COLUMN ONE : Big Wheels, Chromed Dreams : Owners of custom mini-trucks lavish time and money in pursuit of nothing more than a second glance. This fraternity of ‘90s-style lowriders offers a window on the soul of the city.

Beneath harsh fluorescent bulbs in a shopping center parking lot, the Desirable Ones gather for a night of punishment. The Huntington Park mini-truck club did well at a recent car show, taking first and second places in an event called “bed-dancing.” But when Armando Nunez calls the weekly meeting to order, he isn’t smiling.

“You’re getting lazy. Because of you, we looked sad,” the club president tells six sober-faced young men who, despite promises to attend, missed the show. A nod from Nunez and the guilty step one by one into the center of the circle. Sergeant-at-arms Jose Perez meets them, a big paddle in hand. He administers club rule No. 20: “You must accept swat .”

And as the wood hits home, the chastened ones gaze repentantly into the night sky.

Southern Californians have always worshiped at the altar of the automobile. But for the 25 members of the Desirable Ones--and thousands like them--devotion is obsession. For them, life is a relentless pursuit of the second glance. For love of a truck, they have seen marriages founder and bank accounts empty. They have paid countless tickets and looked down the barrels of carjackers’ guns.

Like the original hot-rodders and lowriders of the 1950s and ‘60s, this new generation of California cruisers strives to build the unique personalized vehicles that author Tom Wolfe once called “monuments to their own styles.”

But 40 years have brought some stylistic changes. For reasons economic and aesthetic, many younger drivers have abandoned the classic sedans, bombs and muscle cars that made customizing famous. Instead, the twentysomething crowd’s chassis of choice is the fat-fendered, load-hauling mini pickup truck.

Despite roadblocks and police crackdowns designed to discourage cruising, convoys of slow-moving mini-trucks can be seen most Saturday nights from Pacific Coast Highway to Crenshaw Boulevard to the Sunset Strip. Lined up bumper to bumper, each truck trumpets its club name, hand-lettered in bright paint, on a rear window: Relaxed Atmosphere, Toyz-R-Us, Pure Pleasure, Dreams Unlimited.

And every trucker has a tale to tell.

“It’s an addiction,” said Jesse Marquez, a cargo representative for Mexicana Airlines and vice president of the Desirable Ones.

Marquez, 29, is rebuilding his 1985 Toyota mini-truck for the third time. He has gone through three engines, four coats of paint and an estimated $65,000. He has switched from stock wheels to Porsche alloys to gold wire spokes, from wide tires to skinny ones. Every nut and bolt has been dipped in gold.

Soon, Marquez plans to install a plexiglass window in the bottom of his truck bed--the better to view his chrome undercarriage. “There’s never an end to it,” said Marquez, who lives in Orange with his parents. “You think it’s finished but it’s not.”

And that makes a lot of entrepreneurs very happy.

The custom trucking craze supports a cottage industry of airbrush artists, window tinting, chrome and gold plating, upholsterers and the all-important hydraulics experts, who install switches that drop a truck to the ground or send it leaping skyward. Then there are specialty magazines with names such as Truckin’ and Mini-Truckin’.

Even Lowrider, long the domain of the Chevy Impala, features glossy photos of mini-pickups. Publisher Alberto Lopez calls them a “symbol of the New Age of lowriding.”

Jesse Mata, owner of the Li’l Shop of Airbrushing in Paramount, is one of many Southern Californians whose livelihoods depend on customizers’ ceaseless quest for new looks. For a third of his life, Mata, 29, has painted castles and dragons, the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Virgin of Guadalupe--all on the metal skin of automobiles.

“They come in with a fantasy,” said Mata, leaning over an easel he has adapted to grip automotive parts. “I make it into reality.”

Among the grittier images that Mata has painted with remarkable realism: junkies shooting up in a cemetery, homeless people sleeping under the stars, cruisers cruising and gangsters firing guns.

Because styles are always changing--to customizers, the highest praise bestowed upon a vehicle is the word fresh-- Mata and the handful of other artists who use cars as canvases have made good livings. Mata’s going rate is about $1,000 a tailgate.

