Those Monster Trucks

My first day back after Christmas I’d been sitting quietly when I came across Linda Rodriguez, a Texan, and we decided to see some monster trucks. The Hot Rod tour was coming to Uniondale, Long Island, on February 7th for a weekend of high roaring big wheeled madness and by the heavens we would be there too.

Numbers plummeted but there were six of us buying crisps and beer in the supermarket at the back end of Friday afternoon. We went down to Penn Station and then trotted to the Long Island Rail Road through crowds of commuters with our plastic bags and awful intentions. The train had red and blue seats and people with their scarves, newspapers and half closed eyes. But we were a little giddy, sipping our beer which we held swaddled in plastic bags, trying to abide by some law or other. The train lights kept blinking on and off and the emergency posters glimmered green in the darknesses.

But then it was Hempstead – a brown and yellow foggy place where streetlights and carparks seemed to extend out to the ends of the earth. An obliging tax driver with little regard for anything agreed to squeeze us all into his cab and we bumped along in the thick night to the stadium.

The Uniondale Coliseum rose above the gloom and its truck-filled carpark and stretched round on either side. Inside we heard the middling yodelling bars of the national anthem and the first death roars of the trucks. Buying the tickets I looked along to the queue of guys at the next booth – leather jackets over fleshy twenty-somethings, big shoulders and little beards.

The seats were in the upper level but my god we saw it all. Just in front was a family of three, him, her and the son. Dad in a red racing sweatshirt, son big-eyed and mummified in merchandise – t-shirt, cap and flag.

The action happened in a sand filled oval. The show had three elements: stunted eighteen year olds flinging themselves on trail bikes high into the coliseum air, dramatic and largely staged team racing on quad bikes, and the noisy armageddon of monster truck racing.

The whole bonanza – which altogether felt like the last night at a Sodom-at-the-end-of-the-highway – was presided over by a plump man in red and his dwarf clown called Spike or Clutch or something. Spike would make appearances between shows on various belittled machines and yell “Whose your daddy?” to the family crowd. In the prizes section of the evening, the crowd – which was a few thousand – was asked to scrabble under their seats and see if they were the lucky ones who had won an all free oil check at Jiffy Lube, the perky name of some Kwik Fit or other. The other prize was a bar-stool.

But the monster trucks were the big draw. The red man would say, “The monsters are coming!” and the sound system would slip into some rolling, rising rock. Then the zeeooorrrrrrrr clamour, the grrrrrreeeeeeeoooooooorrrrrrr din and some beast car would come bounding into the arena. The normal format is the body of a farm pick-up perched on top of the wheels of some giant’s toy, the whole thing held together by long bars and springs which help the trucks leap and bounce around. Inside the cars you get a glimpse of the driver, sat right in the middle on his one seat, arms and gloved hands whizzing and hauling on the big simple wheel.

The races started with a great revving as the trucks took their places in opposite corners of the oval track. They pawed up a little ramp before three dead blue cars and the crowd rustled for its earplugs which everyone squashes in – dimming the whole experience to a slight sense of dislocation: everything visible but the monstrous war sounds and thubbing music coming from a next door room.

Then the last wild revs and the trucks leap into the race, flying in seeming slow motion over the busted cars and then bouncing from wheel to wheel as they burn and heave round the corners, sand skidding out at head height, spraying viciously into the hoardings. The air comes a moment after, wumping and flapping the posters around the track as the trucks claw round to the next leap.

The races formed some sort of knock out competition which Grave Digger, the franchise around which the sport is staged, always wins. In between races four young motorcross riders, with cocky walks and names like Jason and Kyle, came out to gun their bikes up a flimsy looking ramp and high into the dome of the stadium.

They zoomed up it, one after the other, and in mid-air flung out their legs and arms in patterns, before grappling back on the handlebars and landing the bikes on a steep sandy hill. Two of them were really good – zipping up, flying and then going all loose, just hanging for a split second with the bike. One of them got off the bike backwards as it flew and was horizontal, then he reached forward with his hands and touched the seat of the bike before pulling it to him and landing. The move is called touching Jesus or something. A blissful, gasping dangerous thing.

The showdown was the freestyle monster truck event. Grave Digger, the perennial favourite, was out last. Monster Mutt was just before. Monster Mutt was brown like a mongrel with sharp little teeth painted around the front and a red tongue. Over the doors were two swoopy brown ears that flapped over the top of the cab just like a real dog’s might. Monster Mutt made the dog walk in the freestyle.

Given the run of the arena, the trucks came out and leaped the cars, stomped all over a doomed van and spun around in circles, making the crowd whoop. The Mutt was full of spring. He wrenched up on his hind legs, the truck vertical as it stumbled over the van and last car, gunning, screaming along its the back wheels. Virtuoso. Then the Mutt came to the middle and chased his tail – how that driver hauled the beast round, tighter and tighter louder and louder, ripping closer and closer until the wheels were leaping and bouncing from tyre to tyre and the sand flew like a halo in the exhaust. It was like Torvill and Dean on a hundred greasy cylinders.

Grave Digger came out all fast and racy and flung the hearse-shaped truck around like an old performer but it was no Mutt. In the spirit of some Hot Rod wisdom, the two were given the same score and it was settled by a shout-off, which Grave Digger, in a Coliseum of moneyed fans, won in a din.

Robbed. The dog was robbed.