Dream Cruisers

Car culture runs deep in Detroit, even deeper than it does in, say New York City.

Most places in America, people are often deeply attached to their cars, whether a Chrysler Town and Country, or a ’57 Chevy. Cars constitute some sort of augmented reality, as though we can create a larger-than-life avatar that surrounds us. Our car-dentity is like a primordial Facebook page we hide behind while we are out in public. People can’t actually see our faces, or more importantly, our bodies, so they have to form impressions of us from these suits of armor we trot around in.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in Detroit during the Dream Cruise. This annual event, a local month-long, rolling Woodstock, is an endless homage to automobile culture painted on the landscape of Woodward Avenue, the main drag from the Detroit River to Pontiac (where have you heard that name before?).

Admittedly, most of the action takes place between the Detroit border at Eight Mile and the loop formerly known as Wide Track Drive. That stretch includes many icons from the hey-day of car culture in the late 1960s until Washington drove a stake into performance in the early 1970s: The Totem Pole, Ted’s Drive-in, the IHOP, A&W. 

Those were the days.

Of course, growing up nerd, I was only on the fringes. While some of my college fraternity brothers drove 56 Chevy dragsters and V-8 Austin Healys, I was stuck with a turd of a ’53 Chevy Custom and a ’60 Olds 88.

Not cool, but I knew. I was there, even if I didn’t have the cachet to pick up chicks.

Now every summer, every cool car within a thousand miles converges on Detroit in a vain attempt to recreate that golden era. The cars are back, but the scene is gone. The hot chicks are hanging out at the mall, and none of them would give the time of day to any of the sixty-something cruisers trying to recover their lost youth.

Part of the problem is trying to dodge between all the minivan soccer moms and Walter Mittys in their Malibus. Part of the problem is that the Dream Cruise has become more of a spectator sport than a machismo competition. A million people come to watch. Their eyes are on the cars, not the rusty, burned out hulks driving them.

In a sense, this is American car culture writ large. Every day of the year, while we perform our daily ablutions and errands, other people don’t see us, they see our cars and make assumptions about who’s driving. If we peregrinate in an Excursion or Suburban or Hummer or diesel F-250, other people are intimidated. We are, ipso facto the Alpha beast, even if we don’t get the putative girl. No one knows who we actually are, but they won’t mess with us anyway. We have won without a fight.

Having a Porsche or a Jaguar or a Lamborghini or Ferrari achieves the same end on a slightly different scale. Same with a BMW 7 series or an Audi A8.

While those of us who compete win by default, no blood is ever shed, the prize is – nothing. We massage our own egos. We offer sly grins in the mirror, but aside from the adrenalin rush, winning the mine-is-bigger-than-yours derby doesn’t offer any monetary rewards. We don’t win the girl. True, she might play along until she finds out you really are a jerk, but what’s your wife going to get in the divorce? Probably the Mercedes.

I care about this self-delusion game because many people are fascinated about where the ego-massage originates. How is the magic created? How do those mincing, palette-waving car decorators create sex on wheels? I’ve got the inside scoop, but you have to read my books to find out. 

All of them.