The Enthusiast Read Online Free PDF Page B

wasn’t my stuff, though. You put in people saying things they never said. They were in places they’ve never been in.”
    â€œYeah. No, we blurred the geography a little. We wanted to spread it around.” I was trying to be stiff with him, but he didn’t seem to get it. “Yeah, that looks like shit, Devon. Henry? You get spring break there, right? You have plans for it?”
    â€œI’m not sure yet,” I said. Troup was going to Telluride and I’d put in for double shifts at Doctor Taco.
    â€œHow’d you like to cover a major buggy event?”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œIt’s at a dry lake in Nevada. It’s going to be great. I’d go myself but it’s right before we close the issue.”
    â€œI don’t have a car.”
    â€œThat’s okay,” he said. “Can you borrow one?” I didn’t answer. “Look, I’ll tell you what. You go there, take some notes, take some pictures, and then come here and we’ll work on it together. You can meet everyone. You’d just drive up to Las Vegas and fly here. Wait, hold on a second.” He put the phone down, came back after a minute, and said, “That’s a regular college you go to, right? Not like a weird Bible college or anything? No offense. It’s just whether you can get a student fare.”
    â€œIt’s a state college,” I said. “State university.”
    â€œPerfect. So you can come here. We’ll pay you.”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œHenry, be a guy. It’s a perfect spring break. Don’t tell me you’re going to Florida. You know what that is? It’s a bunch of girls in bikinis. This is Clayton, Illinois. We’ve got girls in jumpers.” A woman in the background cheerfully said, “Fuck you,” and there was laughing.
    â€œAre they corduroy?” I said.
    â€œCorduroy, muslin. It’s a wide-open town. Henry? We’ll put you in a hotel. You can look over my shoulder if I start screwing around with your prose stylings, okay?”
    I had a fatal weakness for people who spoke smartass and could get me speaking it too—Barney, Gerald, and now this guy. Weighing Doctor Taco’s fryer hood against a kite buggy event and an office where they blithely told the boss to fuck himself, I chose the trip.
    Â 
    G erald was going home for spring break and wouldn’t need his car. I dropped him at the airport and drove into the desert, a sun-wrecked eternity of sand, scrub, and the occasional yucca. On the highway along the Mojave Preserve the air was so dry I didn’t seem to be sweating, but when I walked into an air-conditioned Denny’s I was soaked in thirty seconds.
    In the afternoon I crossed into Nevada, got off the freeway at a town consisting of two casinos and an outlet mall, andfollowed Rensselaer’s directions to the dry lake. There was no road, but steel poles every fifty feet marked the way across rose-tinted dirt that had cracked into a hypnotic pattern of polygons.
    After twenty minutes I started worrying that I was in the wrong place, till I saw a kite in the sky, then two and then seven, and cars and vans parked by a big plastic shade tent. Kite buggies were crossing the lakebed in all directions, their lines buzzing softly in the hot wind.
    I parked on the fringe. There were a hundred people, mostly men, with bodies ranging from young and athletic to sixty and shot, T-shirts that said things like BUGGY TILL YOU FRY, and the goatees and handlebars that come standard with speed sports. There were no spectators and no media but me, with a borrowed camera and a Los Nietos Geckos spiral notebook.
    I knew I should interview people, that someone was probably nailing the essence of the sport just out of my earshot, but I was already getting curious looks for being there without a buggy and doing something that looked like work. I smiled in response, ducking my head to