Street parked classics: random photos of cars

My first car was a 1969 Mustang that I bought from my grandma for $2500. When I was 15 and had just gotten my permit, my dad and I flew to Portland to get the car, but it had been sitting in the parking garage of her retirement home for so long the tires had gone square on the bottoms and we had to have it loaded onto a flatbed and taken to a tire shop for new shoes before we we could drive it back to California.

After driving that car around for a year or so, after somehow surviving a sketchy incident involving the power brakes and power steering neither braking or steering through a red light intersection, and because the price of gas had hit a whopping $1 per gallon — I was in high school, I drove a lot, and I had a very part time job at $4.25 per hour, so all my money was going into that gas tank — I decided that a car with a gas-guzzling V8 302 and sketchy early-era control assistance under the hood was not the business.

Scouring the local paper, I found an architect in Salinas who was selling a chocolate brown 1979 Alfa Romeo Spider for $4k. Pretty much the exact opposite of that Mustang — four cylinders, two seats, manual everything, drop top. The architect’s wife has just given birth to twins and she rather sensibly forced the sale of the Alfa to finance a much more practical Volvo 240 wagon. I was short on cash so my dad, who I’m pretty sure was living vicariously through me on this one, offered to help me out.

I spent the last year of high school tooling around in a finicky Italian convertible, in which my head stuck out over the windshield when the top was down. The curse of being tall.

The Alfa was super fun and super impractical, so when it was time for me to move out of the house and head out on my own, I sold the Mustang and the Alfa and bought a 1985 Toyota pickup. And thus ended my run of exotic and enthusiast motorcars.

I’ve since driven nothing but practical cars mostly from respectable Japanese car makers, and I would describe my current daily driver as a souped-up grocery getter from a mainstream German marque. Don’t get me wrong, I love my car and it’s fun to drive, but it’s not gonna be considered vintage for a long time and I doubt it’ll ever develop any sort of enthusiast airs after its 20th birthday. So be it. Practicality is affordable and predictable, and when it comes to cars, that’s really all I need.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t pine from time to time for something more vintage and exotic. It’s too deeply ingrained in me.

Monterey Car Week is one of the biggest and most celebrated auto gatherings in the world, and when I was kid it made me giddy every year. I remember once sitting in that ’79 Alfa at a stoplight at the intersection of Highway 1 and Ocean Ave. in Carmel and, if the decals in their windows were to be believed, a group from the Ferrari Club of America pulling up all around me. My little convertible rumbled with the ground and the air filled with gas fumes and the glorious blap-blap of idling high-powered engines as a couple dozen Ferraris of every vintage crowded me in. When that light turned green, I put my foot down in earnest and shifted through the first couple of gears in vain, watching as deafening flashes of mostly red swarmed past me and quickly disappeared into the distance ahead. It was magical.

And I grew up with a gearhead. My dad is a proficient mechanic, and restored several cars in our garage throughout my youth. My favorites were a 1967 Volvo P1800, and a ’76 Jaguar XJ6 Coupe, which I drove to Junior Prom. So while I’m not afflicted with the car bug, I’m definitely familiar with its effects.

But those are all just memories now. And according to my hometown newspaper, Car Week is a bit of a shit show these days, thanks mostly to people with big money and, presumably, small dicks who overshadow the more staid enthusiast crowd.

Too rich for my blood anyway.

Have you looked for your favorite old cars on sites like BringATrailer.com lately? The cost of buying vintage cars is more than slightly prohibitive. One of my all-time favorites, the Alfa Romeo GTV coupe from the late 1960s and early ’70s, used to cost $3k to $5k. Now days they run in the $20k to $50k (not even street legal!)range, sometimes way more. Like I said, too rich for my blood.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Because I’ve always associated August as an automotive month — and because my daughter turned 16 this month and will start driving soon, and because I still love cool old cars of all kinds — the photos contained in this month’s edition of O.F.T.R. fall into the category of street parked classics. These photos were snapped on various film stocks with various subcompact 35mm cameras over the last several years. (Except that one of me on prom day, which was snapped by my dad in ’88 or ’89.)

REMINDER: Last month I completed a photo booklet project called Take A Seat Vol. 1. It’s a series of images of places to sit. I’m selling the booklets for $12 each in my site’s store — that’s a flat fee that covers the cost of production and includes shipping in the US (only $3 more for international orders!) — and I’m adding a print from the book to each order of this first run. I’ve got a handful left, and would love to be able to say I sold out. If you haven’t gotten one yet, click over to my little web shop and do it to it. Thanks!

MUSIC

There are currently 50 items in my Bandcamp wishlist. I’ve been terribly derelict in buying new music. But I recently picked up vinyl LPs of Schoolly D’s 1989 classic Am I Black Enough For You, which I used to have on wax, but it was in a crate of records that was stolen from the SF loft apartment I lived in way back in 2007; a quality reissue of Lalo Schifrin’s original soundtrack to Bullitt, the classic Steve McQueen San Francisco cops & mobsters movie (and possibly the best SF movie ever); and Wilson Simonal’s Vou Deixar Cair, a Brazilian bossanova heater that’s increasingly difficult to come by, which I stumbled on through someone’s Etsy vinyl store for $7 (!!). Chase down those links for sounds.

BOILERPLATE STUFF

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