Drifting in Albuquerque

Author’s note: All the information in this essay was gathered through primary and secondary research some of which included extensive recorded interviews with permissions of the subjects conducted in Albuquerque, NM. I am withholding identifying details and last names in order to keep the subjects anonymous which was requested because street drifting cars is an illegal activity. I am also publishing this essay (years) later to protect the identities of the subjects though the information is still relevant.

I check my watch. It’s nine pm on a Friday night and things will just be heating up on Montgomery and Eubank. That’s where the VIP cars go with their hella flesh tires, and back ends dropped down low, blue lights, exposed engines, rims that cut through the dark like daylight.  This is where it starts, I’m told. Kids park their cars at Sonic and circle one another like predatory animals seeking the same food source. Some park and stay silent, the deep black of their windows speaking volumes, some blast by, engines revving for attention. Girls all of fifteen in diamond studded sweatshirts circle up in the florescent light of the fast food joint gesticulating and turning their heads when an engine sounds out. Tonight, there’s a lot of BMWs, Nissans with spoilers, Mustangs, late eighties, maybe early nineties, and one gleams yellow with a sick-smooth paint job so level it could make your eyes water. I walk to the callbox window with the wind at my back and get ice cream for myself. I lean on the hood of my dark green Ford Explorer, (a worthless ride in this lot) and take in the scene. A small crowd forms at the back of the parking lot by Blackman’s Taekwondo. The crowd’s abuzz over a motorcycle that rides up with blue lights and revs its engine. Blue lights are illegal in some states, but not in New Mexico. Someone pulls up and pops their hood. Interested parties pour over the engine, nodding and smoking out of the sides of their mouths. One car keeps circling that has no hood. The paint job is nothing great but the rims are spinning and the engine is front and center for everyone to see. A girl with a pout rides passenger side looking bored but superior, her nonchalance screams, I got a ride. Girls who ride shotty are in another league than the giggling sparkly sweatshirts in the circle. A souped-up Honda hits the scene and two girls dressed almost identical scream a name and sprint across the parking lot to his ride begging to get in. The guy nods like he’s famous and keeps rounding the lot for everyone to see. Two cars at the back of the lot purr at one another taunting, revving and breaking, as they try to pull into the cruise line at the same time. It’s like another language, You go. No. You go.

  A small crew forms by the drive-thru and starts screaming, “BURN ‘EM!” at cars that go by. Most cars oblige by spinning their tires until they smoke and squeal.

I’m chilling, leaning against my hood and I think about what a car means at sixteen. It means you’ve got some kind of freedom and even if you’re going nowhere in particular—you still go. These cars, they circle again and again, they drive up and down Montgomery pulling in and out of the lot. A parking lot that sits above Sonic is also crowded. I’m told people sit up there and arrange early morning drag races, or they talk smack. Sonic is cliquey by car type, car interests. You’ve got the engine guys on one side with their American muscle cars, souped up trucks keep pulling through end to end, not stopping. You’ve got body guys who want it to look good no matter what the cost, the high-end spendy stuff—luxury. You’ve got the fast stuff, and the slower stuff, the four-door stuff and the two-door stuff, and the stuff that looks like sex on wheels, and the stuff that looks like someone needs to pay up before anyone turns a head. There are cars that are all about the inside, and cars that are all about the outside and everything in-between. A cocky 80’s Toyota station wagon speeds by and I’m about to roll my eyes when I hear someone in the crowd say that model has “stupid-fast speed” and it “burned a bunch of V8 guys on a drag one time, and they got all butt-hurt about it.” 

Then there’s the drifters who huddle towards the back in their Nissans. Always Nissan. Those are the guys I’m looking for. They’re in the low Japanese cars they’ve built inside out with fin-like back spoilers, bright paint, rear wheel drive, two doors and hatchbacks, low as hell. But I don’t recognize any of the drift cars that are parked tonight and I don’t feel bold enough to step up to a ride I don’t know. 

