Drive (28 page)

THE IDEA
that people's social lives could revolve around a car seems so American to me—right up there with high-school football on Friday evenings and Sunday mornings at church. But as I discovered in Argentina, the car club is an international phenomenon, and though the nature of the relationship with the car may vary in other countries, the passion is just as strong.

At 7:30 in the evening, the traffic was still heavy in Buenos Aires and on the highway, so the travel time to the old suburb of Monte Grande was about an hour, double the return drive. Our destination was a massive old building that was once a linen factory but is now home to about two hundred cars owned by the 350-member Club de Automóviles Clásicos de Esteban Echeverría. Ruben Ferro, the vice-president, showed Carmen Merrifield—my wife and translator—and me around the chilly site, which had large ads for local businesses on the walls.

A tall, leonine man with a grey goatee and a twinkle in his eye, Ferro's two loves are women and cars. And, as if to prove it, he shamelessly flirted with Carmen while he enthusiastically showed us the cars. Four Model Ts, a Ford V8, a Second World War Jeep, a beautiful blue 1958 Impala and a 1973 Dodge racing car were among the vehicles in the large rooms at the front of the club. We moved along and Ferro pointed across a cavernous room to the
parilla
. He explained that it was the most important part of the club: the place where they eat and drink. Then he hailed a man named Alberto and asked him to get a key.

As we waited, our tour guide explained that we were about to enter a private room with a special collection. Once Alberto appeared and unlocked the door, we saw a row of cars draped with sheets and tarps. Ferro removed the covers slowly and dramatically, revealing one immaculate car after another: a yellow 1976 Mini Cooper; a silver 1985 Porsche; three Fiats, including a limited edition 1972 Sorpasso 1300 Series; a mustard Peugeot 404; and two Alfa Romeos. As he and Carmen replaced the sheet on one of
them, he joked that he makes the bed at the club more than he does at home.

Actually, he probably wasn't joking. His charm had more than a dash of machismo in it. “The bigger the car, the more powerful the engine, the more manly the man is,” he assured us. “It's the man's personality.” But he added that as a man ages, his attraction to cars grows more sophisticated: “What do young people want? To feel the speed and power. And so they fall in love with cars. When the years go by they look for a more classic one, more sumptuous, with a softer line.”

Just before we reached the final car in the room, club secretary Norberto Coelho joined us. His reading glasses dangled on a cord around his neck and he wore white running shoes and a tan flat cap with car pins on it. He was less refined and courtly than Ferro, but just as passionate. An expectant hush fell over all of us as they unveiled the highlight of the collection: a brick-coloured Torino 380, a legendary racing car made by Industrias Kaiser Argentina. Some people consider it the country's national car, noted Coelho, adding proudly, “It represents us.”

As we left the collection, three younger men joined us and we all walked through a room with several BMW micro coupes on our way to a big room in the back that housed dozens of covered cars, including some of Ferro's own collection. He acquired his first set of wheels, a 1959 Chevrolet Impala, when he was fifteen. Since then he's owned, at one time or another, about a hundred cars and trucks, as well as company vehicles at his crane manufacturing business. He can't pick a favourite because he loved them all like they were his children. As I wondered if I should read anything into the fact that he has three daughters and seven cars, he admitted that he takes some grief at home. “My daughters tell me that I have too many cars,” he said. “They question me as a father.”

Among the cars he kept at the club were a red 1996 Camaro, a brown 1996 BMW 320 and a 1980 dark green Ford Falcon. The Falcon was Ford's answer to the small imports that had somehow
snatched nearly 10 percent of the U.S. market. To Americans, it was an inexpensive compact, but since it could seat six it was big enough to be a family car. Introduced in the fall of 1959, the Falcon was such a hit—the company sold 417,000 in the first year—that Robert McNamara, the man behind the project, earned a promotion. In 1960, he became the first president of the company who wasn't a member of the Ford family. His stay at the top was brief, though, because before long President John F. Kennedy appointed him Secretary of Defense.

