NEON EFFECTS
Seeking the Aftermarket Sublime
Emily Hiestand

Recipient of The Pushcart Prize 2000, and Best of Pushcart Prizes, XXV Edition
First published in Southwest Review (1997) and in Domestic Travels (Beacon Press, 1998); revised slightly 2024
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"Do you want to know what I think?" Tommy asks, mildly and not rhetorically but offering his customer the small window of free will, the chance to not know what already burdens Tommy's superior automotive mind. 

What Tommy Hoo thinks has rarely been apparent in the eight years that he and Steve Yuen and their pals at Nai Nan Ko Auto Service have cared for my Subaru three-door coupe. No, normally one must urge Tommy and Steve to say what they think, posing brutally direct questions: "Do I need a new battery before winter or not?" "Is the gurgle in the transmission trouble or not?" Even when Tommy and Steve do answer, they convey a sense that the jury is still out on the beloved Western idea "cause and effect." They have a bone-deep respect for the contingency of all things, and have never before actually volunteered a definitive opinion. So, it is an unprecedented moment in our relationship, when Tommy asks, "Do you want to know what I think?"

"Yes, yes," I murmur. Encouraged, my mechanic declares, firmly and unambiguously, "Don't put it on your car." 

What I want to put on my car came as a gift from Peter, who was with me the palmy summer night that I saw a medium-size UFO floating down Brighton Avenue, hovering on a cushion of clear blue light that came billowing from underneath the craft — an airy, etherealizing light, shedding a serene glow over the asphalt road and its scurrying film of detritus. Some of us have been half-hoping for this all our lives, those of us who as children crept out after bedtime on summer nights, who stood in our backyards barefoot in the mowed grass to look up at the implacable dark glittering.

And we have been well prepared for the moment in the close of darkened movie theaters; the special effects teams of Spielberg and Lucas have taught us, shown us, how to experience an encounter. We grow quiet, we suspend yet more disbelief, we feel a naive awe and a shiver of fear as the Mother Ship appears, huge and resplendent with lights beyond our ken, and again when the fragile, more-advanced-than-us beings step out into our atmosphere.

But we think it will happen far away, if it happens at all, in a remote desert, on some lonely country road, above all, to someone else. We are not prepared for this astonishment to visit our own city street, to publicly glide past the Quickie Suds and Redbone's Bar-B-Que. Now Peter has pulled up close to the hovercraft and I can see inside its glowing body. There, not abducted, are two teenage boys such as our own planet produces. 

"It's a Camaro," Peter says. 

Ahh. A silver Camaro to which the boys have done something — something that washed over me, as Philip Larkin said of jazz, the way love should, "like an enormous yes."  And now Tommy has said, "Don't put it on your car," pronouncing where Tommy has never before pronounced.

•

"It" is two neon tubes that can be mounted on the underside of a car, my car, and create a ravishing fusion of color and light whenever you flick a switch on the dashboard. The effect — "The Ultimate Effect" it says on the package — is produced by an underbody lighting kit which consists of the neon tubes, mounting hardware, and an impressive wad of wiring. This kit is one of the thousands of devices collectively known as "automotive aftermarket products": sound systems, sunroofs, drink-holders, mudflaps, seat covers, carpeting, coats for nose grills, and ice machines. And, I like to think, bud vases. One nice thing about the aftermarket genre is that it opens up what might have otherwise seemed closed and finite. Implicit in every aftermarket product is the idea that a vehicle is never a fait accompli; rather, its manufacturer has merely stopped fabrication at a reasonable point and has delivered a work-in-progress, a canvas.  

The present canvas, my Subaru, has the contour of a sleek sedan, but within that contour lies a hatchback that gives the sedan the carrying capacity of a small pickup truck. The rear window is a marvel of the glassmaker's art, an immense, gently curving expanse that arcs snugly over the chassis like the canopy of an F-16 over its Blue Angel. I have come with this car and the kit to Tommy and Steve because I trust them, and because their shop is so nearby that I can walk over whenever Tommy calls to say "Your car is ready," in his crisp, then soft speech which accents unexpected syllables, often with a faint gust of air — the sounds and emphases of Chinese overlaying English and giving it a gently pneumatic texture. 

It helps city life to be able to walk to the nearby garage of a fine auto mechanic whose wall is covered with letters of praise. It is one of the village-scale civilities that can be found in the urban world, a place that can be an impersonal tale, not least because of the automobile itself, the ways it reconfigures lives, flattens the depth of space, blurs time. So I don't want to go to another mechanic across town. I want to work with Tommy and Steve on this project. When we talked over the telephone, Tommy had said, "No, we don't do that." And then he paused and asked, "Is it a pinstripe?" and, as always, his tone conveyed that we were only beginning, together, to enter into another automotive mystery. 

