I was on my way to meet some friends at Cafe Pacific when, like Peter on the road to Damascus, I was struck dumb in my tracks. Yes, I know. Peter was struck blind. But you understand. This was May 1999. There, sitting in front of the restaurant, sparkling like one of Dorothy’s ruby slippers, was a Ferrari. I recognized it as a 360 Modena only because I’d read an article about it in GQ.
Sexy curves. Deep air intake ducts. Space-age, Barbarella-like headlights. It was like seeing a naked Victoria’s Secret model lounging by the curb. The Modena is a rear-engine car, and one of its most provocative features is a big window on its rear hood that allows you to see the engine. Like a little cutout in a woman’s bathing suit. You should have to be 17 years old just to look at it.
My reverie was disturbed by a young woman who chirped, “We’re raffling it off. Two hundred dollars a ticket, and we’re selling only 2,000 tickets!”
“Thanks, but I’m just looking.” And then I noticed she was actually a pretty young woman. Very, very pretty. “What’s the charity?” I asked. She rattled off a respectable list, and because I’d recently done well on some dot-com investments, I casually said I’d buy 10 tickets.
“Ten?” she squealed, drawing some envious glances from the other, less financially magnanimous dudes hovering around the Ferrari.
“Why not?” I said.
“You have won the Ferrari!” he shouted into the phone in an over-the-top Italian accent. Loud background party noises emanated from his end. This was October, and I had forgotten all about the raffle. “Who is this?” I asked. Fabrizio something-or-other. His accent was as thick as Gérard Depardieu’s in Green Card. Thinking it was one of my more annoying friends, I hung up. The phone rang again. More atrocious Italian accent. Another hang-up. Ring. This time it was a former Dallas City Councilman. Guy I knew. Over the party noises, he assured me that I had, in fact, won the car.
I had a Ferrari.
The car was delivered in January 2000. But in the meantime, I had read about the new convertible version due out later that summer. Well, I hated to be picky, but if you’re going to own a Ferrari, it really ought to be a convertible. So when the car arrived, I agreed to return it in exchange for a place on the list for the convertible model, the 360 Spider.
Except there was the little matter of the $14,000 luxury tax, which was somehow not included in the raffle. And then, in April, there was the $70,000 income tax I had to pay, because I learned—and in situations like this, you learn these things—raffle prizes are taxable as compensation income. So essentially I paid $84,000 for the privilege of having my name on some list.
Here’s something else I learned: people who actually buy Ferraris are treated better by Ferrari dealers than people who win Ferraris. Despite assurances when I traded in my car that I would get one of the first Spiders delivered to the dealer, I had to wait three years. Every time I called to inquire about when my car might be available, I was promised that I was “right near the top” of the “list.” Now and then, I’d see a new 360 Spider flying down Central Expressway and think ill of its driver. The most galling thing about the wait was that I could have afforded the car outright!
Eventually, though, all the people who wanted to buy a Spider were accommodated. On a Thursday afternoon this past July, I received a call notifying me that my Ferrari had arrived. I immediately rang my closest friend and had him drive me to the dealership.
“It’s yellow,” he said.
“Of course it’s yellow,” I said. “What color did you think it would be?”
“Perhaps something less—I don’t know—conspicuous,” he said.
“Less conspicuous? It’s supposed to be conspicuous. It’s a Ferrari! That’s the point!”
“Aren’t you worried that it might look a little cheesy?” he persisted.
“Cheesy?! It’s beyond cheesy. It’s the Platonic ideal against which all other cheesiness is merely a faint reflection. It’s uber-cheesy. Like Aristotle Onassis was in the ’60s. Like Donald Trump today. Cheesiness of such breathtaking audacity that it transcends cheesy.”
This all transpired while the dealer was showing me the ins and outs of the car’s operation, so I didn’t quite catch everything he said. No matter, I would read the manual later. More important was dropping the top and popping into the car’s CD player the disc I’d carefully selected for the occasion.
“Ahh-AAAHH-ahhh AIH! Ahh-AAAHH-ahhh AIH! / We come from the land of the ice and snow / From the midnight sun where the hot springs blow.” Dum da-da-deh-da. Dum da-da-deh-da.
The first track from Led Zeppelin III reverberated off the glass windows in front of the dealership. The dealer looked at me in horror. All of the best possibilities of my life coalesced at the moment when I lurched and stuttered out of the parking lot (should have listened more closely to his explanation of the special gear shifters). The wind whipped my hair as I roared down the Tollway, and, like an amputee feeling a phantom missing limb, I felt the ghost of my ’70s mullet brush the nape of my neck.
The shifters I’m talking about are part of Ferrari’s new F1 transmission. They’re little paddles that extend from each side of the steering column and sit behind your hands on the wheel. Pull on the right paddle, shift up; pull on the left paddle, and you downshift. No clutch to worry about. It’s great! They’ve completely eliminated the need for any skill. Six gears to run through, and you’re already at 100 mph in fourth.
And that brings up the next lesson I learned about my Ferrari: no matter how fast you’re going, you can always go faster. I don’t know how fast my car goes because I always run out of road before I run out of space between the gas peddle and the floorboard. My first time behind the wheel, I was doing 130 mph down the Tollway, and I still had at least an inch under my foot.