Ford made and sold the Falcon in the United States until 1970, but the car had an even longer and more successful life in other parts of the world, where many saw it as a mid-size model. In Australia, it remains the company's best-seller. And in Argentina, the Falcon was not just the most-produced car, with half a million built between 1962 and 1991, but also a hugely important one culturally. The Falcon was a racing car, a family car, a taxi, a police car—and, from 1976 to 1983, a sinister symbol of the country's military dictatorship and the “Dirty War” that the generals who ruled after the
coup d'état
waged against their own people. Death squads used dark green Falcons to “disappear” trade unionists, artists, students and anyone else who might oppose or question the junta. Since the squads illegally arrested, tortured or killed an estimated thirty thousand people, the car now stirs bitter emotions for many Argentines. (Lawrence Thornton's 1988 novel,
Imagining Argentina
, does a hauntingly good job of capturing the ominous mood those dark green birds of prey created.) Even today, some people in Buenos Aires won't get into a taxi if it's a Falcon, and a tour operator in the northern city of Salta, who would have been just four or five when the dictatorship crumbled, told me, “I don't like it when I see a Ford Falcon. I get bad memories.”

But not everyone feels that way. “It's a car that always works. It is faithful, noble and safe,” said Coelho. “The mechanics are simple. It always runs and it doesn't leave you on the road.” And,
as it turned out, the three men who had joined us were from the Club Amigos del Ford Falcon. One of them was Oscar Mota, an organizer of that 350-member organization, whom I'd arranged to meet. He'd brought along two younger members, Adrian Alejandro and Daniel Dominquez.

Just as we were introducing ourselves, another man appeared and announced, “Food is ready!”

“Will you have your meeting while you eat?” Carmen asked.

“No, we're done,” replied Coelho. “Otherwise we'll fight. Now we'll continue talking about cars.”

We walked back to the
parilla
and into a festive scene. The room wasn't much—the white walls were covered with framed drawings of old cars, club photos and a large flag of the club logo—but about thirty boisterous men, all talking at once, sat at a long, thin table covered in a white tablecloth and filled with white plates, bottles of wine and big plastic containers of Coke. As we walked in, the men abruptly fell silent, swivelled their heads and stared at the woman entering the room.

We joined Dominquez, Alejandro and Mota at a small, round table at the end of the long, thin one. The dinner was sausage, seriously well-done beef and salad; the conversation was cars. The son of a Falcon owner, Dominquez, a curly-headed man who works for a doors and windows business, first fell in love with the car when he went to races as a boy. After selling one four years ago so he could get married and buy a house, he bought a 1979 Falcon Sprint a year ago. The clean-cut Alejandro, who was dressed in a white sweater and works in foreign investment for an oil company, bought a 1978 Falcon two years ago for ten thousand dollars. His father has owned a Falcon for thirty years. Their club's only requirement is that members must keep their cars in good condition, meaning that the owners of the many beat-up ones on the streets of Buenos Aires need not apply. Alejandro admitted that most wives, including his, aren't that supportive. “They don't understand what we feel,” he said. “We polish our cars. We pet
them. So they don't get it. They don't understand the way we take better care of our cars than of our wives.”

A burly guy in his forties with curly dark hair and large wireframe glasses, Mota looked a bit like hockey great Phil Esposito and had the hands of a working man: thick, rough and lined with grease. All of the men on Mota's father's side of the family were car lovers and he now owns three Falcons: a 1962 model built in the United States, a 1969 Futura and a 1979 Sprint. When Carmen wondered why he needed three, he said, “They are different.”

I suspected that the mechanic was taciturn at the best of times, but he was clearly skeptical about us, and his apprehension grew as we inched toward the topic of the Falcon's controversial history. His answers were short and curt, with none of the flamboyant pride we'd seen in Ferro. In fact, I figured he'd brought Alejandro and Dominquez along as backup.

Sure enough, Dominquez, who would have been a small boy during the Dirty War, was the one who spoke to the controversy. That government, he pointed out, also had Torinos and Chevrolets, but drove Falcons the most for the same reason everyone else did: they were the most reliable. And that part of the car's history doesn't disturb him any more than a Jeep lover would mind that armies use Jeeps. “The government gave it a bad reputation, but the car isn't to blame for those acts,” he said. “The people who blame the car rather than the military are just looking for something to blame.”

