Wheel Hop – A hopping action of the rear wheels during heavy acceleration.
“I’m tempted to board up that window.”
“Don’t you dare,” mom warned biting her nails. “It’s all he has right now.”
“Please tell me that photo is out of your bra?” Emma asked mom leaning over to peek down her shirt.
Mom smacked at her trying to get away when Emma’s arms wrapped around her waist. “Don’t look down my shirt!”
Alley giggled beside them on the floor in the hallway outside my dad’s room as they performed a CT scan. My grandma, bless her heart was watching them interact, a soft smile drifted over her and then, for the first time in a week, she laughed.
All of us stopped and watched her and then broke out into laughter together. It felt good to laugh. It felt good to be a family though we were missing pieces of it now.
My mom told me once, when our dog Rev died and I cried for two weeks, that change was something that scares everyone. It comes and goes, like a track changing from a tacky track to dry and slick. It was drastic from tons of grip to no grip. What was once a track that provided different grooves is now a tire-shredding monster that forces you into one line, and one direction. You could try to ignore the change, run the line you want, but you couldn’t discount the way your car handles. Soon you had wheel hop and you were forced up the track to the line with the most grip.
You may not want to run the line so close to the wall that could reach out and bite you any second, but you dealt with it. You hung on and hoped the new line took you where you wanted to go.
Smiling at the memory of mom holding me tightly at eleven years old and crying with me as she did what she always did best for me, explaining the change in our lives in the only way that I knew our family to explain anything. In racing terms.
I sat there and watched all of us interacting together and finally breathing for the first time in three weeks. Because, so far, our prayers were answered, the waiting had ended, he was breathing, he was speaking kind of, and had been saved.
It left a mark, sure. We had something to be thankful for, my dad was awake.
Standing, my mom, and grandma watched me closely as I looked at my dad lying still in his bed, looking out the window as doctors spoke to him.
“I have to leave,” I said regretfully. Mom stood and wrapped her arms around me. I noticed then that she was losing weight, weight she didn’t have to lose. “Mom, you need to eat something.”
“I know, baby. I will,” she said, twisting from me. “When does Lily and Ami’s flight come in?”
“They landed about thirty minutes ago. Roger is waiting for me at the airport to take me back to Mooresville.”
“Okay,” she said checking her phone for the time. “How’s everything going there? Did Sherry get all the flights scheduled for Justin and Tyler for SoCal Showdown?”
I nodded trying not to give any details about what was going on back home. They didn’t need to know that Grady had altered dad’s roll cage or that he was actually Darrin’s son. No. They had enough to worry about.
Arie, who sat next to Grandma holding her hand, looked up at me hoping I didn’t say anything. Our eyes met and she pleaded with me and I silently offered my agreement to her.
I left after that, had lunch with Lily, and then I was heading back home to prepare for three weeks on the road. I wanted to block the pain I was feeling, the everyday aches of the change that occurred and racing was the only way. I was dealing with it the only way I knew how.
When I walked into the shop, I knew that dealing with it needed to have a little more effort.
The problem was that it didn’t matter. Any way we looked at the situation, it felt like things were falling apart without dad there to yell at us.
My other surprise that night was the boys breaking out a case of beer after we got the walk through done on the cars and loaded in the haulers. When Greg and Rusty took off for Barberville, Tommy and Willie started drinking. Soon it was only natural that I join them.
“It’s quiet without him here yelling at us,” Willie said almost conversationally looking around. All three of us laid on the concrete shop floor. “I keep thinking he’s going to yell at us for sitting around.”
Tommy giggled. “He saves that for Rosa.”
“By the way, Tommy,” Willie propped himself up on his elbows. “How’s Rosa these days?”
Tommy giggled again taking a long pull from his beer. “She’s good.”
It’d been a while since any of us drank, me included, probably because I wasn’t of legal age, but we needed it that night.
