I was invited by a dear friend with some passes to join him and a few other close friends at the Barrett Jackson Collector Cars Auction. If you don't know what this is you can either google it or watch for when it airs on the Speed Channel. For those of you who know what it is or watch it and Gamble on how much a car is going to sell for know how cool it is.
It was my first time there so I'll lay out the event for you. You pull off the highway and the dirtiest crackhead / tweaker combos that you have ever seen greet you in the street wearing a reflective vest and waiving a little orange flag. Some you could see on their face that if they didn't get high soon, someone was getting smacked and others who must have only recently gotten high walked up to your window to talk at each "security check point" and direct your vehicle in a manner conducive to controlling flow of traffic. Mind you this was halfway through the very last day. We valet parked the truck for $20 so that we didn't have to walk 2 miles from the dirt parking lot and go back through tweaker alley on foot! As you approach the main gate and entry doors the quality of degenerates working there goes up 10 fold. You could see that these were your average alcoholic, coke fiends. The best of the best of sleaze bags gets to work inside the event and clean the porta jons and such. It's always nice to have some cleaned up street person standing there watching you pee. Anyway, once you have survived the freak show to enter you walk in and Ford has the corner of the tent with the new Boss Mustangs and they are pretty sick. These come with two sets of keys, one for normal driving and the other key, when put into the ignition the car then becomes a race car, wild!
Once you get past the Fords and your grandfather's Oldsmobile the tent crosses into another area that I have to admit made me cringe and vomit a little in my mouth. It was those stupid little coffins that people are driving around in, Smart Car or some shit. Now these guys must have had a study group done that says if you are cool now you must have FLAT BLACK for the counter culture. So they have these little jelly beans all scattered around and the one FLAT BLACK BAD BOY!
I was nearly about to turn around and run! I walked into the auto show and was surrounded by sales people. Where is the Cool stuff? As disappointment in the event started to well up in my brain I began thinking well at least it only goes for a few more hours. Then out of the corner of my eye I see it, not only Cool but Super Cool! Super Cars in-fact! A brand new Lamborghini, a Ferrari that I have never even seen before and 6 more Super Cars all lined up side by side. BAD ASS! Every now and again you see one on the freeway out here. Here more often than most places because after all, it is Snottsdale!
Things were looking up now for sure. Well they were for a few seconds. This place must be organized by the Devil himself along with his minions. Once you get through the Super Cars you are suddenly dropped into a God Damned flea market of people selling any and everything. I didn't come to Barrett Jackson to buy hand crafted tree limb porch swings. Nor did I come there to buy faux leather sneakers or have my complimentary one piece of jewelry cleaned. What the hell is going on here? I want to see the Auction damnit, I want to smell the blood in the air! Now here is the biggest problem of the day. Along with the boys today, the ladies joined us. Ya know what that means? You guessed it right I'm sure. It meant that anything that we DID NOT want to look at, was so interesting to the ladies that they needed to stand there and check each and every aspect of it. How the Mongolian etched grain of rice captures the sun if held this way and that-a-way.... I thought my head was going to explode. As I make my way towards the Live Auction that you can hear over the loud speakers I have to keep doubling and tripling back to fetch these wayward shoppers. I believe that I have them convinced to pick up the pace and come along with us when the worse possible thing could happen. At the same time, Diane and Jill see the MASSAGE CHAIRS, we are now DOOMED! I give up, I must carry on alone without the girls, I just cannot look at another USELESS PIECE OF CRAP item for sale and I am not standing there while they get a 20 minute massage from a chair. I learn after I walk away that a fine upstanding gentleman was standing there after I left and was kind enough to offer each of the ladies their very own FOOT RUB.... yuck! Dirty Prick! On the flip side of me complaining here, I must admit that across from the 9 thousand dollar mattress they had for sale there I did find Gold! Childhood memories raced back into my mind, check out this shit!
They also had one hell of a neon sign selection there. From 1930's original signs to some incredible re-pops and let's face it folks, neon is on my list of ALL THINGS COOL! I just love neon signs.
We made our way without the ladies into the next tent but first stopped for a quick 7 dollar Lemonade. I would have bought a hot dog too as I was starving but on principal alone, I could not see myself spending $12.50 for a tiny hot dog and a drink, I just couldn't do it. We made our way towards the Live Auction and came across this display. This is the bike Paul Yaffe made for Arizona's 100th anniversary as a state. It's all done in and out of copper, apparently it's abundant here.
At one point, I was so close to the stage that I thought they were going to hand me rags to start wiping down the cars as they got pushed up. It was definitely something cool to experience. The sad side of the coin was that they say on the Sunday, the final day of the Auction, the deals are just insane and they were. It killed me to not have throw away income any longer and to see what some of these hot rods were going for was like getting kicked in the nut sack over and over again....... the deals were unreal!
After you leave the Auction tent you enter into the tents of the sold vehicles and my God did they sell some cars. There was in one tent alone an entire lane of nothing but original corvettes of every great year. There were muscle cars that look as though they just came off the show room floor. Cars you have only heard of and maybe seen on a tv show sometime. It was some sight. Here are some of my favorite cars sold.
Here's the world's largest bike, cool? NO? But it sold!
The hotly contested Ambulance that supposedly carried JFK's body
I think this was Bret Michaels' Camaro, he's not, but the car was way Cool
Just a sick old nomad!
One of my favorite Chevelles of all time
There was however a very sad note to the event. You could feel it the moment you walked up to the front gate of Westworld. The women were lined up everywhere. At first my friend says " wow, there are a great deal more women into cars then I thought"... I just started laughing. They were not there to find a car or to find a great deal on a new oil painting of fruit, because they had them for sale there, they were there shopping alright. Perhaps shopping may not be the best way to describe it, HUNTING and GATHERING was much more like it. These ladies may have driven up in an old Toyota Camry but they were planning on leaving on a Jet or a private helicopter, at the least a limo, hell even a decent clean taxi would do this late in the game. You could see these older ladies completely covered with "bling" and mid sized heels being closely followed by the younger ladies with heels so high I didn't know how they could walk much less run. You could feel the desperation to find a "catch" at the auction. You would see guys getting the long hard looks up and down as they walked by the ladies. The ladies must have some type of scanner hidden that was running credit reports as each potential sugar daddy walked on past. Each time that the girls would walk away to use the Homeless guy maintained bathroom or to shop, we would immediately have a gaggle of women around us, then the girls would return and the ladies would just step away. Imagine how bad it had to be for them to be hanging around the likes of us? My God, ladies, the ones of you alone out there in this economy shopping for your billionaire, ( millionaire's don't really count anymore) I feel for you, pickings are slim and competition is ferocious..... all I can say is hang in there and keep on fighting the good fight.
See ya down the road!
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