death traps: creative extremism

the rat rods. never underestimate the animated power of bored american teenagers…

by Art Chantry ( art@artchantry.com)

TACOMA is a hot rod town. sure, it’s also a chopper town (bandidos and gypsy jokers and even hell’s angels spent a lot of time here). but as long as i remember, this city has always been about cars, home made cars of creative extremism. sure, you got yer old fat white haired dude riding in their customs (with the missus) on sunny days, parading their youth (what’s left of it). there’s lots of restoration of wonderful old automobiles, too. the lemay museum is opening soon with one of the absolute best collections of vintage autos in he world. so, that means there is a LOT of spill-over in the antique auto department in this town.

we got yer trashmobiles, too. muscle cars and lowrider and gangsta sleds are in abundance, being driven for real, not for show. i mean, you regularly see mean dudes riding in big wheel dayglo k-cars even in the pouring rain (alongside REAL bikers – the guys who don’t just ride on sunny weekends.) and we can’t forget the fiberglass- and-chrome kit-car t-bucket school that is bought right off the showroom floor to display at car shows (like it’s actually their your own private sculpture.) those don’t fool any body – but, nobody laughs, either. it’s ok, there’s plenty of room. and there’s a billion of them in t-town. good clean fun for the kiddies….

however, there is a school of mad car disease that really turns my crank. it’s always been a major factor in the northwest – and especially the outskirts and farm country. that’s the “rat rod” school. there is a big contingent of this philosophical bent in the northwest (bored farm kids, i think). these cars are big and fast and tough and really really nasty looking. they are covered in dents and rust and are extremely loud. they’re made from garbage and they have HUGE FUCKING ENGINES in them. chrome is for fags. fiberglass breaks too easy. street legal is a joke (try and catch me). when you see one of these things barreling down on your butt in the middle of the night on a dark freeway in the wee hours of the morning you just plain GET OUT OF THE WAY. nothing else really works, ya now? it’s about survival instinct – ‘see and flee’.

sure, you tough roackabillies and garage-rock kids with your tattoos and bettie page haircuts and cute little beards may think you’re some sort of toughies, but ya know what? there is a type of white trash in tacoma that is so lethal that you just don’t want to meet them. period. they flash their meth mouth smile in your direction and flex their lizard like muscles under their bronzed leatherized beef jerky skin lifting a stumpy one-finger salute in your direction and you have an instinct reaction, all right. it means, back off, no argument. they will eat you. it’s a predatory moment supreme. period.

when we were kids in parkland, we used to work up our nerve and visit some old alky bastards who lived in a group house (more of a shack, really) out in the boonies. in the front yard , they always had $20 cars for sale. yup, TWENTY DOLLARS. we’d buy one (or trade for a case of beer), cruise them out to the fort lewis reservation and take them stump jumping off road until it died or you wrapped it around a tree. then, we’d leave it and walk out laughing (boredd teens having fun.) i imagine those rusting hulks are still out there somewhere, covered in blackberry bushes.

believe it or not, those cars were not worth the $20 they were asking. but they ran (sorta). i remember one friend bought one just so he’d have a ‘car’ to drive. what a laugh. it was an ‘institutional light green’ 60’s station wagon that was covered in oozing rust sores. the entire top of the carcass had the top roughly cut out to open it to the drizzling sky. the back end was wide open to the rest of the world behind you. and for some reason, there was a huge section of the back quarter panel cut out in a roughly square shape, exposing the entire rear wheel and suspension (no exhaust at all. the entire cab filled up with poison gas wherever you went. it spewed mud up into the air like a rooster tail when you drove it. there was no interior, even the floor was rusting through. there were big holes in the floor that we tossed out empties through as we cruised. there were no seats, either. the driver used a folding metal lawn chair to hold down the wheel. when you hit a bump, he became air born (yee-haw!) the rest of us just sat on the resting floor and rolled around (drunk) and tried to avoid falling through the holes.

this is the staring point of a rat rod. a rusting $20 piece of shit car and a will to have something better. no money, lotsa time and a taste for invention. find a bigger motor, drag it home, get it running and somehow shove it into the engine compartment. needed new wheels? steal them. need parts? again, steal them or if you’re lucky enough, you can find a rusting abandoned car out in a farmer’s field and simply cannibalize what you can use. gerry-rig was the mother of invention. i had one friend who drove jeep. he liked to stump-jump on weekends (drive madly fast off-road through open fields and forests). he’d push that beast until the engine blew. then, he’d scrounge another engine somewhere – anywhere, spend the next week welding and cutting and shoving that engine into his jeep in time for the next weekend of stump-jumping – until the engine blew. over and over and over. it was his LIFESTYLE.

back in the 90’s,there was a punk scene up near the high country behind everett – a poor working class mill-town about 60 miles north of seattle. what they were into was off-road drag racing. basically, they found free cars (or perhaps $20?) and worked on them, supercharging them like mad. then they’d take them out into open land (no roads at all) and DRAG RACE their cars across

untrod new field turf. if the police got tipped off, they simply scattered to the wind.

these cars were junk. i mean REAL junk. i once got to check out the local champ car from that scene. it was (or perhaps “used to be”) a ’56 chev (maybe?) – it was really hard to tell. the body had some black primer here and there, but mostly it looked like it had been sitting in a farmer’s field exposed to the rain and sun for forty or more years. and in the northwest, that meant REALLY BAD. it was literally a pile of rust – blisters, holes, no interior, no windows. there was some sort of bucket seat held together with duct tape bolted crudely to the floor. there were empty beer bottles and garbage strewn around. it literally had MOSS growing on the passenger side floor.

you lifted the hood and exposed an engine that was held together with bailing wire. they had cut out most of the metal around the engine space because i was just a HUGE motor and was way too enormous to actually FIT into that car. but, they just hacked away at it until they somehow squeezed it in. rusty pieces of metal and and gerry-rigged junk that did god-knows-what made it push 200 mph over grass and ditches and stumps. the engine itself was actually held to the frame by a couple of lengths of rusty link chain padlocked tightly to the frame as possible. when you hit the gas, the engine jumped up into the air because of all the torque. those crusty chains restrained it from going into orbit. in other words, this was one of the scariest death traps i’ve ever seen. and it went like a motherfucker. it retired unbeaten.

so, this ‘road warrior’ scene is all around us here in the northwest – and tacoma is one of the epicenters. i love going to car shows around here, because you may see some crazy machine unimaginable that looks utterly ridiculous and impossible. but, it is actually run 24/7 out there in the real world, just like a personal war machine – a tank. this little runabout i show you above was sitting in front of an auto parts shop out on 56th the other day. see what i mean? would you REALLY like to encounter this thing on a dark lonely highway in the early hours of the morning? maybe, even YOU would get out of it’s way…??

never underestimate the animated power of bored american teenagers….