“The best type of art form is one that lots of people can see,” he said, explaining his choice of medium. “I like cars better than walls. Cars move around.”

Truckers say a desire to lure women initially helped fuel their interest. But veteran customizers are quick to note that although trucks help attract women, trucks also send them on their way. Nunez, the Desirable Ones’ 28-year-old president, was married once. But then his wife accused him of loving his truck--nicknamed “Heart to Heart”--more than he loved her. He didn’t argue. When they got divorced, he kept the truck.

Sherrie Kang, 22, met her truck-loving sweetheart, the Desirable Ones’ Marquez, seven years ago. His obsession often tested her patience. “Sometimes we wouldn’t even go out because of the truck,” she said. “Something would break, so he’d fix it. Then while he was fixing it he would find something else broken. All of a sudden, it’d be 2 a.m.”

Marquez, who borrows his girlfriend’s car for everyday driving, said she was silly to feel jealous. But Kang told him: “ ‘The way you act, it seems like it’s alive.’ It’s his baby. It is always going to be his baby. We’ve been together so long I’ve gotten used to it.”

Such passion has piqued the interest of scholars, who see Los Angeles’ custom car culture as a window on the city’s psyche. More than mere decoration, they say, customizing is an attempt to speak back to a society that often is not listening.

George Lipsitz, a professor of ethnic studies at UC San Diego, notes that for young men--particularly African-Americans and Latinos--the automobile often can be a point of conflict with law enforcement.

“Teen-agers and members of aggrieved racial groups get used to being watched, being followed,” Lipsitz said. “If you’re going to be seen by police, (customizers are saying), let’s give them 14 coats of enamel paint and see what they do with that.”

Brenda Jo Bright, a graduate student in anthropology at Rice University who is writing her dissertation about customizing, says that modifying a vehicle can be a form of political commentary, even an act of resistance.

A customized truck is certainly not immune to police scrutiny--in fact, because of the laws on how low a vehicle can ride and how tinted a window can be, a custom truck may be more likely to get pulled over. But Bright said that by drawing attention to themselves, Los Angeles’ customizers transform the humiliation of being watched by police into the pleasure of being watched.

Despite popular assumptions linking car clubs to gangs, some law enforcement officials say distinct differences usually separate the two.

“You have some gang car clubs. Then you have show-type clubs. These guys are for the most part working Joes,” said Los Angeles Police Officer Dino Campodonico, who patrols Hollywood.

For the show clubs, he said, customizing is “almost like a religion.” And as hobbies go, this one has tangible benefits. “It’s twofold. It takes them off the street and gets them involved in some type of project. And at the same time they’re learning a trade,” Campodonico said. “This is their art. They’re really proud of it--and they should be.”

Many car and truck clubs see themselves as positive alternatives to gangs. They build camaraderie and break down territorial boundaries. The clubs are bound by something members say is stronger than turf: a shared love of sleek, clean lines. Some clubs have rules banning gang affiliation and drug use.

“Gang members want to throw blows. We battle with (hydraulic) switches,” said one mini-truck club member, echoing many who say that by choosing clubs over gangs, they set a positive course for their lives. “We say: ‘If you get mad, let the switches do the talking.’ ”

And here’s what those switches can do.

“Watch out!” yells Aod Alvarez, 24, as he leans into the cab of his lowered, royal blue candy-colored Nissan hard-body truck. He flips a toggle switch on his mirrored dashboard and suddenly, with a mechanical wail, the front end of his truck bed jerks upward in a strange and seemingly pointless stunt.

But Alvarez is beaming. “You hit your switch,” he says, “you feel proud.”

Joey Grosso, 23, used to “dance,” too. The bed of his brandywine Mazda mini-truck with the LFTED4U license plate could extend up into the heavens like an accordion. But Grosso got bored with bed-dancing. Now, he “hops,” bouncing his front tires high in the air. At last count, he says, he hopped higher than anyone in the world: 42 inches.

“I’ve been in Lowrider magazine 24 times,” said Grosso, a member of the Realistics, a Santa Ana club. “It’s a good feeling, you know?”

