Purple Manta Ray: Death of a Playboy
bart plantenga
The other night I heard Paul Mauriat’s 1968 hit “Love Is Blue.” It’s forever associated with my childhood bedroom where I’d notate the weekly Top 40 while building model cars like this one, the purple Manta Ray, the only one I ever photographed.
My friend Paul’s father, who worked at the Ford plant just down US 1, always wore neatly ironed, striped linen shirts & combed his hair after his shower like he was in a rockabilly band, & maybe he had been. Like a young Frank Gorshin, with a smile sharp as a blade & stinking of a brisk splash of Aqua Velva, exhaling onto the couch after his shift, feet up on the coffee table, a bottle of Country Club – it’s called malt liquor because it’s a totally different kind of drink – in his right hand.
He was cool – or at least as much as a constellation of product choices & a few borrowed affectations can hint at – he had over 50 LPs (a lot back then – for a father) from Dave Brubeck to Martin Denny, through to Gene Vincent & always had a stack of Motor Trend, Playboy & cheesier magazines piled neatly on the lacquered coffee table, although it was probably Paul’s mother who piled them up so neatly – & chronologically.