Seeing the opening, I replied, "Oh no, it's not a pinstripe, it's just a couple of neon tubes mounted on the undercarriage. I could almost do it myself." An outrageous lie if taken literally, but Tommy took my meaning: that the operation would be child's play for his shop. "But there is some wiring to hook up, and I wouldn't want to mess with the electrical system,” I added.

"No, we don't do that." Tommy said again. I didn't say anything, and then he added, "Why don't you bring it over. We will take a look."  

One look at the kit, however, and Tommy and Steve are dead against it, and the reason is rust. "Rust," they intone together, as clerics of old must have said "Grim Reaper," capitals implied in bitter homage. Here is the problem: to install the Ultimate Effect, a row of holes must be drilled on the undercarriage of the car, and this, my clerics believe, is an open invitation to the corroding enemy. Moreover, on this car the rocker panels offer the only site on which to mount the tubes, which fact gives us reason to say "rocker panels" several times (and me to remember a charged scene in The French Connection), but it must not be a good thing because the faces of Tommy and Steve remain glum. 

The men also point out that the kit instructions say: "IF YOUR AREA EXPERIENCES SNOW AND ICY CONDITIONS, YOU MUST REMOVE THE SYSTEM BEFORE THE WINTER SEASON." Needless to say, New England experiences these conditions, yet it would seem simple enough to remove neon tubes each November and re-mount them in April (dark when Persephone descends, illuminated when she rises). But Tommy notes that no quick-release clamp system is provided with the kit, and points out that he is not inclined to jury-rig one. 

"Half-hour to take off, half-hour to install. Each time," he says funereally. The two mechanics and I stand and look at one another politely, the current automotive mystery now fully declared. Then Tommy says softly, kindly, "Miss Hiestand this will not add to the value of your car."  

After a long moment peering at each other as across a gulf, I venture an explanation. "It's for fun," I say. "For fun," Nai Nan Ko's mechanics repeat slowly, skeptically. And then, nimbly, before my very eyes, they begin to absorb the new concept. "For fun," they say to each other. And now they are smiling and trying very hard not to smile, nearly blushing and bashful. We have unexpectedly stepped over into some new territory. 

Upon reflection, one knows why these men did not consider fun at the first. Commonly I appear, as many of their customers must, in a stoic, braced attitude awaiting the estimate, or later in miserly ponderings: Can the brake repair be put off a few weeks? (No.) Would a less expensive battery be okay? (No.) Fun has not come up during our eight years of dealings, not once. And now optional tubes that cost a bundle to install, tubes that tempt fate, that add no value, do not strike Tommy and Steve as barrels of it. 

In the silence that steals over us as we stand about the neon kit, I mention that it is a gift from my husband, that I will have to talk with him about the rust problem. At this piece of information, the situation transforms. Immediately, Tommy and Steve are smiling at me directly and sympathetically, relieved to be able to believe that I am on a wifely errand of humoring. In a near jolly mood, Steve stows the kit in the trunk of my car, and when last I see the two mechanics they are huddled, brooding happily under the raised hood of a bunged-up Civic.

I am also left to brood. Here is dull old duality, posing its barbaric polarity: radiant swoon or structural integrity. Shrinking from the horrible choice, it occurs to me that someone must know how to do this, that the fine mechanics of Nai Nan Ko may simply not know the tricks that New England's custom shops have devised to deal with neon and rust, neon and winter, even as MIT's particle physicists do not necessarily know how to keep a cotton-candy machine from jamming. Sure enough, Herb, at the Auto Mall in Revere, knew all about neon effects.

"Four tubes or two? For two tubes, lady, that will be three hours, a hundred and fifty to install." And he is emphatic about rust, roaring out "No problem!"* (One of America's mantras and a phrase that wants a whole essay for itself.)

"None at all?" I persist.  "Won't the holes allow water to seep in, especially during the winter when the tubes are out?" 

"Well, sure," Herb replies peevishly, "a little water is going to get in, but it's not going to rot out right away, maybe in the future or sometime.  Hold on a minute, lady.  Eddie!"

Herb calls into his shop. "That guy with the black Saturn gets his CD-changer installed in the trunk." Then back to me. "Where were we?"

"About the underbody rusting," I prompt, but greatly savoring the sound of Herb's Future — a place where rust does occur but whose temporal locus is so indeterminate as to make precautions about it absurd.

