The World’s Worst Drag Race

 


© Tim Peeler, 2019

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We left the high school basketball game, hyped on adrenaline and testosterone. Four high school seniors, football players all, headed towards a Christmas gathering at our friend Donnie’s, where there were girls, the same ones that had turned us down every time we asked them out in homeroom.

The party wasn’t far away, maybe four miles. We were all revved up with somewhere to go.

Driving my car, with a freshly rebuilt, more powerful engine, my friend Brad was riding shotgun. We did a lot of stupid stuff together in those days. He broke into his family’s lake house – lake trailer, really – so we could take our junior prom dates there. He climbed through a secretly unlocked window in a rented tux and we grilled steaks that another one of our crew procured from the restaurant where he worked.

In the other car were two offensive linemen, Big Tom and Carp. Between them, they weighed about 550 pounds. Their combined weight kept the car snug on the road, much better than any rear spoiler ever could.

The four of us had known each other since we started playing Optimist Club football together at the age of 8.

Pulling out of the high school parking lot, we started acting the fool. I tried to pass Big Tom. He tried to pass me. We tailgated each other. We buzzed by each other. Generally acting like immature teenagers we so obviously were. Fortunately, there were no other cars on the road.

Approaching Warlick Hill, a one-mile stretch of Highway 27 that went straight up heading west, we both went into overdrive. I was just behind Big Tom’s back bumper, drafting unpolished chrome. I downshifted, pulled into the other lane, ready to make my hero move.

We could basically hear the strains of every teenaged car crash song ever released, from “Last Kiss” to “Deadman’s Curve” to “Bat Out of Hell.” In fact, one of our good friends had wrecked in a near-fatal accident on that very hill a year before.

If either of us had a girl in our car or a working back window or deer antlers on the roof, it would have been just like that stupid car scene in Footloose.

Just as my car inched ahead of him, engines roaring like the last weekend in May, the blue lights came on. We hadn’t notice the sedan following us up the hill. We were all screwed, our futures flying out the window like Baby Face Nelson’s folding money in that Coen brothers movie.

The highway patrolman yanked us unkindly out of our cars, still wearing his mirrored shades that late night, oozing both anger and a slight sense of…laughter?

We sat there on my 1969 Volkswagen Beetle, a hand-me-down from my two sisters with scars of multiple engine rebuilds. Tom and Carp leaned on the hood of his 1978 Toyota sport station wagon, wood side panels muting the glare of the flashing blue lights.

“I really should charge you both with drag racing,” he said to me and Big Tom, “which is the most dangerous and stupidest thing you can do in a moving vehicle. But neither of you ever got over 34 miles an hour the whole time I was following you.

“If anything, I should charge you for driving too slowly on a state highway.”

We made it to the Christmas party, just a few minutes late. Every single person there had seen us pulled over on the side of road.

None of us left with any dates.