The L.A. Auto Show is an exercise in pent-up lust and stymied id.
If you weren't drooling on the chrome or ogling the bizarro bodywork of the mescaline-influenced concept vehicles, you were probably tirekicking some hallucinatory dream that you never could, and never will be able to afford. Because it's not about bended metal or horsepower or cupholders or any of that trivia. It's about who that car would let you become.
As Lou Reed sang, "Does anybody need a $60,000 car?" Or as Hazel Motes says in Wise Blood as his POS deSoto is showering the pavement with smoking parts seconds after after he drives it off the used-car lot, "A man with a good car don't need no justification."
Questions. Questions and fucked dreams. Your hands full of Detroit propaganda, your gut with hastily gobbled hot dogs and Mountain Dew, you walk away from the Auto Show every year with more questions and burning frustration than anything else.
Try not to scratch the paint or step on anyone's toes in the middle-class herd of Angelenos shuffling around the unattainable objects of desire - do the dreams they sell you at this show include a wood-trimmed, turbocharged $305,000 Maybach 57 limousine with GPS and DVD navigation and onboard tire pressure monitoring?
You are what you drive - would you be a rich, arrogant agency tool snapping stock-sell orders from the back seat at your cowering broker via onboard satellite phone? is the ethernet connection fast enough, the delicate leather sufficiently free from blemishes, the sound-deadening insulation thick enough for your comfort?
Are you the hard-jawed captain of industry at the helm of the hyper-steroidal Cadillac Sixteen concept, teasing 942 of the 1,000 horses in its 16-cylinder engine along Mulholland Drive toward your Schindler-designed Bel Air mansion full of exquisite Danish modern furniture, Jasper Johns canvases and Tony Duquette mandalas?
Maybe your 2005 Mustang GT is rumbling in the driveway in Culver City, waiting to whisk your high school sweetheart off to that drive-in movie (and certain window-steaming makeout session) she never agreed to go to back in the day because your Datsun B-210 had barfed up all its radiator fluid again and left you stranded a million miles from home at Will Rogers State Beach.
Maybe you and your code-genius programmer girlfriends are blowing off post-build steam in a moonlit cruise in your leased Dodge Kahuna to some hidden Point Dume shore because the surf is up, you just got a brand new stick, you've waxed the shit out of it and cut a new mix disc of DJ Spooky and Pizzicato Five for the drive and the boys are too high or hung over to bother you.
You cashed out with millions before the dot-com bust and poured a few into this kicky little 6-speed Lotus Elise now thrashing about sexily in your grip as you wind it out up Route 33, hanging the double-yellow through the hairpins. Why not, you've earned it. It's cute, it almost recalls Emma Peel's Lotus ´lan if you squint hard enough, and it's only $40,000.
You're a Reseda handyman struggling through a rapacious divorce with five kids and a doomed mortgage on your overstuffed ranchhouse, but as you stand there picking grout from under your nails and gaping at the musclebound Hummer H3T concept pickup truck (which will surely be built and sold at $60k-plus) you're a master contractor inspecting the new airhandling system you just installed at Disney Hall.
At 150 on the Pear Blossom Highway, sixth gear beckons from the sculpted aluminum shifter in your retro GT40. The rally stripes are just so boss, you think, feathering the clutch with your thigh-high suede boots and laying rubber towards the top of the gauge en route away from Swingers, where you told your needle-dicked, Armani-clad agent in no uncertain terms to play hide-and-go-fuckyourself after showing him the new contract for your role in McG's next summer action thriller.
You're 17. You just tossed your mortarboard into the hidden rumble seat of the ridiculously wack PTeazer cabrio concept that your rich parents gave you for graduation, and you try to decide how you're going to trash the little piece of shit - it's so pathetically lame - before using Dad's secret cache of sex tapes with his physical trainer to blackmail him into the Beemer M5 you really want. But you can't help running your fingers over the candyflake dashboard and imagining you're some kind of barrio space alien as you sink into the ribbed fingers of the custom-built seats and turn the key. Maybe, just maybe you'll tell him you trashed it, you think as you nudge the sculpted shifter into gear. Then you can have both.
But you're a writer. Just another writer in a town full of writers.
And outside it's the same shitty mob of busted Toyotas, overblown egotistic Humvee limos, crackerbox Pontiac beaters and Benz ragtops as common as cockroaches, all dodging the buses and the potholes and threat of gunfire and getting dirtier and dirtier in the endless, burnt smog.
You get back in your old car where your fat ass has permanently dented the seats and your elbow has left a years-old layer of grime on the door liner and you wonder how long it will be before the clutch finally fries from heel-and-toeing it through traffic every day and night.
And you turn the key.
Posted by: mack_reed on Friday, January 16, 2004 - 03:46 PM
