Autoerotic Infatuation

I have a kind of animist relationship to vehicles. I have motor lust.

Once after selling a book for more money than I am ever likely to receive again, I bought a new VW Passat wagon V6 off the lot, for the sticker price, because I was an idiot back then. I was married, owned a brownstone, had long red hair. I did a lot of yoga and wore sport clogs. I don’t know who the fuck I was back then, and remember very little of that entire life episode. I was a totally different human being, a happily bourgeois wife and homeowner. I didn’t personify or anthropomorphize the Passat. It was too grey, too new, too boring. It had no personality. It was merely a car. When I sold it several years later, it was at one of those lowball joints where you drive your car in and they buy it. I took the lowball and hailed a cab. It was wholly unsentimental.

Then I started choosing cars and motorbikes on the basis of my personal passion for them. Cars with style and character. It’s not something you can give up once you start doing it, despite the numberless financial pitfalls. There’s a kind of love you feel for your soul vehicle which is surely akin to the love animal people feel for dogs or cats or perhaps even children. Nowadays I wince whenever I see a Toyota, only because the owner is leaving so much glory on the table. Getting into your car should be like putting on your favorite pair of dancing shoes. It should give you a little shiver and thrill every time you see it.

First there was my motorcycle Donna, the Ducati Monster 695. The first truly swish vehicle I’d ever owned. My sexual stock instantly went up about 54%. Men ran out of cafes and restaurants into the street to talk to me. I never bought my own drinks again. Nobody can resist a chick on an Italian bike. I felt like a superhero.

The Ducati was so fast it pretty much scared the shit out of me and I stopped riding it after a while. It was eventually stolen, and I was a bit relieved. I’d never been in a wreck, and since it’s a “when not if” proposition on a motorcycle, I hung up my spurs while I was still lucky.

My first real car love was my California poppy orange 2012 Dodge Challenger RT. She was so visceral and so throaty, I named her for her letters: RT, after the opera diva Renata Tibaldi. She sounded so sexy roaring in the fog, with that cold air intake and the gnashing HEMI. Renata smelled like oil on the inside and was a suave, almost ladylike kind of Loud. I liked to “drive like a dick” in it and do the occasional burnout. It was pure muscle, sunshine and fun. She had a pistol-grip manual transmission, racing stripes, and the advantage of my nieces and nephews being able to hear me coming from a block away.

Renata scraped the tilt on every single driveway. One day the radiator just gave up. The engine block cracked and the whole subframe had to be replaced. Thousands later, I had to jack it up with a lift set for normal street movement. It also had terrible visibility, but I loved her, I loved her, I loved her to the bolts.

I had to sell her when I moved back to New York to run a wine bar.

Since I still required something with a glam and fun factor, I bought a black Vespa Primavera for Brooklyn. I felt too chicken to ride a motorcycle anymore – the Vespa was an ideal solution. It was like riding a sexy black lounge chair.

I named her Conchita after deciding she was a temperamental Puerto Rican girl — she threw me into a parked car the third day I owned her. She showed me who was boss. I sold her to a DJ named “Fish” when I opted to move back to California.

My car now is a sexy little German black lady — a hot little coupe named Mona, named after a dancer I once knew. She’s like Lola Falana. She’s older, has some miles on her and a few dings, but my heart flutters every time I see her. I’d say more, but I want to respect her privacy.

The other day my roommate Char-O and I drove over to San Lorenzo to see a used treadmill we were interested in. The owners of the treadmill turned out to be a gorgeous Latino couple who were both classic car enthusiasts. The treadmill was an absolute behemoth — too big for us — but the owners were so hospitable, that when I asked to see their car collection they sweetly obliged.

Opening the garage door was like opening King Tut’s tomb. We saw wonderful, wonderful things.

Inside was a metallic purple 1974 Monte Carlo. The hood was up and a spotless, chrome, supercharged Edelbrock engine gleamed inside. The top and back hood were custom painted in the multiple layer Lowrider custom — abstract geometrical shapes in subtly different colors; a tremendously difficult feat of custom painting.

“It also has hydraulics,” said the husband, and I swooned.

The husband of the couple had been a master mechanic for 30 years at a major car manufacturers — but this was his art, his baby. This was obviously his soul. The time, passion and investment represented in the Monte Carlo was like seeing a great marble statue or a mosque dome — it was love, care, expertise, design talent and devotion, reified.

In the driveway they had three other priceless vehicles. The wife, an expert at embroidery, unfolded her car from its cover: a perfectly cherried out, flawless metallic magenta VW Beetle, lowered, chromed out, exquisitely upholstered — a car for 4 Barbie dolls to pile in and drive to the tattoo parlor.

When the husband uncovered his driveway car — a black 1950 Chevy, the original prototype for the BelAir, I nearly fell into their hedge. This car so closely resembled my all-time dream car — a 1950 Mercury lead sled — I practically did a St. Vitus Dance of spazzed-out enthusiasm on their lawn. The round headlights had chrome eyelids. “You shaved it!” I shouted joyously, noticing that most of the chrome had been stripped from the body, so as to not to distract from the car body’s elegant lines.

The windshield was a two-piece, with a bar in the middle — and the roof projected over it enough to become a visor. The roof was also painted in lavish layers of Lowrider geometry. “That is La Raza, man!” I enthused. They laughed.

Their third car really spoke to the couple’s artistry, for me — a patina’d Volkswagen hatchback, the likes of which I haven’t seen in years— a car that must require constant tinkering and interference, like a diabetic cat. All these cars were labors of ongoing love, talent and automotive mastery.

I know people who think they’re artists, who really aren’t. This couple would not have described themselves as artists, but they absolutely were. It’s the work, it’s the time, it’s the skill and the emotion; their creative spirit was clear and glistening from the loving relationship they had to their beautiful, artistic car-babies. It was downright Holy.

May the Virgin of Guadalupe keep your rubber side down. Alafia.