The First Time I Heard About the Disaster of '55

We sat at a round dining table covered in lace, somewhere in the middle of France. These were friends of my parents—was it the family my mom had stayed with as a student? Or someone else they’d met along the way? We were forever criss-crossing the country: Paris, the south, Provence, the Alps, Brittany, the Pyrenees. Who the fuck knew who these people were. I can’t remember.

They were older—older than my parents—which befit the exquisitely bourgeois surroundings. The fine china displayed in cabinets along the wall, the flowered wallpaper, the Louis chairs. There must have been a grandfather clock somewhere.

We were there to eat cake. A classic French cake with meringue and cream and lavender. It was not very good, in my opinion, as it contained no chocolate. But it was sweet, so I ate it. I don’t know why we didn’t eat lunch. Just cake. Maybe we’d arrived too late, stuck in traffic on the autoroute.

Someone mentioned the 24 Hours of Le Mans. The man wistfully recalled the race in ‘55. A car slowed on the track and Pierre Levegh struck it. His Mercedes took flight and tumbled along the stands, disintegrating as it crushed and tore asunder dozens of human beings.

I gripped the silver fork and thrust it into the violet icing. The meringue resisted a little bit—you had to press hard. When it broke, the layers shifted willy nilly. Soon, crumbs and cream covered the floral pattern along the perimeter of the plate. I was afraid I was not elegant enough for this.

I love the long, long track, passing by odd artifacts of French countryside: methodical rows of high-branched trees, lush green knolls and ditches, little stone and tile structures to which there seems to be no access.

I went to Le Mans in 1975 and 1977. The memories blur but I remember the beautiful baby blue and orange Gulf Mirage that Derek Bell and Jacky Ickx drove to victory. I remember it was number 11 because I was fixated on the numbers too; the colors and the words and numbers. Blue, orange, Gulf, 11.

Dawn broke with cold gray skies and rain. We went over to the pits and I remember peering over and seeing the Gulf car from above. There were also blue Ligiers in the race, done up in the design of Gitanes cigarettes, with the silhouetted woman on the hood.

I remember telling my dad and brother that I was hungry enough to eat a horse but I don't know what we ate. At night the cars' headlights got mixed up with the lights from the ferris wheel and the fair.

In 1977 it was all about Porsche 936s with white, black and red Martini colors. Jacky Ickx won again. I remember sitting in the sun on the lawn to the right of the track after the first corner, waiting for hours, it seemed, for the race to start. In my memory the winning car crept to the finish line, stricken, moving a few miles an hour and held together with wires and tape.

I've been watching the 24 Hours of Le Mans about an hour and a half at a time, over the course of the last week and a half. The race signals the true beginning of summer to me. It's miraculous; it persists into the night and again into the morning as if the sun had never set. Don't tell me who won, I don't know who won it yet. I'm pulling for Jacques Villeneuve, who got drummed out of Formula One and is trying to become among the very few who've won Indy, the F1 Championship and Le Mans.