The Wake

Entering into the second hour at the monster truck rally, someone asks if the cloud of exhaust fumes and floating dirt hovering above the rally might get a person high. Checking with Alice, the biology major, she says we would be more inclined to acquire nausea, but her words fade away when the deafening roar of Martial Law, the monster truck, echoes so hard throughout the dome that our chairs vibrate, and we’re sitting in the upper deck.

But that isn’t all one experiences while attending his or her first monster truck rally, or “Monster Jam” as the children’s t-shirts refer to it. There’s dirty cigarette odor from dust interacting with gas and the swell of the engine sounds drowning out army recruitment speeches conveniently played during the Air Force monster truck’s second run through the course. No, you won’t see many Birkenstocks here.

The old west sentiment overwhelms the four of us stationed in the upper deck; it’s me, Jacob our Lit editor, Alice from S&V, and Ethan our photographer and photo editor, bravely cruising through the Metrodome, snapping away shots of the trucks and the crowd, the spilled beer and glowing green headlights that adorn the vehicles. What is this, really? A sporting event, an activity? It avoids the objectification of women, unlike the noxious “ultimate fighting” events, yet the Monster Jam maintains the primal, macho instinct to adore such destruction on a grand scale. We’re editors, paid staff of a liberal, liberal college magazine in a Democrat’s town, so we didn’t exactly fit in among the Bush ’04 bumper stickers and Polaris leather jackets, but we tried our best. Jacob and I didn’t shave, and plaid is definitely present, but was it so necessary?

Fortunately, the Monster Jam is one arena in the vast realm of public entertainment where politics don’t matter, and nobody is a being sexually objectified by parading around in their skivvies with a sign reminding people what round it is.

No, I’m as comfortable here as I would be at a war protest, and it’s because of the honesty we find in each person we talk to. What is it, Alice and I ask, that makes an event like this so exciting? One middle-aged man’s eyes grow dreamy, angled at the ceiling when he says that he can’t explain it, “there’s just something about seeing a car torn apart.” And boy is he ever right. Like when the semi-truck drags out the aging RV into the center of the dirt arena, the crowd roaring, uninhibited, and then Taz, the truck dedicated to everyone’s favorite Tasmanian devil, groans through the center of the old RV. The action sends splintering sections of fiberglass and furniture (and I think the steering wheel) into the air to pause under the heartbeat of flickering cameras, silent blue explosions, with the truck still cruising through the air beneath us until they fall in the dust together.

On break between the segments of racing and jumping trucks, they bring out a dozen or so goofy looking cars with trailers connected. “Trailer Race,” they call it, and the cars are off, waved forward from the starting line. One truck trailing a television the size of a small Honda is the first to spill, and when it does, the shattered skeleton of the TV breaks out in a cloud of dust. Following this display of beautiful destruction, an El Camino with a pick-up bed filled with what appears to be confetti swerves to avoid the aborted television and instead annihilates three posts that indicate where the track once lay. Shreds of an amputated speed-boat lie crippled and scattered throughout the dirt. A few moments later, grey smoke funnels out from the hood of a yellow car with a black “64″ spray-painted on the door. In the confusion of cars straying from the now indistinguishable track, a little guy climbs out of the window of his mangled car door. The crowd cheers as he waves his arms with pride.

Trying to ignore the irony of the announcer’s unrestrained comments suggesting the drivers’ “tremendous displays of courage,” Alice and I talk to the guy sitting behind us and his tiny kids about why they come here and what they enjoy. The guy, who looks like he’s in his late twenties, has a thin mustache and wears a black Yankees hat. Excited, he tells us it’s “all about Grave Digger,” and his children concur happily. True, Grave Digger appears to be the crowd favorite. Like seeing the Harlem Globetrotters or maybe a matador in a Spanish corrida, the idea of an underdog proves slightly irrelevant here. Grave Digger is always the winner, the legend, the hero. The deep, husky voice from the commercials we all remember is not far removed, even this high up in the nosebleed sections. A man a few rows behind us, brandishing his beer with pride, imitates the burly, belt-of-bourbon tone when he cheers for his hero, turning “Grave Digger” into a twelve-syllable groan.

Then the surge of momentum starts to wane as the semi-finals are completed, and the trucks are replaced by go-cart racers from around the state. As the figures cruise around, they are dwarfed by the massive, horrendous gods patiently waiting their turn. The young man with the Yankees cap explains what is happening next. “Freestyle jam,” he says, smiling. With this section of the event, each truck is given ninety seconds to kick as much ass as possible. The enormous jumps, which have remained untouched until now, are tainted when Taz soars off the edge of the ramp, scraping the roof of the jalopy ambulance he’s surmounting, his nose coming down hard and leaving a scar in the dirt. Then Air Force, your taxes remember, finishes off the mutilated RV as it side-swipes the obliterated skeleton.

Finally, the apex arrives. Grave Digger warms up his crowd with a long wheelie, then a few rams against some cars, which closely resemble leftovers wrapped in wrinkled tin-foil. Then it reverses back, in front of the biggest ramp. The growing crescendo of the painful engine swells, eradicating any hopes of maintaining my eardrums as the truck speeds toward the ramp. Now it’s higher than any truck yet, suspended in culmination of what our eighteen dollars paid for, sparkling from the flashes of thousands of cameras catching the moment forever. Then it lands and flips purposefully near the side of another ramp. The cheering dies away, and a mass exodus forms in direction of the windy doors at the dome.

After it takes us a half hour to get out of the parking ramp, we’re still inspired and giddy so I’m drinking whisky from the bottle in Uptown, reviewing the pictures with Ethan, when we nod to each other and he says, “This was awesome.” And I tell him, dude, I couldn’t agree more.