A Cavalier Attitude

"Why would any man want a Cavalier in the first place? And if that's what you have, why would you want to make it . . . embarrassing by tuning it?"

"My '95 Buick LeSabre beats Cavaliers."

On StreetFire.net, where guys post street-race videos, there's one of two Cavaliers going side by side down a highway, and the guy with the camera pans over to the speedometer and shows them doing . . . 105 mph.

"This is the slowest race I have ever seen," writes one poster.

Sneer if you want. Cav guys don't care. They shouldn't. Amping up a homely ride is American Romantic, like Bruce Springsteen, only older.

A quick history of customized cars in pop-culture America:

After World War II, GIs came home with a little money in their pocket and a new sense of working with mechanics. Out in Southern California, they bought old beaters, mostly from Ford. Like a '29 Model A Roadster, or anything after '32 with the flathead V-8. Something wasn't right with the engine but, hell, they could fix that. Get out the tools, ratchet, ratchet. Honey, crank it when I tell you to. Right. Give it some gas. Good. Good. Slam hood, wipe hands on a rag. Take it out on the strip and turn the quarter faster than anything else alive.

The hot rod was born out of reworked junk. That was part of the glory of it, the great young male joke on respectable society.

America at mid-century, a sense of all things possible, a sense that nothing was really real.

Keeping Out of Trouble

Sunday afternoon, a day off. Detorie's in the garage at his grandparents' house. It's overcast and windy and bleak, and the cars are hissing past on the multi-lane roadway out front.

It's his dream space. A hydraulic jack. Spare bumpers, boxes, parts, a 60-gallon air compressor in the corner. Meguiar's detailing sprays and polishes.

"Chevy Cavalier SS," he's spraypainted on the wall. Also "Zoe" and "Anna."

Inside the house, Detorie's "Pa," the grandfather who raised him, "never had nothing."

Joe Salzman tells you this without bitterness. He left school in the sixth grade to work, pumping gas in Upstate New York, helping the family pay the bills. He's standing in the living room, lots of pictures of the kids on the walls. He's in his 70s and still works six days a week, 2 in the afternoon till 10 at night, at the post office, overseeing the vehicle maintenance unit.

"When I was coming up, it was just work, work, work. Nowadays, all these kids are so far into drugs and alcohol. The car, it keeps him out of all that. He works, and he works steady. He doesn't have that drug and alcohol problem, and that means all the world to me."

It's Salzman who has bankrolled almost all the modifications on the car.

He and his wife, Ruth, like having the boy close. Ruth lost her daughter, Belinda, in 1973.

She was fine, just fine, then started to get really tired. Leukemia. She was 17, and her hair started falling out with the chemo. She was in the ground the next year.

Guts. Work. The kids. The roadway out front of the house. Here is what has been earned, or what God has allowed. A sense of Sunday afternoon, the quiet.

Limited Possibilities

Detorie pulls out a few minutes later, candy-blue Cavalier rumbling, the body four inches off the asphalt. His car club meeting is outside I-695, the Baltimore Beltway, in the parking lot of Lucas Brothers Flooring. It's right behind a Dunkin' Donuts. By the time darkness falls, maybe 20 cars and guys are standing around, hands in pockets against the chill, shadows on the pavement, it's all about Available Glory and the American car.

Detorie has his blue neon lights on the Cav, the doors open, talking, laughing, smoking. Sunday night, work looming tomorrow morning, the outer suburbs, a place in America where everything seems so real and so little seems possible.