Dream Wheels : Low Rider: This customized pickup is definitely in a league of its own.

For the past several years, Derrick Jhagroo has had a dream.

But the 22-year-old mechanic and MiraCosta College student is just a little too shy to talk about it in front of strangers.

His mother isn’t. “One day he would like to have Michael Jackson drive his truck,” says Thelma Jhagroo, a bus driver for the North County Transit District. “Because he (Jackson) is one of a kind, and his truck is one of a kind.”

That’s putting it mildly. The pickup--named Wrapped with Envy--glistens in deep swirls of gold-flecked paint and rests on 24-karat gold-plated wheels in the garage of their Kimberly Lane home in Oceanside.

More gold gleams from grill, exhaust pipes, frame--even the windshield wipers.

A touch of a button by Derrick and the truck bed suddenly lifts 12 feet in the air on a gold-plated hydraulic scissor hoist. Push another button, and the camper shell turns like a helicopter rotor.

And what truck would be complete without deep, purple velour upholstery, or a color television and VCR, or neon lights with columns of bubbling water in the door panels.

The pickup, now valued at about $100,000, has been named truck of the year by Low Rider magazine. Yet the trophy--7 feet tall--is almost lost in the forest of others, nearly 150, earned by Derrick and his truck at car shows throughout California, Arizona and New Mexico.

Thelma Jhagroo seems to have no doubt that Jackson will one day sit in the truck and fulfill the dream.

After all, just look what happened when Derrick started dreaming about his truck.

That was just five years ago, when 17-year-old Derrick graduated a year early from high school in Phoenix, where they were living.

Thelma and husband, Roy, decided to reward him with a present--a 2-year-old 1985 Nissan King Cab pickup.

“It was an everyday work truck,” recalls Derrick, who also works as a mechanic with his father when not in school. “It was white. It had a camper shell, a blue vinyl interior and 70,000 miles.”

Then Derrick started to work on it, fixing up this, changing that, going back and refixing something else.

“I kept changing my mind,” he recalls, “just doing little things to it.”

But, after a year’s work, he won a trophy and was hooked.

“After a while it just sunk into my head that I wanted to be the best,” he says.

Thelma Jhagroo says she wasn’t very happy with the idea at the time: “I was very much against the low-rider vehicles. I didn’t really know what they were about. I thought it was a waste of money . . . that it would sidetrack children from getting their education.”

That changed, she says, when Derrick talked her into going to her first car show in Phoenix.

“It was very classy,” she says. “It showed workmanship, creativity, what the young minds can do.” Best of all, “my son won first place!”

Soon the truck became an all-out family effort, Thelma and Derrick say.

Father, Roy, a master mechanic and manager of an Oceanside auto shop, took charge of the engine while Derrick came up with idea after idea for making his truck better than the competition.

Thelma joined forces in the design effort, helping Derrick work out more modifications each year.

Derrick’s younger brothers, Tony, 13, and Chris, 16, say they chip in with elbow grease to clean the truck and ready it for shows.

“It’s a family thing,” Chris says.

In all, it took thousands of hours of effort. “It took two years of my mother’s life,” Derrick says. “I couldn’t have done it without my family.”

Now Derrick says he has a few more dreams.

By September, if he can find a sponsor, he and the truck will be in Osaka, Japan, where he hopes to land a buyer. That money would help fulfill another dream, becoming a doctor.

Does Thelma think her other sons will follow Derrick’s lead? Not likely, she says. “They have different hobbies. They are into jazz, drums--thank God.”

Little does she know.

“I’m going to take over when (Derrick) retires,” Chris says confidently. “I want to get a Honda Accord and fix it up.”

But Derrick isn’t ready to retire yet. While on the road to becoming a doctor, he says he wants to start another show car.

“I want to do an exotic, like a Lexus,” he says. “I want to do one that makes this one look like nothing.”