Because when the weekend came the cars came out of hiding. Long, sleek, candy-colored machines with fantastical names like LeBaron and El Dorado and Monte Carlo. Cars with periwinkle interiors and sparkling headlights. Suicide doors, Daewoo speakers piled in the back, whitewall tires, rear-view mirrors draped with green pine trees, embroidered Mexican flags, rosary beads. Twenty-inch rims. The license plates read LINDA and MAMI and SANCHA and the trunks told an airbrushed story about La Morenita, the Virgin of Guadeloupe, re-envisioned with a ripped red bodice to match her sheath of roses. These were cars that demanded the sacrifice of every Friday afternoon for polishing, cars that insisted upon trips to Richmond or Daly City for the special mechanics who could make them bounce. These were exacting vehicles, and what they exacted on Santa Clara Street was a traffic flow of about five miles an hour.
So there we were. Our driver was thirty-five years old, with two jobs, two kids, and a gambling habit. He had no patience for Santa Clara Street. He snarled and honked and ducked in and out of lanes. Our vehicle was a hardtop, rust-colored behemoth, completely at odds with protocol. But although we were ashamed, neither Indiana nor I expected anything else. We knew that Santa Clara Street was not for the likes of us. We were content to be in the crush, the excess, the sweat, the beauty, the noise—we pushed to each side of the bucket seat in the back and hung our heads out of the windows.
That’s when I heard “On a Sunday Afternoon,” approaching from a red Sentra on our right. Sentras were not designed to cruise—they were Japanese, for one thing, and aesthetically they were far too small and boxy—but this one was trying its best, with gleaming rims, tinted windows, and a sound system blaring the song of the moment. I was enthralled: the song’s focus was a rolling barrio voice, which looped and hopped down one of the melodies I had heard so many times from my mother’s Motown collection.
