Demolition: a Friendship

We watched our first derby from my Grandpa Bud’s third floor room in the Good Samaritan Elder Care facility, which overlooked the Carver County fairgrounds. From the large windows of his living room you could see the field of chaos, the crowd in the grandstand, and the pit where the cars and drivers waited their turn to crunch into each other. While attendees in the bleachers were being baked and blinded in the late August sun, we sat in temperature controlled comfort. My family invited me, and I invited my friend as kind of a joke. He said “I love a fucking demolition derby. I’m in.” Someone brought fried chicken, someone else brought Bartles & Jaymes and Coors, and my mom scored a program so we could keep track of which heat was next. Mid size, trucks and vans, mighty minis, and last cars standing. If a driver doesn’t hit another car at least once every 60 seconds, they’re out. If a car stalls or doesn’t move for 60 seconds, they’re out. No ramming drivers’ side doors. Wear a helmet. I learned when white plumes cascade out of a car it's the radiator bursting, not smoke. But sometimes there was smoke from an engine fire and we all cheered along the fans in the stands because we were there to see something a little dangerous. 

There have been some years when he and I didn’t talk from one year’s August to the next. Years where I was lazy and distant because sometimes I’m a bad friend. I put away the shame and embarrassment of forgetting to call on a birthday or missing the BBQ or the Christmas party because hey, it’s the end of summer and it’s derby season now and this is something we do together. “Hi, how are yous” are put on hold, because first we have to figure out who is driving, which derby we are going to, where we will get a beer before and after. The 50 minute drive to Waconia or Elko or Clearwater reconnects us as we fill each other in on a year’s worth of living. Or, sometimes it doesn’t, and we listen to a Ray Charles Christmas album on cassette instead of talking. But we can always start a conversation on a new year’s trip by remembering something from the previous one. The shared memory of a crumpled sedan with the words “WE EAT ASS” spray painted in blue in white on the side is enough to smash any chilly silences. Good years or bad years, a standout moment stays with us as something only our friendship shares. Others are not invited, ever. It is a public, private ritual. Our friendship is more than the derbies, but those memories become a mortar. 

After three summers of comfortable viewing with elderly Good Samaritan residents, my grandpa died. We did not make friends with any of his elderly neighbors so we had to find another way to watch a derby, preferably for free. We could not fathom paying for a ticket AND having to sit on the hard, oven hot bleachers of a county fair grandstand. We looked for a new derby and found the Steele County Free Fair, which closes out their week-long run in Owatonna with six-plus hours of “impact motorsports.” Tickets are $15 apiece, but they mostly stop checking tickets after a few hours and the gate by the bathrooms is unmanned anyway so we could wander in and no one cared that we didn’t have a wrist band. Not a lot of narcs at demo derbies. 

The Steele County derby is sub par. Rules are important and their rules suck. Cars can stall out for half a heat and still be in the game. When a driver gets stuck on a cement barricade or rammed into a corner, it's “RED FLAG DRIVERS” and they stop the whole heat to unstick the car. Every year this happens and every time the crowd boos and jeers. Disgust with their lack of guidelines for the chaos becomes a favorite talking point. We commiserate with one guy in a camo derby shirt with hot pink font that screams “STRIP IT SMASH IT FIX IT REPEAT” and he offers us a room temperature White Claw from his wife’s purse. Derby pals. 

Our favorite vendor at Steele County is the aptly named “Good Lord that Chicken’s Good!” and sometimes if I flirt a little the owner gives me an extra thigh and a free lemonade. In the stands we share the chicken and gulp down $3 tall cans of Coors Light while the air around us vibrates and roars and reeks of exhaust. At the VFW across the highway from the fairgrounds, we pour out a strawberry daiquiri Bartles and Jaymes in the parking lot and remember Grandpa Bud together.

I have lost a lot of friends over the years. Distance, drama, apathy. Not calling for a while until a while becomes forever. Getting busy, prioritizing napping instead of hanging out. It’s hard to find anything more appealing than the home I have made for myself, my partner and my dog and the couch. Summers are busy, and aren’t we all just too damn tired to go anywhere? I have let friendships peter out, unjustly and unkindly. But not this one. Sometimes all it takes to maintain a relationship is getting into my friend’s car, even when I am so hungover I want to die, and even though it’s 90 degrees and he doesn’t have air conditioning and none of his car windows can open. Even though his car smells like McDonalds and cigarettes, and I am so sick from the two shots of whiskey (and the four other shots of whiskey) that I don’t even make it to the highway before I make him pull over so I can open the passenger side door and barf all over University Avenue. A jogger swerves to avoid my mess and he cackles and takes pictures of me, limp pale and sweating, because that’s what friends do. I did not want to get into the car and go on a drive that summer afternoon, but it was tradition and it was important. Had I missed that derby, had I opted to stay in bed and drink ice cold coke and chew ibuprofen, the spell could have been broken. That could have been the end, and maybe I knew it, and I am glad I got in the car.

You don’t really root for any one driver, at least not right away. It makes no sense. It doesn’t matter what a vehicle looks like from the outside, you really can never tell who has a chance of winning until nearly all the drivers have been forced to pull their flags. The distorted bodies of suburbans and hearses and minivans have been welded and taped and screwed together, almost beyond recognition. Some wrap their bumpers in chains (to make them more vicious or literally to hold them on, who can say), and others keep their cars unadorned and light, maybe for easier maneuvering. All cars have some kind of logo or girlfriend’s name or message to mom (or WE EAT ASS) spray painted on the broadest remaining surfaces of the cars. So you kind of root for everyone, and wait for good head on collisions, but ultimately, it’s an endurance game. Drivers bash into each other, and their vehicles crush down like so many flattened Coors Light cans, they lose bumpers and tires go flying over the muddy field, but if their car is still running they are in the game. Thick white steam pours out of a blown radiator but if that car is running even a few seconds longer than their opponent, it could mean a trophy. Survival, no matter what it looks like at the end, is a win.

A friendship does not seem like something that you should ever have to endure, but it does require endurance. Commitment. It requires a kind of relationship that can idle, for weeks or years, but thunder to life again when needed. Maybe sometimes you spend the day at the derby but it was raining and cold. You didn’t have much to talk about, and a couple of heats had to cancel because the mud was too much and the cars couldn’t get traction. You couldn’t get seats in the covered section of the grandstand and you are both soaked through. Who brings an umbrella to a demolition derby? Apparently everyone except you, and all afternoon your views were obscured by the colorful domes keeping everyone else relatively dry. Good Lord That Chicken’s Good wasn’t in its usual spot by the Midway this year so you ate drenched corn dogs, maybe the saddest thing that has ever been in your mouth. The VFW was closed for cleaning. But then on the quiet ride home, maybe you take a frontage road between the highway and soybean fields for a few miles, where your Rav 4 is the only car. Going for a win, you indulge in a little vehicular danger yourselves, and he shuts off the headlights. You speed through the cool wet landscape for a few seconds, the simple thrill of the darkness making you both grin, as you make your way back to the city.

LILY CROOKS is a writer and preschool boss who lives in Minneapolis. She has an MFA in creative writing from Hamline University.