Thunder Road (2 page)

FOR THE FIRST few days I went hard-out looking for jobs.
Anything
would do. Cash was always short and my savings wouldn’t last long. I figured no more building sites. Tried that. I checked out a couple of office jobs: office junior and dispatch clerk – but sitting behind a desk writing wasn’t for me. Too much like school. Near the bus stop there was this big hardware shop, with a card in the window.

So I did. Started work straight away. It would do for a while until I got myself sorted. The hardware shop was one of those that expanded to become an everything shop. The hardware sections were stalked by guys who were like professional
know-alls
. I used to hear them approach someone digging through a box full of shackles, and before you knew it, they had solved their problem. They were like this about everything else too. At smoko, reading the paper, they would do the same with national issues.

The main guy was Ernie, this 60-year-old English guy who saw himself as a thinker. He would kick everyone else into action.

‘If they want their land back, well then, they should give the cars back too. And the TVs. And the telephones. Can’t just have the good bits and not the bad bits.’

‘And the rugby,’ someone else would chip in.

‘Can’t use whiteman’s magic in one place but then want the good old days somewhere else.’

‘And the TAB.’

‘I’d respect ’em if they said “fuck ’em” to the schools and the hospitals, but they don’t. They want those, thank you very much.’

‘And the Lion Red.’

‘Yeah. They wouldn’t get far then.’

It always surprised me that Joe, the old Māori fork-lift driver, didn’t say anything. He just sat there.

Sometimes young people were the new topic of discussion.

‘If they raised the drinking age back to twenty-one again….’

‘And the driver’s licence….’

‘And the school leaving age….’

‘Yeah – well, they can’t handle it. Read the paper. It says the same thing every day: “they can’t handle it”. I had my first pint when I was sixteen. My father bought it for me at the local. I was taught to drink. The kids here….’

‘They should teach them to drink in schools,’ I offered.

They all looked at me to see whether I was taking the piss, then decided I wasn’t.

‘Not such a silly idea. They do all the other jobs that the
parents
should do. Sex education … sorting out their emotional problems.’

‘We never had emotional problems.’

‘Hadn’t been invented.’

It was hard to sit there and ignore it. Not get drawn in. It was like listening to my father’s opinions. The world was falling apart, and he was the only one who knew why.

The job itself was OK. It took about a day to learn how to do 90 per cent of it. The hardest part was colour matching for people who came off the street carrying some old can that had
been under the house for ten years. Most of them seemed to think that there was one colour called cream.

A couple of days after I got the job, Devon turned up. I was beginning to think I knew all about him by this time, from his stuff in the room and what the others said about him. I hadn’t noticed his car outside, I was still lost in my ‘end of the day’ thoughts as I walked into my room and found this guy lying on my bed smoking. He was 19 too, had longish hair, olive skin and these weird green eyes. What is it about brown skin with green eyes? You can spot them from 50 yards away.

I stood there staring down at him; he reached up, offering the flat of his palm for a slap.

‘Hey man. It’s Trace, right?’ He sat up. ‘Mrs Jacques has been threatening to stick someone in this bed for three months. I thought it would be Sergei, Version Two.’

He seemed so at home lying there on my bed, like he owned the place … that blew me away. The confidence, where did it come from? He was about as tall as me, but as skinny as a rake. Lived on cigarettes and coffee.

Mrs Jacques walked past and called over her shoulder. ‘
Smoking
outside, Devon.’

He looked at me with a grin. ‘She’ll be Jakes. No jiggery pokery.’

Nothing seemed to get to him.

We wandered out onto the verandah. He offered me a smoke.

‘A stick?’

‘Thanks.’

‘So where you from?’

‘Down near Hamilton.’

‘Just came back from there. Cow country. If you can’t milk it, forget it.’

‘What were you doing down there?’

‘I had to cover the big farm equipment show at Mystery Creek. It was a long week.’

‘You’re a reporter?’

