Cruise Control

Albeit gold-plated stock. Practically every knob, switch, handle, mirror, button, dial and appendage on the '64 Impala is 24-carat gold-plated. And that's just the outside.

"I had hydraulics, too," Bernal says. "But I took them off to get them gold-plated. These days, you have to. Before, you just had to do the paint and interior, but now, in the '90s, no one will look at you unless there's gold. You could spend $64,000 easy just on the gold alone. You save and save and wheel and deal until you get it done. Some people even take out loans. Me, I've spent about $7,000, and I'm not even done. It can get really expensive."

It wasn't always that way, though. When Bernal was growing up in the San Luis Valley, cruisers barely had enough money for the primer and the whitewall tires. But in those days, that was enough.

"They had style," he says. "They didn't have much money, but they had style."

Bernal remembers his older brothers coming home after work, slicking back their hair, slipping on white T-shirts and khakis and rumbling into town in their lowered Mercuries, Chevys and Studebakers. What they lacked in 24-carat gold, they made up for in streamlined chassis, sideboard exhaust pipes, custom fender skirts, intricate grillwork and imaginative use of spray paint.

"They didn't have fancy wheels, so they took off the hubcaps and spray-painted the rims red," Bernal says.

And he took note. As a boy, he sat on the floor playing with his toy cars and swapping parts, modifying engines and cooking up ideas. When his dad bought a '55 Chevy, Bernal painted flames on the hood and slathered housepaint on the tires to make them whitewalls.

"I was always getting into trouble," he says. "And my dad would always make me get out there and clean it off."

Still, each Sunday his dad would shuttle Bernal and the rest of his family into town, where they parked along the main boulevard and watched the lowriders rumble by.

"It was just like the movies," Bernal says. "You'd go at about one in the afternoon and stay until four. There would be tons of people. Your friends, your neighbors -- practically everyone you knew. You'd get a burger and a soda and just watch. The older guys would sit real low in their cars, and the girls would walk back and forth waiting to get picked up. Every weekend. That's what we did. We'd sit there and look at each other."

And while they looked, Bernal imagined himself behind the wheel of his own street cruiser.

"That was something everyone dreamed about," he says. "We just waited for the day when we could get a nice car."

When he turned seventeen, that's what he did. His dad bought him a white-and-cream '59 Ford Galaxy. Like his brothers before him, Bernal cut the springs and lowered the Galaxy to only a few inches from the ground. Which, in a place like San Luis, had its consequences.

"Only the main street was paved," Bernal says. "There were mostly dirt roads. When you dropped your car, you paid the price."

But on the weekends, on the boulevard, he enjoyed the rewards, too.

"Girls? Oh, yeah. If you had a nice car, you could probably get anyone you wanted," Bernal says. "Girls would look at the cars and say, 'That's the one for me.' That's how I met my wife, I guess."

Bernal eventually left the San Luis Valley for Denver, and after a few visits to East Los Angeles, formed a Colorado chapter of the renowned California lowrider club, the Imperials. He participated in Denver's early lowrider shows, cruised 38th Avenue with the early cruisers and formed another club or two. And when the cruising strip relocated to Federal between 38th and Alameda, he relocated, too.

"I've been around a long time," Bernal says. "I've got a lot of memories."

And not all of them pleasant.

Bernal and the members of his car clubs were never into gangs or drugs. But the police treated them like they were.

"I was married and I had kids, but they didn't care," he says. "They searched our cars and tore them up. I even saw them tear into people's interiors with knives, using the excuse of looking for drugs and guns. They towed cars just because they had hydraulics. In those days, just because you were a lowrider, they treated you like a criminal."

Even now that he has a resumé as a businessman, a one-year-old granddaughter and white hairs on his goatee, the stigma remains. When he pulls up to a traffic light in his Impala, he says, commuters will look at him "like I'm going to murder them or something.

"Shit, a lot of people are confused," Bernal adds. "Right away, they put us all down as drug dealers. And if there is a drug dealer, we all pay for it. Young, old, whatever. People don't have enough sense to stop and think about it. If I was going to shoot someone or do something terrible, would I go out in a car like this? No. With a car like this, everyone would know who I am and where I live. It's just stupid."