Racetrack, speedway, freeway, home. Drive-thru, slowdown, cellular phone. Right turn, left turn, tow-away zone. Driveway, parking meter, automobile loan. Wipe out, peel out, slippery when wet. Ignition key, roll-over, too much debt. Residential, artery, collector, lane. Highway, median, a street named Main. Yellow stripes, white stripes, dashes and dots. Red light, green light, parking lots. Sign poles, bridges, on and off ramps. Big flags and dinner and hitchhiking tramps. Windshield wipers and cleaning fluid. Diesel, premium, regular, crude. 10W40, change your oil. Build a new road over tender soil. Gas slicks, oil slicks, gutters and curbs. Inner ring, outer ring, and more suburbs. Jack-hammer, pile-driver, build us a road. SUV, pickup truck to lighten our load. Driver's license, license plate, traffic cop, curb cut. Enforcement, arrest warrant, high speed chase, road rut. Safety belt, tollbooth, air bag, bag of trash. Tailpipe, smoking engine, tires rolling, crash.

Penny's first job out of Ad Copywriter's College was just across the street from the apartment she had. She didn't have a car then; she didn't need one, really. She knew how to drive, but she didn't have the extra money and she was young and there was a good bus that went down her street and this was years before the ongoing war against pedestrians so she was one of them, she was a walking gal. She walked across the street to work where she would dream of words and stories for the open road to make cars so tantalizing, but she didn't need a car herself and she was quite satisfied, and thought no more of it nor no less.

Every once in a while she got a chance to test drive a new model when she was working on a campaign and this was good, this was a good time and she enjoyed the speed and comfort and the physical act of riding in each new showroom car, the touch and the taste and the journey on the controlled test-driving strip. It was something that she could remember at her desk the next day, with her shoes kicked off under her chair and her keyboard in front of her, and she came up with some dazzling words that summed up the experience nicely, the feel of the seats, the command of the steering, the way the wheels rolled your dreams into reality, the harsh cliffs in the midnight moon and the curve of the road that sticks to you like glue beneath, and the thoughts of all the foolish ones who select another competitive model.

She wrote good copy. Her supervisor was impressed. He was an old school, by the numbers, here are the statistics, here are the figures and the scientific proof and the statements kind of guy. That's the kind of copywriting past that he was hard-boiled in, but he could appreciate the good gut emotions that Penny knew how to juggle with her verbs and similes, how her strong simple statements packed a punch with the word symbols, how they went right to your head by way of the great heart freeway. She wrote to put you there in words, she wrote to take you there by tugging, and her cool crisp sentences were models that he could show to the rest of his staff, to the slowbodies who couldn't get past their the's and and's and their short and gutless sentences that took you nowhere on the road, the words that had no wheels below them to spin their way to your head and your hands and your pocketbook pocket. Penny had a way with the words and sometimes, on a good day, she could design an entire campaign or two while the rest of the writers in her work group stumbled over the word order of their first couple catch phrases.

She wrote about cars all day and then she'd take the elevator down and walk out on the sidewalk and maybe stop at the market before crossing the street to her apartment building, or if it was Friday she'd walk a block further to her favorite club and hear the music pounding like a road and have a drink and some smiles with the bright faces around her, the ones she knew with their kind configurations, and she'd dance with a nice guy she'd meet and it would be good and she'd smile her good halfway smile but when she'd dance with a guy she'd think about Walker years ago and riding beside him in his tailored small racecar and his silence beside her and his strong legs and reflexes and how he moved the clutch with a robotic speed but how it was somehow silky too, and his shy look in her eyes, she thought about that too, and how this guy she had tonight was good but how the experience was so much smaller than that day long ago on the raceway, and tho this was fun, it would be gone the next morning when she woke up a little woozy, and yet he'd still be there and the sound and the speedway from all those years ago.

Never was so clear

Til you squeezed by

Wind shield wi pers

It was nice to be able to walk across the street to easily get to the little ad agency that she worked at, but it was a small agency and she had a small apartment and she thought that she had enough talent to be hired by a larger agency and she thought her talent was so promising that it could buy her a large house somewhere far off in the suburbs. She sent her resume out to many different ad agencies, and with one application she sent out a little idea she had been toying with, an ad series based around the life of Walker, based on the life of the famous or nearly famous young man Walker, the racecar driver on the evening news and the sports report at 5:22.

Walker's star was rising, he was winning one big national race after another, the Columbus 500, the Tucson 2000, the Big Circle Race in Orlando, the Seattle Seaside Speeding Showcase, and many of the other races of which you have surely heard. He was the one collecting the winner's flowers and holding them so close he could smell them over the gas fumes, or sometimes the second or third place flowers, and those were just about as fragrant.

