The Best American Travel Writing 2011 Page 6

  Sitting in the row in front of me, four guys in their late twenties were smoking cigarettes and drinking Bud tall boys, occasionally casting what seemed suspicious glances my way. The one closest to me, with a wispy goatee and greasy black hair, gave me a quick, un-smiling nod. Finally, during a caution—a car bounced off a wall and two other cars barreled into it—as the race slowed to a lighter roar, my neighbor turned to face me.

  "Where'd you get that?" he demanded, pointing to the press pass that hung from a strap around my neck. I held up my credentials, dumbly inspected them, and explained that I was a reporter. He was interested not in the press pass but in the lanyard that held it.

  "I'd trade ya'," he said. All fans wore their tickets necklace-style, but the lanyard issued to the general ticket buyer, I now saw, was a black and yellow band with the word NASCAR repeated along it. Mine was red and white and had BRISTOL running along its elastic material. I could think of no reason why I'd want to keep the artifact, why my children would prefer it to the NASCAR one, and I was nearly certain that it had no or little monetary value. So I swapped him. He rubbed his new strap between a thumb and two fingers, then passed it down the line to his admiring friends. "Man, you don't know how much this means to me," he told me. "Thank you."

  He and his friends had driven in that morning from Georgia, about eight hours away, and they would head home after the race. The tickets belonged to his boss, who couldn't use them. He told me he was a Tony Stewart fan, big time, and so were his friends, except one of them, who pulled for Dale Jr. Then he asked me where I went to school for reporting, and whether he might have seen me on TV earlier in the race, and who my favorite driver was. I had actually anticipated being asked this last question, and so had tried to figure out the best response. Over the weekend I had heard each of the top drivers speak during their press conferences, spent half an hour with the veteran Jeff Burton in his trailer, spoken to Jack Roush about his Ford team, and seen the drivers practice and interact with their crews. But under the Georgian's gaze, I could think of no reply that would properly elevate me in his eyes. I told him Juan Pablo Montoya. At least the Colombian looked like a comic book supervillain in his red car and red jumpsuit adorned with the Target bull's-eye logo. My new friend stared at me, seeming to consider my choice. "Yeah, Montoya brings a little more color to the sport, a different flavor," he said.

  When he inquired where I was from, because he could tell that it wasn't the South, I told him I was living in Nashville but was originally from Chicago. He used to party in downtown Chicago, he said. Then he offered up his review of northern cities: "Detroit—shitty city; Chicago—great city." He said his mother was from Dayton, Ohio. Which meant he was not like the other guys. He motioned toward his three Georgia buddies. "Yankees," he said, holding up his hands, palms out, in an expression of nonviolence. "They're okay with me."

  Kurt Busch, from Las Vegas, led for 278 of the 500 laps of the race, but then with just seventeen remaining, a late caution gave Jimmie Johnson the opportunity to pit and take four new tires. On the restart, he somehow catapulted from sixth place to first in just three quick turns around the track and then nosed ahead of Tony Stewart to win the race by .89 seconds. (Montoya, for what it's worth, finished twenty-sixth.) It was Johnson's third victory of the young season, the fiftieth win in his career, and his first triumph at Bristol. I looked in the papers the next day, at all the write-ups of this stunning come-from-behind finish, both to understand how it could happen and to see what poetry it might inspire. There was none. Most accounts simply described the race as a failure, Johnson's victory coupled with the lackluster attendance a double loss for the sport.

  At the race's conclusion, the track announcer tried to put a smile on things, saying to the crowd that this would be the last Sprint Cup event with the much-derided rear wing. "Fans, you do make a difference. And NASCAR hears you. You didn't like the wing, and we got rid of it." I tuned in to the drivers' post-race interviews.

  Greg Biffle: "I'm just so proud of everything. I'm just so proud to have the U.S. Census on this car."

  Tony Stewart: "I just want to thank Office Depot and Old Spice."

  But Kurt Busch may have best captured the general mood among the fans at the track, and among those at home. When a mic was thrust in front of him just moments after his last-minute defeat, he said, "To lose to the 48 sucks. I'm sure everyone here wanted anyone but the 48."