I finish my ice cream and get in my car. I’m gonna have to make a call if I want to ask more questions—and I do have more questions, or maybe I just want to feel the energy pouring off the drifters once more. I’m interested in this subculture of cars in a sea of cars. The crew that modifies their cars just to wreck them. I relate. I’ve wrecked my own life and had to put back together. Break ups, leaving corporate jobs. I moved all the way from New York to New Mexico to pursue an M.F.A. in writing as part of my attempts to put myself back together. When I heard there were drifters in Albuquerque I decided to find out for myself. I thought I could write something or learn something, about others and maybe myself. I sought them out via word of mouth and have been cruising their hangout spots trying to make a connection, but, tonight is a bust. I speak to no one.

One truck pulls up to the crowd at the back of the lot as I’m leaving and does a long burnout. This move is when you intentionally spin your car’s tires while in park to create sound and smoke. This car’s tires create so much white smoke that it carries through the lot like a slow moving ghost masking everything in its view. The moment feels profound, heavenly, and the veil of white leaves the chanting crowd roaring in its wake. Everyone got what they asked for and the night seems more meaningful as the car speeds away. I get in my car and as I drive through the cruise line to leave, the crowd calls after me begging for a trick but I keep driving.

* * *

At the shell station off of I-25 at Paseo and Jefferson the drifters gather on a different Friday night in February. They’ve invited me. My curiosity has won them over. David, kind, handsome, charismatic, is the ringleader, and there’s nothing scary, or ominous about him though media might try to make you believe drifters have that sort of presence. He’s a student at CNM and mechanic by day. He cares about his family, his girlfriend, he creates community wherever he goes, including a drift community. When I ask him what drifting is he says, 

“I mean controlled chaos—inside a car,” he flashes his thousand-watt smile. Cars pile into the station that almost look like stunt vehicles, crazy colors, spray paint, spoilers, stickers, built. They’re Nissan 89’ 240 SX’s.  

The motorsport of drifting is rumored to have started in the mountains of Japan in the late 1970’s early 80’s. The exact origin is sketchy and when I ask David where it came from he shrugs at me.

“In the mountains of Japan some guy got mad at his girlfriend and hit the gas, and went around a corner and slid out, and it felt good, so he did it again, and again, and again…” He raises his eyebrows, and the other who are leaning against their cars laugh. But then David drops the name of Drift King Keiichi Tsuchiya. Tsuchiya was a fan of car racing and started noticing at professional tracks that the fastest cars always spun out slightly on turns. In order to improve his race times he went out and started practicing sliding around curves at high speeds—he just so happened to be practicing on a 86 Toyota Corolla GT-S, which in the drift world is one of the best cars to work with. There are a few preferred models, but the 86 Toyota Corolla GT-S is the stuff of legends and anyone into drifting knows the significance of that make and model. That car even stars in the Japanese anime drifting film “Initial D” (1998) which is at cult status among drifters. In the film, teenager Takumi Fujiwara is just a high school kid with a job at a gas station attendant, and helps his father's tofu shop by delivering tofu to a mountain top hotel every night in his father’s 86 Toyota Corolla GT-S. This of course sets Takumi up for becoming the best mountain-pass drift-racer in all of Japan without even realizing it. The sport has huge support in Japan where there’s D-1 drifting and it’s nationally televised. In the United States it depends what state you’re in terms of what the scene is like. 

Street drifting rules can be strict state by state, and in California if you get caught, people claim you’ll get a police invitation via arrest warrant to watch your drift car get crushed. Even being caught spectating street car tricks can catch charges. When you research how drifting got to the states into smaller communities you’ll keep hitting one point of entry: videos and videos on the internet. The stories come tumbling out of the drifter’s mouths in tandem. 

“I watched this video.”

“I saw someone do it.”

“I saw, I watched, I wanted.”  

Before that, it was coloring books full of cars and sitting in the dirt with toy cars. All of the drifters tell me they learned how to drive before the age of sixteen. A coincidence? Maybe.

Local Pro competing drifters race in New Mexico when events are sponsored. Often they’ll head out of state to compete though. California and Michigan have bigger scenes than New Mexico, but there’s something about the die-hard Albuquerque drifters that you have to respect. They’re doing it because they really love it not because it’s popular or necessarily has an audience or scene. They really are doing it for themselves. For the love of it. Rumor has it the height of drifting in Albuquerque was back in the mid-90’s. When David was a teenager, he used to draw crowds of sometimes over a hundred people with his stunts. He points to his friends like a game of duck, duck, goose.