Once we moved past that subject, Mota relaxed a bit and told us that he spends about six hours a week on his cars and that his wife shares his passion. He would love to own a Ferrari but can't afford one. Eventually, without saying a word, he left the table, walked over to where the photos hung on the wall and took something down as the men at the long table razzed him loudly. He brought it back and handed it to us. Under the glass were a photo of Mota's gleaming turquoise 1962 Falcon, a Ford logo and some text that began, “I have a heart that's blue and oval,” and
went on to explain what each of the letters in Ford stands for: F is for strength; O is for pride; R is for racing hard and reliability; D is for the destiny that put the Falcon at his side to be his companion, his loyal friend, more than something that just transports him, his guide, his Ford for life. “If I die of old age,” it ended, “you will keep on running.” This quiet man, for whom expressing emotion did not appear easy, had written a love letter to his car.

13
Glendale

“The Biggest Wins”

THREE WEEKS
into my road trip, I'd travelled over 3,200 miles and it was time for some automotive and personal maintenance. The car needed an oil change and a good cleaning, and I needed to do a load of laundry and get in a workout. So I dropped my machine off at a nearby Grease Monkey franchise and then walked a few blocks to a Bally's for some overdue exercise.

My hotel was in Glendale through chance more than anything else. I'd checked in there on Friday evening because it was close to Denver University, where Scott and I went to see a hockey game. I spent Saturday night in Colorado Springs and, after hiking in the Garden of the Gods on Sunday, returned to the hotel because it was the most luxurious place I'd stayed so far on my trip and the early-week room rates were more appealing than what I could get downtown.

Bisected by Cherry Creek, Glendale is an inner suburb of Denver dominated by offices, shopping malls and apartment buildings. The small enclave's density of more than five thousand people per square mile is not particularly high, but it's not an inviting environment, so it's the sort of place that gives succor to those who say a dense existence is an unpleasant one. Of course, the real problem is not the density but the urban design. The streets are too wide and the traffic lights are timed for drivers rather than pedestrians. What really surprised me, though, was the impatience some drivers had for those of us on foot.

Fortunately, no one ran me over and I made it to the gym and back in one piece. So I took my tuned-up vehicle to a nearby car wash. It cost $16.95, about what I pay at home, and I was surprised
to see everyone in front of me tipping. Americans do tend to be more generous tippers than Canadians, but I couldn't remember ever seeing anyone tip at a car wash. Then I saw how long the employees spent on the car after it had gone through the wash— they polished and buffed everything. One man with two bottles went to work on the wheels, and the boss made another guy go back at the dash and the inside of the windshield twice. I was so impressed that I pulled a few bucks out of my pocket. My car hadn't looked that good in years.

THE ANNOYED LOOKS
on the faces of drivers forced to wait as I crossed the street—with the lights—in Glendale was at least better than the complete contempt drivers have for pedestrians in Argentina. Buenos Aires is, like many European cities, a great walking town, but pedestrians have to worry about two things. First, everyone, it seems, owns a dog and yet no one poops and scoops. This presents a dilemma: enjoy the beautiful architecture or play it safe and watch underfoot. Second, when it comes to crossing the street, even at a light, it's definitely a case of pedestrian beware.

My wife and I arrived in Buenos Aires on a Sunday afternoon and, despite having heard stories about the traffic problems, zoomed into town. The streets were still damp, but the rain had stopped and there were hardly any cars on the highway or near our hotel in San Telmo, one of the oldest barrios in the city. After checking in, we walked among the antique stalls along Defensa, which becomes a pedestrian mall on Sundays for the market. But even at the cross streets, and when we got to Plaza de Mayo, we saw few cars.

Though it's in South America, Buenos Aires has a European feel to its cityscape, cuisine and culture because of waves of immigration from countries such as Italy, Spain and Germany. Almost 2.8 million people live in the city, which has a density of more than 35,000 per square mile, but the population isn't growing because so many residents are leaving town. The
metropolitan area has a population of more than 12 million. Ruben Ferro, the car club vice-president, told us many people have tired of the congestion and crime in the city and are moving to the suburbs and even into gated communities. “So they need to have two or three cars,” he said. “We are getting more American.”