Diary of an articulate boy racer

By JOE BENNETT

OPINION: WAKE at 10. Fetching coffee and the paper, I reflect on last night. Wonder whether our burnouts will have made the front page.

Aaron's managed three front pages in the past month, including a photo of him and his Nissan, albeit a bit blurry on account of it coming from a security camera, under the headline Outrageous, Out There and Out of Control. It's not fair.

His sub- woofer's pretty well an antique and his muffler's frankly pathetic. But he seems to have the knack of attracting publicity.

He's even made it fleetingly on to the network news channels a couple of times, though none of us are that bothered about television. We recognise its visual immediacy and emotional impact but the television audience is a fickle beast always seeking the next sensation.

Television fame tends to be ephemeral. Cold hard print is the publicity you want. More satisfying and altogether more durable.

Before I can unwrap the paper, the phone on the pillow rings. I flip it open with a grunt.

A la-di-da woman's voice announces the title of the low- circulation glossy she works for up north. She wonders whether I'd mind answering a few questions.

I can sense her nervousness at talking to an actual racer.

"Fire away, darling," I tell her. "We're doing a feature piece," she says, "on, um, young male car enthusiasts."

"With photos?'

"With photos.'

"Colour? Double spread?'

"Colour and double spread. And we're hoping you'd like to put your side of the story and perhaps explain to our concerned readers exactly what it is that impels you to, um, do what it is that you do. Why exactly, that is, you feel the need to."

I drop the phone beside me on the duvet and let her tweet on for a bit while I scan the paper.

We missed out on the front page. It's all Aussie bushfires. Ah well. Stiff competition, I suppose, but we'll be back. That's the beauty of our business. We're always there when needed.

Sipping coffee I resist the urge to turn straight to the unfailing joys of the letters to the editor.

Beside me the phone squeaks like a trapped mouse. I catch the usual phrases of cod social psychology cast as questions, groping for some sort of explanation.

". . . lack of discipline, parental indulgence, parental neglect, chest-beating expression of the growling sexual urge, societal shift emasculating male children, destruction of moral fabric by affluence, feminisation of teaching profession, absence of positive male role models, low self-esteem," and all the rest of the hypothesising guff.

I PICK up the phone and interrupt her mid-polysyllable.

"To quote Margaret Mead the social anthropologist," I say, and I can sense her jerking to attention at the other end of the phone and scrabbling for a pen, "whose book Growing Up in Samoa, caused such a stir in the fifties by implying that social alienation was not intrinsic to male adolescents but rather induced by the breakdown of the extended family unit and the changing roles imposed on males by the straitjacket of industrial society."

I pause to give her shorthand a chance to catch up, and also for dramatic effect.

"Yes?" she says breathlessly.

"F . . . off." And I click the phone shut and turn to the letters page, chuckling. You can play these journos like fish on a line.

It's a breeze. Were they never young? They fall for it every time. Foment a bit of outrage and they can't stop themselves coming back for more. And it keeps you in the headlines. That's the joy of it.

I'm just scanning a delicious letter calling for the immediate reinstatement of compulsory military service when a learned article on the opposite page catches my eye.

It's not so much the title, Boy Racer Psychology - An Expert's View, that seizes my attention, as the name in bold on the byline.

It takes me three attempts to get through to Aaron.

"So you saw the article," he says straight out. "What did you think? Neat eh?"

"What's going on?" I say.

"Nothing much," Aaron says. "I've just become an expert, that's all. On the scourge of boy racing. I'm just what the media's been looking for. They can't get enough of me. The phone's been ringing red hot. Some polytech up north even wants me to run a unit for their social work course."

"So you've sold out."

"No mate," Aaron says, "just moved on. Life's a journey, and I'm taking the next step. You can't stay a boy racer for ever. You've got to grow up some time. But so long as we keep the publicity going, those of us in the business of explaining the obvious are in clover."

- © Fairfax NZ News