hotel six miles away with the rest of the crew and the Bud beer fairy didn’t go there.