‘I’m meant to be, but I’m more like the Boy Friday. The gopher. Go for this … go for that. How about you?’

‘Paint shop. I was a builder’s labourer but I had a
situation
so here I am.’

‘What was it?’

I told him.

‘Ah, the glass dome.’

‘What’s that?’

‘I’ve got a theory about it, I’ll tell you later. Got wheels?’

‘Not yet.’

‘I place them right up there, next to sex. Better in some ways.’

‘Where’s your car?’

‘Around the back. Come and look at it.’

On the back lawn was the little Ford Escort from the photo: bright orange, rear wing, Recaro seats, fat tyres on spoked mags, tinted out windows.

‘What drives it?’

He popped the bonnet. The motor crammed the bay. There had been heaps of modifications. Double Webber carbs, extractors, fancy cam cover.

‘Wow! What a beast!’

‘Two-litre motor, with all the right shit to make this baby dance.’

‘Did you do all this?’

‘No. My man Martin. I’ve only had it a while. My ambition is to flick it on before I kill it. What do you reckon my chances are?’

‘I haven’t seen you drive.’

‘Come on then,’ he said, throwing open the door, ‘time for a tour.’

I guess I had ridden with wild drivers before. Hell, I had driven some fast beats after midnight, but never like this. Devon made the little car suffer. It wasn’t the speed as much as the
aggression
. There is a code with us drivers: you don’t criticise and you don’t show fear. I felt plenty of both as we howled around the busy streets, passing cars so closely some drivers pulled over and jumped out. I didn’t know the area so I never knew what was around the next corner. The way Devon cornered, you’d think the roads had been cleared by track marshals.
Eventually
we reached a long straight road lined on both sides with two-storey warehouses. Devon looked at his watch. ‘Six minutes. I’ve done it in five.’

‘It was pretty quick,’ I offered.

‘There’s pretty quick and then there’s five minutes … which is low flying.’

He slowed right down until we came to a stop in the middle of the road. He sprang out of the car and threw the bonnet up.

‘What’s up? Overheating?’

‘Nah! Just an excuse to park in the middle of the road.’

Such cheek. It was liberating. Road rules were for other people.

‘What do you notice about this street?’

I looked down it. It was nearly six p.m. so there was not much traffic. Dead straight. Factories on both sides of the road.

‘I dunno.’

‘This is Whaitiri Street, but we call it Thunder Road. It’s where we race mostly. You come back here at midnight on Saturday
night, there can be a thousand cars along here. Lining the street with their headlights blazing. Full of people drinking, smoking, dropping tabs and, in the middle of the road every thirty seconds or so, two cars head to head, winding their tachs up to nine thou … sorting out the order.’

I looked at the street again. This time I noticed the burn-out marks for the first hundred metres of the straight.

‘What’s that?’ I said, pointing to a big stained area.

‘They drop the diesel there and set it on fire. For the
flameouts
.’

A red Falcon ute chugged up alongside. It had flames on the bonnet and real low-profile tyres. The two vehicles were now blocking the whole street. In the ute there were three guys about our age. Two of them were twins. The other one by the passenger window yelled out to Devon, ‘Hey man, how’s it hangin’?’

‘Ay! The Taylor Twins and Rebel.’ He gestured to me. ‘Come and meet.’

The twins had been to the same hairdresser I’d say; their red hair was short on top, long at the sides. Rebel was a solid little guy, muscles and a spider tattoo coming out the collar of his T-shirt. He looked like a heavy bastard. The sort you don’t want to mess with. There was a green trail bike roped on the tray. The sound from the bass driver was shaking the
neighbourhood
and the cab was a fug of cigs. The three of them were all smoking, hard-out.

‘Who’s this?’ asked Rebel with a flick of his head.

‘It’s Trace, he’s living at my house. Showing him the strip.’

The three of them all fixed their eyes on me, sort of weighing me up, then Rebel offered me a palm for the bro handshake. The other two followed.