Justin and Tyler came by around ten that night and brought more beer. Soon they, too, were lying on the floor with us drinking. We reminisced and talked about jokes they used to play on my dad and grandpa. They told me stories of my dad and Uncle Spencer cutting the locks to the haulers in the pits when they were kids and then replacing them with new ones so that the morning of the race none of the guys could get into their haulers. They told me stories of my parents growing up together and ones of my dad’s first season in the Nationwide series when he couldn’t make a pit stop to save his life and every time got into the box sideways.
It was what we all needed.
“We’re doing a shitty job at this,” Justin said raising his beer in the air.
“I don’t think we’re doing that bad,” Tommy defended but then looked around at the mess of parts scattered everywhere and just about every box we had opened in the last few weeks. It didn’t help that Charlie and Noah didn’t understand organization either. “Okay…maybe we have some work to do.”
The side door opened drawing our hazy attention. It was Arie.
“What are you guys doing? Get up.” Arie kicked Willie in the thigh.
“We’re stressed out?” Tommy asked holding the beer in the air. “We drink!”
“What are you doing here?” I asked Arie rolling onto my stomach.
Her eyes shifted around the shop. “I was looking for Easton. Have you seen him?”
“Now...” Tommy’s tone took on a curious but amused timbre, “...why would you be looking for Easton?”
“None of your business, fire crotch.” Arie smiled kicking his side.
Tommy doubled over laughing. “Oh geez, like mother like daughter.”
“Arie!” Willie called out when she walked to the office.
“What?” Shelooked over her shoulder trying to hide her amusement.
“Can you get me another beer?”
“No, get it yourself!”
The door slammed behind her and Willie looked at Tommy. “She’s so much like Sway.”
Before we knew it, Speedweeks had started and the NASCAR schedule was tight. With Daytona starting, Easton did what he could but the fans wanted to see Jameson in the number nine and they didn’t stand in line for hours to meet Easton Levi. I will say that Easton gained a tremendous amount of fans that week in Daytona. He was smiling and represented Simplex Shocks and Springs in a manner they appreciated. But it wasn’t the same. I snuck off to Daytona for a day trying to help Kyle and Mason in any way I could and I quickly realized the void that was there.
Kyle was never a guy who was known for speaking his feelings. At least not to me. When I walked inside the hauler, he was there going through his meticulous notes. He looked up when I entered and the eye contact with him somehow made the emotional divulgence, though he never spoke, more difficult.
“Hey, kid,” he finally said, his eyes falling back to his notebook. Though dad was stable now, the clarity of that night was still heavy on my mind, and Kyle knew that.
“Hey,” I took a seat next to him. We spoke about Barberville and how the testing went last week with Easton. That was when he asked about dad.
“I heard Jameson’s doing better and communicating a little.”
The mention of his name made me feel sick to my stomach. “Yeah, he’s slowly coming around.”
“You’ll never forget that shit, kid,” he said slowly understanding my feelings around the accident. “There are memories that will forever be with you and, unfortunately, that’s one of them.”
The emotion, the fear, the devastation crept up and the lump in my throat rose again. Everyone’s reaction, even if you were not in Knoxville the day of the accident, was withdrawn. We didn’t want to talk about it in fear the emotions would drown us. Escaping it altogether wasn’t happening. We lost a legend. We lost a great man and one was still hanging on. It was then, at the table in the hauler with marks on the wall from where my dad had lost his temper so many times, that Kyle offered me an invaluable insight I had never considered.
“You can miss him and you can wish he was here, both of them, but that’s just being selfish. You can want him back because you miss him but there are a lot of people having that very same thought. We can’t focus on the life that’s gone. We have to focus on what’s in front of us. What we have to be thankful is for what we have.”
He was right. He was absolutely right. I left the track that afternoon and went back to Mooresville to meet Tommy.
He was there pacing the shop floor and muttering to himself.