  By the middle of August, the Sprint Cup season would see a total of eleven different drivers claim victory, with Denny Hamlin, a twenty-nine-year-old Virginian, winning as many races as Jimmie Johnson, and Kevin Harvick leading in overall points with the most top-ten finishes. It was, however, a season that was doing little to reverse NASCAR's fortunes; restoring the devotion of fans would require something far more elusive than rear spoilers and revised start times. NASCAR hoped to inject into the sport not only more action but also a greater sense of authenticity. Gaining speed on such slippery ground would not be easy. The New NASCAR, like the New South, is less culturally distinct from the rest of America than its votaries would like to believe. The sport still delivers on horsepower, but as a costume drama set in some imaginary Dixie, it is no longer as pleasing, or convincing, as it used to be. Every performance leaves the audience longing for some golden era when The Dukes of Hazzard played on prime time and the stars of the track were better stand-ins for the stand-ins for Southern manhood who had come before them.

  At Bristol, wandering about the grounds outside the track, I joined some tailgaters in a couple of rounds of cornhole, the beanbag-toss game. The rear window of the car they were tailgating behind displayed both the Red Sox insignia and the number of Jeff Gordon's race car. The owner, busy manning his portable grill, had moved from Boston to Charlotte years earlier, his accent still thick as a Kennedy's. He dropped his r's, broadened his a's. He went to about a dozen races a year, he told me, and had seen the steady declines in attendance everywhere. "The South built this sport," he said, pronouncing "sport" as two syllables and gazing wistfully at the giant billboards on the speedway's façade, one showing a snarling Dale Earnhardt Sr., another shoots of E-Z Seed grass sprouting from the center of a potted race tire. "It is regional. That's what it's all about. It started to go wrong with the races up North."

  The Coconut Salesman

  David Baez

  FROM The New York Times Magazine

  THE COCONUT SALESMAN appears every morning in front of the tourist hotel in Jinotepe, Nicaragua. He stands there with his cart full of coconuts, his machete to hack the tops off, and his bag of straws. He is in his fifties, with a pronounced belly that strains the fabric of the old T-shirts he wears, and dark, wet eyes.

  Last year, unable to find work in the U.S., I came to Nicaragua to stay with a relative. Shortly thereafter I started drinking so much that I checked myself into rehab here for eight weeks. When I got out some months ago, I used to run into the coconut salesman near the market, and he would try to get me to buy coconut milk. I never really liked the taste, yet he was persistent, so one day I asked him why I should spend money on a drink that I didn't like very much. He told me coconut milk has a multitude of health benefits: that it cleans out the kidneys, for example. I asked him if it would therefore be good for a person who had a long history of drinking, and he said yes. So I decided I would try to drink coconut milk every morning. He sold it for 30 cents.

  Not long after, I came to live in the hotel in exchange for volunteer work. And so I saw him every day. One day he told me that he wanted to paint his cart red as a way of attracting more clients. His cart was functional, but some of the wood had rotted away, and the wheels were almost as close to square as they were to round. When I asked him if he really thought it would help, he just crouched down and pantomimed painting the cart with quick sidelong strokes, and smiled.

  He told me that the paint would cost 95 córdobas (about $5), but that he had only 40. He showed me the 40 córdobas. He was asking me for a loan. I told him that I
had very little money. He said that if I gave him the money, he would bring me coconut milk every day until he had given me an amount of equal value. So I gave him 50 córdobas and told him I was looking forward to seeing the freshly painted cart.

  The next morning the coconut salesman did not show up, and once evening came, nobody had seen him all day. I just figured that I had lost about $2.50, and that I could learn some sort of lesson from it.

  The following day, when the coconut salesman saw me, he immediately grabbed a coconut, hacked the top off, stuck a straw inside, and handed it to me. I drank the milk and asked him why his cart was the same sorry green it was before. He told me that on the day I gave him the loan, a pickpocket stole all his money. I decided that whatever happened, the coconut salesman was making good on the deal we'd made.

  The next morning the coconut salesman came again, gave me my coconut, and told me he had a problem. I drank my coconut milk and told him I wasn't surprised. He told me that one of his sons wanted a Bible but that he didn't have the money. I told him that the managers of the hotel were Evangelical Christians and might be happy to give him one. He asked me if I would go in for him. I said sure, and went in and got him a Bible.

