There are some automotive enthusiast events left this season. There’s the big ImportExpo show at the International Centre in November, plus someone is organizing a Fast & Furious film festival set to run all winter. But over the weekend there were a couple of ‘season closer’ parking lot meets, and I attended a couple of them.
The first one was hosted by Versatile Empire, a good bunch of guys who regularly compete in CSCS Racing events all summer in their rides. The event was held on Billy Bishop Blvd in a parking lot between the highway and a strip mall. Doesn’t sound great, but having a Jollibee and Starbucks a few steps away makes all the difference in the world.
Capacity maxxed out and latecomers started blocking laneways (and blocking me in) so I decided it was time to go. There was another car meet in the west end on Rexdale Blvd that was billed as a Halloween Meet. Even though I didn’t have spiderwebs strung across my roof, I changed my underglow to orange and zipped across the highway.
The event was a bust, with maybe a dozen cars huddled together, compared to the 300 to 400 at the previous meet. But it didn’t matter anyway, because the location was garbage. The empty parking lot of a closed shopping mall; desolate. I was preparing to head home when a friend suggested a spot up the street for an impromptu photoshoot. I was leery, but programmed the GPS for the Sikh Spiritual Centre.
Our photoshoot coincided with the ‘Day of Liberation’ festival, when Sikhs decorate their places of worship with thousands of lights in celebration. I was just astounded with the beauty of their Gurdwara and the effort it must have taken to cover every wall with tiny lights. Just incredible. I posed my car next to an illuminated flagpole, and as I snapped some pics, to Sikh gentlemen walked by and I complimented how lovely the spiritual centre looked. They smiled.
I could hear other cars from the meet approaching, their loud exhausts bellowing in the half-empty parking lot. It was well after midnight, yet plenty of worshipers were inside the spiritual centre and I just felt embarrassed; they must think we’re a bunch of street hooligans. One teenager in a Subaru Forester proved the point when we drove over to a gravel covered overflow parking lot and started doing donuts, sending rocks flying in every direction… including the beautiful building. The rest of the bunch revved their engines and popped their exhausts. So shameful. The car club were uninvited guests at a house of worship, but instead of showing respect for the place, the guys were smoking joints, the girls cackled loudly. Being older than these kids, I walked over and gave them proper shit for the way they were behaving. It’s one thing to act out in an empty mall parking lot, quite another to do it at a church or temple.
One of the other club member privately thanked me for stepping in and saying something, but I knew I would never come to another one of this club’s meets again. This was an example of everything wrong with the car scene today.
~ Chris Demaras
That is truly terrible behavior. I just don’t understand how people can be so inconsiderate.
When I met this ‘crew’ of car-crazy people earlier in the year, I thought I’d met some cool guys. But they’re fucking hooligans, man!
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Can you imagine a bunch of Sikh guys rolling into the parking lot of YOUR church and doing donuts? People would take that as a serious insult! Fights would result.
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I need to choose my friends more wisely.
Sadly, behavior like this doesn’t surprise me any more.
I am officially … a grumpy old man.
Bro, this isn’t grumpy old man stuff. This is anti-social stuff. I could not believe that I was lucky enough to be allowed into a Sikh temple parking lot during a special ‘festival of lights’ event. I was frickin’ mortified when these street urchins started burning rubber, smoking up and talking all loud. Totally disrespectful.
And I, for one, was surprised.