Hot Rod Show
I don’t feel like spending 1000 words on “Custom Kills and Hot Rod Thrills” the Rumbler’s Hot Rod Show held under the BQE every year, so I’ll just let a bunch pictures to do it for me:
Kandy-Colored Tangerine-Flake
It was a busy weekend for gashuffers. Saturday afternoon was the Rumbler’s “Kustom Kill and Hot Rod Thrills” custom car show under the BQE featuring everything from rusted jalopies held together with bailing wire to tricked out cherries with flaming exhaust pipes. Choppers wailed circles around the perimeter, strafing the crowd and popping ear drums with baloney-cut straight-through pipes. Low riders bounced on hydraulics center stage while stereos screamed with psycho-billy.
Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Babies, time-bombs, stepping out of assorted sordid pasts to spend a sunny afternoon in the horror of an eco-concious future before heading back in a cloud of smoke to the world of 50 cent per gallon gasoline.
“This show isn’t nearly as big as the hot rod shows they have in LA,” said Deborah. “But it’s way cooler.”
Despite the variety of cars, the exhibitors held an extremely narrow aesthetic when it came to clothes and hairstyles: Greasy jeans and black T-shirts for the guys — maybe a short-sleeve button down shirt with rolled up sleeves if they were feeling flashy — gingham or polka-dot dresses for the girls. Short, Betty Page bangs, high-heel May Janes, and red, red lips.
And tattoos, not just up the wazoo, but in and out and all around the wazoo, too.
One girl in cotton so tight she could barely shuffle had a bombshell cartoon va va voom hourglass figure with torpedo tits, wasp waist and a bottom end enhanced with old-fashioned Fredrick’s of Hollywood-style butt pads bigger than the pillow I sleep on.
“I would love to dress like that all the time,” said Deborah.
“Seems like a lot of work.”
“I know. A lot of work. That’s why I look like this, instead.”
Deborah told me about a guy she knew in LA who was overseeing a construction job and hired a rock-a-billy cat to help out. The rock-a-billy cat refused to mix cement a certain way because “that’s not how they did it back in the day.” In other words, he was so fully immersed in his past-life lifestyle that he not only refused to wear or drive anything post 1950, he refused to take part in any activity that would nudge him out of his parallel universe. Needless to say he was fired on the spot.
The vintage motorcycle show was a lot more diverse. Not just the usual old guys and old bikes, although there was plenty of that, too.
It was on the way to the show that I got my speeding ticket. I started to write the story about how it happened, but since it’s about as serious as a speeding ticket can get, including a compulsory court appearance, I think I better just stick to what everyone who is facing charges always says: “I can’t talk about it.”
The ticket put me in a funk, but I tried to forget about it and enjoy the show. It was held at Works Engineering, a motorcycle repair shop with a new location on North 14th Street in north Wiliamsburg. I met Deborah there, told her about the ticket, and she suggested we get a drink. Free beer at the event, but you couldn’t drink on the street and we had to stand inside where a band was playing — a blistering Japanese punk band that kicked it’s cowboy boots into the stirrups of my inner ears rode them to the land of the setting sun and back again, leaving my choclea hair cells standing on end, singed and smoking. I guzzled my drink as fast as I could to get away from the assault and preserve what little is left of my hearing. Deborah sipped slower and I met her outside.
Deborah and I had plans to meet our friend Katrina for brunch and since Katrina doesn’t ever leave the house before one in the afternoon, we told her to meet us at the show. She was late, explaining that it always takes her twice as long to get anywhere as she thinks it will. She arrived chipper, nonetheless, in a bright red outfit that, along with her blond hair, set her apart from the otherwise mostly all-dressed-in-black biker crowd.
“This is reaally good people watching,” Katrina said, not knowing what to expect beforehand, and being surprised by the variety.
She obviously wanted to stay and poke around, but Deborah and I had been there a couple of hours by then and we were starving. “We’ll come back,” we promised.
I left my motorcycle at the show while we walked to find a place to eat. As if walking several blocks in my riding boots wasn’t enough to make me cranky, when we finally sat down somewhere, I pulled out my speeding ticket and looked it over more closely. When I saw the list of fines, and that I was required to appear in person, my cranky funk turned to full-on depressed.
I don’t know what the motorcycle shows are like where you come from, but this is Brooklyn and when we returned to the show, the performance art was in full swing: a guy stood over a canvas spread out on the street, splattering Day-Glo paint from a silver bowl while someone played an amplified buzz saw and another guy tinkered with a motorcycle. At least I think that’s what was going on. I didn’t bother to fight the crowd for a better view. Katrina was fascinated and peeled off to investigate closer. Deborah rode her bicycle home while I rode my motorcycle, nice and slowly, to the garage and headed home, too.
Although last year my motorcycle won the “People’s Choice Award” I didn’t bother to enter the judging this year. There were a lot of really nice bikes there, a lot more bikes than last year, and I doubt I would’ve won anything anyway. I haven’t heard who the winners were, but I hope this girl won something, at least:
Hot Rod clubs from all over the Tri-State area lined up their creations in the parking area under the BQE overpass. Cars coated in bottomless coats of candy colored paint, next to rusty jalopies held together with nothing but a faith in the lifestyle.
When I left the house, earlier in the day, it looked like rain so I had a white, lightweight nylon rain jacket with me. It’s a rather insignificant detail except that it didn’t take long to realize I was the only one wearing white. I felt like the only kid in school that didn’t wear a hat on hat day. Every other guy there was dressed in identical outfits: black T-shirt s with various hot rod club logos silkscreened on them, blue jeans rolled at the hem with chain wallets in their back pockets, engineer boots, and slicked-back hairdos. Of course, if I really felt left out, I could’ve gotten a greaser hairstyle from the barber who was there to do just that.
For the most part, the girls were dressed just like the guys, except for the few who chose to get all dolled up in I love Lucy style dresses and bright red lipstick. Tattoos of pin up girls decorating their pale white skin. The guys had tattoos, too, of course. Eight balls, skulls, and flaming V8 engines up and down each arm. The only guy I saw without a tattoo on his arm, other than me, was the the guy doing pin-striping. I noticed his unadorned arm when I stopped to watch him paint clean, perfect stripes on a fender that someone had waited in line to give him. I was so busy watching him paint with his left hand, impressed by his sure, confident technique despite being surrounded by gawkers like me, that I nearly didn’t notice his right arm was prosthetic. “That explains that,” I figured.
I’m exaggerating, of course, when I say that everyone was wearing the exact same uniform. And I’m teasing the people who were, but truthfully, it made the show a lot more fun. Whenever I saw someone inside a car who didn’t have the look — the Asian guy with the new wave hair and freshly laundered Polo shirt, for example — it made me appreciate the ones who were living the life. Who cares that so many “custom” cars looked exactly alike? They were still fun to see.
In the middle of the show was a hotrod hot dog truck, painted black, with orange flames, of course. As I waited for a hot dog and a drink, a burly Hell’s Angel, a foot taller than me, and twice as wide, cut in line and walked away with the last of the bratwurst. Like I said, I was in line for a hot dog, so it didn’t matter much to me, but the guy behind me seemed rather bummed. He looked at me and shrugged.
“C’mon, man. Go tell him that’s your bratwurst.”