Tommy ran his hands through his mess of orange curls, tugging. “What time did Greg say he’d be here for these two cars?” he motioned with a nod to the No. 9 of Justin’s sprint car and No. 19 of Tyler’s. Cody and Rager’s cars were already there.
“He said he’d be here around noon.”
“Well it’s three, so we’re fucked,” Tommy snapped standing from his place on the shop floor. “We should call Rusty... because if these two cars are not in Barberville come Wednesday, Jameson will kill all of us.”
“It’s kind of hard to do that when he can’t move without grunting in pain,” Casten added pushing the last of the pit equipment inside the 18-wheeler.
“He does have a point,” I added with a chuckle. “But we really should call Greg and see where the hell he’s at.”
We were heading into the first week of the Outlaw tour at Volusia Speedway Park in Barberville, Florida, for the DIRTcar Nationals. We needed those cars there.
Casten, Tommy, and me left on Wednesday night, a few days after dad woke up and it had been non-stop work since we landed in Mooresville. It helped to keep our minds off everything but it didn’t wash away the pain we felt. We missed grandpa and it was gut wrenching to watch dad be in so much pain over his injuries and mentally dealing with losing grandpa.
Not only were we busy with the sprint cars but Kyle, Mason and Spencer had to deal with the Cup team and CST Engines, which was closely related to both teams. They had cars to test, engines to put on the dyno and sponsorship obligations for dad that were now on hold until Easton could attend to them.
We were all overwhelmed but I think it helped us all deal with the loss. We weren’t over it, no. I don’t know that we ever would be. But it kept us distracted.
Charlie and Noah pulled their heads out of their asses and helped with the dyno testing for not only the 410 engines that went in the sprint cars but also the 358 engines that went in the Cup cars for Riley-Simplex Racing. We also ended up hiring a few guys, only family recommended, to help out since most of us were already spread so thin we barely had time to sleep.
Lily understood. We weren’t even married a month yet and already we hadn’t seen each other in a week.
Lily and Ami refused to leave my mom and grandma alone at the hospital. I was thankful for that.
So everyone pulled together and kept not only the business and racing going but our support system from falling apart.
Cole and Lane showed up after we finished loading the trailers. “Hey,” Cole smiled. “Rusty is on his way with Greg to get the trailers.”
“Thank God,” Tommy huffed rising from the floor to toss a few shop rags in the garbage from the oil spilled after changing the gears in Tyler’s car. “Where were they?”
“Hell if I know,” Cole said handing my bag to me. “Something about traffic and ...” he smiled. “I wasn’t really listening to him.”
Lane walked up to me. “How’s Uncle Jameson doing?”
It never entered my mind that my dad would never race again because that wasn’t him.
“Mom called a few hours ago and said they were getting ready to do another CT. He’s still disoriented and mumbling a lot. I guess he had another seizure, too.”
“It takes time. He’ll be fine.”
“I know, but it’s easy to think the worst after Grandpa.”
Lane grimaced when I said grandpa. Aside from me, he was the closest of the grandkids to him and had taken it very hard.
“I don’t have to be in River Ranch for round one until early March... I can help out.”
I was just about to respond when Charlie pushed Cole. “Do it yourself then!”
Lane rolled his eyes. “It’s like working with a bunch of children.”
The truth was we were all children aside from Tommy and Willie. I just turned nineteen, Casten was fifteen, and Noah and Charlie were eighteen. Lane was only twenty-two and had his own career in the motocross racing. We had no clue what we were doing.
We knew this wasn’t going to be easy but we had to try. We couldn’t leave this all to our parents to figure out when we were all more than capable of dealing with it.
Surprisingly, Tommy was the adult in the situation. “Listen, assholes,” he separated the two of them by yanking on the hoods of their sweatshirts. “Get your shit together. Cole, you come with us. Charlie, stay out of trouble and get those engines on the dyno before tomorrow. Kerry will be here in the morning. Do not let anyone else in the shop.”
Tommy rarely gave orders, so when he did they listened.
