The Need for Speed

Drive down from, say, San Francisco and by the time you hit Reseda, you notice it. People in Southern California do drive faster--and more smoothly--than anywhere else in the West. Where else will you see a middle-aged mother with three kids and a dog glide onto a freeway at the perfect, go-with-the-flow speed and then slide across four lanes of fast-moving traffic without halting, jerking or endangering anyone’s life? Sure, in Seattle they drive fast, too, but in short, nervous, caffeinated moves. Multiple lane changes are achieved in strange, violent lurches. In Portland, the game is to prevent you from changing lanes in the first place. If, perchance, you see ample space and put on your blinker, the car behind you roars up to close the hole. And then there’s San Francisco. There people go with their own flow, not the flow of traffic. And lane changes? Oh, tricky. Very tricky.

Only in L.A. will a kid grow up to become a sort of Fred Astaire in a Ford. I admit it, I loved coming of age in this car-eographer’s paradise, though I never reckoned there’d be any psychological advantage to it. And I certainly never dreamed that it would cure me of the nightmares of a murder.

Mind you, I grew up taking the L.A. speed thing a little further than most. I started by racing overpowered go-carts (120 mph-plus) around rubber-coned tracks set up in the huge and weekend-vacant lots adjacent to Los Angeles International Airport. My competition: Porsches, motorcycles, Lotuses--whatever went fast on a short, tight track.

When I grew more physically--though clearly less emotionally--mature, I took my speed-lust onto the city streets. The canyons became my tortuous playgrounds--with Latigo, Roscomare and Beverly Glen being my tight-turned favorites. There was, as well, Mulholland Drive, particularly west of the 405, where, some 20 years ago, long stretches were dirt and dangerous.

I did, however, grow out of it--and quickly enough. When, with my best friend in the car, I lost my brakes going down Roscomare pegged at 125 and had to negotiate two short 90-degree turns, I woke up fast. I managed a controlled slide through the first turn but lost it on the second and slammed into a high curb. The car almost rolled, but luckily we stayed on the road. I did, however, sever all of the 3/4-inch body bolts and bent both axles. The car, my father’s car, was essentially totaled.

And if that wasn’t enough, a few months later while driving my own jalopy, I roared around a corner in a residential neighborhood and hit a patch of water--someone had had the gall to water his lawn next to my racetrack. I slid across the street, barely, and I mean barely, missing a misplaced pedestrian. Two inches and a split second saved her life.

Realizing how close I’d come to killing someone--the proverbial “innocent bystander”--I slowed down. I pointed the demons that drove me to drive too fast in other, safer directions. Eventually, even, I got married, had a couple of kids, moved to San Francisco and, but for the rare burst of speed on long and sweeping freeway exits, did away with excessive speed. I became, simply, a typical L.A. driver, adept at dancing with my fast-moving partners.

And then I saw a murder. I didn’t know the man, had never seen him before. I first saw him while standing at my second-floor bathroom window, brushing my teeth at 7:30 one morning. I heard a “pop,” then a groan. I looked out the window and saw one man running away from a parked car and another man tumble out of the car and onto the ground.

Shaking, I threw down my toothbrush and yelled to my wife to call the police and an ambulance. Then, barefoot and fighting my urge to run away, I ran down the stairs, out to the street and over to the dying man. He was lying face down in the street. I didn’t have the courage to turn him over. I could tell he was close to death; he was breathing blood. A woman walked up, screamed, and ran away. I knelt down, stroked his head and, unable to think of anything else to say or do, repeated over and over again as gently and convincingly as I could, “We love you, we love you, we love you.”

Eventually, the paramedics came and rushed him away in an ambulance. Officially, he died en route. The man had been shot, once, in the heart.

That night I sat at my drums--my congas--and played for hours. The next few days, I did the same. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, I didn’t want to think, I just wanted to lose myself in the compelling complexities of sundry rhythms. But even that wasn’t enough. I needed stronger medicine.

A buddy called--a friend with whom I’d raced when we were younger--who was now racing professionally. He was going to the Sears Point racetrack, now Infineon Raceway, in Sonoma for a rally. I asked if I could join him.

“To watch?”

“No, Walt,” I said, “to race.”

He made a few calls and I got the go.

The Raceway is a road course--it has twists and turns all over the place and enough straights to get you going good and fast before the turns--just the kind of course I like. It had been years since I’d done such a course, and my slightly tweaked Acura was clearly no match for the thoroughly customized machines I was racing. But--well--because I still had that formative feel in my bones, I had no trouble the first few laps. It was exhilarating. For the first time since the murder, I was not thinking of a man’s death and what I could have done to help him. I was defying death without even thinking of it. Death just didn’t matter--mine, his, anybody’s--not at full throttle on a tight course.

I was doing fairly well--top half of the pack--when, all of a sudden, I noticed people waving black flags. At first I was sure they were waving them at someone else. But they kept waving those flags and pointing at me.

Was I trailing oil and about to blow an engine?

Had I inadvertently cut someone off and sent the poor fellow head-first into a wall?

Had I run over an official and thought it was simply a bump in the road?

I pulled over and stopped. A track official ran up to the car and yelled, “What are you doing with that thing in the back seat?”

“What thing?” I asked.

“The baby seat.”

“Oh, that thing.” I’d forgotten this little detail. Flopping around in the back seat as I had slid and shot through various turns was my son’s food-stained car seat. While tossing it quickly behind a barrier, I asked the man if this sort of thing happened often.

“No. This is definitely a first.”

I didn’t win. No one else had been required to stop to remove a kid’s car seat. On the other hand, neither did I lose. I still had nightmares about the man dying in my arms--but not as many. Better still, my waking hours were not constantly shadowed with murderous memory. My “ballistic meditation”--going fast, really fast where it didn’t risk any lives but those of the willing--had done it. That and the life-affirming meaning of the baby seat.

Ultimately, though, I have L.A. to thank for opening my eyes to such transcendental carelessness. Even though the dance floor has become so much more crowded in recent years, the speed and beauty of the dance we do with our cars can--briefly, briefly--transport the mind to a better place.