‘Where are you from, Tracey?’ said the Taylor with the
chipped tooth. ‘Up from the sticks?’

‘It’s Trace,’ I said.

The other one turned to Rebel with a grin.

‘Sure man, that’s what I meant.’

‘The Waikato.’ I didn’t want to be too exact.

‘Hicksville!’ Rebel grinned with contempt, and then added, ‘Got a car?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Planning to?’

‘Yep.’

‘When you’re ready … see me. Midnight Autos. I do the deals.’

We all laughed. It had that corny, TV, used-car salesman sound to it.

There was the bleep of a siren, then a voice saying, ‘Move on!’ over a loudspeaker. A cop car had pulled up behind us without us noticing. Me and Devon jumped back in and the ute shot off in the other direction. We pulled over to the side to let the cop through and he came alongside.

‘What are you up to, Devon?’

Devon flashed a charming grin. ‘Sorry Orificer Carmody, those young men were asking for directions.’

‘I’ll give you directions if I see you hangin’ around here.’

‘Yeah I know it. Do not pass go … do not collect two
hundred
….’

Then Devon flashed the hang loose sign at him. ‘It’s cool,’ and gave a little blip on the accelerator. Drag talk.

‘Don’t even think about it. This could eat your
old lady
car over any distance.’ The cop grinned smugly and then, to prove it, he planted his foot. The police car disappeared down the strip like a sped-up film.

‘I know that guy. Story goes he used to race this strip and
now they’ve got him on the other side. That’s a special patrol car just for chasing down the dudes. It can really move. He’s taken some of my mates off the road.’

We drove back slowly.

‘Who were the other guys?’

‘They’re your genuine Westies. Petrol’s in their blood. Born to race. The stocky dude, Rebel, real name’s Billy Revell. He’s a hard bastard. Been inside. “Rock College” he calls it. He runs this car and parts outfit … Midnight Autos,’ Devon said with a laugh.

‘What’s funny about that?’

‘You want a set of mags, he says, “I’ll get you a set from
Midnight
Autos.” Because that’s exactly what he does. He goes out at midnight and rips them off parked cars. The Taylors hang with him a lot now. I reckon they’re in on it too. He hardly ever drives himself – well, not during the day time, anyway.’

‘Lost his licence?’

‘Yeah, for about sixty years. He reckons by the time he gets it back, we’ll all be cruising around in space craft.’

I had to laugh. Devon had such an easy way with him, he seemed to be able to talk to anyone. Crims and cops, back to back. Made them all seem like cool guys.

Back at the boarding house Mrs Jacques was in watching TV, really loud. Sergei was in his room making freaky sounds on the piano.

‘Listen Trace,’ Devon stopped me in the hallway outside his room, hand cupped behind his ear, ‘sounds like Beethoven … decomposing.’

After a few hours with Devon it was like I had always known him. Dev came from the East Coast. His great grandfather, Diego
Santos, jumped ship a hundred years ago and began the
Santos
dynasty. Devon was really proud of the Spanish thing and claimed he would go back there some day… back to the old hacienda. Drink Bull’s Blood and eat paella. He made it sound like it was just around the corner, and I was invited.

We clicked. Held nothing back, there was no point. I’ve always been a bit of a fatalist. If it’s meant to happen, it’ll happen. Devon showed up in my life at just the right time. He was what I needed, and as it turned out, I was what he needed too.

I GUESS THE NEXT big thing that happened was Karen. Bob Bryant asked me to work weekends until five. He had this trainee/manager angle that he dangled in front of me. Seven days straight was tough going but I needed all the money I could get. The good thing was that most of the usual staff didn’t come in. A different bunch did the weekends. They were a cool change from the weekday stiffs. The old, burnt out guys. The nightmare mums.

