I Gave You Spectacle
Monster Truck Fiction
This piece is part of The Lot, the first volume of SUM FLUX. Featured in Edition 3—the culmination of Volume 1—this work is one of eight contributions to this edition. Read more about this zine and its theme here: https://sumflux.substack.com/p/volume-1-the-lot.
These other cars pretend like I never feel emotions. You see the way they treat me, like I’m just a Monster Truck, like all I am is a shiny exhibition for brutality. They put me in shows, jump me across obstacles, spin me around, crash me, put me up on two legs like I’m a fucking horse, like I’m their plaything, instead of a mechanical miracle engineered of metal, rubber, oil, and God.
My forefathers were built from SUVs and Pick Up Trucks. Pulled apart, and transformed to have higher suspensions, they forfeited body parts for bigger and bigger tires. No one knew what to call them at first.
I was mangled from the imagination of cigaretted men in cheap blue overalls, men on their backs underneath half-machines, on their tiptoes at the hood of half-machines, a focused, hapless crew of tinkerers, prone to lose the point of the engineering to the leisure - beer, shit-talk, sweaty maleness.
I was the second generation, son of Grave Digger and Raminator, the generation that first stunned Bob George to name this new phenomenon, Monster Trucks. Mud Bogging contests at county fairs disfigured rural southern towns into excitement; boredom determined to delight in nature’s muck.
My upgrades were the envy of the junkyard. I had a custom-built tubular chassis, a black and gold fiberglass body. My builders modified my custom designed automatic transmission to mimic the Turbo 400, then gave me more control by adding heavily modified transbrakes.
Grave Digger and Raminator leaked oil the first time I was ignited. My childhood junkyard predicted I would be a champion Monster Truck one day. They named me Paver.
Retired life in the Parking Lot, I take up several spots. You would be stunned at the things I see. A man pissing by a tree cuts up a Papier-mâché. Nicky said this parking lot was a luxury retirement, but I’ve seen people running from robberies, desperate mid-age hookups, and a homeless man eating Orzo with tomatoes and feta cheese.
That’s not the half of it. I once watched a woman and a young man doing some craziness standoff. The woman damn near killed the young man but he escaped - not before crashing her windshield with two punches to the face. Hurt my smile. The loss of last chances.
Nothing compares to my vibrations of grief after what they did to my cousin, Soul Crusher. Petty gangsters' explosions take casualties without even noticing, and they call us Monsters.
But I keep the secrets, like that of the gang of Troubled White-Collar Workers who come nightly and circle a self-immolating F-150, playing ‘Sketches of Pain,’ punching, bleeding, kicking each other like a prayer ritual to an unnamed deity.
Their cult worship one night is broken by the strangest eruption. A poet with a black Robin Hoodie slung over his head approaches the parking lot reading poetry, “where dynasties were scraped away/By sudden wrath or slow decay/We knew what chance's miracles were worth, “and soon all the cars in the parking lot levitate with him to build a new utopia.
I fall asleep and dream of two figures skirting past me, opening the mouth of the mother, and descending into bottomless anarchy.
My only driver was Nicole. I’ll never forget the first time we rode together. She leaned into my black leather seat bolted to the metal floor, her body forming into mine in raptured conformity. She gripped my steering wheel and I felt my lungs gasp.
We ground the dirt together for many victories - relentlessly chasing the high of our first win. The junkyard had always claimed a Monster Truck was not a Monster Truck until it was tamed. I slept shorter the nights before she rode me for contests. Life became purpose-refined.
Spectators screamed and clapped, wowed, giggled and whoaed. The chainsaw sound of engines powering my kin across the mud mountains chopped away at the limitations of machine imagination.
Oh, the things Nicole and I did for the spectators. I’ve flown for longer than a man dunking from the free-throw line. I’ve spun around 360 degrees. I’ve been driven on one tire like a ballerina. I’ve raced through obstacle courses, crushing cars as I bent around turns.
Dirt dominated. The crop of value. Our destiny as blood. The decimal exploding caterwaul of the crowd would pulsate from above like theater lights. Strange bursts of slogans stuck out in the mayhem. Knock Em down.
The crashes I witnessed would shock nightmares. My brother flipped, landing on his stomach, catching fire until half his body was burned. A cousin flew too high after a long take-off, and rolled over five times upon landing, breaking his neck a little bit more with each rotation. Both of my uncle’s legs were ripped off after one fall. My best friend fell on his head one show and decapitated himself. I’ve seen a Monster Truck spun around until he shredded his entire frame, left completely naked for the whole crowd to gawk at him, an emperor disrobed.
We had our bad accidents, Nicole and me, but mostly kept our emotions from getting inflamed, protected our most vulnerable parts, taking strategic risks worth the rewards. We swept many events during our run together. For a while, we were on the Mount Rushmore of Monster Trucks.
