I am a car guy through and through. I have been obsessed since I was a little boy and remain so to this day. I remember going religiously every year to the New York Coliseum on Columbus Circle (now the site of the Time Warner Center) to what was called the National Rod and Custom Car Show. This was Valhalla for a kid who skateboarded, played guitar, listened to Led Zeppelin, and was constantly editing and curating the garage I kept in my bedroom of 1/18th-scale versions of the chariots I knew one day I would be cruising the boulevards in. The NR&CCS was nothing like the bland, homogenized Jacob Javits car shows of today. There were ridiculous lowriders that were never meant to be driven, all glistening fuchsia and gold with pages of the Bible lacquered into the wheel wells. There were the most badass muscle cars that would go 200 mph as long as you never had to turn. There were loads of tricked-out, heavily veloured, barrel-seated "Love Machine" vans, often with Frank Frazetta evil Viking-devil-knights airbrushed on the sides. Gosh, I miss those. All the Ed "Big Daddy" Roth cars were there too. Suffice it to say, it was very, very special.

Since then, I have always had a running dialogue with myself about the fleet of cars I want. And of course as I've grown up the vehicles of my desires have shifted. For instance, I no longer crave the souped-up ice cream truck John Bonham drives in his fantasy sequence in The Song Remains the Same. For a long while it was a seventies Aston Martin Vantage, then, weirdly, a Rolls-Royce Camargue. Notice a pattern? Very often the cars I love are English.

A couple of years ago, my wife, Julie, and I were living on Perry Street across from Cooper Classics in the West Village. I would always walk by and fantasize about some gorgeous jalopy in there. Very rarely did I ever test-drive or take it to the next level — until I saw a 1964 Jaguar 3.8 Mk II automatic. Julie and I agreed it was the perfect blend of elements in Old English White (the color of clotted cream) with dark red hides. We got hooked. I took it for a drive and it felt good. It smelled good too — a heady bouquet of toasted wood and saddle leather, with wispy hints of mossy earth and petroleum. It was the manly musk of an excellent machine.

I was in love. I had an independent Jag mechanic look the car over and did a heap of research on it and its foibles — foibles that have now become my foibles and the foibles of one of my best friends, but more on that later. It all checked out, as much as this kind of self-deluded crash course–type crap can. Whenever I'm confronted with a major commitment of any type, I go into that reconnaissance mode where I fool myself into thinking I'm being responsible when what I'm actually doing is grafting the dance steps of measured decision-making on top of pure greedy impulse. But we were in the midst of a home renovation, so I deemed it indulgent and didn't pull the trigger. I did put the car on hold for a while and Elliot Cuker, the owner of Cooper Classics, was kind enough to indulge my whimsical trip. At last, I let it go and was secretly crushed. I kept looking on the Cooper Classics Web site and finally it said sold over the picture. I called Julie and said, "Well, it's gone for real." To which she responded, "No, no, no — Elliot rented it to a commercial or movie shoot for a while and put the sold sign up so he wouldn't have to deal with so many calls." I wanted to believe her.