The Race Car

Inviting Your Fool To Emerge

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Excerpt from their book “Work Like Your Dog” by Matt Weinstein and Luke Barber

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I’ve noticed that most of us like to think of ourselves as sane, sensible people. But if the law of reversed effect is true, then there must also be a fool within each of us, just waiting to be liberated. If we really want to fill our lives with laughter and play, then it is not enough to find a fool or two to hang around with sometimes. Instead, we must be willing - at least at times - to find our own fool and let that fool come out and play. We must allow ourselves to do the unexpected, to take a risk, to turn things upside down. We must give ourselves permission to wear Tweety Bird slippers whenever the fancy strikes us. Not only will our lives then be more blessed with joy, but we will also bring more joy to those around us. Of course, once you invite your fool to emerge, it is likely that they will choose to appear at the most unlikely times and in the most embarrassing situations.

This certainly was true for me the time I “customized” my car. During the days when I was famous among my friends for refusing to drive anything but inexpensive used cars, I was also at the height of my powers as a long-distance runner. As we were walking to my garage one day, my friend Peter Alsop noticed two cardboard boxes that I had stored on the floor in the back of the garage. He could see the glimmer of silver and gold reflected in the light bouncing back from the cartons. He paused to get a better look. “What have you got in there?” he asked me.

“Oh just my old running trophies,” I explained.

“Really ?” he asked me, intrigued. “What are you going to do with them?”

“What am I going to do with them?” I laughed. “Nothing. I’m going to keep them in boxes. I’ve had these boxes for years. Every time I get a new trophy I just throw it in one of the boxes.”

“You’re kidding!” said Peter, moving in to get a closer look. “You’re really not going to do anything with all these trophies?”

“What am I supposed to do them?” I asked him. “Can you imagine me having a trophy room in my house? Can you imagine what my friends would say?” We both laughed at the idea.

“I have a fun idea,” said Peter holding a few of the statuettes up to the light as he examined them more closely. “Can I have them?”

I paused for a long moment to consider his request. I began to worry slightly. I had known Peter long enough to know that deep within his artistic soul a trickster was alive and well. He had that unnerving gleam in his eye that usually meant he was about to involve me in some kind of a crazy project. “Sure, I guess you can have them,” I told him hesitantly. “What are you going to do with them?”

“First let me see what we've got,” he said grinning. So we emptied out the boxes and started to inventory our cache. There were piles of metals and plaques, but Peter wasn't interested in them. All he wanted to see was the trophies. They were forty-nine in all. Some were silver-painted, some were golden. Some were five inches tall, but most were double that size. All of them had runners mounted on a trophy base in the identical position, left arm angled out ahead, left foot kicking up behind.

Forty-six of the runners were men, and three were women. How I got the women's trophies I'm not sure. Sometimes at the end of a race there's a lot of confusion when it's time for the trophies to be handed out. There have been many times when I've had to leave before the awards ceremony and one of my friends would say, “Don't worry. I'll stick around and pick up your trophy for you.” And they’d grab whatever trophy they could find. Man, woman, they knew I wouldn't care. After all, a trophy is a trophy.

Peter unscrewed one of the statuettes from its base and held it up triumphantly in front of him. He looked me straight in the eye. “What would you think,” he asked me, trying to keep a straight face but not succeeding very well, “if we mounted all of these runners on the top of your car!”

I hoped he was joking, but I could tell right away that he wasn't. Stunned, I thought about his proposal for a few moments. After all, my car was just a beat-up old station wagon, but she was also my only set of wheels. I even had an affectionate nickname for her: Jewel. I mean, this was a really funny idea, but after all, Peter would be flying back home to Los Angeles in a few days, and I would be left behind living with the car. On the other hand, if I said no way, then my reputation as a player would be severely questioned.

I grinned back at him, “Sure,” I said. “Let's do it!”

We borrowed a drill and bought some nuts and rubber washers. “Don’t worry,” Peter assured me, “these washers will protect you in case it rains on the car after we’ve drilled all the holes in the roof, … I hope.”