You wouldn’t believe the work that goes into building a sprint car and a Cup car. Thankfully, the NASCAR side of the business was taken care of. We had people for everything as it was a business that Jimi took great pride in; Randy quickly stepped in as well as Tate.
The sprint car team with JAR Racing was a smaller scale and kept that way by my dad. That was where family came in. We were determined to keep it that way and to do that we needed everyone to work together.
I hated to admit it because they were still assholes, but without Charlie and Noah taking care of everything related to CST Engines we wouldn’t have known what to do. They argued, threw shit at each other and blew up three engines on the dyno that week but they did manage to get all twelve sprint car engines ready to go in two days and the testing of the ten Cup engines done as well. No one knows how, but they did it.
I guess it was true when my mom said that against all odds, life does go on. You move up the track and search for a new groove that doesn’t have as much wheel hop.
Watching your husband in pain, disoriented, and trying to understand what’s happening around him was probably one of the worst experiences of my life. Sure, I had seen him in some horrendous wrecks and I’ve seen him beg for forgiveness but seeing him suffer in ways that no one could help him was the worst.
He didn’t understand much about the accident in the first few days and asked a lot of the same questions but slowly, he began to comprehend and the magnitude of the situation hit him.
I would ask constantly, “Do you need anything?”
His gaze would always be on the window, staring at the snow, and he would respond with the same inert, “No.”
There was no emotion in him. No fight. Nothing. He was a man who had lost his hero. His legend. But most of all he wanted to be left alone.
“I’ll come back a little later.” I would tell him and give him the space he needed.
Just like the man I’ve known since I was eleven, he reacted the same way I expected. He blamed himself. He regretted preparing the car for him and thought it was something he had done. It wasn’t his fault. It was an accident.
I had just gotten off the phone with Arie who had flown to Florida to help Axel and the sprint car teams out and now I was headed back to Jameson’s room where Nancy was inside talking to him.
I didn’t go in. Instead, I sat outside the room out of view and listened.
“You can’t blame yourself, sweetie,” she told him. “It’s not natural, Jameson.”
Jameson didn’t seem to respond so I peeked inside to see that he was looking out the damn window in his room again. When he didn’t want to talk to you, he looked out that window. Everyone was tempted to board that goddamn thing up, especially the doctors who he frequently told to “Fuck off.” At least we knew he’d be fine as his vocabulary had returned.
“I forget things now,” Nancy laughed. “I walk upstairs only to stand there wondering why I even went up there.” She paused and smiled down at Jameson. A few doctors walked past and gave me a funny look. I felt kind of stupid sitting on the floor outside his room but, really, I’d done worse in the past. After all, I walked around for weeks with a magazine ad tucked in my bra.
“I can handle getting old, it doesn’t bother me. This...” she motioned around the room, “I will never get over.” Jameson tensed beside her looking back out his window. I could see his breath catch as he tried holding in the emotions for the sake of his mother. “But I will go on,” Nancy added meeting her son’s eyes, “as should you.”
As expected, he said nothing.
“Honey, you forget your age, or where your car keys are. And if you’re Spencer you sometimes forget what street you live on. But my point is you don’t just forget a man like your father. I’m strong though and I have an entire family who loves me and is willing to be there if I forget things like my car keys.” Nancy paused again, her eyes glazed over but she didn’t cry. “I loved him for over forty years, I will never forget him but I will go on. You’re brave even though you’re dying inside and I need you to be brave, Jameson. I need you to realize this isn’t your fault. I need my son. You remind me of him and I need that. I can’t lose you, too.”
His eyes were still focused on that damn window but he surprised me when he looked up at his mom. “I will … Mom.”
It felt wrong watching their moment together after that so I slipped away and wandered outside for some fresh air. After walking around the hospital I was freezing my ass off and being followed by press so I snuck back inside to find Nancy leaving Jameson’s room.
She looked good. Tired, but good.
“He’s asking for you,” she whispered reaching out to hug me.