Three of them were about my age: at last, I thought, people I can relate to. Two guys and a girl. The guys were university students: Jason, who was tall and thin with a crew cut and glasses, and Richard, who had long brown hair, and an annoying way of not looking at you when he spoke to you. They’d gone to some private school together, and they were always talking about their teachers, what marks they had got in the school exams, and most of all, which of their mates were dicks. There were big dicks, dumb dicks, fat dicks, sad dicks and total dicks. I had never heard the word dick used so often. Where I came from, anyone called Richard was always called Dick but this Richard didn’t seem so keen.

The girl, Karen, was quiet, shy I guess, and still at school. Pretty though. Even with her hair tied back and wearing the company smock. One of those girls who played down her looks. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

They all came to work in a mint old Jaguar: Jason’s father’s.
‘Dad uses the work car.’ The three of them had all known each other, like, forever.

I was looking for a chance to break through with Karen, but casually, so it didn’t look like I was hitting on her. You’ve got to let girls think that they’re the ones in control. Their guard
always
goes up when they think that you’re coming onto them.

The two guys just stuck together and made smart comments about people and ideas I had never heard of. They had their own way of talking: accent, lingo, it all left me on the outer, like a loser. Seemed deliberate. Karen worked on the cash register so she was pretty much on her own. The two guys were stocktaking at the back of the store, my end. Whenever I had to talk to one of them, they exchanged looks after I had finished: some sort of code. It didn’t take a genius to work out that I was in the dick category … if I was lucky. I probably didn’t even rate.

Most of the time I was stuck in my paint-mixing bay. I needed a reason to leave it. Richard and Jason were doing a slow stock take on the shelves, so they were free agents. There was
something
about their oh-so-casual manner that said, ‘This work is meaningless’ … or maybe even, ‘I don’t really need this’.

In part I agreed … it was crap work. But I needed it.

Their talk went along these lines.

Richard (reading from a sheath of notes): ‘Latch locks,
galvanised
, assorted, do we have a tally yet?’

Jason: ‘Wait varlet, tally approaching. I make it seventeen – that’s a one followed by a seven.’

Richard: ‘Are we talking assorted?’

Jason: ‘We are. I’m not paid to particularise.’

Richard: ‘Remember Mr Bartram in history last year? “Selwood, the significant cognitive shift I am waiting for is when you learn to move from the particular to the general.”’

Jason: ‘I can’t see Mr Bartram working in a hardware shop sorting
galvanised
latches obviously.’

Richard (mimicking): ‘Obviousleh.’

Jason: ‘Obviousleh. Yeh! Ho ho ho!’

Richard: ‘Bismark
galvanised
Europe with a complex system of alliances.’

Jason: ‘Napoleon marched to Moscow for a
galvanised
clasp.’

At this point they would both laugh loudly. Even that sounded as if it had been learned at school. The braying, in-group laugh. It really got up my nose.

We had lunch in shifts. Richard and Jason went first, Karen and I second. On my first weekend shift I looked forward to it because I hadn’t had a chance to talk to her. When I came back from the Vietnamese bakery, she was sitting at the lunch table eating a packed lunch. Her nose was buried in some big, fat book. I wanted to break through, but she was sort of
self-contained
and aloof.

There may have been a chance, but I had left it too late. Awkwardness had arrived and the moment was gone, so I sat at my end of the table, eating my lunch in tense silence. The time began to drag and soon I couldn’t bear it. I went downstairs and lurked out the back, feeling a failure, having to eat my lunch among the rolls of wire netting and pallets of cobble-stones. Thought I might as well just go back to work.

The afternoon dragged after that. Gone was the possibility of making new friends. They were just three more rich kids doing a bit of work for fun money, so far up themselves it was unreal. Sometimes Jason or Richard would come over and ask where something was, and I would just point and go on with what I was doing. I thought, ‘Fuck you! Why should I bother?’

By five o’clock I could tell that even my quiet hostility was
the basis of ‘Oh so amusing’ jokes. At the end of the day we all left out the back way together without exchanging so much as a glance.

