Hot Cars, Fast Women

Escondido, CA – The deep rumble and roar of heavy V8s, the hot rod builders and body men, flame specialists and mechanics in their best blue jeans and white t-shirts. the delicate, tattooed assistants wearing bright orange halters, lemon yellow hot pants and sporting pink pumps that have never seen gravel, the sidewalk strollers with urchins covered in molten gelato that must be forever admonished about the incompatibility of their sticky mitts and the 24 clearcoat epidermis of the classic sleds, this is the way to spend a Friday eve, among the motoring rabble.

Starting in the spring, all summer and well into fall Escondido holds ‘Cruisin Grand’, an old school main drag procession of dressed up jitneys, flivvers, hoopties, low-riders, trailer queens, ranflas, gas-hogs, t-buckets, buggys and beaters putt up and down Grand Ave. on Friday afternoons. Parking is reserved for the beasts, svelte, souped up or sucky and people line the sidewalks snapping pics and asking about distribulators and five barbell carbonaters. Owners sit by in lawn chairs under gaudy umbrellas and answer as tactfully as they see fit, how many times can a motor-head expound upon the virtues of a silicone covered spark-plug wire. Sweet rides abound, everything from curvy Corvettes to muscly Mopars, full featured Fords and some models that were invented in a drunken stupor patrols the streets. This editors favorite is a model T truck that was intentionally built in as ramshackle a fashion as possible, it bops right along with a rotor made from a wooden stick and a pan-head screw, spark-plug leads of barbed wire, (Exposed!), and carbide lantern headlamps. Everything about the car looks to be scrounged from what’s left in the dump after the third-world scroungers are done, and it is a penultimate work of art in all its details and Rube Goldbergness.

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