Life at the speedway is a world of its own
A mere fence is all that stands between the rubber-smudged oval track and the modern-day Roman spectators sitting atop their parked chariots, eating boiled peanuts and drinking Natural Light. Here on the other side of the fence, removed from the gladiatorial battleground of speeding metal, are the bulldozed fringes of the Greenville-Pickens Speedway backstretch.
This is where the true chaos and bedlam is.
Where pick 'em ups are jacked to the heavens, where Public Displays of Affection are very public and very affectionate, where the sober and the drunken co-exist in a distinct kind of tailgating symbiosis.
Here where parked vehicles are portable bleachers, the scent of venison grilled over an open flame mixed with the distinct odor of racing fuel makes for an exotic cocktail.
It's opening night at the speedway, the first day of spring, a fitting beginning to what is already an abrupt, loud, unpredictable season.
There's an explosion of noise as all manner of stock cars — late model, super, charger, renegade — flash by in warm-ups. (The roar is outdone only by Mother Nature's thunderous wash-out later in the evening.)
Somebody heard tell that pro wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin is in the pit tonight, but the rumor is quickly quashed: "Maaaan, he ain't down there," a voice of temperance retorts.
For if the champion of all that is rugged and cantankerous would set up shop anywhere, it would be here along the backstretch.
Certainly not across the way in the grandstands, where the spectators who arrived in Camrys, Aerostars and Beamers are encamped.
And not down inside the oval, filled with critics whose attention is transfixed on the strategies of speed and maneuvering.
"There's a little bit of everybody," says Edward Parker, who builds decks during the day and on warm Saturday nights mans the admission gate, where he meets church groups, lawyers, real estate agents, convenience store clerks and any manner of folk who claim no status.
This gate is its own entity, a collecting point where Abercrombie & Fitch meets camouflage jacket, Michelob Ultra meets Busch, Outkast meets … well, Outkast isn't here to meet anybody.
A middle-aged woman with teased hair rolls up crooning Kid Rock, adding forceful inflection to make sure everyone around her knows that she "saw your picture today/sat down and cried todaaaaay-hey-ay-ay-yah."
Will she head to the grandstands? Or will she cast her lot on the backstretch, where others might be more willing to join in her song?To immerse yourself in the more-carnal aspects of the speedway, you must drive your stake into the hallowed ground of the backstretch, where, Parker says, nothing is really weird because … everything is a little weird.
It's here that everything is wrapped in a warm, familial sense of appropriateness, a consensus that this is the way things are done.The burnt rubber and the burnt hot dogs; the walking advertisements for Tide detergent in the guise of NASCAR gear; the looming sign with a No. 3 that serves as a monument to racing's ultimate martyr.Amid the roar and thunder, there is a place for everyone, and 'most everyone has been coming since God knows when.
Mark Price and his son, Graham, have been coming to the speedway for four years now. Graham is 4.
Graham is wearing his oversized headphones over his Dale Jarrett hat and his ears. It takes just enough edge off the intrusive shriek of mechanical muscle.His dad explains the procedures for handling a pre-schooler whose interest in cars lapping a track for hours has waned. In the van is a DVD player, where Graham will often fall asleep watching "Looney Toons."
"He likes SpongeBob Squarepants," Mark says, "but I don't have that on DVD."Graham lifts his headphones with a scowl."No, Dad, I like 88; that's Dale Jarrett's number," he says with a cherubic lisp and a "what-are-you-thinkin'?" inflection.
On days like this, SpongeBob takes a back seat … if there were one in a stock car.
From the plywood platform mounted on his truck, Randy Scott and his 10-year-old "grandbaby," Jeffrey Brooks, can see everything:
+ The boiled peanut shells they've strewn — like they always do — onto the red-dirt ground around the truck.
+ The proliferation of shining-new Thermos cooler/grills bought especially for Opening Night.+ The smiley face etched with lime green and fluorescent pink sidewalk chalk along a walkway, drawn in a tamer hour, before the roar and the smell of hot rubber took over.Scott is a roofer by trade, so his 1979 powder/primer blue Ford truck is fixed with a metal frame above the truck bed to carry any manner of roofing paraphernalia.
