JEFF PEARLMAN

JEFF PEARLMAN

Monster Truck: Oy

Went to my first Monster Truck event today. Live and raw from Nassau Colisseum. Live! And! Raw!

In a word: Ugh.

Where to begin? My sister-in-law, the lovely Leah Guggenheimer, purchased the tickets for $15 a pop. Which was, really, our motivation—hey, if it sucks, we only paid $15. And, Lord knows, it sucked. Monster Truck, which is really called Monster Jam, involves big-ass trucks with big-ass tires driving atop brightly painted junk cars. But, just in case this isn;t enough action, all the driving is accompanied by a REALLY irksome man screaming inanities into a microphone. For example, as irksome man encouraged us to “make some noise for the Grave Digger!” it occurred to me that:

A. The Grave Digger is a truck, and therefore can’t hear us.

B. The guy driving the Grave Digger can’t possibly hear us, either. Because, well, he’s driving the Grave Digger. And that’s an awfully loud job.

To watch Monster Truck is to watch, well, trucks drive over and over and over again. The first five minutes are sorta eye-catching, because it’s not every day one sees a truck dressed as a turtle. But then it gets old. Like, Grandma Mollie old. My eyes began watering after 10 minutes, and by 15 minutes I walked to the bathroom, even though I felt no real need to excrete. It also happened to be icy cold inside the building, because all the doors are kept open, and it was probably 30 degrees. Why keep the doors open? So we don’t have a mass asphyxiation of 5,000 people.

I digress. Monster Truck sucks, and I mean sucks with a capital S. Best I could tell, there’s a loyal following of fans who travel along from show to show, itching to see more Monster Truck madness.

I’m guessing these people have teeth.

Well, some of them.