Back in 1979, I was commuting to college. I was attending Pratt
Institute in Brooklyn and living about 20 miles away in New Jersey.
Prior to transferring to Pratt (from the University of Southern
California - what the hell was I thinking?) I'd bought a new Pontiac
Trans Am (what the hell was I thinking?). A silver one with the
screaming chicken on the hood, and a red velour interior.
Well,
if you know anything about the condition of Manhattan and Brooklyn
pavement, you'll know that a low-slung T/A won't survive too long. In 3
months of commuting across Canal Street, I lost 2 mufflers, dented the
oil pan, and had 2 radios stolen from the “guarded” school parking lot.
By December, it was apparent I needed to buy something that would survive at least until my sophomore year.
It started innocently enough. A nice bright red and white Chevy full size K5 Blazer with a 350 V8.
Now
in today's climate, where every soccer mom is driving some sport ute
that's as cushy as any luxo-mobile, Chevy Blazers don't even raise an
eyebrow. But in 1979, any car guy worth his salt knew that a stock
truck is like a blank canvas, awaiting its masterpiece.
So I began painting.
Fast
forward 2+ years and several thousand dollars. The truck now rides on
44″ monster mudder tires. The suspension has been lifted 8″ into the
sky. There's an array of lights atop the roof and on the bumper that
could light a little league field. There's enough stereo wattage to
deafen passersby, cause old people to shake their canes and send
children scurrying. There's a supercharger poking through the hood and
an exhaust note that makes Harley riders cringe.
The truck has become known as The Beast.
This
is the perfect Urban Assault vehicle. It looked Big and Bad and it
handled any pothole New York could throw at it. The thieves stayed away
from it, thinking it was owned by some crazy white-supremacist
good-ol'-boy, and that was fine by me. Even cabbies backed down and
shied away.
So one fine Spring Break, my best friend Milo and I
decide to take the Beast on a Road Trip. We've made plenty of
long-distance treks to Watkins Glen and Lime Rock for camping and car
races before, but this time we'd be heading South.
We loaded the Beast with camping gear, my bicycle (more on that later), some firewood, and lots and lots of beer.
Lots of beer.
Our
first stop was in Washington DC, where our friend Lon was
pre-medicating at GWU. We spent the night carousing in D.C. Then headed
to see some girls we'd known since high school at University of
Virginia. Our timing was perfect, as UVa has a tradition called
“Easters” that culminated in a 100-keg party on their athletic fields.
It too, needless to say, was fun.
From there we started the long drive to our ultimate destination, Road Atlanta for the IMSA races.
We
arrived around dinnertime, found a nice patch of Georgia clay to set
camp upon, and commenced to drinking and getting to know the neighbors.
It was a nice evening, and as it was still light out, I decided to take
a bike ride around the track. For the uninitiated, Road Atlanta is a
2.54 mile road course that undulates through the hills of northern
Georgia. It's one of the more historic and scenic courses in the US.
So
I pop the front wheel on my 10-speed road bike, and head out onto the
track, which is open for bikes and pedestrians after the day's
racing/practice is done. I'd seen races from Road Atlanta on TV, and
seen pictures of the famous “Esses,” which is a fast set of nasty
uphill (very uphill) squiggles that has separated the men from the boys
for years. I decided it'd be easier to head down to Esses, rather than
labor up them near the end of my lap, at the top of which we were
camped.
Now on TV, one's perception of the Esses is that they're 100 yards long and maybe a 40 foot elevation change.
Um, no.
I
crested the top of the Esses and headed down the hill, which I quickly
realized was about 1/3 mile long and must have had what looked like a
10 story drop. The bike picked up speed as I tucked down over the
handlebars. The track was clear, the sun was setting to the West, and
the warm air roaring past my un-helmeted noggin was a giving me a rush.
About halfway down, though, I felt a vibration in the bars. Now
traveling at probably 30 mph, (did I mention I was wearing cut-off
shorts and a ratty t-shirt?) I looked down at my front fork. Now the
bars aren't just vibrating. They're doing a full-tilt wobble, and
through my blurred vision, I can see that the clamp that actually holds
the wheel on the fork is hanging loose, swinging back and forth in time
with the wobble. The only thing keeping the wheel attached to the bike
frame is the weight of the bike and myself. I fleetingly think that if
I hit even the slightest bump, the frame will just jump off the axle
and I'll be doing a full road-rash face plant, mixing a fair amount of
my carcass into the tarmac of Road Atlanta's famous Esses.
Somehow,
counter-instinctively, I leaned forward to put as much weight on the
front fork as possible, and then laid on the rear brake, which I could
hear screaming beneath me. The bike finally…finally!… ground to a
halt. I put my feet down, and by now my legs were wobbling as badly as
the handlebars had been shortly before. I was sweating like a rancid
piece of pork in the sun, and all I could think of was how badly I
needed to ride all the way back up the hill and drink a bunch of beer
to calm my nerves.
Luckily, by the time I returned Milo had
gotten the fire started, so I grabbed a cold one out of the cooler and
gulped it like a man staggering in to the oasis. I spent the next
little while regaling Milo, and some of our neighbors of my near-death
experience, and we pondered how different our trip would have turned
out had I been scraped to a bloody pulp. (We determined that Milo would
have had to drink all the beer himself).
