Debra Pickett

Lunch With Dale Earnhardt, Jr.

We tried to get better, and we ended up getting worse," Dale Earnhardt Jr. says as he comes in from making his test laps around the track at the Chicagoland Speedway on Friday afternoon.

He's clocked the ninth-fastest lap in the 46-car field, but he knows it's not what it could have been. After meeting with his pit crew and giving them his version of a motivational speech -- "We're trying to get our s--- together right now" -- he's sprawled out on the black leather couch in the back of his tractor trailer, in a gray Under Armour T-shirt with the top half of his fireproof racing suit hanging from his waist, staring at the satellite TV.

Lunch is a double burger cooked on the gas grill outside, in the heat and noise of the Speedway's infield garage area, and a can of Sun Drop soda.

"You know the world's a f---ed up place when you come in and 'I Love Lucy' is on and you don't even change the channel," he says, nodding at the black-and-white rerun on the wall-mounted TV. His usual tastes run to the "Adult Swim" cartoons on the Cartoon Network and the History Network war documentaries that TiVo picks out for him, but this afternoon, he'll take what he can get.

There's a sudden downpour outside and he's half hoping the afternoon's qualifying laps will be canceled, so that pole positions will be determined on points alone. By that measure, he's in second place.

He looks tired, the brim of his Budweiser hat pulled down almost all the way over his blue eyes.

He'd finished his appearance at the NASCAR fan fest in downtown Joliet by 10:15 Thursday night but hadn't gotten to bed until hours later.

"I stay up and play video games," he says. "It's hard for me to get myself into bed."

Lately, he's been obsessed with "Fight Night," spending hours at a time on his Xbox, inhabiting the virtual body of boxer Arturo Gatti.

"He bleeds a lot, and he has a nasty left hook," says Earnhardt, who has all of Gatti's fights on tape and has studied them. "You have to watch them in slow motion. One time, he hit a guy with a knockout punch and then hit him like three more times on the way down... And one time he broke his right hand in a fight and then beat the hell out of the son of a bitch with one hand."

Gatti is a classic fighter, in the Rocky Marciano mode, and Earnhardt admires that lack of showiness. He seems to wish it was an option for him.

But Earnhardt -- known to his mobs of fans simply as "Junior" -- knows it isn't. He is rock star famous. And people expect a rock star quality showing-off from him. When he walks into a room, women actually squeal.

Giving autographs Thursday night, he looked alternately grim and dazed, mostly just nodding in acknowledgment of the admirers who handed him all manner of memorabilia to sign, from replicas of his race car to a cold, sweating can of the day-fresh beer brewed by his main racing sponsor, Budweiser.

"You have to understand I've been at this for two days," he said then, as we stole a few minutes for a quick, introductory interview between sets at Bud's "One Night Stand" concert in the Rialto Theater, where he sat on stage for an audience question-and-answer session before introducing the headlining act, Saliva.

That was the second thing he said to me. The first was, "You got any gum?"

We're like old friends now, on the second day of our acquaintance. On the road during racing season, Earnhardt spends most of his days inside a tightly maintained shell, as a small army of handlers work hard to protect him from the seemingly endless streams of people who want to get close to him. It gets to be a rare thing in his insular and stage-managed world, just sitting down with someone and having a conversation.

"You withdraw so much when you get this much attention," he said, as two cops and a couple of private security guards tried to bring some order to the crowd of autograph-seekers who'd managed to make it into the VIP room at the Rialto. "You withdraw and you withdraw."

The two-second encounters with fans are sometimes the best he can do for human contact.

"If it wasn't for things like this," he said at the Rialto, "I'd probably be sitting in my motor home, playing video games, and that's not that healthy, either."

Interacting with people, he said, "keeps me right."

Earnhardt says he isn't sure what accounts for his incredible popularity, which has transcended even the NASCAR superstar status of his legendary father.

"What do you think it is?" he asks his publicist, Mike Davis.

"I think it's that he's such a regular guy," Davis suggests. "He's someone you could go have a beer with. He's the neighbor you borrow eggs from."

"The neighbor you buy 'ex' from?" Earnhardt jokes, imitating Davis' drawl, which is of a slightly different variety than his own North Carolina inflection.

There is something to that, of course, the winning combination of a royal blood line and a common touch. Earnhardt is the kind of celebrity who, talking to a fan he met in an Atlanta bar, agreed to show up at the guy's wedding the next day -- as the best man.

"The preacher was trying to say all this stuff about NASCAR flags," he says as he laughingly recalls the ceremony, "like the caution flags of life and the big Victory Lane in the sky."

He's got a friend for life in that groom, he says happily.

Some days are like that for Earnhardt, like he could be friends with anyone he meets. Other days, he says, "I wake up in a bad mood, and I don't feel like talking."

His sister and mother, who are also his employees, try to monitor his moods, he says, and remind him that he's got to act like the massively popular celebrity he is. "They always have to beat it into my head," he says. "I don't see myself as so big... Maybe that's a self-esteem thing because I was real short in high school and stuff."

Still, at just 29, he has been so famous for so long that it's hard to imagine life any other way. He's just learned to manage around it.

He plans to watch Saturday's Busch series race, before his own run in the Tropicana 400 race on Sunday, and he'd love to do it up close, perched in a seat on top of a giant tool cabinet in his team's pit area, "but things don't go right when I'm there. People get tense." So he'll probably just watch it on TV in his motor home, where he won't cause a distraction.

And, even in his personal life, which almost -- but not quite -- lives up to its reputation as bachelor nirvana, he finds he has to work on keeping his fame, and the groupies who chase it, out of the way.

"You've got to test them," he says of the many women he meets. "Because a lot of people put on fronts when you first get to know them. So I give them a lot of tests. I'll make them clean [his cat] Buddy's litter box or something, just to see how they'll do it."

He's still laughing about that when his pit crew chief, Tony Eury Jr., walks in. Earnhardt's smile fades and he says, "Four pounds up in the left and 12 up in the right."

He's unhappy with an adjustment in tire pressure that slowed down some of his later test laps.

"It's all good," Eury assures him.

"That first lap," Earnhardt says, referring to the qualifying laps that he'll run later this afternoon, "I'll just be testing it out again."

"You don't have to test anything out," Eury says.

Earnhardt shakes his head. "You're sending me into a whorehouse blindfolded. I need to test things out a little bit."