Back at Mrs Jacques’ I wanted to have a shower but Sergei was in having a bath. I could hear him singing ‘Deep River’ through the wall. You could tell he was listening to the fake low tones of his own voice. No sign of Devon. He hadn’t come home the night before, so I figured he had forgotten his promise to take me to Thunder Road.

The phone rang, for Sergei, so while he stood in the hall, nattering away wrapped in a towel, I got my shower. At last, a chance to wash off all the filth and tiredness of the day. I emerged feeling fired up so I put on clean clothes, scrabbled together a few bucks and set out. I had gone about 50 metres when Devon’s exhaust note sounded at the end of the street. He swung over to the wrong side of the road and threw open the passenger’s door.

‘Planning to shoot through without me, eh?’

‘I thought you’d forgotten.’

‘As if … get in man!’

I was surprised to see that the back of his car was full of clothes: he usually kept it spotless.

‘What’ve you been doing, man?’

Tapping the side of his nose with his finger, he flicked a glance at me. ‘I’ve got involved with this lady. It’s complicated.’

‘What’s the story? Is she married?’

‘Not when I’m with her.’

It was a bit like that with Devon. The only things that
mattered
were the things we were doing right then. The past and the future took care of themselves.

He pumped up the sounds and we buried ourselves in its regular pulse as we weaved through the ’burbs. That night changed much of the way I thought about things. I often
wonder
why. Some of it’s to do with what Devon later explained as the ‘glass dome’ theory. But maybe more importantly it was this other world. The one we dived into. The world of cars, of dope, of speed, of no rules, no old people and nothing beyond the scenery flashing past. The world just a blur in our peripheral vision.

Devon had this idea. It goes like this. Young guys like me and him, we’re held back. First by our parents, then by schools, and finally, when we leave home, the rest of the world makes it clear early on that we are crap. Most of the time you just accept it, you think it’s the way things are. But every now and then you get this little flash, where you see that it’s all a game … none of it matters. My run-in with the foreman on the building site was one of those, Devon says. The really important thing is what happens next. If you roll over and take it, then you’re dead already. The brainwashing has worked. The rules are made up by the winners, just to keep them on top. You have to bend the rules, otherwise it’s just a lifetime of kissing arse. If you can bust through the glass dome, then you’re a free guy. When I walked off the building site, Devon says … that’s what I did. My first step towards becoming free. Cool!

On the way to Thunder Road we dropped in to see this guy, Martin. He and his girlfriend, Gail, lived in a tiny house in the poncey suburb of Parnell. All BMWs and cappuccino bars. Their place was nestled between two big apartment complexes. It stank of piss from one end to the other. They had a kid who was called Martin too. Big Martin and little Martin. Little
Martin
looked like a wild boy: long stringy hair, a bit dirty and not
enough clothes on. I guess he just pissed wherever he wanted to. Freedom.

Martin was the mechanic who had done the work on Devon’s Escort. He had a garage rigged up for it and the driveway was jammed with dead cars. All the long grass in front of the house was a sea of rusty old parts.

Gail was an artist. The walls of all the rooms were covered with her visions. They looked like pictures of bad acid trips or heavy metal album covers. I liked the way she and Martin didn’t seem to give a shit about what people thought. Or about how they raised little Martin. Or the car parts filling the section in this posh part of town. Or painting every wall with images of hell.

Martin was an American. He wrote poetry because ‘it pours from my soul like a river … like I have no choice man, it’s just there’. He read us some. It sounded like Bob Dylan to me, but I liked it. ‘Fixing cars … just puts food in our mouths … we gotta eat man … there’s no love in it for me.’ He and Gail were serious tokers so Devon paid for everything with dope. That night he was after a bottle of Jack Daniels to fuel us while we cruised.

‘Dope,’ Devon explained, ‘is our currency. The trap’s
thinking
it’s a doorway. It isn’t. It’s just a window. The freedom it gives is just an illusion. Real freedom takes more effort, more guts. When the dope wears off you’re still in the same room.’

