ALWAYS CRASHING IN A DIFFERENT CAR

the late pj o’rourke once published a magazine article under the title “How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink”. A headline that is either unimprovable, or unforgivable: delete according to prejudice.

Whatever your position on these matters — and it’s a free country, until further notice — even those courageous souls who remain determinedly po-faced at PJ’s provocations will concede the fact that no better piece will ever be published about motoring, half-cut, across America in the company of coke-addled groupies. This is because, given our present predicament, it’s likely no worse piece will be published on this subject, either. (Small mercies.)

O’Rourke’s story, for my money, starts off funny and accelerates wildly, without signalling or checking its mirrors, towards a state of high-speed delirium. I won’t quote from it here, for reasons above. But you can find it online or, better yet, order a copy of O’Rourke’s rambunctious collection, Republican Party Reptile, and read it there. I double-dare you not to laugh. Or chuck it on the bonfire. One of the two. Maybe both.

In cautious tribute to the shit-stirring old rogue-slash-patriarchal-bigot, a few days after his death last February, the New York Times pegged O’Rourke as a representative of a “shrinking tradition”. This was an oblique reference to celebrity magazine journalists, a dying breed indeed. America was once blessed — yes, or cursed, if you insist — with a conspiracy of them: Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S Thompson, Nora Ephron… Not anymore.

When I was a kid, dreaming of one day having his wing-wang squeezed while drunk at the wheel of a high-performance vehicle — or indeed while stone-cold sober, and pretty much anywhere doing pretty much anything — so well-known was O’Rourke, even outside his own country, that he fronted TV ad campaigns for British Airways. This was a man who was famous for writing humorous-satirical magazine articles, and for that alone. Not that anyone else should bother for a fraction of a second to mourn the passing of a period that was, undoubtedly, more indulgent of my kind, but such a situation is not merely remarkable today — it’s inconceivable.

O’Rourke’s death, at the age of 74, was much mourned. Respects were paid across the political spectrum, which is not a phrase you hear too often in 2022. And yet the implications of the coverage were clear: such shenanigans as O’Rourke once indulged in, waggish as they might have seemed at the time, were better off cremated with him. That was then, this is now. Keep your big Ivy League schnoz and your unseemly urges and your overpowered passion wagons to yourself. Check your privilege, frat boy. As if that hadn’t been O’Rourke’s point, or one of them, all along.

Bully for me, I never had pretentions to be famous or feted like PJ O’Rourke — which is appropriate, since I lack none of his qualities except for his wit, intelligence, originality and talent. But I did, as a younger man, fancy a small slice of that fabled Gonzo pie: getting twitchy on other people’s coin, chucking myself about in far-off fleshpots, reporting back on said escapades for envious readers of prominent periodicals. I wanted to trash my hotel room in the company of people of whom my elders and betters would have disapproved, and I wanted someone else to pick up the bill. And, envious reader, as a young magazine writer and editor at the turn of the century, I got all that and more. Not the whole pizza, like PJ, but a modest slice, which was more than enough for me. It was good pizza. I liked it.

Less memorably than “How to Drive Fast...”, even to me, and to a somewhat less ecstatic response, in the mid-2000s I published my own essay on the topic of harum-scarum motoring in the land of the freeloaders. This story was about the many scrapes I got into over the years piloting prestige vehicles around California in my role, at that time, as chief celebrity-frotter for a glossy magazine. Throughout that decade, due to a dangerous cocktail of carelessness, chemicals and inept motor skills, I crashed cars in LA with almost pathological regularity. And, somehow, impunity. I mounted kerbs in Cadillac SUVs, made suicidal late-night handbrake turns in Lexus convertibles, gouged the sides of Porsche Turbos, took chunks out of BMWs. I backed a Range Rover into a wall. I wrote off a Lincoln Navigator in a Downtown carpark. If Teslas had been around then, I’d have happily totalled one of those suckers, too.

My article, which was no doubt hilarious, was illustrated by a caricature of me, tie askew, at the wheel of a topless American guzzler, careening across a clogged Hollywood intersection with a mad glint in my eye. The article is long lost, but I still have the original illustration. It reminds me of that period during which I was visiting LA three or four times each year, staying for a week or more at a time, blowing my own miniscule mind with the amount of fun I was having. All this was, needless to say, a long, long time ago.

Last May, I was invited to a fashion show in LA. It had been four years since I’d been there, and I had missed it. At least, I thought I had. I suppose that somewhere in the recesses of my smoggy consciousness I was aware that perhaps I missed the idea of LA more than I missed the place itself. I missed who I used to be, or perhaps just the position I used to be in, and what LA once meant to this younger me: foolish, footloose, fame-adjacent, and fully indemnified for third-party damage, fire and theft.