“I influenced him, and him, and him…” They nod in agreement. 

“I used to pitch some streets like Aztec curb to curb, people loved it. They lined up, they wanted rides, they went nuts for it.”

“The bottom line is, in Japan, everybody started doing it, sliding the back end out, and then they started putting like, 600 horsepower behind it, so much power, so much mass just going around corners. People can hit guardrails, hit mountains, hit other cars, people have died from it. But we’re gonna go behind that building over there, it’s safe, there’s no traffic.”  He nods behind the gas station sign, and it’s gotten too dark to see where’s he pointing to.

“What about the mountain?” I ask.

“Is there anyone else here who would drift down Sandia besides me?” David calls out. A guy who’s been standing behind David in a Volkswagen mechanic’s jacket, with dirty blonde hair and emotive blue eyes leaning against David’s ride pipes up.

“I’d do it,” he says.

“That’s legit, he would do it. No fear, right Jeff?” David shakes his shoulder. Jeff doesn’t answer, but the blue of his eyes do. Jeff’s intense, but there’s something about him that softens when we start talking. I-25 roars and stretches behind him; the Shell station lights half of his face, there’s blonde scruff on his chin, and his eyes grow kind. His hands are large, cracked, and black with car grease and oil. The February wind is blowing hard, so I keep angling my hand, waving it awkwardly between us because I want my tape recorder to catch his low, soft, voice.   

He says he started off doing donuts at 30-40 mph and saw some kids trying to drift in a parking lot.

“I wanted to try it, too, and I was decent,” he says earnestly.

Jeff tells me mostly mechanics are drifters. Some guys try to do it because they have the money. Celebrity children like Hulk Hogan’s son can wreck cars indefinitely. People who try the sport often get out quick. They start off not understanding how much money goes into it, then realize they can’t afford to keep putting money into their cars. 

“Mostly it’s us low-end guys, and the mechanics that really have a passion and are good that make up majority drifters. It’s a skill. I’ve been drifting for four or five years now,” Jeff shrugs. It sounds so poetic when he says it like that. 

“Yeah, I’ll be doing it until I can’t drive a car anymore. It’s a major addiction. I’m in deep,” he says like it’s a bad diagnosis, then smiles to himself. This is where I start to understand my own draw to this crowd, an obsession, a compulsion, something you know isn’t going to do much for you, but you want to keep going. The risk taking without much reward. I know it well. The feelings before you fall are sometimes worth it. I think back to all the times I’ve physically or emotionally risked in order to feel something, though it never quite turns out the way I hoped.

“So, you’ll be 90 and drifting?”

“Yeah. I guess I will,” Jeff tells me about certain modifications (mods) you do to a car to make it a drift car.  “You have to lower the car, lower the center of gravity, lock the rear end up by either welding the diff, or buying one that will actually spin both wheels at once, you gotta get big wing, the car’s gotta look good, you do a body kit, and paint. Nice wheels, everything.”

“It’s gotta look sexy; gotta have sex appeal,” David shouts from nearby.

“Sexy?” I raise an eyebrow.

“You have to look good doing it, that’s part of it.”

Mike is taller with a buzz cut, he’s lanky and sure of himself, he leans in and tells me he met David doing rodeo donuts at 40 mph in parking lot. 

“He was a maniac, and I thought to myself I gotta carry on with this kid.” 

  Rodeo donuts are when you pull donuts while sitting on the driver’s side door window of your car. You’re driving half in, half out of the car. 

  “Way back in the day, when I was seventeen, I was always into imports, racing, stuff like that, and I started watching videos from Japan, and reading magazines about compact cars, and drifting was blowing up, and it was making its way over here. A rear-wheel-drive car with a light-weight chassy, that’s the perfect combination for power, speed, it’s just dope looking. You go around a corner so close to the curb, but you maintain that perfect drift line without wrecking and it’s cool.”  

“Is it an art?”

