Time Out for Bonding

Spending a couple of nights in a Holiday Inn Express for a weekend of NASCAR races is not exactly the most popular form of teenage entertainment in the Northeast suburbs. But my son Steve is a 15-year-old hooked on NASCAR, so off we’ll go. But Steve has other plans as well, a movie with friends before we depart Friday eve.

His mother’s concern, it seems, is does dad have enough sleep in him to make the drive down to Chestertown, MD, our hotel locale, leaving about 9 or thereabouts. Mapquest says the drive should take 1 hour, 52 minutes. Total estimated distance: 90.85 miles. Shouldn’t be a problem. So what if I’m usually in bed reading some book or magazine by 9:30. So what it’s too damn bad Steve is three months short of being able to drive. My problem could well be reading the small print and numbers on the map, in the dark, with squinting eyes and no GPS. Where the hell’s Chesterton anyway?

It’s where the closest hotel exists that I could find for the Big Dover Monster Mile weekend. If the room didn’t cost $200 a night, I’d have cancelled Friday night and driven straight to the track Saturday for the afternoon Busch Series race. In fact, Steve asked if we could do just that a couple of nights ago. Alas, too late. Past the cancellation deadline.

So this compromise. Steve gets to go to the movies with who? Whom? A girlfriend? A gang? It’s a mystery, of course.

“Ready to go, Steve?” mom asks. To the movies, that is. “I’ll take him,” she says. “It’s a mom thing.”

I just wonder, has Steve done any packing whatsoever for the weekend? “No, I was going to do it while he was at the movies,” says his dutiful mom.

OK. I think I’ll just sit in the rocker here and have a couple bourbons. Don’t worry about a couple of shots of Kentucky’s finest. First, it’ll kill some time. Two, I’ll shower before we leave. And I’ll take a jumbo cup of java from Wawa before we try to find Chestertown.

“Choppa, choppa,” yells mom. “We gotta go. Movie’s almost starting?”

Just wait. Daughter Kate is showing me how download a ringtone for my new cellphone. Elvis’s “Suspicious Minds.” “C’mon, let’s go,” yells mom. The car’s running.

Just wondering. How’s Steve getting back from the movie?

“That’ll be figured out later,” says mom. Figured out later. It’s like a mantra.

One more act of practicality before hitting the Kentucky firewater. Call the reservation desk down in Chestertown. “Looks like we won’t be rolling in ‘til about 11:30 tonight. Just want to be sure we’ll have a room.” “Yessir. Your reservation’s guaranteed.” “Thanks.”

We pull out from the driveway about 9:30 pm. Steve climbs in the back seat to “chill” about 9:40. Around 10 three lanes on I-95 merge into one and it’s a crawl. On the tape deck Paul Simon sings about his nine-year-old traveling companion from his first marriage going to Graceland with him. Steve toured Graceland once. He might have seven or eight. Other than Elvis’s Jungle Room, all Steve wanted to know is “when’s this tour over?”

“Is this it?” he asks when we pull into the Holiday Inn Express about 11:30 pm. “How come you kept stalling out all the time?” Got a new clutch put in and yeah, it was touchy and I drove it like a teenager.

“All right if I take a whiz here?” Steve asks, hopping out of the car. What is it about young males pissing wherever they feel like it? I whizzed off the side of Jersey Turnpike one time in rush hour so who am I to tell him to hold it in?

“You do snore a lot, dad,” the boy says next morning upon rising. “Good thing you brought your earplugs.”

Steve does geometry homework, God bless him, and I drive and check out Chestertown, Maryland. It’s Eastern Shore rural upscale you could say. We’ll miss the diesel tractor pull this afternoon. Dollar discount stores in strip malls ring the downtown village green that’s circled by brick sidewalks. Then there the street, Philosopher’s Terrace, Idiot’s Books, an Intuitive Gardens service, “Unwind your mind” with a Swedish Deep Tissue therapist, and a farm house with pond going for $3 million from Select Realty.

