Saturday night was mapped out for me and I was feeling good about it. Booze, hot dogs and a press pass to the monster truck rally at the Rose Garden.
For days I had been salivating for the extra-large and fattening slice of hi-octane, skull crunching, shrieking, red-state meatloaf I would receive. I was finely tuned to observe and participate in a rotten orgy of high fives, “fuck yous,” unprotected sex and some fights.
Walking back and forth from one spot to another I decided to keep a tally of two things: cowboy hats and propositions to fight. I ended up with one of each.
The lack of cowboy apparatus (and once inside, country songs) was almost as strange as the fight proposition I received. Well, at I least I think that’s what it was. It was kind of a hey-do-I-know-you-do-you-want-to-fight sort of thing.
I’d finally made it unscathed and I couldn’t wait to begin my adventure hanging around the fans.
There were about seven or eight giant trucks scattered around the dirt-covered Rose Garden floor. A big American-flag-painted ramp sat between two rows of cars waiting to be crunched.
The noise from the engines was absolutely deafening. Almost incapacitating. There would be no talking. Most hardcore fans wore large earmuffs to protect their ears from the noise. Even so, the Monster Jam MC prattled on throughout the night even though no one would catch a word.
Led by the most popular, Grave Digger, two trucks would pull up side by side to a starting line, right before the row of cars. On command they would jam the gas and scoot over the cars. This was the wheelie contest, and each round lasted about a half-second and covered some 25 feet. This went on for a while. A half-second of action, then a minute or two of taxiing around, every run a blaring photocopy of the one before.
I asked around during intermission, hoping to realize what I was missing, but the response was always the same: “They’re just cool trucks, man.”
Then there were four-wheeler races (about as fun as watching go-carts at the fair), some freestyle motocross (far from the cutting edge) and a final freestyle session with each truck getting 60 seconds.
Take the 10,000-pound truck around in circles over the already crushed cars, maybe do a doughnut, or take the big jump–that was it. This could’ve been entertaining if the trucks had more than a basketball court’s worth of space to actually build some speed.
Bored, I spent most of my time trying to identify someone or something odd happening in the crowd, but it was just not to be. The best I got was a guy in a Dale Earnhardt jacket stumbling lightly into a wall.
He rested his shoulder there for a minute, caught his breath and walked back to the stands. No yelling, no vomit, not even a “goddamn.” That was it. A stumble, the highlight of my trip to Monster Jam.
I realized that this sort of thing isn’t meant to take place inside an arena with high security and $8 beers. It’s made for a summer night in the country with wooden bleachers, coolers and a big parking lot for tear-assing around after the show.