That night we drank and talked, cruising the streets, eyeing up other cars and other drivers. The later it got, the more street racers appeared. At 11 p.m. we headed for Queen Street. The mum and dad traffic had thinned and the beastie cars were gathering. RX7s, Skylines, worked Holdens, Evos, Integras and
grunty old Falcons with bucking hydraulics. There were small cars too, like Devon’s: 323s, CRXs, Civics and Lasers, everything you could think of. There were even a few cars that were worth big money, like Porsches and BMWs.

A blue Mercedes with four kids in it pulled up next to us at the lights. Devon had his choke out slightly to produce the rough chug-chug idle that suggests a racing cam. The Merc slid in beside us, silently biding its time, the guys in front, girlfriends in the back. The driver kept blipping the gas pedal and
peering
our way, anything to get our attention: but unworked, the motor just went swish, swish, swish. Devon carried on talking to me as if they didn’t exist. When the lights went green he floored the gas pedal and then shut off almost immediately. The Merc took off down Queen Street like a raped ape. A solo drag. What a shrink! A block later at the lights we chugged up next to him. The kid driving looked shamed. He’d blown it. He’d tried to race someone who wouldn’t engage. A bit like reaching out to shake someone’s hand just to have them whip it away. This time it was them looking away and Devon with the big ‘Mr Friendly’ smile.

‘Just school kids in a D.C.,’ he said.

‘What’s that?’

‘A D.C.? It’s a daddy’s car. There’s no respect in that. No one will race him except other kids like him.’

It was all like that. Unwritten rules. Where I came from the races and burn-offs were casual, spur of the moment things. Here, no way. They were carefully thought out and cunningly planned. First it was staring and mini drags, just like we were doing: trying to guess what you were up against, and what chance you had of creaming the opposition. A game of show a little, hide a lot. By the time we all headed to Thunder Road,
the pairings were mostly decided. Of course this was the way it worked for those lower down in the order. The top guys, those guys whose cars were really tuned, they all knew each other. They had a running tally of grudge and payback drags that went on until someone gave up or their car got totalled. It was hard core.

About midnight the whole main street of Auckland was packed with snarling drag racers, blipping up and down, and juiced-up wannabes making claims their cars couldn’t possibly back up. There were cop cars too, checking out anyone who got too frisky and did anything stupid. Devon pulled the Escort over and ran back to a Holden ute parked on a bus stop. I could see him yacking to the driver. Suddenly I noticed the traffic had started to thin out and within five minutes all the racers, the cruisers and the parked, had gone.

Devon appeared, breathless, caught out. He stamped the clutch and jammed it into gear. We screamed around the corner, completely ignoring the red light. I waited for the siren to start up but nothing happened.

‘They’re just pleased to get rid of us. We’ll hammer it over to Thunder Road.’

Devon hadn’t been exaggerating. It was a carnival of
headlights
, smoke, and people thronging about. There must have been a thousand cars lining the canyon of warehouses and factories. The place was teeming.

‘They’ve come in from all over. There are guys who drive up from Taupo for this, just for a chance to put their car on the line and have it out. This is something you’re never going to see on the
Wide World of Sport
.’ He used this fake announcer’s voice.

We joined the procession of cars buzzing up and down. It was
time to do a couple of runs backwards and forwards to show ourselves and check out the talent. There were knots of young guys sitting on the bonnets of their cars knocking back beer, cars with the boot open letting their sounds out to make their mark, there were even a few girls’ cars, which surprised me.

On our way back through, this guy tried to take us. He was driving a lowered 323 with all the windows blacked out. Devon built up speed at the same rate as he did until we were doing about 120 kilometres through the narrow corridor of cars and foot traffic. It was wild! Cars crossing our path at the last
moment
, drunk dudes staggering around the edge: anything could happen. I realised that it was all on about the time the other guy decided to drop back. Devon backed off too, as soon as the other guy had flagged it.