“Thanks... are you staying?”
“No, but I will be back tonight with Spencer. I have to meet with Phillip about Jimi’s will.”
“Is Alley going with you?” I hated to think of Nancy going anywhere alone right now.
“Yeah, she’s waiting for me in the lobby.” We hugged once more and then I turned around to see Jameson looking at us. He smiled lightly as though it was forced.
I washed my hands and then made my way beside his bed. Naturally, he motioned a slight nod for me to get in beside him, so I did.
Nothing was said, I didn’t want to pressure him. If he wanted to talk, he would. This was hard for him. Inside he was there but it was hard to just jump back into what you were before. I knew that.
You don’t wake up from a coma and become yourself. The soap operas lie. It is days and days of slowly waking up, mumbling and confused. By the time the two-week mark rolled around, Jameson was responding more and more and was able to focus on objects and actually respond coherently to you but there were still days where he struggled stringing words together.
He asked about racing frequently and who was in his car.
Every day more of Jameson returned and not those cold distant glances.
He was able to get up and walk around after four weeks, which was huge, because with most patients, brain injuries as severe as he had forgot the simple things like walking and putting clothes on.
He could do it all because he was determined. You could see the fire inside him. He wanted to be better and he wanted to recover fully. He was slowly finding his new line again. He was gaining grip and getting less wheel hop.
Time, it was all I had right now. It went by slow; dawdling even. When I think about time passing, it never ceases to surprise me how it passes. An hour is an hour and sixty minutes can be the longest sixty minutes of your life.
When someone would say to me now, “I’ll be back in an hour,” it seemed like they were gone for days.
There were times when it felt like a freight train, barreling onward with nothing to stop it. Yet other days it was like the Earth stood still, nothing moving, nothing breathing and I felt like I was looking at a picture of my life.
Those days I felt like I was trapped.
I felt like I was locked into some kind of continuous loop with no way out and no hope for moving forward.
The pain was fading with each day, just as the daylight washed into evening. It was never gone. It hurt to breathe. It hurt to speak. It hurt to be touched. It hurt to think.
Physical pain faded as days went on and stiffness took its place.
I was sad. I was confused. I was frustrated at the very thought of most things.
I saw sadness all around me. People looked at me and I saw pity. I couldn’t look at my wife without wanting to cry. I hadn’t cried that I knew of. Maybe a few tears but nothing what I felt like doing. I couldn’t look at my mom. I wanted to hold her and tell her I was sorry and how much I wanted to take away the pain she felt but I couldn’t. It hurt too much.
I didn’t want to see the pain anymore. I didn’t want to feel it anymore.
I wanted a lot of things.
I never wanted to see the look of pain my mom had on my wife’s face. I never wanted to see that look on another woman’s face again.
I hated the feeling when someone said my dad’s name. I hated the heavy unfamiliar feeling I got. I hated that his memory was fading with each day.
I hated a lot of things.
I wanted to comfort my wife and hold her the way she needed to be held. I wanted my kids to remember me, but not like this. I wanted them to remember me as I was before my life was ripped apart.
I tried not to feel like a ticking time bomb. I tried not to feel a lot of things.
I tried to remember that it wasn’t my fault, something broke on his car and that could have happened to any of us. I tried not to feel the burden for the sake of my mother. I tried to offer a smile for her.
I remember a lot.
I remember my dad.
I remember the look on his face when I won my first championship, fighting back tears that I did it. I remember being four years old and I told him I’d be a champion someday.
I remember that he believed in me.
I remember him telling me that hatred can fuel the brightest flame and that resentment could kill you if you let it.
I understood I needed a lot of things.
I needed my wife. I needed my kids. I needed my family, my mom, my brother, my sister. I needed my friends. I needed the feeling of being needed by them.
I needed less wheel hop and more grip.
I was sad and confused and remembering and hating. I had a lot of needs and frustrations and memories and aches.
I had wheel hop.