MORE HORSING AROUND

Get a bunch of hot rodders together. Put on a party. Give them a few beers. Wait until late at night. And then watch funny shit happen ... It’s an incremental thing. One guy does something funny, and that seems to trigger something else, and then the competitive spirit kicks in, all fuelled by too many Speights and a vivid imagination. Old mate Glenn Larsen was involved in this horse story too. He must have a thing for horses. It was 1997, and Glenn was on the organizing committee of the hot rod club that was putting on the NZHRA Street Rod Nationals that year. They’d chosen the Trentham Racecourse as their venue. Huge big area for all the cars, room for the games and stuff that goes on during a big rod-run kind of weekend. And it also had a huge conference centre inside — big enough to accommodate the thousand or so hot rodders for their evening functions. Great venue, as I recall.

As with any hot rodding party weekend, Saturday night was the big night. All the usual stuff: drinking, dinner, a band, lots of catching up with old mates and making new mates, and the obligatory prizegiving for the cars that had really shone during the course of the weekend. Strangely, I can’t remember a single car that won an award all those 23 years ago, but I can remember — like it was last year — the horse.

The massive conference room was packed. It was late enough for everyone to be having a good time, to have drunk a bit too much, to be telling stories, to be, shall we say, up for a bit of fun. The band was going great, and there were, if not a thousand people, getting close to it. A few hundred people were up dancing, the remaining few hundred were sitting at their tables, talking, drinking, laughing, and having a good time. Guys were standing around the outside edges of the hall, and a few blokes were loitering around just outside — probably having a smoke.

While all this good normal stuff was going on inside, among the few dozen hot rodders outside were a few blokes who were having a snoop around. Just 20 or 30m from the hall entrance was an old weatherboard shed, obviously part of the same Trentham Racecourse property. It was a bit smaller than a single-car garage, but it was a garage nonetheless. And when hot rodders find a garage, of course they want to see what’s inside it.

The main front door was locked, but one of the inquisitive blokes found an unlocked side door and peered inside, finding a bunch of old timber and other junk, indicating that the shed might have been a place that the racecourse people stored stuff that didn’t have a current purpose, but which ‘might be handy one day, so we won’t throw it out’. There were no lights, but someone had a small torch on their key ring, and so a couple of the lads wriggled in there and started poking about.

“Bloody hell! Look at this!” we heard from outside. “What is it?” someone asked.

“Dunno. But it’s bloody big.”

“Shit! It’s a f**king dead horse!”

“No it’s not, ya plonker — it wouldn’t be standing up like that if it was dead!”

“Ah. Good point.”

“But it’s cold.”

“Still doesn’t mean it’s f**king dead.”

“Ah. It’s not a real horse. That’s why.”

After some more conversation from inside the shed, we started to hear the banging and crashing of stuff being shifted out of the way, and, bit by bit, out through the side door of the old weatherboard shed and into the half-light cast through the curtained convention-centre windows, inched this enormous full-size-but-lifeless horse. As it was carried closer to the outside lights at the main building’s entrance, we could see that it was made of fibreglass, and was a replica of a bloody massive horse — of one of New Zealand’s most famous race horses of all time, Phar Lap. We guessed that it must have been made for a display of some sort, had become redundant, and had spent the last few years semi-buried in the caretaker’s shed.

So, there we were, at around 11 o’clock on a Saturday night, with close to 1000 hot rodders partying just over there in that big hall, and we’ve got the biggest damn horse you’ve ever seen. What now? All it takes, at a time like this, is a bit of imagination.

And Steve Levine’s got plenty of imagination. Sometimes, too much imagination. Steve’s an Auckland-based hot rodder, well known for many things. Steve first came to national prominence when he built ‘Slime’ — a super-radical bright green ’38 (I think) Ford Sedan that blew everyone away on debut at the 1990 Street Rod Nationals in Paihia. He wanted to call it ‘Snot’, but the people at Personalised Plates back then thought that the plate ‘SNOT’ would be too offensive, so Steve had to settle for ‘SLIME’. Steve’s also well known for being a great car painter and airbrush artist — and for walking around car shows in a British Army greatcoat with pockets full of grain to feed the enormous kunekune pig walking along beside him on the end of a lead.

I bumped into Steve one day while visiting George Bunce at Bunce Motor Company. George called Steve over,and then whispered to me, “Check out Levine’s hairdo.” It took me a minute to figure out what was going on, but Steve had decided to take the piss out of semi-balding men who get comb-overs by shaving off all of the hair on the top of his head to make himself ‘bald’, and then flicking up one side of his remaining long hair to arrange across his ‘bald’ head in thin strands, held perfectly in place by a disgustingly thick layer of hair product. It was truly hideous. And, bloody hilarious. Anyway, that’s getting a bit off track, but you can see the kind of bloke we’re dealing with here, who’s just had what he thinks is a really great idea about what should happen to this enormous fibreglass horse at 11 o’clock on a Saturday night. Despite being February, it was a bitterly cold night. But that didn’t matter. Steve stripped himself naked, and, kicking his pile of clothes off to one side, he said, “You guys hold the horse up. Yeah, that’s it. Now, gimme a lift.”

So, a few of his North Shore Hot Rod clubmates held the horse upright, while some other clubmates (rather reluctantly) gave the butt-naked Steve Levine a lift up onto the horse’s back. From there, everything fell into place pretty much perfectly. Steve was sitting up high-and-mighty on the massive horse, hanging onto its fibreglass mane, and then four big burly blokes took a leg of the horse each, and lifted the horse and rider up into the air.

“Let’s go!” said Steve. And they did. Slowly, carefully, clip-clop, clip-clop. The guys began each step with the horse lowered a little, and then lifted it up with the latter part of the step. Steve started bobbing up and down in time; bouncing his naked backside up off the seat, and then down again. Up again. Down again. The blokes holding the legs developed a bit of a rhythm as they walked along, up and down the pathway just outside the main hall. Before long, they’d developed a perfect horsey style of stride: as the boys lifted the horse up, Steve’s naked butt would continue rising up from the seat, and then down again, and in no time the five of them had created a picture-perfect slowly galloping horse, with Steve responding to the horse’s gallop in a perfectly fluid motion.

And then, someone opened the big front doors of the main hall. And then, of course, 600 or 700 or 800 people were treated to the spectacle of a life-sized Phar Lap being galloped along by a bunch of half-pissed hot rodders, and ridden by a completely naked Steve Levine — who by now had perfected slapping the horse’s hindquarter with his outstretched right hand in time with his bobbing up and down.

Through the hall they went, past the guys leaning against the wall talking, in and around and among the tables of people drinking, through the middle of the people dancing, all in perfect rhythm. All five guys made the outrageous situation look even more hilarious by keeping absolutely straight faces, just as if a naked Steve Levine galloping through a packed convention centre on a full-size fibreglass horse at 11 o’clock at night was the most normal thing in the world. Steve and his mates did a few slow gallops around and through the crowded hall, and then, while everyone was wiping away their tears of laughter, the boys just galloped back out through the main entrance doors into the cold of night and disappeared, just as suddenly and as easily as they’d burst into the place.

The whole thing probably only took a minute, but I’ll guarantee you that every man, woman, and child there that night still hasn’t forgotten Steve Levine, Phar Lap, and the Midnight Cowboys …