Loving is in the Slipstream
I lay in the hospital bed sipping water through a straw after an ‘incident’ while motor racing, and ponder, what is it; what is the rush I get from racing cars? It began back when a child, fixing up ‘bogeys’ to race in the street, using a plank of wood, some old pram wheels found at the dump, the ‘Silver Cross’ model being the best, a wooden orange box taken from the back of Mr. Puddifoot’s grocery store, a few nails, a hammer, and hopefully, the day of the race, a fearless spirit. I always had this desire to light up my hair.
After I came out of surgery, the surgeon told my wife I’d been lucky. Clearly, he knew very little about my life, for he might have said, "Your husband continues to be lucky."
I always had an unnatural talent for taking apart anything mechanical and assembling it in a different format. Having removed the wheels from the Silver Cross pram, I attached them to a half-inch thick axle rod and assembled that onto a foot-wide, four-foot-long plank of wood. The finishing touch was to paint flames on the side of the cockpit, ‘go faster flames,’ we called them.
The big race was on Sunday. Halfway down Haste Hill, it occurred to me this could end badly. Even so, there was something, some feeling. There were no brakes on my racing bogey. Billy Harrison, the school bully, was going to be looking at the back of my head, so whatever happens at the bottom of the hill will happen, but Billy Harrison will finish behind me. That is for sure.
That feeling never left me, never dimmed, never will.
Later, in scorching steel wrapped inside a roll cage, I lived to experience the limits of hot rubber adhesion. In my mind, I make unsought decisions on chance, and with lips of clay, pass the green flag, turning into corners where ghosts applaud, telling me I’m not dead, that the thirst in my throat, the force against my body, the suffocating heat within the hideous heart of factory built precision, is all part of an endurance examination. The kiss of Caiaphas hangs in my slipstream. There’s no time to think about love; I think about the prospect of rain, four-second wheel changes in a stone valley called pit lane; I think about the crystals of information, fuel, tyre heat, angle of the airfoil, and thousandth of seconds…not love, not compassion, not life itself.
So, lying prone, swollen, broken, the woman who owns my heart stands next to my bedside, and what she says is profound.
“I know you, and have loved you since you first appeared in my life. You can’t know how much you’ve guided my love, inspired my spirit, and calmed my soul — you are my safe place. So please, I beg you. It’s time to promise me. Enough, now. Enough.”
And I looked at her a long time before I answered.