Going that fast, you might wonder about the brakes. I can confidently report that they work like a brick wall. Traveling faster than 100 mph, you can take the car down to a dead stop in less than a block with only a little skidding. (After a friend told me how much the tires cost, though, I began to use the brakes sparingly.)
After retrieving my Ferrari, I headed home to pick up the wife so we could then get my Jag at work. Pulling into our driveway, I goosed it a bit, announcing my arrival with the deep, throaty roar of the air intake valves over the rear wheel wells.
“You have to sell it!” was her greeting. Because she’d never seen the first one I’d returned three years ago, I could see how she’d be intimidated by its sheer Ferrariness.
“Honey, Sweetie, I know it’s hard to take in all at once, but you’ll get used to it. No time at all, it’ll seem ordinary,” I told her.
“No, I’m serious,” she said. “You can’t drive that thing. What will our friends think? What will your clients think?”
I hadn’t considered this. A car that costs $175,000—30 percent more than the average single-family home—might give the wrong impression. My clients might start questioning their bills.
“We won’t tell anyone we have it. I’ll drive it incognito,” I said.
“Incognito?” she shrieked. “How can they miss a yellow Ferrari?” Still the shrieking. I would have to talk to her about this annoying habit later.
“Exactly,” I said. “Everyone will see the car. They won’t notice us in it.”
“You in it,” she said. “As you drive it back to the dealership.”
Luckily, she was going out of town for the weekend. I played it cool. “Kiss your mother for me, Sweetie. I’ll see you Sunday night!”
Turtle Creek was like a slalom course as I raced to the bottom of McKinney Avenue. There were bound to be attractive young women sitting outside at Primo’s for Friday happy hour. With any luck, the one and only curbside parking spot in front of the patio would be available.
It wasn’t, and I couldn’t see if the women were looking at me when I drove by, because I had trouble jockeying with the other cars going up McKinney, and I forgot to put the car in a lower gear, thereby causing it to lurch, cough, and almost die. I would have to make another lap around the block. Same problem on the second pass, but this time at least I shifted more smoothly. Still couldn’t get a read on whether I was getting any looks. I wondered how many times I could drive by in a 15-minute span without being too obvious. Five? Six?
I figured the best place to get maximum viewage was Fishbowl on Knox Street. Throngs of beautiful people were always waiting out by the valet stand for their cars. The valet guys always parked the convertible Porsches and Mercedes in front, right outside the patio. A Ferrari would trump them all.
Fishbowl was closed. As in out-of-business closed. As in the-building-was-stripped-down-to-its-steel-beams closed. I hadn’t been out in a while, and apparently nobody thought to mention this to me. I figured I could at least stop in at the Starbucks next door, but after circling the parking lot, I couldn’t find two adjacent open spots. God only knew how much it would cost to fix a door ding in a Ferrari. It was time to go to Sense anyway.
Sense was the hottest nightclub in Dallas. It was members-only, and I, of course, had a membership. At least I was pretty sure I did. I had been to Sense once before with a friend who had a membership, and the owner had taken my business card and told me that he would put me on the list. As I drove across Central onto Henderson Avenue, the cars were already lining up at the valet stand. Watching the valets sprint back and forth, I realized there was no way I was going to entrust my Ferrari, with its sensitive shifters, to some 20-year-old punk. And then I wondered what would happen if I got up to the door and that Sense guy had forgotten to make me a member. I drove on.
I felt like a shark. Sharks, you might be interested to learn, don’t have swim bladders. They will sink and die if they don’t keep moving. That was me. I couldn’t valet for fear of some clown abusing my car’s transmission as he took my Ferrari on a joy ride. I couldn’t park in a parking lot for fear of a door ding.
But as I cruised back down Knox, my luck changed. Talenti, the Italian gelato place, was still open, and there was a gaggle of young girls sitting at sidewalk tables. Best of all, there was an extra-wide parking spot right in front, on the far end, so I was assured no one could park next to me. I revved the engine and prepared to pull in.
Here’s something else you should know about a Ferrari: the bottom of the car rides about 4 inches off the pavement. This is a good thing when you’re helping your miniskirted date into the car. I’m married, of course, so I can only imagine. There would be no dates or miniskirts in my Ferrari. (What? Have my wife wear a miniskirt? Who wants to see that?)
So there it was in a nutshell: I had this awesome chick magnet in the town that has the hottest chicks in the world, and it was useless to me. Like a man on a deserted island with a flat-panel, high-definition television set. In my case, my Ferrari was all form and no function.
And as I turned off Knox, which has a rather severe crown to it, and pulled into the uphill parking spot, the front end of my Ferrari scraped the pavement with a loud, long, sickening sound. It certainly got the girls’ attention. I opened the car door, and the bottom of it scraped on the curb. I was almost in tears. I lost all stomach for ice cream. The nose dragged as I backed out. And I almost got smashed by a car I hadn’t seen. I was serenaded by a horn as I made my exit.
But here’s another miracle about a Ferrari: it looks fabulous parked in the garage. And someday, when my grandchildren razz me about the mullet and the Led Zeppelin and all the other uncool things of my generation, I can say, “Yes, but I had a Ferrari in Dallas.”
The author wants you to know that if you see someone driving a yellow Ferrari around Highland Park, it’s not him.
