This is a beautifully restored and tricked out Chevy El Camino. Unless it's a Ford Ranchero, but I don't think so. I saw it at a stop light on Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood on kind of an overcast morning as I drove to my therapist, early on a Friday this past December. It had just been a year since I had terminated therapy after going pretty consistently since Spring of 2001, but now I was going again since my engagement ended. At this exact moment my ex-fiance and I were driving in separate cars to my shrink--we were going to try couples counseling.
The paint job and finish on the El Camino were really beautiful. The super straight sedan-like line was made even cleaner by the fact that the door handles had been removed in classic cholo street rod fashion. I don't really know if there's such an aesthetic as "cholo street rod" but it seems like there might be.
If I was rooting around for metaphors for what went wrong with my relationship, I could do a lot worse than a car with no handles on the doors. The two of us had really been in love for going on two years, and had even weathered being apart while she finished grad school, but once she graduated and moved to LA to live with me, well, the handles fell off. Up to then, whatever problems there were had been minimized by the fact that we were in love, really liked hanging out together, and of course the long distance aspect probably extended the honeymoon phase of the relationship. Once we were living together in the same city and were engaged, a lot of shit went wrong. Our differences in age and culture, (20 years, Jewish/Asian) which previously seemed awesome in many respects, were now causing problems. I didn't understand why she would invite her friend to stay with us for three months and she didn't understand why I was such asshole who didn't want to open our home to someone who was like a sister to her. That was one of our central arguments and after a while it really felt like we were standing outside our past relationship, looking inside at the plush tuck-and-roll upholstery, wondering how in the hell to get back in there when the door handles were missing.
Normally I'm not a big fan of big rims and white walls, but with the simplicity of this car in every other way, the blingy-looking wheels and tires give the whole ride some serious dignity. I'm not going to tell what happened at couples counseling. It would probably bore the hell out of you. I just wanted to say that seeing this car really cheered me up on an otherwise totally crummy day.