Can I shock you? I’m not much of a one for drink-driving, these days. The thrill has gone. The jokes have dried up. I’m no longer a person who wants to go especially fast, even while clean and serene. Speed scares me. I worry I’ll kill myself, or someone else, or at best be arrested and imprisoned, forced to pay an epic fine, and in consequence of all this be sacked and lose my livelihood, and my home and family, and be miserable, and disgraced, and cancelled, and forced to beg for work as a curator of branded content. I mean, it really could get that bad.

Show me the man who doesn’t want his wingwang squeezed from time to time and I’ll buy you a Lamborghini Urus. But no longer would I, like PJ O’Rourke, suggest you attempt to engineer that ticklish situation while balancing a margarita on the dashboard of a supercar doing 95mph on the Pacific Coast Highway. That would be tasteless. I mean, margaritas? Please.

I’ve changed, but not entirely. In preparation for this most recent trip, I contacted MercedesBenz, a company that has in the past been very generous to me. (For the record, I have never crashed a Mercedes, nor did I think it germane to mention to anyone there my previous prangs in other, lesser marques.) I was given a choice: a stately S-Class saloon, befitting my age and station, or a G63 AMG. I went for the latter.

The G-Class Mercedes, the boxiest of boxy SUVs, was first brought to market in 1979, the same year O’Rourke’s wing-wang piece appeared in National Lampoon. Fortysomething years

on, the design is mostly unchanged, at least to the untrained eye, although the formerly spartan interior is considerably zhuzhed, and numerous modifications have been made to the chassis. The G63 AMG, which is the considerably supercharged version, has a 4-litre V8 petrol engine that, despite the car’s bulk, means it can sprint from 0 to 62mph in a terrifying 4.5 seconds.

The G63 AMG is difficult to write about without recourse to the language known as Clarksonian, in tribute to motoring journalism’s Apex Predator. The car is a Slavering Beast. It has the proportions of a Steroidal Silverback. It accelerates like a Charging Grizzly. It corners like a Frenzied Great White. At the touch of a button, it roars like a Furious Tiger. (Coincidentally the name of this magazine’s forthcoming fragrance launch. Say it in a sexy French whisper: “Furious Tiger… by Esquire.”)

In America, you can buy an actual tiger for around $2,000. You could buy a hundred of them for the price of a Mercedes-Benz G63 AMG. But if you’ve got the $200,000 burning a hole in your board shorts, I’d say it’s worth it. And if you’ve got a tiger, I’d say it’s almost essential. Try fitting one of those crazy cats in the trunk of a Kia Picanto. Don’t try it after your third martini.

“They cut your hands off for DUI here now,” says my friend Sanjiv. Sanjiv is Esquire’s longstanding US correspondent. He’s been my partner in very petty crime on the West Coast since the turn of the century. We were talking at Horses, the new Hollywood hotspot, over cheeseburgers. This was the first time we’d seen each other since 2018. Ten years prior to that, our happy reunion would have been an excuse for amateurish — but fully committed — hell-raising. Instead, after a ruminative nightcap at the Sunset Marquis, for old times’ sake, we each headed home. He caught a Lyft. I ordered an Uber, and was in bed by midnight, reading Renata Adler on nothing stronger than a melatonin. OK, two melatonin. The G63 AMG was safely parked, by someone else, in the basement garage.

LA was still LA, or at least it looked a lot like it. Same shabby palm trees and sun-bleached strip malls, same slow-moving traffic and insane wealth disparities. Hoping for what I don’t know, I cruised, soberly, past the scenes of ancient debauches. A few old haunts had been redeveloped into luxury condos, but for the most part things were pretty much as I’d left them. LA was still LA, but you can’t repeat the past. Old flames are better remembered than rekindled.

The car? Returned without a scratch on it. For whatever reason, it simply hadn’t occurred to me to crash it into a wall. I don’t know what’s happened to me.

The closest I came to vehicular confrontation, I was on foot. One morning in Santa Monica, in the driveway outside Shutters on the Beach, a handsome woman in early middle age, carrying a dog that was smaller than her sunglasses, asked me, not unreasonably, what the hell I thought I was doing climbing into her Mercedes. As a valet brought mine around behind us, and she realised I wasn’t an overdressed carjacker but instead the “owner” of a near-identical G63, we compared trims. She’d ordered the blacked-out license plates, she said. I should do the same. It would look better. Courteously, she allowed her valet to keep my tip, jumped in — she actually had to jump — and gunned the thing up Pico Boulevard. If she’d glanced in the mirror, she could have watched the ocean receding into the past behind her. But she didn’t seem the type of person to waste time looking back.

○