“We removed the inside roof of the car and started drilling. We drilled forty holes in all, with the runners bunched together in a pack at the back of the roof, then spaced out across the rest of the roof as the pack thinned out the way it would in any race. Then we glued two of the runners racing down the windshield, finishing up with nine runners mounted across the hood in a mad dash for the finish line. We put the three women runners in the number-one, number-seven, and number-thirty positions, wondering if anyone but us would ever notice that a woman was in the lead.

Then we took the car out for a spin. As soon as we pulled out of the driveway, I realized that my life would never be the same. People in the neighboring cars were laughing, smiling, and pointing us out to one another. They were giving me the thumbs-up sign and pounding on the sides of their own cars in attempt to make contact with us. Peter and I were ecstatic. This was a supreme example of the positive power of acting like a fool, a rolling billboard that shouted out to the people we passed, “Nothing is that serious! Come on out and have some fun!”

In the weeks that followed, whenever I left the car in public I almost always found it surrounded by admiring crowds. Every group seemed to have at least one person who was seized by the irresistible desire to mimic the runners and to stand frozen in front of the car, right fist angled out ahead, left leg kicking behind, smiling delightedly at the cheers and comments from the other onlookers.

The Race Car, as we came to call it, provided an opportunity beyond my wildest expectations for me to make contact with other people, and for total strangers to reach out to me. A man came running up to me as I started to enter the car, and he shook my hand excitedly. “My wife came here to go shopping,” he told me. “She took one look at your car and then drove all the way home to get me so that I could see it before it drove away.”

Later that same week I prepared to pull out of a parking lot when the parking attendant ambled over to me. “I’ve been waiting to see who owned this car,” he said, looking me over cautiously. : “I figured it was either a starving artist or some kind of a mad genius.”

Some people who couldn’t wait around to meet me would leave notes on the windshield instead. One note I got while I was parked at the college where I was teaching said, “I love your car. If you are not a student in the art department, why not?” Another simply said, “Your car is great! It makes me feel good!”

I mentally prepared myself for someone to have a strongly negative reaction to the Race Car and to release a torrent of abuse and contempt on me, but it never happened. The only negative incident, in fact, was a fairly predictable piece of vandalism: one day I returned to the car to find that the woman runner who was leading the race had been snapped off at the ankles. Whether it was coincidence that she was the only runner damaged, or whether she was intentionally destroyed by some outraged male chauvinist I will never know, but my response was an effortless one. I simply moved the woman in the number-seven position up to the number-one spot and replaced her with one of the spare men from my collection.

As you might imagine, the first time I drove my car to the site of a running race it caused a minor sensation. It made me feel wonderful when a twelve-year-old girl came over to me and said with tears in her eyes, “I can't believe that you let a woman win the race on top of your car. That is such an inspiration to me that I am going to go out today and run the best race of my life!”

Things came to a total standstill when I went to a car wash. Both the attendants and all the other customers stared open-mouthed as I drove in. They had seen plenty of customized cars in their day, but they had never seen anything like this before. I drove onto the conveyor belt and ran to the end of the wash line as the car emerged from its bath. Everyone else in the place ran along with me. Would the runners survive the attack of the soapy bristles? Would the rubber washers really protect the inside of the car as Peter had promised me, or would the car emerge flooded with water through the holes in the roof? Shout of triumph went up from half a dozen throats as the car emerged, victorious, from its maiden washing. It glistened. It shined. And the runners looked great. My car received its first standing ovation as I drove off to work.

Since I work on a college campus, it was inevitable that my car would be an object of serious academic study. Classes from the art department came outside to take a look at the Race Car, and anthropology classes examined the car as well. Since historically the gift of the fool is to be a teacher, this particular act of foolishness proved to be of great use to my fellow faculty members, who wished to teach their students about a different way of looking at life.

One of the anthropology professors came by my office to tell me about the field trip his class took to the parking lot to examine the Race Car. “I asked my students, what the difference was between a teenager driving around town in a Trans Am, revving up his engine every time he sees some girls, and you driving around town in this wacky car of yours? The difference is it is an important one. The teenager is driving around going Vroom! Vroom! and what he is saying to people is ‘Look at me. This is who I am!’ You, on the other hand, are driving around town in your Race Car, but what you are saying to people is ‘Look at me. Who are you?’”

Luke Barber - Peter Alsop - Matt Weinstein - Jewel the Race Car - 1998