The next day, we spent
watching IMSA cars practicing for the race on Sunday. On Saturday
evening, I took the Beast for a trip to the nearby 7-11 for supplies,
and when I returned to the camping area, I decided to take a drive
around to check out all the other campsites. I was toodling along (if
one can toodle in a 9-foot high truck with a blower whining through the
hood) when a shortish, shirtless bearded guy wearing cut-off shorts, a
chewed-up straw cowboy hat and mud-caked, virtually untied work boots
comes running out in front of the truck to flag me down, spilling the
can of Bud he's carrying as he waves. I stop the truck, and runs over
to the window.
“Ya'll wanna git in a pull-off!?” he yells, belching furiously.
“Huh? A what?” I reply.
“A
pull-off, man! You know, with yer truck and mine!” He points to a
mid-70s pickup with a cap on the back. I finally realize what he means.
A
pull-off is basically a tug-of-war between two vehicles, with a hefty
chain attached securely to the frames of the two contestants. You draw
a line between the two, yell “Go!” and whoever pulls the other
backwards over the line wins.
“Um, I dunno man.” I demure, “I'm a thousand miles from home and if I bust something it's gonna be a tough time getting back.”
“Aw c'mon man! Where's yer Yankee Pride?”
Well,
I don't know if it was the beer, or somewhere deep down, the New York
Jewboy in me does actually possess actual Yankee Pride, but damn, if
something didn't snap inside me.
“Well, whatcha got under the hood of that thing?” I ask.
“Big block. 454. Mostly stock.”
Hmmm.
Mostly stock? That could mean anything. I know, even stock, it's gonna
have me in the torque department, but with the blower, my small block
was cranking over 400 ponies, so it might be interesting, even from
just an engineering standpoint (yeah right).
I say, “Let me go fetch my co-pilot, and I'll be back in 5 minutes.”
I
drive over to get Milo, who's dozing in the tent. I jump on him and
yell, “C'mon Milo! We're gonna do a pull off with The Beast!” He's
groggy and confused, so I hurriedly explain the deal to him as he
staggers to the truck and we drive back to our Redneck buddies.
When
we arrive, our man has got his truck out in a clearing, with a hefty
iron chain about 20 feet long laid out behind it. I back The Beast up
so the trucks are about 10 feet apart, tail-to-tail. We both hook the
chain up around the framerails. Then we look at each other, smile, and
walk around the trucks. We walk to front of his truck, and I say,
“Lessee what you got under there.” So he pops the hood, and he's got
pretty much what he described. I basically stock rat motor with a
Holley 1050 carb and some cheap headers. We walk to the front of the
Beast and I show him the blown small block, even after 1000 miles,
still pretty shiny and intimidating-looking, especially with the
compressor whining and sucking above the engine din.
Now
sometimes, these pull-offs are done in dramatic style, where the two
combatants back up to where their back bumpers are virtually touching.
When the signal is given, they both punch their rides to the floor 10
feet later the front wheels fly up into the air as the chain snaps
taut, and the drive trains give great heaving kachonk! sounds as they
strain against each other.
In this case, since both of us still
needed to actually make sure we'd be able to get home, we idled the
trucks until the chain was taut between us. Just for irony, I cranked
on the stereo and began blasting Lynrd Skynrd's Sweet Home Alabama, and
the crowd that had now gathered started whooping and hollering. I
looked in the rear view mirror, and my opponent was giving me a thumbs
up sign. Milo and a friend of our buddy stood aside our trucks and
counted down from 5. When their hands dropped, I nailed the pedal
through the floor, and The Beast started spinning all four monster
tires furiously. I could see and hear mud being thrown off the ground,
slapping on the sides of The Beast, and onto the back of the pickup
behind me at a prodigious rate. I thought it was strange that he wasn't
tossing up any mud, but neither of us was moving much, forward or back.
This went on, with me sawing the steering wheel like a madman, trying
to find some traction, but The Beast just throwing mud and sliding left
or right along with my steering input. After about a minute, with about
200 crazed drunken racing fans screaming and jumping up and down, I
looked in my rearview and my opponent was making the cut-off sign. I
eased off the gas, and then backed the truck up a few feet to slacken
the chain.
I climbed down out of the driver seat and as soon as
I hit the ground, my opponent came running up to me whooping like a
good-ol' boy that he was, laughing and a-hollering. We gave a great big
bear hug and he handed me a Bud, and Milo handed him a greenie, and we
toasted each other for the fun we'd just had. We walked back to the
chain, which had not traveled in either direction. The flag tied to the
middle was resting right on the now half-buried gash we'd scraped
between the trucks to mark as the starting center line.
Basically,
his tires had just dug in, and his motor held ground through it's sheer
torque. My monster tires clawed for grip as my mouse motor chucked
every bit of horsepower it had, but neither of us could budge the other
an inch. We called it a draw, and we walked around the trucks laughing
at their now-wholly red mud covered flanks. I vowed not to wash The
Beast until all that Georgia clay had a chance to visit the streets of
Brooklyn.
That night we drank around the campfire with our new
good ol' boy buddies, and we went home knowing we had upheld the honor
of our Yankee Pride.