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The mouth feels as if someone poured in a half cup of baby powder, dry, yet sticky. The straps are tight over the shoulders, almost cutting into the skin. They join down in the middle of the stomach, with a latchover lever designed to be opened by a rescue worker. Behind the latch is a thick leather plate meant to keep the belts from cutting the body in two. The suit is medium blue fireproofed cotton, with a navy blue "Dunlop" logo, for the tyre company that made the racing tyres. The interior had been stripped of all fabrics and headliner, and painted flat white, to better spot lost tools or an oil leak. A small, red fire extinguisher was next to the driving seat, with the passenger's seat removed.
The dry mouth continues as a very fat man walked out in front of the block of forty cars,sitting with motors shut off in the brutal heat. He carried a green flag in his pudgy right hand,rolled up tightly. Forty sets of eyeballs watched his every move as he turned and faced the mass of multicoloured cars. He did not smile. Then, he raised the green flag over his head, and with a curious motion, he moved it in a circular movement, as if he was stirring up a hornet's nest, which he was.
Forty racing motors roared into life at that signal, and hearing individual noises stopped, and a rising, rasping howl blocked all out. The dry mouth cried out for icewater that would never come. The fat man turned and walked away down the track, his back to the howling metal mass of danger.holding the flag downward in his right hand, pointed toward the hot ,reeking asphalt, SUDDENLY he pirouetted around.and with an oddly agile, ballet-like leap, he whipped the green flag up over his head, and around in a giant circle. He vanished, as the left foot shot the clutch out, with the right foor simultaneously mashing flat the gas pedal. No thought possible in the tearing, roaring mass of metal , blasting from a frenzied halt, to maximum everything in a microsecond. Forty containers of mortal flesh jockeyed for position with only inches separating them, and sometimes no inches as paint was scraped from fenders and doors.in the midst of the maniacal din.
Up the hill, and to the right,then lef tas the hill was crested at full speed, then third gear,at the tachometer showed maximum engine power. Down the green ,tree-lined front straight away then fourth gear.top speed.held.with right foot
rigid on the .gas .pedal .other cars crossing .right in front of the windshield at 130mph in a tiny tin box, called an Austin-Cooper,Type"S" [my car]. Not the sort of thing that the average Sunday driver would call fun................But, we did.
Later, that night we danced with pretty girls, in a wonderful rustic lodge by a long, beautiful lake, and drank much,and told lies about our day, all in good humour, as we tried to forget the man whose head had flown through the air, parting in midair from the helmet, like some horrible pad of lining material,but was actually a real head [I saw it] for his wife to take home in the box the doctor put it in ,at the site of the crash, where the seatbelt had the wrong nuts on the bolts, somehow, and the side of the door snipped the head off as the car rolled. Yes, we never spoke of that, and we danced the night away in the crisp Fall night at the village of Watkins Glen,in upstate New York. Yes, some called it fun.
THE END
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