  The next day the coconut salesman told me he had another problem. I told him I wasn't surprised. He told me that his son was very happy with the Bible, but now his other son wanted one, too. He wanted me to go into the hotel and get a second Bible. I said: "I'm pretty sure there's a passage somewhere in the Bible about the concept of sharing. Maybe they could read that together." The coconut salesman listened to me, then went inside the hotel himself and got another Bible.

  About a week after that I noticed that the coconut salesman had placed a coconut on top of his cart as a way of advertising his product, and was selling his coconut milk in a much more energetic manner than usual. A couple of hours later, he was still there, and I asked him if his newfound promotional zeal had made him any money. He reached in his pocket and took out 60 córdobas. I encouraged him to continue with this kind of advertising and promotion. He told me that since he now had 60 córdobas, he only needed 35 to buy the paint for his cart. Could he borrow it from me, since he was now so close to his goal? I told him I would think about it. In early sobriety, and especially in Nicaragua, hasty decisions are rarely advisable. And so I went inside the hotel to take a nap.

  Venance Lafrance Is Not Dead

  Mischa Berlinski

  FROM Men's Journal

  A COUPLE OF WEEKS after the earthquake, the werewolves came down from the hills.

  "It's serious!" one man said.

  He was talking about the loup-garou, a distant cousin of the werewolf. In Haitian lore the loup-garou was a kind of sorcerer who had learned to transform himself into an animal—a cat, a goat, or even a cow. Thus disguised, the loup-garou went out into the night to feast on the blood of small children. Two or three days after such a visitation, children would sicken and die. Now, with so many people in Port-au-Prince sleeping in the open air, the loups-garous were believed to present an exceptional danger.

  He told me that not here but farther up on the mountain the werewolves had already killed a number of small children. This was the way the loup-garou story always went—not here, but not far away, the loups-garous were prowling. Another man told me that a brigade vigilance was formed to keep an eye out. Our baby's nanny later said that the police in her neighborhood had instituted a policy of zero tolerance for looters and loups-garous: both were killed on sight.

  We were in the hills of Carrefour Feuilles, a neighborhood above Port-au-Prince. Before the quake small cinder-block houses had been stacked steeply one upon the next, climbing the bowls of the mountain, the inhabitants maneuvering through tiny alleyways. When the quake came, one house took down the next, leaving the entire hillside a smear of concrete and rubble and fallen satellite dishes.

  "But why do loups-garous want to suck children's blood?" I asked.

  The question provoked discussion. One man proposed it was a vice, like a taste for whiskey or smoking. Another man just shrugged. But a third man said, "Le loup-garou—c'est le mal absolu." The loup-garou is absolute evil. I suppose, thinking it over now, that it was easier to stay awake at night watching for werewolves than it was to stay on guard for lethal aftershocks.

  The earthquake was still recent enough that every passing truck gave me the shivers. Very early one morning, my phone rang, but when I answered it, the caller abruptly hung up. This pattern irritatingly repeated itself perhaps five or six times. This was Venance Lafrance's way of saying he was not dead.

  I had met Venance three years earlier, shortly after my wife and I moved to Haiti. She had found a job in the justice section of the United Nations peacekeeping mission here, working with judges, prosecutors, and lawyers to reform the Haitian legal system. I had just published my first novel, and I figured that I could avoid writing a second one as easily in Haiti as anyplace else; in this I would eventually be proven completely correct. Cristina was initially assigned to the town of Jeremie, only about 125 miles from Port-au-Prince but remote, like an island off the coast of Haiti, fift een hours of bad road between us and the capital. There were more coffin makers in Jérémie than restaurants, more donkeys than cars, and the paved roads petered out at the edge of town. We rented an old gingerbread house flanked by a quartet of sturdy mango trees. In the mornings merchants came down from the hills past our front gate with baskets of fruit balanced on their heads, and at night in bed under the mosquito net when the moon was silver and big, we heard voodoo drums and strange, spooky singing. I don't know if I've ever liked a place more in my life.