"See," says Herb, "I use a non-acid silicon sealant and we prime the holes with a primer."  Pressing the harried Herb one more degree, I ask if he has devised a quick-release system for the tubes for winter removal. 

"Naaah," Herb replies. "I've never taken one off. They just leave 'em on." 

"Really?" I ask. "But these instructions say that ice and snow destroys the neon tubes." 

"Yeah, maybe," says Herb. "But I've never taken them off for anybody. Nobody takes them off in the winter." As an afterthought, he adds, "And that's when they get wrecked."

And that's when they get wrecked. In a tone that means, Winter is the time, lady, when neon tubes on cars are supposed to get wrecked, Ecclesiastically speaking. 

"Anything else?" Herb asks.

“You want just the glow to be seen, not the units themselves.” This is first-rate advice that the Luminist painters and Hudson River Valley School artists would recognize at once — all those painters who knew to locate the source of their sublime light just beyond the mountains, the looming crag, the native firs.

A hard frost comes to the old Puritan city, and then winter, and the tubos de neon lie in their box along with the manual in Spanish and English, the high-voltage transformer, the rocker switch, fifty feet of black cable, six nylon clamps, six black tuberia termocontraible, eight hex screws, and la cable de energia rojo. There is a time for everything: a time for seeking a neon mechanic, and a time to just read the manual instead and wait for spring, even as gardeners all over our region are curling up under quilts with the Book of Burpee. The first instruction, printed in large capital letters at the top of page one, is "SOLO PARA EL USO FUERA DE LA CARRETERA O EN EXHIBICIONES / FOR OFF-ROAD OR SHOW USE ONLY."

Taken seriously, it would void the whole project. The scroll of warnings continues. "El transformador para el Sistema de Luz de Neón produce un voltaje muy alto. Proceda con cautela durante la instalacion para evitar una descarga electrica o heridas." Meaning, you can die of electrical shock doing this, so seriously, do not mount the effect at all on vehicles with antilock braking systems. Do not install the wiring too close to the gas tank, in consideration of the five-to-nine-thousand voltaje muy alto. And always always turn off the effect at gas stations when refueling. In the same large, all-caps typeface used for its death-warnings, the manual stresses one crucial aesthetic pointer. "KEEP THE NEON UNITS ABOVE THE LOWEST POINTS OF THE CHASSIS TO HIDE THEM," the manual instructs. "YOU WANT JUST THE GLOW TO BE SEEN, NOT THE UNITS THEMSELVES."  This is first-rate advice that the Luminists and the Hudson River Valley School artists would recognize at once — all those painters who knew to locate the source of their sublime, bathing light just beyond the mountains, the looming crag, the fringe of native firs.

I look up from page three (how to use a cigarette lighter to melt the tuberia termocontraible to make a watertight seal), and the only thing aglow outside is a streetlight in the dull gray cowl of a cold January. And yet there is a somewhere where the neon season never ends: South Florida, whose tropical climate and car culture, whose fancy for sheen and the night were destined to have brought neon and cars together at some point in the twentieth century.     

•

The provenance of neon on wheels is traceable to Hialeah and the dragsters who first began to substitute neon tubing for the wiring on their distributors — Whoa, that lights up the whole engine block! Maybe Steve Carpenter saw that, the photographer who first rigged up some temporary tubes under a Ferrari Testarossa and took a picture of the result for the album cover of a "Miami Vice" soundtrack. Soon, the general idea was wafting through the air of South Florida, and all awaited the brothers Efrain and Roberto Rodriguez.

During one of the boreal storms that shudder into our region, I place a long-distance call to their shop in Miami. Deirdre Rodriguez answers the telephone and over the next twenty minutes tells me that her husband, Efrain, is out in the warehouse right now overseeing a shipment to Tokyo; that the fire-loving countries of Latin America, China, and Japan are her best new customers; that, of course she has neon on her car! "What do you think, darling!?,” that her lights have a pink-purple-magenta spectrum, and that her mother has one too!  Mrs. Rodriguez, who speaks in the clipped accent of her native England, remembers the hour of advent.

"I will tell you a woman-to-woman comment," she says, lowering her voice. "This is how it really happened. One night, we were lying in bed reading, and my husband said, 'Deirdre dear, I am going to put neon under cars.' Well, neon is so very fragile, isn't it? Sometimes our installers cannot even transport the tubes to the job sites without breaking them. So I said to him, 'Darling, go back to sleep.' Poor thing, I thought, he has completely snapped."

