[Waves crash on the beach as seagulls squawk in the background]

SONI BROWN: It was the mid-eighties. I was a kindergartener in Jamaica, and the only girl in a house filled with boys. Some of my fondest memories involved watching my older brothers work on cars, the way they worked closely and quietly, handing each other tools.

Cars and rallies were a big deal in our house, and The Dakar Rally was standard viewing.  If my brothers weren’t watching a race, they were talking about one, like the Mint 400 in Las Vegas, which, at 5-years-old, was as far away and exotic as Dakar because I had never seen the desert before.

[A loud, smoggy engine starts] 

Although my brothers were adults by the time I was born, we bonded by watching races together. On Sundays, when we went to the beach, I would take the Hot Wheels toys my brothers gave me and pound them into the sand dunes, pretending they were the souped-up cars and trucks making the trek from Paris to Senegal, just like the Dakar Rally.

[A thin banging sound, as if a hammer was hitting a flimsy piece of metal, plays underneath]

It did not matter who won a race. My brothers would whoop and holler and our dogs would join in. Then they would head out to the front yard, under the sprawling mango tree, to resume working on cars.

[Short bursts of a power drill join the other sounds]

The earth underneath their feet was black from motor oil and axle grease. I would leave my dolls on the verandah, hike up my dress, and stumble over to them. They tried to keep me away. I don’t know if they thought this wasn’t a proper place for a girl, but that never stopped me.

Eventually, they would tell me to climb down from the mango tree and hand them a Phillips Head screwdriver. Once in a while, they’d let me fire up the tig torch on a fender they were welding.

 Those are some of my best memories.

 [The static sound of a torch lighting fades into the sound of waves. The waves are eventually eclipsed by the moaning of high-speed cars whizzing by]

By the early aughts, the Dakar Rally had moved to South America. I had left Jamaica for Texas, and my brothers moved to Florida. I didn’t watch races anymore because it wasn’t the same without them. Besides, I had traded toolboxes and grease for make-up bags and heels.

Eventually, I fell in love with dirt bikes because of a boy. And, just like that, I was watching racing again.

  [The low growl of engines plays in the background]

Motocross is a different world than car rallies. First of all, you’re standing in the dirt with other spectators separated from the racecourse by a rope. You constantly brush dirt from your shoulders and feel the grit on your skin.

It’s neat out in the dirt watching people do tricks on their motorbikes. 

But as a Black woman, I also felt very aware that I looked different. There wasn’t anything tangible to make my skin pimple with anxiety.

[Sinister music, reminiscent of a heartbeat, pulses in the background]

But after the 2016 election, it felt like this was not the space for me anymore. I became hyper aware of my surroundings, scanning faces for signs of… what, exactly, I don’t know. Something sinister? A wink? Do violent racists give a signal?

Shortly before the 2016 election, now living in Las Vegas, I was searching for car rallies in the area. I realized around this time that my adult life has been about chasing the things from my childhood that made me happy, like memories of watching the Dakar Rally with my brothers. That’s when I stumbled on the Mint 400 off-road race, as described in Hunter S. Thompson’s book, Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas.

And the Mint, that was something else.

[Rumble of cars circling each other plays in the background]

LEVAR BURTON [reading a passage from Fear and Loathing]: The race was definitely underway. I had witnessed the start; I was sure of that much. But what now? Rent a helicopter? Get back in that stinking Bronco? Wander out on that goddamn desert and watch these fools race past the checkpoints? One every 13 minutes. …?

By ten they were spread out all over the course. It was no longer a “race”; now it was an Endurance Contest. The only visible action was at the start/finish line, where every few minutes some geek would come speeding out of the dust-cloud and stagger off his bike, while his pit crew would gas it up and then launch it back onto the track with a fresh driver … for another 50-mile lap, another brutal hour of kidney-killing madness out there in that terrible dust-blind limbo.

 

BROWN: Assigned to write a blurb about the Mint 400 in 1971, Thompson, instead, wrote a rambling conspiracy saga. When his story was rejected, he turned it into a book that was then lauded as an American masterpiece, marking a high point of counterculture literature and gonzo journalism. This made Thompson seem so cool that Johnny Depp portrayed him twice.

[Audio from Fear and Loathing]

Benicio del Toro (Gonzo): What kind of story is this?