Atop the platform is a plywood board supported by two 2×4 planks that rest on the metal fixture, an invention tailor made for just this ritual.
It's a tradition that began when he would travel down from the Cherokee, N.C., Indian reservation where he grew up.
Scott, who now lives in West Greenville, is only two years younger than the speedway, now in its 59th year, and he's been coming since as long as he can remember.
Even when, three decades ago, he was living in Moncks Corner and each Saturday would drive up to the speedway and back to the Lowcountry that same night.
Inside the truck, a Tony Stewart racing card is wedged into the passenger-side sun blinder, and on the back window is a No. 74 sticker. It's the number on the go-cart his grandbaby used to race in Dacusville before, as Scott says, he "wore the new off of it."
It is from this lofty perch that the pair can drink in all that is the speedway, both on the track and among their own.
To walk among the crowd is to become an exhibit for the people-watchers. But exactly who is on exhibit is not for sure; the gawkers atop their metal thrones in turn become exhibitions themselves.
The backstretch is terraced into three levels, like stadium seating made of dirt — for cars.
At the highest level, the third terrace, are Don and Sheila Coleman, who like to keep themselves above the fray. Sitting in their nondescript modern trucking vehicle, the two don't make a big show of themselves. They could just as easily be watching a drive-in movie.
Tonight is quite the human spectacle (Opening Night and the Fourth of July are like that, Don says), and the couple can't see the track quite as well.
There's a trade-off here. Which will be more entertaining tonight? The show on the track or off it? You never know from Saturday to Saturday.
For the Colemans — avid race fans but not quite enough that they want to set up camp inside the oval — the off-track exhibition rarely measures up to when the "renegades" take to the track.
"You can tell who they are right away," Sheila says.
These are the amateurs, the erratic swervers, the raw newness of ultra-fast, perpetual left-hand-turn daredevilness.
They are the crashers.
Ah, yes, the crash.
Everything has its primal apex: the home-plate collision, the face-melting guitar solo, the Act III thunderclap.
Inside the oval — "in the action," as race fan Mike Doyle calls it — a collision is an intimate, visceral experience.
He's in the oval tonight, but Doyle knows the real show is on the other side of the fence. His finger points to the backstretch, where the roof dwellers hold onto their seat cushions for a truly satisfying crash."It's fun to watch the people up on the hill when there's a wreck," he says. "They go crazy, crowd the fence and hoot and holler."Up on that hill, from the truck bed of her boyfriend's 1980 Toyota — raised six feet off the ground on a virile foundation of 44-inch boggers and 11-inch suspension — Brittany Page is a connoisseur of every spectacle, both metal and human.
The drunks, the 18-year-old says, are funny, but nothing beats the crashes.
The car with the smiley face immediately comes to mind.
"Remember that smiley-face car?" Page asks her boyfriend, Tim Lollis, a racer himself at the Anderson Speedway.
"I think it was Marty Ward," he says.
"Nah, it wouldn't be Marty Ward," she says. "Anyway, the other guy hit the guy with the smiley face. He wasn't smilin' after that."
There is something good and basic about racetrack humor; irony at its most fundamental.
Out here everything is that way. Nothing is ever really complicated . Lollis, a 20-year-old delivery driver, has come here on Saturdays since he was 4, when his older cousin Rick would bring him.
He comes to one simple conclusion as he searches for the words to describe his love for the speedway, on a night like tonight, when a flannel shirt with a pack of Marlboros in the front pocket feels just right.
"I ain't havin' to carry anything," he says.
But there's something else.
It's a search deep down for something simpler, even more quintessential. Something that reaches way back into the childhood senses and never seems to change.
Then, as the cars roar past, it hits him. It's the sound.
"And …" Brittany says.
Then Tim finishes her sentence. "… The smell of the fuel."
"Uhn hunh."