But within a week, Mrs. Rodriguez says, the brothers had one tube of purple neon installed under Roberto's car. "Incredible!" Mrs. Rodriguez recalls of the sight. "We were speechless." On the spot, she says, her husband and his brother understood that "they must do something." Over the next months, Efrain and Roberto spent hours experimenting in their sign shop, where they invented a way to encase neon tubes in heavy-gauge plastic cylinders, figured how to bundle the tubes with a compact transformer and how to lay out the wiring system under a chassis. By spring they were ready, and at the Miami Grand Prix the Rodriguez brothers presented the Glow Kit.

Miami saw and Miami approved in a citywide supernova of enthusiasm, which was to be expected. In less warm blooded places, neon has been a symbol for a garish modernity: "The neon glow from those technological New Jerusalems beyond the horizons of the next revolution," sniffed Aldous Huxley. But Miami knows better. She seems always to have known, intuitively, that this emanation from a gas both noble and rare belongs most to her streets. Although Las Vegas and Tokyo both have more ostentatious neon than Miami, and Paris long ago enfolded the bright gas into the evening cascade of her boulevards, no city does neon with Miami's style.

Mere days after the Rodriguez invention was unveiled, Miami's salt-free vehicles had begun to glow with the same radiance that nuzzles its old Deco facades. A native Miamian muses to me that her city's neon must be a human signal back to the glossy subtropical landscape — a semaphore sent to roseate spoonbills, to pink flamingos and lurid sunsets — a friendly, natural wave, a wish to belong. 

Soon after the debut at the Grand Prix, the neon effect began to migrate from South Florida westward to Texas and California. It moved northward up the Eastern Seaboard until it reached the Mid-Atlantic coast, where it began to bog down. In Maryland and Virginia, the effect was declared illegal, possibly because underbody lighting tends to wash out painted highway lines, possibly because the police are a jealous police. (Especially the police do not care for other vehicles using blue light, which is their own color.) Of all regions, New England has been slowest to respond.

Naturally, I am aware that a good many people are not only not putting neon on their cars, they have sold their cars and are going about on bicycles and subways, mentioning holes in the ozone layer. Who does not take their point? The automobile was once our super-dense icon of protean motion, of independence. Was once made sensible by vastness; was a soulful chamber, its highways songlines. It was deliverance for Okies driving through dust. And then its Faustian appetite overtook farmlands and estuaries, dissolved the city in sprawl, fumed the air, spurred malls and Valhalla Villages. The car and its beds of tarmacadam possessed planners to trade in the boulevards of memory for cloverleaves and concrete ramps. It has nearly ruined the railroads (our Zephyrs, Crescents, and Coast Starlights). 

The usual erasure of places — all the vanishing places that can be carried only as Baudelaire's great swan carries its natal lake through the poultry market — has been painfully accelerated by the automobile's demands. I know that. And yet I wish to adorn the suspect thing. It is one of the small canvases of a fragmented people. I know that too. And there is a credibility problem for me, who has railed about the commodification of everything, saying, Marx was right. Marx was right, consumer culture does insidiously invite us to think of everything, even our own lives, as "product." And yet I am gladly shelling out $154.99 for a box of glam.

Perhaps it is because these lights, while admittedly not a totally worked-out policy for transformation of culture, do seem finer, truer, more heartfelt than one recent president's let-them-eat-cake "thousand-points-of-light" non-program. Or because the lights feel like descendants of Baudelaire's movements brusques and soubresauts, the strange, quick new ways of moving in the city. Or because they are nite lights, sending the kind of signals — "affectionate, haughty, electrical" — of which Walt Whitman spoke. We can easily guess that the poet of the urban world would go for neon lamps: "Salut au monde!" Whitman calls across the mobile century, "What cities the light or warmth penetrates I penetrate those cities myself…I make the signal."

Maybe too it is because these glow pods are a shard of the sublime, the old aesthetic of exaltation, so chastened over this century by a well-known catalogue of horrors. Maybe the sublime, turned hyper-modern and re-calibrated — is lurking underneath things. Is “the ultimate effect” merely fun and flash, a way of saying "I'm here?" Maybe. But it does turn a mass-produced object into a carriage of light, and the light these youths bring into the city also seems to work a little as safe passage, as a visa across the often guarded lines of urban and ethnic territories. "Es como una familia," one young practitioner will say of the fraternity of neon. 

•

About the time that our ground begins to relax into spring, Annie, a design friend and tango dancer, tells me about Bigelow Coachworks. Annie has a leonine shock of gold hair, a closet full of swirly skirts, and a collection of vintage Fiestaware. I felt sure that her word about neon customizers would be trustworthy. The first thing I notice about Bigelow Coachworks (other than it being named coachworks) is that the shop is immaculate. Not one oil-soaked rag. Inside the office there is a counter and a young woman behind it whose strawberry blond hair has been teased and sprayed into what used to be called a beehive. For neon, the young woman says, I must talk with Jim Jr.  