Penny had this idea and she made it clear that it was just an idea and that she hadn't talked to Walker about it, but he was the hometown boy and maybe if she could remind him of that Junior Ad Copywriters Scouts field trip years ago when he drove her around the track, or she could remind him of it, maybe he would accept the idea. Of course, an actor who looked like him would play him in the spots, a whole series of actors to show him at many ages, but maybe he could appear at the end of the spots for real, waving for the camera or taking a big swig of beer from a victory cup (file footage). The concept was that it would be a whole series of ads to show Walker's life from boy to man, and how he won the race with the right car behind him to do it in, and that's what they could sell to the people, and that's what she could sell for her job.

She sent that proposal to the ad agency that she knew she wanted to work for. She sent it to the firm with the name that was like the breath of god for a Junior Ad Copywriter Scout, or an apprentice copywriter at a smallish firm. She sent that proposal with her whole portfolio and resume. They called her back for an interview.

At the interview, the junior partner asked her about that idea, asked her to flesh it out a little, and Penny let her imagination drive even further with it and picked specific shots with rubber on asphalt and how the road burns up with the driver's speed and it was all so vivid that she got the job at the Big Ad Agency, out in the suburbs on the big round ring road.

She celebrated by purchasing a car, the first one she ever owned, and she also celebrated by purchasing a condo far from her new workplace and her old so she'd have to drive the long crooked trails and the wide ring roads to work each day to butter her bread and feed her car with more gasoline to spin its wheels.

At first she thought her long commute could be very productive, and that she could use it to think of all the great ad ideas she had yet to think of, so all she had to do was think them out on her commute into the job and write them out on paper at work. During her long commute she thought she might think of more ad ideas, but mostly she just listened to the radio and got mad at things. The traffic was always thick and some other driver was always horribly wrong and sometimes her mind would drift to a winding peaceful mountain road and she could gun her engine there and take the curves like a motor speedway but mostly she just sat there waiting in a long line for the light to turn green.

Her first task at the new Big Ad Agency was to further develop the idea of the series of ads based around the life of Walker. So she tapped her keys and commissioned storyboard panels and made detailed descriptions of the sets that would be needed and even visited the town speedway where she first met Walker on that bright and shiny day. She wrote it all down and the junior partner liked it so she handed up the sheets and sketches to the vice president and the vice president liked it only he flicked off a hair or two that the junior partner had left and so the vice president handed the sheets up to the president and the president looked over the panels with a serious face and solemn and he wiped off a stain that the vice president had made on the proposal and the president liked the pitch and the product and so they were approved for the production line.

This meant that Penny had to meet for real with Walker and talk him into his permission for the series. This meant that she needed to wear her nice voice and put on a nice dress and make reservations at a nice restaurant. She did all that, and even more.

Across the parkinglot

I can see hope reaching

It's the crazy fingers of cracks

She found his name in the phone book - it was his own phone in his own room at the speedway. It was he who answered but she didn't know his voice, but it was hot like recognizing the back of your own hand in a photograph, and you slowly realize it but there still is some denial about it.

He didn't know her voice either but he remembered those hands and eyes and the weight of her body beside him in his little racecar long ago; he had never, ever forgotten them. It was a picture, it was a fantasy, it was so faded with memory. He hoped and he dreamed but he wondered whether she wasn't lying, if maybe she was playing a trick on him because so many did - they wanted him for his racecar and his way of moving it correctly but not for him, not for the he who he wasn't sure he was just quite yet. This was before the accident at the Indy 500 happened, before the split second moment that would turn him about-face like a soldier, the accident whose commanding voice he would have to follow.

He said that he would meet her for dinner, because he liked food, and that he would listen because he was good at that, but he also told her that he wouldn't agree on anything, at least not right away, because agreement takes time and is challenging.

They met for dinner with the small light of a candle and a clumsy waiter who spilled their water and spilled their wine. "Oops," said the waiter, who wrote down the wrong thing, not the thing that they ordered but completely the opposite.

They tried their best with their spoons and their forks, and their napkins and their sips, they tried their best to eat around the pounding disaster, the next few missteps, but they still left a nice tip because they felt sorry for the guy. He spilled their dinner on the storyboards that Penny was trying to show Walker, he spilled someone else's dinner on the pages of script that she was reading to him to give him an idea, he knocked over their candle and began a small orange fire, but Walker put it out with his water and his wine and his place and his napkin and the very same fast action that you need to steer the speedway curves and straightaways.

