The Car Show

When we leave the restaurant, night has settled. Lights are sprinkled like confetti in the hills across the dusky river, and someone has lit bamboo torches along the riverwalk, the flames licking hungrily at the dark. We are sated, happy. Ready for something new.

Across the road, tucked into a parking lot in the shadows, is a car show. Hidden away from people like us—in our khakis, our watches, our clean lines and comfort, sipping Mojitos at the outdoor bar. He likes cars, and so we make our way into the dimly lit parking lot to look at each shiny jewel, each polished trophy, around which patched-up men stand in baseball caps with bellies straining against thin cotton t-shirts. Patriotic country music pumps sluggishly through old speakers set up on a truck. The men laugh, smoke; caress smooth, curved metal and chrome with lint-free cloths.

We have stepped into their world, the tall man and me, strangers still to each other, strangers in a strange world tonight…

The first car standing with its mouth wide open is a 1969 Chevy Camaro—as shiny as hope itself, a brand new penny on a breezy Sunday morning. The man in the dirty cap beside it grins when he sees us look. He tells us the car’s history, her value, her secrets. There is an intimacy between them that’s clear, he and this car. More than an intimacy, he finds his salvation in her; purpose. Listening to him talk makes me wonder what I know about love—what I know about joy.

But we have stumbled in late, and already they are packing up to go home. A small caravan of vintage cars and their craggy drivers make their way out to the road, heading home to their hard earned lives. But one man is in no hurry. He waits for us to walk by, to notice him, to talk. He stands beside a cranberry colored Cadillac with rich red leather seats. But tonight it’s not about the car—it’s about fear, about death, about connection. He recognizes on this quiet July night—the sky littered with stars—his aloneness, his own quaking mortality, as two strangers pass by. The car is merely the rope he casts out to catch us—which we both grab hold of: two strangers as we already are, looking for truth in each other, not quite certain if it’s there. We don’t know at first what we have latched on to—we are, after all, looking for something new—but the man with the raspy voice and cranberry colored Cadillac is as lonely as the night sky, as terrified as the thin, ground edge of a knife. He tells us of his cancer, his payments, his plans. We three of us pretend it’s about the car—peek inside at the tufted leather seats, bend over to look at the white wall tires—but it’s about fear tonight, about loneliness. In a darkened, near-empty parking lot, three strangers trying to make a connection, trying to stave off the hungry hand of fate, if just for a few moments more.
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