  Everywhere I went in Jeremie, people asked me for money. Out front of the Internet cafe, a woman who was almost obese looked up from her breakfast and told me she was hungry. At the market, on the beach, in the streets, people would throw up their palms and say, "Blan, ba'm cinq gourdes"—White, give me five gourdes. I've been in other places as poor as Jérémie—the slums of Calcutta, the highlands of northern Thailand—but I've never seen more persistent and aggressive begging. There is a Creole proverb: "Degagé pa peché"—Getting by isn't a sin. Asking someone who had money for money was just another way of getting by.

  Venance Lafrance asked me for money just a few days after I got to Jérémie. I was walking to the beach—think goats, chickens, cows, pigs, and wild turkeys; mud huts; a strip of white dirt road snaking along high cliffs diving down to a postcard sea—when a young man with a bag of sweet potatoes on his head accosted me and told me in broken French after some conversational preliminaries that he wanted to be an artist. He was seventeen at the time but looked about twelve. He looked a little like a space alien, with very big eyes, a wide, tall forehead, and high, prominent cheekbones tapering down to a narrow, angular chin. He was wearing a T-shirt that read LIFE IS SHORT. EAT DESSERT FIRST. He was very skinny. I don't remember how he began the conversation, but the upshot was this: he was a student; he had no money; his mother had no money; his little brothers were hungry; and he wanted to be an artist. He had a terrific smile—chiefly what the good Lord gave him in exchange for all his troubles was this smile like an exploding sun. He asked me for money to feed his little brothers and I gave him the change in my pocket—about a buck fifty. I wouldn't have been sad if I never saw him again.

  A few days later, Venance presented himself at the front gate of our house. Jérémie is a small place, and Venance, going from neighborhood to neighborhood and door to door, had found me. This was a degree of persistence and hard work that Venance would never again display in my presence. He had a look on his face as he waited for me of patient, fragile hopefulness. I invited him in, where he drank a glass of orange juice. Much later I learned that he was so excited to see me that he hadn't slept the night before. That's exactly the look he had on his face as he sipped his orange juice, like he couldn't quite believe that he, Venance Lafrance of Carrefour Prince, Haiti, was sitting there on my terrace drinking orange juice. Like it was
all too good to be believed.

  In the weeks and months thereafter, no pretty lady has ever been courted by such an animated and constant suitor as I was courted by Venance Lafrance. He came by the house all the time. He was unshakable. My wife and I tried many schemes to convince Venance to leave us alone. I told him that he was allowed to visit only every third day. Every third day without fail he showed up at our door. We asked him to visit only between five and six in the evening, with the result that we had a standing appointment with Venance Lafrance at 5:01 P.M. We told him not to visit us at all. Ha! He was resistant to hints, oblivious to suggestions. What did he want? Not just to ask for money, but also to say hello, or to eat a meal, or to hang around, or to ask a question. After I had known him a week, he told me that he loved me like a brother; after I'd known him a month, that he loved me like a father. What he wanted more than anything, I think, was to sit with us out on the terrace in the evening and belong.

  In the end Venance wore me down. I came to like him. It was hard to be mean to somebody so young who wanted so badly to be liked. He was the kind of kid you could horse around with. He was always up for kicking around a soccer ball, or taking a trip to the beach. You could send him up the mango tree and he'd come down with a half-dozen fresh, juicy pieces of fruit. He had an easy laugh. You could read a book around him and he'd amuse himself, or you could tease him about girls and he'd laugh. After a couple of months in Jérémie, it got to be an accepted fact of life that two or three or five days a week, Venance Lafrance would show up at our house and hang around until we told him that he had to leave.

  Brilliant smile aside, Venance wasn't very handsome. He had terrible body odor, and his hair was reddish at the roots, a sign of protein deficiency. He asked me for money to buy deodorant and shoe polish, which he rubbed on his head. Though he said he wanted to be an artist, I never saw him actually make art. He was functionally illiterate. He was one of the laziest people I've ever met—and I say this as someone who is quite lazy himself. He had been admitted to a free school of ironwork, which he often didn't bother to attend. We would later hire Venance and his younger brother to sweep our yard on Saturday mornings. His brother would arrive on time and work diligently. Venance would show up late, work halfheartedly, and leave early.