Penny told Walker about her idea. She summed it up in sentences and in the pauses in between. She said it over ashes and the wreckage of their dishes, she said it over the table where they met and ate in battle. She displayed the food-stained storyboards with the blood red of hastily spilled pudding across it, and the cars and the grandstands and the grease-monkeys and the little helper boy. And the speedways and the races, first for kids and then for grownups, and his fancy steering style as if he could take his car the routes that nobody knew but still end up at the finish line.

Walker didn't recognize it as his own life. It was fun and distant but he thought it told a good story. "That chap has had quite a life," he said, and at first Penny didn't understand him but she went on with her explanation and she saw his eyes turning slowly, unlike the wheels at the raceway.

It was someone else's signature, as if you were your own forger, as if you recreated someone else's life with the days and weeks and years of your very own. It wasn't him, not those sounds or those poses, but there was something very recognizable, and then the waiter came by and blew up their bill by mistake.

That night Penny described a whole series of ads to Walker. She spoke of TV commercials that would play one after another for perhaps a very long time. The commercials professed to tell the life story of Walker the racecar driver, from his birth in the grandstand to his coming success in the Indy 500. They would rush the ads into production, so the campaign would be done and could premiere on the television in the upcoming months as the Indy race neared. One picture from each commercial would be taken out with tweezers and made into a magazine ad to take your breath away for a moment between page turns. Some sound would be extracted for radio advertising, and the feel of it all would vibrate on the collective unconscious, at least that was Penny Driver's mission, and she was very good at her job, she told him so.

He just saw her eyes and he remembered them from that day, that speedway day and her eyes beside him in the seat in his tiny racer, and the warmth of her whole body beside him. He remembered that day and how he suddenly knew her and how she could be an explanation of all the things surrounding. He could see the world and know it thru the windshield of the car but there was a universe or more that he could roll out of her eyes. He saw the sparkles like stars and her words of description were like the roads they were passing under but in her eyes was everything else, the distant landscape, the coming adventure, and the sky.

You'd think

The asphalt patch would cover the crime

It just can't do it

Walker drove everywhere, it was just his way, it was the way at the speedway, it was the speedway way. He drove for a glass of water he drove for a glass of beer he drove when things were very far and even when they were near. He drove when he had a reason, he drove when he didn't know why he drove to test that theory of his and to get that speck out of his eye. He drove when he didn't know the way to go he drove when he was quite sure he drove to look at the countryside that went by him in a blur. He drove when he went for groceries he drove because he didn't care he drove to keep his pants from falling he drove to breathe the air. If you knew that it was Walker and you knew that he would get there then you knew that he would get there in the wheels and the seat of his car.

Penny Driver knew this as she waited for him, as she waited for him to pick her up so they could sit at a table somewhere and maybe the table was out where the sun was shining, and they could talk about the series of ads of which she was finishing the scripts, the ads about the life of the racecar driver, and the sights and sounds and smells, and about the secrets behind his eyes, the secrets of the car that he really wants to drive and they talked and he thought it was a good story, but he didn't think it was much like his life but he didn't say so, he just nodded his head and in that nod Penny was sure she heard a thousand words as clear as bells ringing and that she knew everything, she and the ads she wrote and the storyboards and the pre-production planning.

Walker drove everywhere - that's what you do when you're a racecar driving man - that's what you do in modern civilization. He didn't drive for practice; he drove because the roads told him to. He didn't drive because it was the only way to go - he drove because he didn't think anything about it. He drove, and he insisted he drive Penny when they had to go somewhere to see a proof of one ad or another in the series, and he insisted and he did.

It all depends on

A single pothole

Trying to breathe free

She wrote the scripts with the lines like, "a man-sized vehicle up and down on the rocks of the mountainside, climbing like a goat to the top to rescue the trapped sedan." And sometimes Walker saw one of the commercials that were made from her scripts on the TV set, and he recognized it from the pictures, because she would tell him about her ideas, tell him about what she was writing. And he congratulated her and said it was all tops because he loved the lilt of her voice and how her lips moved in saying it, and the sweetness in her eyes that shone like headlights, that grabbed inside him like she knew his secrets but he had them cleverly hidden from her, and that's what he thought and the shadows reassured him.

"I want to see you again," he said.

And she said, "Of course, we will get together again, and often," because she wanted him to personally approve each and every storyboard of the new Walker ad campaign.