“It’s art because it showcases the car, it showcases the driver’s skill, their driving ability, and there are so many ways to do it, approach it. Maintaining that drift line whenever you go around a corner. In a drift line the apex is in the center of the curve, and how you position your car for going around the apex, what speed you’re at, and then how you initiate the drift is all art. You can initiate a drift by pulling and e-brake, or you can do a clutch kick, or you can go fast, really, really fast and then let it slide out. It’s dope to see a car do all that, go sideways and yet forward.”  

Mike tells me he’s wrecked two older model cars but never a Nissan S14, which he has now. He says it’s got good balance, good drivability.  He says despite his wrecks he’s never hurt himself, he emphasizes the damages to the car are always worse. He rattles off instructions for any person interested in the sport. 

“Oh you know, buy a rear-wheel-drive car. A Nissan 240 SX, Mazda RX7, or an old 86 Toyota Corolla GT-S. It’s gotta be rear wheel drive and it’s gotta be light. Find a parking lot and practice car control, going sideways, doing donuts, counter steering controlling your slide. Take all your money and put it into the car suspension. Get a welded diff, after market differential. Start accumulating cars and skill. Go from there…”

“We’re moving.” David interrupts.

I follow the caravan of cars behind a service road, behind what looks like a chemical plant, and a bank. As we drive the guys are all over the road, joke driving horribly, and swerving for show. On the straightest road leading up to lot there are giant speed humps that they take at angles. David tells me it used to be a big drag spot back in the day, and the cops got sick of being called so they put the humps in. There’s a small moment of pride when he tells me, “We did that. That’s all us.” The forcing of the city to respond to their havoc.

There are a few different ways to initiate a drift. Pulling the emergency brake locks the back wheels and the front spins out. The rear slides, and it will slide for as long as you provide throttle. Or, when you approach a corner, rev the engine super high and put the clutch in, then dump the clutch, drop it, and that will lock the back wheels. You can also feint, by turning the car in the direction you want to go and then turning it back quick and that causes the slide. Most of the guys I’m with do a combination of feint and e-brake or clutch and feint. Cut the wheel one way cut the other, pull e-brake and initiate the slide and give it throttle. As you give it throttle you’re counter steering the whole time. They all agree gas, steering, and emergency brake, are the elements of control needed to drift. 

David walks up to me as I get out of my car behind the cement plant and maps out the course.

“Basically you go back there and you pitch and slide all the way around then slide right back.” When he says the word around, the cement poles, chain link fence, and a cement wall start to pop out of the course he’s mapping. It’s not a large space; one could hit all three of those things easily. Engines start revving from a place behind David. Suddenly Jeff comes careening around the corner and throws the course perfectly, whirling around all obstacles. Cars follow Jeff, spinning the same course all slightly differently until a large cracking sound rings out and all the guys howl out into the night. 

“Major damage!” David yells as one of the drivers slowly drives up to the top of the course. It’s Joey. He’s tapped a cement pole and cracked the metal of his wheel in half. 

“I was trying to just give it a little love,” he sighs to us through his car window as he pulls closer. He has a naturally mischievous air about him. Perpetual hand in the cookie jar vibes. 

“That’s four hundred bucks worth of damage in thirty seconds,” David laughs.  Tapping is a skill that leads to style points in professional drifting. If you can tap objects without wrecking or damaging your car, it’s a sign of incredible skill. This is part of how drifting has evolved. It used to be more angle, more power, more speed, smoke, now tapping, and back entrances. It becomes clear that movies and television that glorify the thrill of drifting don’t articulate the extreme control drift drivers are employing over their vehicles. There’s an outsider illusion about drifting, that it’s the act of being out of control and this is where the sport gets its bad reputation. The reality is that the car 

movement a driver is creating only feels out of control. In truth, the driver is in complete control when drifting is done correctly. 

“I almost had it,” Joey winces.

“Almost.” 