Destiny derailed; a short truck drive from Chihuahua City, Mexico, El Rejon Dam, the regulations weren’t what we expected, but none of us imagined the tragedy that would occur.
Our newly met comrade lost control and rammed into the stands, imploded, and shot his metal guts into the fans, killing dozens of people, lifelong injuries for many others.
I refused to inflate my tires. Nicole discovered I wouldn’t jump anymore. My engine would turn off the moment it was time to race. We both cried the morning she conceded our work together was over.
I had what the mechanics called Post Crash Syndrome. She retired me to a parking lot and came to visit me a few times the first year, once annually in subsequent years, until she no longer visited at all.
I wake up to synthetic drums and boppy disco bursts from an electronic piano. A 1957 BMW 507 sings about playing around with someone’s heart and then an orange BMW E30 M3 pulls up next to her and begins playing, “yesterday somebody wacced out my mural, “and the two cars go song for song for hours.
HUD built an affordable housing apartment complex while I was asleep. There’s smoke pushing out of an open window on the top floor, cigarettes falling from its belly like placenta.
A homeless man, wearing an dark hunter green trench coat with Parkistan stitched into it, has been here since I first retired. He keeps swatting at flies while a security fraud tries to use a flashlight as a lightsaber against a gang of middle-aged swinger couples beating him to a pulp.
I watch the homeless man catch one of the tossed cigarettes thrown from the window, pretend to re-light it with his finger, and squat down to drive an invisible OLDSMOBILE. The car keeps revving its engine but never leaves.
Two adult women in pantsuits, wearing hard hats, walk up to the apartment building and unroll building plans to adapt the apartment into a boutique hotel, part of their chain. They discuss the opportunity and the brunette one, clearly the leader, pulls out her cell phone to close the deal on the spot.
Her shorter, red-haired partner paces around her. A few moments later, the leader hangs up the phone and pumps her fist in the air. Both women celebrate their newest acquisition like pre-teen girls, skipping through the parking lot, spitting on cars.
The sun rolls up the tint on its windows and the darkness begins to spook me. The night reminds me of a blown engine. The last heart of a Monster. I can hear the guttural screech of the vultures brushing the sky above.
A car pulls in with its lights bright and circles me a few times, looking for parking. They stop at the entrance to the lower level. No one goes down there for obvious reasons, but this driver appears determined to brave the descent.
The sound of a car in a blender erupts underneath me a few minutes after the mistake. I shudder and watch a rain of cigarettes dive from the smokey apartment window. A turtle with black framed glasses sweeps the cigarettes into a lunch pail and clanks them away.
The turtle continues to scour the parking lot for debris. His deliberate and patient swaddles are barely visible in the dark night. He has a sticker on his shell for a lost teenage daughter and a phone number for anyone who finds her.
The turtle comes to a section of the parking lot filled with condoms. He opens his lunch pail again, but at that invitation, the condoms come to life.
They dash away from the turtle and huddle together. After a few groans of time pass, they burst into Beyonce formation. And begin to dance.
The turtle shakes his head and turns his shell to clean another area, missing the performance.
The condoms finish, take a bow and pull MacArthur Genius Statues from inside their intestines, bouncing them on their noses with joy. The statues are a Thinking Man pissing.
The moon and the light from the apartment window are the only two eyes left in the sky. The person inside that apartment must be feeling mighty regret from the pace of the cigarettes.
The window’s lights turn off and a much larger cigarette tosses itself from the window, leaping out in an elegant display of loss and fortitude, extending every inch of his fingers in commitment to the dive, landing louder than a camel on the sand.
The mouth of the mother opens, and a woman jots out and pulls the new corpse into the underworld. Knowing hunger of desperate proportions fills the lives of those beneath the parking lot, I sympathize with the consumption, but still try to avoid thinking of the poor man.
I remind myself: they can never eat me, for I am a Monster Truck.
I saw wreckage and renewal over the centuries of my retirement. Each iteration was more luxuriously decadent than the one prior, and the life span of value shorter.
I gave up on the Parking Lot, its liminal nature began to depress me. The best years of my retirement were gifted to that asphalt wasteland. The one created after the other collapsed.
I slumbered more deeply, never turning my ignition, existing through the decay. Fanged children climbed around me and through me and on top of me and whispered fantastical purposes for my creation. There were no more Monster Trucks.
Vines clung to my body and spread slowly like a declining population. I never opened my eyes those last years, my antenna reaching back into my past for the moments of thunder.
 | A guest post by
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And what was the monster’s name? I imagine it might be something like Leviathang or Rough Justice, maybe Bog Bandit or G Wrecks.
ALL THE DAMN EASTER EGGS! What a fun monster adventure. But also so tragic.