I HAD a Ferrari Mondial "t" cabriolet, Pete. I sold it several years ago to some plastic surgeon from Miami who bought it through an on-line ad by Michael Sheehan, the best damn Ferrari broker on the planet. The car was thoroughly surveyed before purchase and the buyer knew exactly what he was getting- reasonable price, no comebacks, no surprises. I bought a Kirkham Cobra with the money from the Ferrari- a worthwhile change, I felt. I was glad to see it leave.And when someone asked me what it had been like to own a Ferrari, I told them this;
What is it like to own and drive a Ferrari? It's like having a beautiful Italian girlfriend.
You meet a stunning Italian woman, you hit it off, you begin dating her. Shortly you are in the sack with her, doing things to each other that you've only ever heard about. The first week of the affair, you are in heaven- she cooks magnificent meals for you, the two of you make love all the time, she sends you hot messages at work, you take her out and show her off, you feel you are the luckiest man in the world.
On the first day of the second week, you come home and her entire family (mother, cousins, brothers, sisters, etc) have moved into your house. Her mother looks vaguely like her, except thirty years older, three hundred times as loud, and three thousand pounds heavier. They eat all your food, argue and yell all the time, make the place a pigsty, and take up all her time so you never are alone with her. You complain about all this to her, whereupon she locks you out of the bedroom, banishing you to the couch, spends all her time complaining about you, etc, to her family, and her mother tells you you are no good because you have broken her daughter's heart. Who, by the way, is having her period and how dare you want to make love at such a time. This in front of all her relatives who decide you are lower than low.
This all goes on for a total of three weeks. You are a wreck. You are miserable, you are eating takeout, and the last day of the three weeks you fly into a rage seeing anything Italian because it reminds you of your current predicament. Seeing a Ronzoni commercial on TV makes you want to go postal and kill a lot of people, preferably Italians, but anyone will do. You come home from work in a fury, having decided to banish your Italian sweetheart and her relatives, and you fly in the door of your house, to find.......
...her family is gone. The place is cleaned up- at least you think it is, because the lights are turned down, the aroma of amazing Italian cooking fills the house, music is on the stereo, and your Italian girlfriend is curled up on the sofa with a bottle of wine she's just opened, smiling at you. She is wearing about three square inches of something, certainly no more than that. You want to ask what happened, but you are quickly transported to a state of bliss and exhaustion that you dimly recall from about a month ago. You wonder exactly how "just sex" can produce such simultaneous feelings of pleasure, fatigue and dehydration.
This goes on for a week. On the eighth day, you come home holding two dozen roses (one for each orgasm she's awarded you in the last twenty-four hours), you open the front door, and there's her mother and all her family again.
This rotating cycle of enjoyment and misery continue for several months. You finally throw them all out, realizing that you can have nearly as good sex (and four weeks a month, too!) with plenty of other women who will NOT move their families in, throw stuff at you, throw fits at no provocation, throw your money away, and throw you into despair for three-quarters of your time.
Owning a Ferrari is like dating that woman. I've been there, done them both, and got the T shirts. On the day that I blow the doors off a Ferrari with my GT40, I will have gotten a third T-shirt that I am going to enjoy a lot more than the first two.