No sooner have I said the word "neon" to Jim Jr. than he has plunged into the issues: First, the switch and ways it can be wired — into the headlights or parking lights, or independently onto the dash. The independent switch is a problem, Jim says, because you can forget to turn it off and drain your battery. Next, do I want two tubes or four? Two is plenty in Jim Jr.'s opinion; in fact, having no rear-mounted tube avoids the messy matter of plastic cases melted by the exhaust pipe. Now the mounting.  Am I aware that the tubes aren't really made for New England winters? And do I know that the kits don't come with dismounting hardware? Do I know that Jim has engineered custom clamps which stay in place and make it easy to pop the tubes in and out with the seasons? As for rust, a touch of silicon on each screw will suffice. 

It is a virtuoso romp, all the nuts and bolts of the neon sublime known and mastered by Jim, who has installed some fifteen systems, including, he says with a shy smile, the one on his own truck. This is my neon man. Jim Jr. levels with me about the thirty-six-inch tubes. "These are going to give a lame effect," he says, examining the kit. "There isn't enough juice here for the effect we want."  

The “ultimate effect” does turn a mass-produced object into a carriage of light, and the light these youths bring into the city also works a little as safe passage, as a visa across the often guarded lines of urban and ethnic territories. “Es como una familia,” one young practitioner will say of the fraternity of neon.

Fortunately, the fifty-four-inch tubes for the effect we do want can be had right up the street, at Ellis The Rim Man's Auto Parts store, a temple to the aftermarket product where a beefy salesman shows me the selection (all made by the Rodriguez brothers of Miami) and then says, in the tone of a man who wants to have a clear conscience, "You know, it's really dying out." 

"Dying?" 
"I think the kids just got tired of being harassed by the police."

The salesman now pauses, glances at the two young salesclerks at the counter, then clues me in: "It's only boys who buy these lights — you know, Hispanic boys." As the present contradiction occurs to him, he studies me evenly. When the young men at the counter see what I am buying, one of them asks politely, "Is this for your son?"  My son, I think, not the least taken aback, only feeling the sudden sensation of having one, and being the kind of mother who would get a top-of-the-line neon kit for him. 

"No, it's for me," I say, smiling.  
"Al-right," the boys say, giving me a thumbs-up sign. Now they want to talk neon. 

"Si, si," of course they have it on their caros. Enrique has green and José has aqua. They have neon inside their cars too — under the dash, and on the gear shift knobs. The store has a demonstration model. José gets it out, plugs it in; we stand around it to ogle the colored coils zooming around inside the clear plastic handle.

What do Enrique and José like about having neon on their cars?  What don't they like! It's way chevere, way cool, it's like being inside a nightclub! It lights up your whole body and everything you go by, and makes things look really, really bright. When José and Enrique hear that I saw my first neon car near the store, they cry out in unison.

"That was us!"  
"You drive a silver Camaro?"
"Oh, no," they cry again, just as pleased. "Oh, no, that wasn't us, that was Alberto. That's Alberto's spaceship!"

Now they want to tell me something way-way chevere: the festival is coming. That's where we can see all the best neon cars and also the low-riders slow-dancing their cars down the road, each spotless vehicle also booming with Salsa. 

"So neon hasn't died out?" 
"No way," gapes Enrique, incredulous at the thought. “Wait and see, much lighting-up in the streets before summer is over.” 

The boys hold the door as I exit the showroom — carrying a long cardboard box of glass, transformer, and rare gas under my arm. They step out with me onto the broad sidewalk of our city's Commonwealth Avenue. It is about nine at night, July, prime time, and while we are standing there a boy that Enrique knows comes billowing by in a Cougar with some brand-new magenta light to shed on the city. He creeps almost to a stop.

"Hola!" he calls.
"Hola!" the boys call back. "Que lindo se ve. How nice it looks.”
Que bufiao! Miraeso. Look at that. Ooouuu, la luz."

Homage Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Content At-A-Glance

*Glancingly, one can say of the phrase "No problem!" that it suggests a radical laissez-faire-ism, which triggers a semantic backfire, making you think, “This person may not only not solve any existing problem, he may cause an entirely new one.” The term is also used now in situations where previously a speaker would have been expected to say, "You're welcome." And this new response creates a curious sensation, introducing into an exchange of simple courtesies the idea of some problem, albeit one that is, for the moment, absent.