But he wanted to see her because the eyes can connect the dots that take you from wisdom to knowledge, because the eyes are the one part of our bodies that can bear the immense weight and revelation of the immense sun above us or of the greater stars below us and because the eyes are pools that reflect the world to itself and to us, and its sounds and its colors in such vivid imagination. He wanted to see her and he wanted her to see him for he could finally see himself, he could see himself better, he could see himself in love and wetness as the reflection in her eyes and then hiding in her blink.

The old blanket

In the trunk of the car

You forgot all about it

She said she was cold and she made a quick little shiver. He asked if her coat was warm enough and she nodded her head no. He said maybe they should go inside to a warmer place and she said it wasn't necessary. She had a permanent smile on her face and it was soft and her head was round and he wanted to put his arm there, and he wanted to put his arm around it, around her neck and on her shoulder and when he moved his hand to start in that direction she curled her body toward his to make his arm encircle her; she curled in assistance. With their bodies crushed side-by-side he felt her heat and knew she hadn't been so cold, but he could transfer whatever extra heat he had to her easily, just in case. They took their few steps in synch, like soldiers, and when they got to his car she rotated her head to peck a kiss on his cheek, and when he turned his head to look at her for doing that hers moved back quickly and so their lips met, just a little at first and then more and more.

It's the back seat

It's the front seat

The seat of pure love

When they were first dating, Walker drove them everywhere in his custom street Speedster and Penny beside him. She looked at his face but she heard the accelerating strength of his body. She hugged his firm skin but she felt only the comfortable upholstery. She knew that he had a certain musk about him, or maybe that was the new car smell, or the little flat tree air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror. She rode deep beside him as if his hands were wheels on her body and her skin. There was the thrust of forward movement, and she felt it to her toes, and she knew it was the speed that made her love him so.

It was a creative period for her. A ride for a date with Walker left her with a mist of feelings the whole next day thru. She'd relax in the mist at her keyboard, and the words dropped out like a gentle steady rain. It was the collective central car inside of each of us that she wrote down on those days, the pumping vehicle of experience and passion. All she had to do was take a breath and the descriptions and the right words would fall with no effort, as if gravity alone moved her fingers in the correct direction. These were the commercial scripts that, once made into the flesh and blood of cars and gasoline, would win her awards and make her career a great certainty.

As a matter of fact, on days when she felt no creativity, she'd have to call Walker and he'd drive to her door and the whole world was still solid beneath them but there was just the two of them, and they were moving in his car like the breath of the wind. There were houses and landscapes they passed for sure, but each only meant their future and the two of them as a one. They raced for the sun and they could nearly touch it with their front bumper and acceleration, and the stars played in her mind like tiny pricks so that after the drive she would only have to be seated and she'd drop her fingers and the proper words would come falling, would ring in her head like church bells, would say those lines like overheard talking, and Walker was like her career, a power that could settle her forever, that would remove all worries and send her all the shiny boxes. It was all about comfort, and once she had committed these feelings to paper she knew that they would be accepted in any advertising situation, and significant.

Between the wheels

Is the axle

So they roll together over the surprised squirrel

It was an impulse but it was Walker and Penny Driver. Two lives two faces four hands four lanes two rings. They said, "Let's get married," at the very same pinpoint in time, and maybe at first it was meant as a joke but it really was the rest of their lives.

The flowers made all the smells you could eat, the organ made all the music you could see and she said, "I do," and he said, "I do," and they kissed long and sweet with their lips and their bodies and Penny could have reached out and grabbed her dream of the feeling racing by but her eyes were too closed too far and she was just so in the moment.

There followed the reception with drinking and dancing and Penny kept her last name and Walker kept his name and they both got too drunk and said things that they shouldn't have but forgot them immediately or maybe they somehow saved them for future keeping, for a broken lamp and the wall in silence.

Her father from the old country licked the paper gold star himself and glued it in place, in the kitchen, with no certain ceremony, on the small vertical line on the long horizontal line of time. He put the small star on the small point marked, "Penny is wed."

Their honeymoon went round and round in circles. They took it on the speedway when no race was going on.

Two places

Become one

As fast as a freeway

The report comes thru the TV glow: "The Enemy is putting up a harder fight than we expected." There are exchanges of gunfire and prisoners taken. There are military and civilian casualties. The tanks and supply vehicles roam over the desert floor and Walker and Driver have to watch it on their TV set. They might turn the channel to try to get away but all they find is another angle on the same tank roaming. But a few more clicks bring them to an ancient movie. It shows a world where there are no cars and there are no Wars for Cars.

"This is much better," Penny says.

Walker watches too. He sees all the people standing in place and talking and he knows that their cars are not waiting, but does Penny know that? He doesn't know if she knows.

It's a sound

It's a vibration

You can feel it coming

Part Five

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