Says a middle-aged woman in a wide-brim straw hat sipping coffee outside Play It Again, Sam: “In the evening we all sit around an parse over the news and have a glass of wine and fall asleep.”

OK, enough parsing, let’s go racing. Steve and I cruise past cornfields, yard sales and large rain puddles. I decide to ask him about last night’s movie. “What did you see?” “The Bourne movie.” “Not with girls, did you, that’s not a chick flick.” He smiles. “I don’t think you know who they are?” “They who, the girls?” He smiles.
This is delicate, dicey territory with a 15-year-old. “Can I get a name? Of the girl you went with.” “Mackenzie.” Ah, how far to venture? “She play sports, music? What’s she do out of school?” “She plays soccer.”

The inquisition shall end there. This is a road trip, not a torture trip. Thirteen yellow flags slow the RoadLoans.com 200 Busch Series race until almost the sun sets on Saturday afternoon. The Dover Raceway is maybe one-third full for this “B” series race. We catch dinner at a nearby TGIF Friday’s on Route 13 and get back to the hotel to watch three hours of college football on the Vizio flat screens. Good games. Kentucky 41, Arkansas 29. Georgia 26, Alabama 23, OT. Wisconsin 17, Iowa. 13.

Along the way, in the dark flatlands, Steve asks some hard questions: “(Since the race is in Delaware) What does DuPont make?” “How do you think we will get out of the Iraq war?” He answers that one himself: “There is no easy way to get out of a war, is there?”

Sunday the raceway is jammed with 120,000 fans. I wear an AC Milan Italian soccer league jersey to see if even one motor head in 120,000 know their soccer. Turns out two do: “AC Milan sucks!” yells one. The other, shirtless, eyes glazed, leaving after the racing, blurts, “Is that a soccer shirt? I always get lost at this point coming out of races.” He is, as kids would say, way lost.

Steve and I barely speak to each other during the race. For one thing, it’s so frickin’ loud. And we’re the equivalent of 15 stories up, a good 150 feet above the track. Plus the crowd around you at a NASCAR race is always entertaining. Steve calls it a traveling circus. I say it’s like a state fair fueled by beer, great quantities of beer. Two wide-assed guys sit in front of us. One’s tee shirt reads, “The Beer’s Prayer — Our lager, which art in barrel…” The other’s displays the Periodic Table of Fish Lures & Flies” in great detail. To the left of them sits a fellow with a black Mohawk, so black it’s got to be dyed.

We save our race analysis for the ride home. Steve does some English homework with one of the inside lights on. Mostly we play old hip hop cassette tapes of mine, but Steve, the iPod download boy, has trouble with retro tape player technology. He can’t figure how to insert a cassette, but he can set the correct time on my cell phone in maybe a minute. Would’ve taken me an hour.

Nearing home around 8:30 pm I need some loud tunes to fight the weekend fatigue factor setting in. Steve looks at my tape collection from the late ‘90s and hasn’t a clue what to play. “I got one for you.” It’s the Stones’ “Get yer Ya’s Ya’s Out,” recorded in Madison Square Garden November 27th and 28th, 19 frickin’ 69. My god, 38 years ago, 22 years before Steve was born. I talk about Keith Richards’ Swiss blood transfusions and the driving brilliance of Charlie Watts and the blues, how the Stones listened to the blues in their formative years. “I remember going to blues concerts with your mom. You know, blues fans are like NASCAR fans. Different. Strange looking longhairs and bikers. I’d say, ‘Where are these people during the week? You don’t see ‘em at the mall.’ Like NASCAR fans.”

Ah, there’s so much more to lecture on about the Stones, Delta Blues, Chicago Blues, Muddy Waters. Willie Dixon. “Where’s the House of Blues?” asks Steve. But I stop. When I was 15, I wasn’t musing over music made 22 years ago in 1933. Not Duke Ellington , not Louis Armstrong, not yet. “It’s a pretty good album,” says Steve of “Yer Ya’s Ya’s.” We’ll leave it at that. When bonding, like many things, it’s what you don’t say sometimes that helps cement the bond.