Then Jeff pulls up, leans over, opens the passenger side door, and asks me if I want to get in. I want to, and so I do. Jeff buckles me into his bucket seat with the racecar belt and we pull into the drift line. The screeching of tires and revving of engines are making my heart beat fast. Jeff asks me if I’m scared and I tell him I am, but I’m okay with that. Only when I say it aloud do I realize that feeling of fear coupled with acceptance has been a running theme in my life, it probably is what put me in that seat. It’s that feeling of risking destruction—total annihilation. When it’s our turn I can feel the power of the engine more than I’ve ever felt in a car. I do feel like I’ve given something up, given my power over to the car, to Jeff, I’m watching him carefully as he glances side to side and gets up to speed. As we ramp up and he starts to pitch around the poles it’s not unlike the feeling you get in a carnival ride, your stomach dropping out, and your head pushed all the way back to the seat, and your body feels beside the point, like it could snap, or it could remain whole, or that being in pieces might be the best option. I start to scream when we approach the second pole, and this makes Jeff laugh. He does the run perfectly though, so perfectly we drift two more times. 

* * *

The next morning I brew a cup of coffee and play back the audio tape of my drift. I want to remember the details. I hear Jeff pull up in his car telling me he’s going to bust a tire soon, and do I want a ride? I answer, and my footsteps on the pavement are heard, then his car door slams as I get in. Engines rev in the background (other drifters) and foreground (Jeff’s car) and I hear my voice tell Jeff I’m scared. There are tires screeching because we’ve pulled up to the line of cars that go one at a time around the corner, and David just took off. Jeff and Joey are the only ones not driving their “daily drivers,” they have cars custom built, and gutted for drifting.

“Ah, you’ll be alright. It’s like a roller coaster. It’s only scary the first couple of times, then you’re addicted,” Jeff answers evenly. I laugh nervously, then there is only one engine revving, then tires squealing, and then I hear myself cry out, and it bleeds over the noise of the car. 

“Oh my God,” I pant.

“More?” Jeff asks. 

“Yes.”

I initially told myself I wanted to get to know the drifters, maybe to write about them, but I can hear myself getting lost in the investigation—blurring the edges of interest, research, and self. I’m struggling to hold the boundaries a little. I tell myself I should wrap up the interactions, get enough information to write a small editorial piece, and then let go of the connections, but that weekend I find myself out driving again, texting to meet up.

* * *

“Us drifters, we’re the weirdos,” says Allen, who kicks the curb absentmindedly with his sneaker. We’re back at Sonic on a Saturday. He’s tall, and he’s got shaggy brown hair that makes him look more like a boy than a man, but he is a man. Jeff is leaning on his car, which has no license plate. Earlier that day on Facebook his status read: “drive your racecar to work day,” with a photo of the car that Allen is standing next to.

“Drag racing is boring, you just gas and go, we’re into something more freaky. We go sideways, we do the small V4 cars, and we like it that way,” says Allen.

Jeff’s Nissan has changed suddenly from silver to bright purple. He only painted it last week. In this crowd it’s already been called “The Barney” and “The Grimace” but Jeff hides it behind his blue eyes if it bothers him. His grey hoodie is up and he has a devilish grin tonight. 

  “Let’s go for a ride,” Jeff says, and the others agree. 

We drive up San Mateo, a fleet of drifters—I’m buckled in his low racer seat. The seatbelt weighs a ton and Jeff had to lock me in. Three different bands feeding into one clasp keep me safe. The car in front of us has a toy dangling off the bottom of the car - a “drift charm” which shows how low the end is, but also signals this person is “down to race” at any time. In Japan it’s rumored to clear evil spirits from the road. The whole interior dash and ceiling of Jeff’s ride are covered with messages in permanent marker. “Don’t be a bitch, Bitch” is one of them. Jeff gets a phone call while we cruise and picks it up.

“No. I got someone in my shotgun already,” he says, and then looks at me. After he hangs up, he revs the engine and pulls up next to his buddies at a light flipping his middle fingers to them in both directions. 

“Someone else wanted a ride, but you’re not done yet, right?” Jeff turns to me and puts his phone back in his pocket.

