The Automobile Snob
Everybody knows an auto snob. There’s always some guy down
the block or two blocks away who has a Sunday Corvette stashed in his garage,
or the weekend lady who drives her antique Duesenberg Roadster, the “ultimate
car,” with the top down in spring as flowering hyacinth whips by her reddening
ears. There’s the slim, dapper retiree who babies his polished Porsche with
advanced stereo system to show off to five weekend guests a year. There’s the
nostalgic rockabilly who drives to the dry-cleaners in his white Ford Fairlane
convertible with red leather interior and slipping transmission. Despite the
phenomenal repair bills, there are those who regularly drive a Jaguar with a
rusty chassis or a sporty car suffering a terminal engine illness like the white
Mitsubishi convertible with its paper-thin plastic Lego-like fenders. A couple
of lucky nags at Belmont once bought my father a gleaming Model-T Ford that he
drove around the neighborhood with me honking the big rubber-ball horn before
he had to sell it to avoid foreclosure on the house after having a couple of
bad weekends at the race track.
Some opt for sound upscale
brand names like Mercedes, BMW, Lexus, or Cadillac. Advertisers remain
well-aware that people purchase cars on the basis of status fantasies, the
moving-on-up thing, or that for a man his car is his legitimate, legal, and
safe-sex mistress. Teenagers and those in their seventies jump for the
acceleration stats for different reasons—the former for the rush or casual stop-light
drag-racing, the latter because they fear their reaction time has slowed down
to a Bingo-night rhythm. Women are usually hooked by the safety angle, as well
as the easy drivability that will cause some drivers to nod off at the wheel
and smash into an historic oak tree. Occasionally, a car model becomes famous
for its longevity and people are willing to purchase such a model at an
inflated price just before the pistons blow. I know from experience because I
once kept a 1997 Honda Accord much too long when I could have sold it for a
profit.
But I’m the kind of
man who doesn’t care what he drives as long as the car travels from point A to B,
even if the suspension is shot, yet preferably with not unreasonable gas
mileage or outrageous upkeep. So you see, I’m not at all a car snob. Yes, there
are some of us still out there
running around with jumper cables who just want to get to work and have a pocket
litany of car woes at hand in order to avoid driving to one’s father-in-law’s
house or the friend who’s addicted to a vile brand of Scotch I’d only offer to
an enemy. So I pride myself in not
being a snob and look down upon everyone who passes me on the left, reserving
special epithets for those who pass me on the right.
In my humble
opinion the only antique car you can own without being a snob is a blue
Hotchkiss. That’s because F. Scott Fitzgerald bought one. Scotty was a good
fellow and not a snob. When the car pistons blew up after twenty-thousand miles,
Scotty was in shock. How could such a well-made car die so quickly? Scotty was
amazed when a wealthy neighbor explained to him that a car burned oil and you
had to put more oil in every so-many thousand miles. Poor Scotty—he had to
spend another ten months churning out marvelous short stories, red-eyed and
sleepless, crumpling page after page into the waste basket until the break of
dawn, so that he could buy another car. But Scotty learned his lesson. When his
wife Zelda crashed and went into a lunatic asylum, he didn’t go out and buy a
new wife or new car. He never even drove again. In sober moments he fiddled
with film scripts which drove him to drink and in the evenings he wrote maudlin
letters to his only daughter on whom he doted.
But Scotty had
written The Great Gatsby, that
melancholy jazz serenade to ruthless love in such gorgeously sculpted prose.
Why hasn’t Millbrook produced its own Gatsby masterpiece? I completely
understand why the rest of the country has not been up to it, yet I know
Millbrook has all the qualities and qualifications for that project. I keep
asking myself why? Why not? Why? As my Hotchkiss sans seatbelt speeds by Stissing Lake
—Gonzo Lorenzo, a pen name for Kevin T. McEnenaey
Gonzo Lorenzo’s columns are inspired by William Thackeray’s
humor columns on the gentle art of snobbery that appeared in mid-nineteenth
century Punch.