Johnny Depp (Duke): It’s the Mint 400! The richest off-road race for motorcycles and dune-buggies in the history of organized sport!

BROWN: I’d read the book before in a literature class, completely disgusted with the antics. Nothing prepares you for the drugs, violence and outrageous behavior that Thompson indulges in while in Las Vegas.

It dawns on you that this could only happen to a white man of privilege. The depraved decadence and over-consumption in Fear and Loathing is what lives in outsiders’ imagination of the city. The idea of Las Vegas as an outlet for America’s drunken abusiveness and excess didn’t start with the book, but its legacy lingers.

[Sound of a crowded room with faint uptempo techno music in the background]

BURTON: In some circles, the Mint 400 is a far, far better thing than the Super Bowl, the Kentucky Derby and the Lower Oakland Roller Derby Finals all rolled into one. This race attracts a special breed.

BROWN: When I read Fear and Loathing, Thompson’s version of the Mint 400 seemed as wrong to me as his depiction of Las Vegas. Probably because he doesn’t actually see the race.

[Sound of the crowd and music crescendos]

He arrives late, gets lost, crashes around the desert and only catches glimpses of the action. To him, the people in and around the race are “fools,” “geeks,” “lunatics.”

[Sound of the crowd and music abruptly stops]

But that’s not my experience. In March of 2015, I met a father-and-son team at the Mint parade downtown on Fremont Street. The feeling that day is the closest I’ve been to carnival in a while. People were in the streets jumping into the dune buggies. Some were under the hoods of the specialized trucks “oohing” over the engine.

[Sounds of power tools and tinkering with parts underneath narration]

The father and son weren’t paying much attention to anything around them. They were cleaning the side mirrors of their black dune buggy, passing the polish or cloth to each other. They told me they’d spent years building and retooling their vehicle for the race. 

I could tell theirs was a bond forged years ago, tinkering on a car like my brothers did. I closed my eyes and inhaled the engine oil, letting it take me right back to Jamaica.

[The sound of an engine starting fades into crashing waves]

Out at the race’s starting point, in Jean, Nevada, about 30 miles south of Las Vegas, you can hear the full-throated growl of the trucks and snarling motorcycles. Each rev and vroom brings a sickly sweet smell of race fuel and exhaust. People mill about in denim short shorts, cargo pants, and boots.

Thompson, at least, got the feeling of the Mint right. It makes you giddy and excited. The spectators are eager to see half-ton bodies of metal fly through the air, leaving a trail of dust, which you literally eat. There is no escaping that. 

If you block out the casino carnival ride in the background, you could imagine the Mint 400 was happening on Mars. The drivers look like astronauts in their jumpsuits.

There is a kinship among the crowd. No one notices me, or when they do, I am greeted with a smile. I am just one of them, a racing fan. I feel I belong. Maybe I’m one of the special breeds.

[Country music, reminiscent of a movie scene on a desert highway plays]

 I don’t see the father and son in Jean. After a few days, they sent me an email saying they never made it to the race. An axle busted during practice. They were already planning for the next year.

[Country music continues to play]

This year is the 50th anniversary of Fear and Loathing’s publication. Reading it, I see how Thompson made the Mint just an odd extension of the Las Vegas he invented. The way he widely exaggerated the craziest aspects of the race left out everything that mattered to me about it, and about Las Vegas. It’s an image privileged outsiders seem to always fall back on no matter how loathsome the fantasy.

Sure, the book is canonized as literature. But when I read it, I couldn’t help wondering, “who’s cleaning up after this bozo?” The answer, of course, is someone who lives here, a hotel maid, or a minimum-wage worker. People who make their homes in the places not accounted for in Thompson’s supercharged prose.

 

A writer friend of mine said Las Vegas is America’s ID, a place where people come to indulge in their primal urges. For 50 years, it’s been almost impossible for Las Vegas to shake the template Thompson established. It’s why the slogan “what happens here, stays here” was so popular. But for some of us, what happens here stays here because we stay here, making our lives in the spaces between the city’s profitable illusions.

As for the Mint 400, I guess both Thompson and I saw what we needed to see in it, and in Las Vegas too. Thompson needed an out-of-control spectacle to reinforce his fish-out-of-water narrative. Well, good for him. All I really needed from the race was a way to reconnect to those happy memories of my brothers — to recover a bit of Jamaica here in my desert home.

[Country music fades in and fades out until the end]