“Right” I say, and lean back in my seat. This question, too on the nose. My answer, not the one I should have given. Who do I think I am anyway? I’m riding shotgun every weekend in Jeff’s Nissan acting like I’m some anthropologist, when really I’m very much getting my own kicks out of all of this, feeling more, and more, the pull of just becoming part of the scene and not actually asking any more questions. Each Monday I keep pushing the reality of my feelings down and making excuses. I am going to write something, I am studying. This is ethical. I’m not losing myself to the lure of the drift. This is not some distraction about being close to graduating from my M.F.A and the anxiety of nothingness and the abyss of what to do with my life doubling and tripling in size by the day. I know the lure of the drift is too perfect a metaphor for my unknown life ahead. I should be focused on other things, but letting someone else take the wheel on a chaotic drive feels safe right now.

“Very few people drift their whole lives,” Jeff tells me. 

“They get smarter, most people, they wise up, but some of us, we’re just stuck.” He’s looking straight ahead when he says this, and something about it resonates. 

I’m reminded of Mike, he’s thirty-three-years-old and was the oldest guy at the drift party a few nights ago. Behind the chemical plant he stood on the sidelines next to his own car, in quiet approval, smoking.  

“I was just never that good at drifting,” Mike confessed, “I had an older model 240, but I actually wasn’t that good, I used to smack curbs, break control arms, tension rods, and this and that. Of course it was fun.” He was thoughtful about it for a minute. “Now I prefer grip driving. When you’re going around corners as fast as you can but you remain in control. This car,” he pointed to it, “I’m building it for grip. I do some work on cars, but during the day I do billing for a case management company uptown.”  Maybe all our obsessions drip into other forms when we’re humbled by reality. Mike found his place. I can too. 

Jeff speeds up as we do cruise loops beside the Sandia mountains in the dark. I wonder to myself if he ever drives the speed limit.

After we finish cruising Jeff drops me at my car and tells me to meet them at the IHOP off of Montaño. Scooting into the restaurant booth facing David, I can see behind him, out the window are all their cars parked in the lot—a line of good-looking rides. They glint in the streetlights. The sun is down but the sky is that gentle New Mexico purple of evening. Jeff dropped his racecar at home and came back with a Lexus. David leans over his omelet towards Jeff, smiling.

“How much? How much have you spent on drifting since you started?”

Jeff bristles and shrugs. 

“I dunno man, not that much. I’ve worked for dealerships so I get stuff you know.” 

“Come on man, how much in five years?” 

“I stopped count at 50k.” 

When I ask Jeff to name on the spot the best drifters in the state, he rattles off names, and includes David in past tense. David looks up at this.

“What do you mean used to be the best?” 

“You don’t compete anymore man, you’re not out there like you were.” 

David nods at this. 

“He’s right, I’m trying to get married, get my degree, move to Florida.” He puts his arm around his girlfriend who leans into his shoulder sweetly. 

Outside the IHOP, another drifter, Joey, tells us that his girlfriend is having a baby, and he’s setting her car up. As he talks, the other boys visibly react to the mods he’s planning on making. 

“I want my girl Set. Up. You know? She’s gonna grip drive at 100 miles per hour and then look back at our baby.” 

As he falls silent two cars drive by. The first, a white four-door Taurus, mid 90’s model. Nothing special according to this crowd, and as it accelerates they burst out laughing. 

“Exactly where does he think he’s going?” Someone calls out into the cold. Once the sun goes down, that desert air cools quickly no matter the time of year, but it’s now April, I’ve technically been drifting for three months now.

“He’s got a fire to get to!” Joey cracks.

The second car is a white, two-door, mid-eighties Nissan, rear spoiler. 

“Heeyyy,” Jeff breathes into the night. There’s quiet as the car passes, but then David starts laughing,

“Did you see that bumper?”

“Jacked up,” Jeff answers.

“Looks like someone tried a back drift entrance,” David smirks. This is the latest trend in drifting, rounding curves at top speed backwards, and then initiating the drift. 

“And then…someone lost control” Jeff finishes the thought. We all laugh giving one another knowing glances. 

The next time the drifters text, I tell them I’ve got all the information I need and thank them. I spend my weekends filling out job applications now, preparing to defend my M.F.A thesis in May. 

The last time I saw Jeff was on a random Saturday night. We both pulled up to the same stoplight downtown. I leaned over to wave, but saw a girl in his passenger side, so instead I sat back and just let it be—