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Puffy, plasticky packages of Doggie Depends stocked in the pantry. I’m sure Denny would get me one of those little wagons I’ve seen on the streets,
I’ve seen it on TV. A documentary I saw about Mongolia, of all places. It was the best thing I’ve ever seen on television, other than the 1993 Grand Prix of Europe, of course, the greatest automobile race of all time in which Ayrton Senna proved himself to be a genius in the rain.
After this happens, Denny will be free to live his life, and I will return to earth in a new form, as a man, and I will find him and shake his hand and comment on how talented he
It’s one of my favorites. The racetrack is dry for the pace lap, and then just after the green flag is waved, indicating the start of the race, there is a wall of rain, a torrential downpour that engulfs the track, and all the cars around him spin out of control into
Schumacher, Wendlinger, Hill, Prost—and he passed them all.
Denny is as good as Ayrton Senna. But no one sees him because he has responsibilities. He has his daughter, Zoë, and he had his wife, Eve, who was sick until she died,
he does before he sleeps each night. Brushing and squirting and splashing. So many things. People and their rituals. They cling to things so hard sometimes.
never knew my father. The people on the farm told Denny that he was a shepherd-poodle mix,
Everyone knows that shepherds and poodles aren’t especially smart. They’re responders and reactors, not independent thinkers.
I’m sure my father was a terrier. Because terriers are problem solvers.
In order to reach any kind of success in automobile racing, a driver must never remember.
great champion Julian SabellaRosa has said, “When I am racing, my mind and my body are working so quickly and so well together, I must be sure not to think, or else I will definitely make a mistake.”
Denny moved me far from the farm in Spangle, to a Seattle neighborhood called Leschi
Why can’t they see that spiritualism and science are one? That bodies evolve and souls evolve and the universe is a fluid place that marries them both in a wonderful package called a human being.
My nails grew too long and scratched the wood floor; she frequently attended to her nails with sticks and clippers and polishes to make sure they were the proper shape and size.
Eve
body that can carry an entire creature inside. (I mean, other than a tapeworm, which I’ve had. That doesn’t count as another life, really. That’s a parasite and should never have been there in the first place.)
remember the day the baby arrived. I had just reached adulthood—two years by calendar count.
Endurance racing is not for the meek. Four drivers each spending six hours behind the wheel of a loud, powerful, challenging, and expensive race car is an exercise in coordination and determination.
Daytona
else. I could provide something of need to the people around me. I could comfort Eve when Denny was away. I could protect Eve’s baby.
From the moment they arrived, the Twins had been admonishing Eve for having her baby at home.
He stuffed it when a Daytona Prototype—a much faster car—was overtaking. First rule of racing: Never move aside to let someone pass; make him pass you.
To Zoë, I said to myself. Whom I will always protect.
My nose—yes, my little black nose that is leathery and cute—could smell the disease in Eve’s brain long before even she knew it was there.
he had just taught me. Such a simple concept, yet so true: that which we manifest is before us; we are the creators of our own destiny. Be it through intention or ignorance, our successes and our failures have
When a driver reacts, Denny says, it’s important to remember that a car is only as good as its tires. If the tires lose traction, nothing else matters. Horsepower, torque, braking.
Thus, the spin in one direction, when overcorrected, becomes a spin in the other direction, and the secondary spin is much faster and more dangerous.
carefully took stock of the situation and understood these things: Eve was ill, and the illness was possibly affecting her judgment, and she likely would not return for me; Denny would be home on the third day, after two nights.
When he denied dogs the use of thumbs, he gave them the ability to survive without food for extended periods.
“I love you, boy,” he said. “And I promise I’ll never do that again. No matter what. I’m really sorry.” He was blathering, he was drunk. But it made me feel so much love for him, too.
These are things that only dogs and women understand because we tap into the pain directly, we connect to pain directly from its source, and so it is at once brilliant and brutal
Like in the Luxembourg Grand Prix in 1989, when the Irish racer Kevin Finnerty York finished the race victoriously and later revealed that he had driven the final twenty laps of the race with only two gears!
Demon. Gremlin. Poltergeist. Ghost. Phantom. Spirit. Shadow. Ghoul. Devil.
The smaller cousin of the raven, they are resentful and angry, bitter at being genetically dwarfed by their brothers.
race car driver must be very selfish. It is a cold truth: even his family must come second to the race.
For Denny, the results of the race were very much the same as the first: spilled fuel that resulted in a stop-and-go penalty, costing Denny a lap. Thirtieth place.
For instance, adrenaline has a very specific odor, which is not so much smelled but tasted. I know a person can’t understand that concept, but that’s the best way to describe it:
Zoë grabbed her mother and held tight, which unleashed a flood of tears from both of them, and they were joined by Denny, who hovered over them like a firefighting helicopter, dumping his bucket of tears on the fire.
felt bad for Zoë: all she’d had to do was say that the nuggets didn’t taste right, and this incident would have been avoided.
Your car goes where your eyes go. Simply another way of saying that which you manifest is before you.
“You’re scaring the dog,” Trish pointed out. She rarely called me by name. They do that in prisoner of war camps, I’ve heard. Depersonalization.
in Laguna in early June, he pegged a podium finish—third place—at Road Atlanta, and he finished eighth in Denver.
This is a rule of racing: No race has ever been won in the first corner; many have been lost there.
new category. There’s DNS: Did Not Start. There’s DNF: Did Not Finish. And there’s DFL: Dead Fucking Last.
did, too. Everything about the track. The sounds, the smells. Walking through the paddock and feeling the energy, the heat of race motors emanating from each pit.
People, like dogs, love repetition. Chasing a ball, lapping a course in a race car, sliding down a slide. Because as much as each incident is similar, so it is different.
“You probably have a minor concussion,” Denny said. “But they should check it out.”
In Mongolia, when a dog dies, he is buried high in the hills so people cannot walk on his grave. The dog’s master whispers into the dog’s ear his wishes that the dog will return as a man in his next life. Then his tail is cut off and put beneath his head, and a piece of meat or fat is placed in his mouth to sustain his soul on its journey; before he is reincarnated, the dog’s soul is freed to travel the land, to run across the high desert plains for as long as it would like.
People, if you pay attention to them, change the direction of one another’s conversations constantly. It’s like having a passenger in your car who suddenly grabs the steering wheel and turns
Zoë stuck with the Twins, Eve sick in a hospital, me shuttled off like a foster child. And now my dog, washed clean of smell.
Eve stayed in the hospital for a long time. Weeks. Because there was so much for Denny to do, caring for both me and Zoë,
