I’ve just returned from vehicular purgatory, or as it’s known locally, Hong Kong. Here sad transgressors very like ourselves, who’ve committed the sin of lust for fast cars, suffer the penance of having nowhere to go fast.

Hong Kong is a great place to make money. And the first thing a person of our kind does with money is buy something such as a Maserati Quattroporte. My Hong Kong pal Dave is our kind of person, and he’s been making money. He picked me up at Chek Lap Kok airport in his Maserati Quattroporte. The travails of purgatory—says Dante’s long, boring poem of the same name—produce a patient, humble soul resigned to divine will. I guess Dave hasn’t been in Hong Kong with fast cars long enough, although it’s been more than twenty years, and he once owned the only ’60s Mustang in the colony. And it had the 289 four-barrel and the four-speed stick. Alas, Dave doesn’t seem any closer to sacred grace now than he did in the pony car. He shouts, “Capitalized-top-line-of-the-keyboard it! We’re on an eight-lane expressway! And look at the speed limit! Ninety kilometers per hour!”

Since we were, at that moment, going zero kph, I didn’t quite see his point. Hong Kong has the universally familiar squeezed-tight expressway congestion, negotiated at the speed of a toothpaste tube’s last dollop emerging.

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Magazine Issue: Winding Road Issue 31