“Here we are at Lowrider Magazine’s Los Angeles Supershow. The people are funky. There’s some chunky girl wearing a skirt that’s way too tight and way too short. The guys are like “Hey!” and she’s like, “whatever,” all conceited.
There’s a guy removing an invisible dust speck from his car, “Dancing with Wolves,” painted with growling wolves and a beautiful naked girl. There’s mirrors on the ground so you can see the sparkling engine, which looks like it’s never been driven.
There’s the bike section. It’s so cool. They’re purple, yellow, green, red, black—with flakes that catch the sun. There’s an Animaniac bike. There’s the “B—— Killer,” with a painting of a devil-skeleton stabbing a woman.
There’s a car with crushed velvet seats. Someone’s vacuuming it, even though it’s like never been used before, so it can be just perfect, just the way he wanted.
There’s the fabulous classic cars, huge and curvy like big juicy pears. One has a little fan on the dashboard for air-conditioning, really, that is so cute.
Look over there—it’s the low riders. Some guy is changing the position of his hydraulic purple truck, moving the truck bed so it hangs in the air like some kind of Lego toy. “Hey, ese, check this truck out! So fresh!” someone calls.
$12,000?
One of the owners, Roberto Gonzalez, starts chatting, telling you how he spent $12,000 on his ’56 Chevy. He’s no gangster; everybody thinks lowriders are just for gangsters, but actually all kinds of people are into them. “It keeps me out of trouble,” says Gonzalez.
MTV is filming a girl in a skimpy outfit in front of the stadium where the car hopping competition is going to be held. People from Power 106 are giving away CDs, T-shirts and people are bopping their heads to those hip-hop sounds. There’s a big white van called Atomic something-or-other, and people are sitting on the beautiful couch in the back of the van and listening to the huge speakers.
Over there, some glistening Chevy has sacks of money in the back. One truck has a velvet bed in the back, another has a hot tub. You wish you had that car just in case you want to take a dip while someone drives you home after a hard day. “Whoa, check it out.” People are standing around gawking.
Some guy gets a little too close to a car and set off the alarm, and the alarm is screaming, wheeoooo, wheeeeoooo, beep, beep, beep. The guys with the hydraulic trucks are making their cars jump, getting the truck beds to dance and spin, and everybody’s yelling.
And every car has a story, how the owner bought it, how they found this one part, how they dragged themselves down to Florida to buy the perfect bolt.
Lowriders have come a long way from the days when I watched guys hopping on Sunset Blvd., showing off their cars and getting hassled by the cops. According to my press material, Americans spend half a billion dollars a year on customizing and equipment. A lowrider is actually on display at the Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. Lowriders are getting cooler and cooler. They might even be art.”