Rich People Things

In my unmourned midwestern youth, vans were a status symbol for a certain drugged-out kind of dude-on-the-make. If the vehicles in question were airbrushed with the countenances of R Crumb characters or pastel-drenched beachscapes, the owners were singled out on the roads of Davenport—and so they fondly hoped, in the hearts of eager young lasses—as true masters of countercultural leisure.

But now the van, like so many other features of American life, has lost its once-seedy cachet, and metastasized into a brutalist plaything of yon Gotham overclass. Witness the testimony recently collected by New York Times scribe Christine Haughney, who chronicles how rich Manhattanites have embarked on a gaudy romance with “cargo vans on steroids.”

Consider how Steve Kantor, an “affable investment banker” says he likes to roll: “I have two big-screen televisions; I have a couch in the back that goes into a bed,” Mr. Kantor said. “I have four chairs that go back and massage you. It has a desk, a table and an intercom so you can have meetings in there if you want to.”

That’s right: Forget the bong and the shag carpet; our new generation of high-end van owners would like nothing more than to host a mobile financial confab—perhaps to keep Occupy Wall Street protesters off guard—and then unwind with a rubdown in a bank of customized chairs. There’s also the demure, not-so-affable-seeming proprietor of a mega-van that Haughney espied on Park Avenue one late fall morning; he declined an interview, “saying he did not want to draw attention to himself,” but his wheels were clearly speaking a different language altogether. He let photographers capture the interior of the $425,000 tank-like van, while permitting his 44-year-old chauffeur, Carmelo Umpierre, to display the many features and specs of the whole vast, rumbling lifestyle diorama:

“The seats were upholstered with heavily scented leather and a stocked bar had individual lighting for each wine glass and Champagne flute,” Haughney notes in a proper tone of dumbfounded admiration. “Mr. Umpierre said he vacuumed the interior every night and covered the custom-designed gray wool rugs with towels when it rained. He said he tried to navigate the van through side streets so gawkers could not peek in when he dropped off his boss.”

And Mr. Umpierre has to be nimble in navigating his oversized charge through the streets on New York, for the simple reason that the glorified yacht-on-wheels—which customarily docks on evenings and weekends in Connecticut—is too goddamn big to park. 

“It is nearly impossible to find a parking space for such a large vehicle,” Haughney notes compassionately, “so Mr. Umpierre often waits for his boss in illegal spots, and moves when the police come by.”

Yes, that’s right: the new Freicorps of supervans has taken James Howard Kuntsler’s “home from nowhere” thesis to the next level, with the overclass simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, never to be fully viewed, or named, before the passing urban public. Was George Romero’s last zombie fantasia, Land of the Dead, really a dystopian glimpse of the urban future, or more in the vein of a gritty contemporary docudrama?  Or to paraphrase the crasser horror reveries of Stephen King: How can you kill something that you can’t possibly park?