The weekend before last, I did some grocery shopping at the Real Canadian Superstore, easily the best grocery store ever. Great quality, lots of selection, environmentally-friendly (for the most part), and clean and spacious, it’s even got a home and furniture section, a pharmaceutical section, a clothing section (by Joe, the guy behind Alfred Sung, Club Monaco, and Caban), and of course, a toys section.

But first, a little background info. My residence room, though well-furnished and handsomely-designed with a sense of IKEA, seemed a bit too plain to me. I like simplicity and modernity, conservative styling, but I wanted a little something different, specifically for two cube shelves on top of my dresser. So while I was at the Superstore, I blew $20 on two die-cast assemble-it-yourself car models of 1:24 scale. The last time I bought a car model kit was when I was eight (a decade ago, wow!), and it was a Ford Explorer. It took me a long time and a lot of frustration to get it done (it was actually a hard model, I had to build the engine myself, too), and I hated it because it was dull-and-colourless and nothing like the picture on the box (not to mention that there was a ton of controversy over its safety issues in real life). Needless to say, I found great satisfaction dropping a small boulder on it (from my mom’s garden) and smashing it to bits; we’ll just say that I was re-enacting a meteor strike in the 20th century.

Anyway, when I came home from shopping I cleared my desk and began my task of building a gangsta carbon-grey ‘86 Chevy Monte Carlo SS, which I like to call “the Denzel Car” because it reminds me a lot of Training Day:

Denzel is probably the coolest actor around. Off the top of your head, can you really think of someone cooler than Denzel? Didn’t think so, either. Seriously, this guy wakes up every morning and showers in concentrated amounts of cool. I can’t wait to see American Gangster. Anyway, the Monte Carlo SS is pretty cool as well, so the name fits.

So I started off by opening the box:

Whereupon I noticed that this toy is for eight years and over; sometimes it’s great to be a kid all over again.

I began assembling the Monte Carlo SS…it was very easy and straightforward for the most part, except for the steering wheel part that I spent like five minutes trying to snap together, for some reason (it just wouldn’t snap in!).

Twenty minutes later, VOILA! A spun-out gangsta old-skool ride that would make anyone sitting in it feel like a tru G. As The Game himself would say,

I’m the ice cream truck man, guns in the trunk man,
Drugs in the in trunk man, call me the front man.

- Too Much (feat. Nate Dogg)

And this is the part where I tell you that despite it just being a toy car model, I like to make things a little more interesting, add some twists and turns and a storyline to my designs. Let me introduce to you…the POLICE CRUISER!!

Didn’t see that coming, did ya? Well, wherever there’s hustlers, pimps, and pushers, there’s bound to be the white-n-blue looking to do some straight up law enforcement. You didn’t really think that I’d really let gangstas on the street drive around in their old-skool pimpmobiles with kilos of coke and ganja in their trunks ready to sell like hot cakes! Not in my crib, anyway.

So every day, I’ll give the Denzel Car and the Po-Po Impala a new situation. One day it’ll be the Denzel Car just chillin’ (perhaps sippin’ some 40oz) and the 5-0 will roll by with a suspicious eye, another day it’ll be the Impala serving up some justice to the Monte Carlo caught in the middle of a drug deal with its trunk wide open, and yet another day it’ll be the SS sneaking up behind the copper and giving it a big dose of 9mm bullets. Or perhaps you might see the two cars side by side; yep, “that cop is as crooked as scoliosis” (from Prison Break). You never know what’ll happen into Mini Compton, it all depends on how much of an imagination I have that day. I’ll leave you with more pics to give you a sense of the hardknock lives of two die-cast car models, one representing the law and the other reppin’ the law!