Mini-truck chic has evolved through several phases, from spare to gaudy, mild to wild. Some truckers, of course, overdo it and end up looking “like they drove through Pep Boys with a magnet,” said Courtney Halowell, an editor at the Placentia-based Mini-Truckin’.

The phenomenon began in the mid-1980s, when the relatively low price of light-body trucks first caught the attention of young customizers. What was under the hood was less important than a smooth, rounded look. Until 1988, when Chevrolet began streamlining its truck designs, Chevys were widely rejected as being too boxy.

At first, customizers kept the alterations simple: flashy wheel rims, lowered suspensions, maybe a ski rack on top. Then, they started cutting off the tops of their cabs. Next came camper shells--a style that endures in part because of their many possibilities.

Stocked with stereo equipment, it becomes a rolling reverb chamber--an essential for those who want to compete in sound-off contests, which reward those whose woofers and tweeters create the most pressure, pound per pound, inside a closed vehicle.

“I can’t wait to get a snug top (shell) so I can put a chandelier or two in back--maybe even a waterfall,” said Mike Garcia, a member of an East Los Angeles mini-truck club called Just for Looks.

But ask Garcia to explain what possessed him to remove the windshield wipers from his silver 1987 Toyota, to shave off his antenna and to install an ’89 grille, a ’91 bumper and a lower, ’92 valance. Ask him why he is bent upon installing a VCR in the dashboard and why he plans to someday build a driver’s seat that will allow him to “power forward, power back, tilt forward, tilt back, push a button and come out sideways.” Ask him these questions and the mood turns serious.

“Some people re-wallpaper (their houses),” he said. “It’s just the same thing.”

It seems reasonable to wonder: Given customizers’ insatiable hunger for change, perhaps mini-trucks will prove a fleeting fascination. Recently, small compact cars have begun to catch on among customizers, while classic cars have an enduring (though prohibitively expensive) appeal.

But if you ask Rudy Torres, 12, who was up one bright Sunday morning for a show at Garfield High School, trucks have a future.

The East Los Angeles seventh-grader is a member of a club called Good Times. His lowdown ride, which he calls Swamp Thing, sports a metallic paint job, green and black velour upholstery and a gleaming silver kickstand. It is a lowrider bike.

Rudy pats the plush seat of his 1973 Schwinn--a $150 frame upon which he has lavished $500 worth of accessories. He doesn’t ride it much. “Only once in a while,” he said. “It’s a bad neighborhood (where I live) and I’m afraid.”

But just owning a customized ride is worth working hard for. And already, even as he competes in the bike category, he imagines graduating to the next level.

He wants a Mazda, he says, with his favorite green paint and a bed that dances. He wants a mini-truck.

A Truly Radical Truck

In the stylized kingdom of custom mini-trucks, a 1985 Nissan called Wrapped With Envy is the reigning monarch. The truck, Lowrider magazine’s Truck of the Year in 1991 and 1992, has been completely altered, from its dashboard to its taillights. Owner Derrick Jhagroo, a 23-year-old gold-plater from Oceanside, estimates he has spent more than $110,000 to build a vehicle he rarely drives. “It’s too tough to clean,” he says. Customizing “was just a hobby at first. But it turned into an obsession.”

A) Roof of cab is sliced off, creating a mini-convertible.

B) Paint job begins with a silver base. Next come various sparkling hues of candy metal-flake paint--golds, coppers, lavenders and purples. The more tiny bits of metal in the paint, Jhagroo says, the more glittering the vehicle. He used more than six pounds of flake.

C) The radiator, carburetor, valve cover, pulleys and power brake unit are plated in gold or chrome. A hand-painted message under the hood reads: “Are you dizzy yet?”

D) Out front, the tube grille, bumper and windshield wipers are 24-karat gold-plated.

E) The gold wire wheels are made extra eye-catching with hand-etched designs around the rims and hubs. The low-profile tires drop the already lowered chassis even closer to the ground. The wheel wells are lined with pinstripe sheet metal.

F) The interior has contoured seats with dark purple pleat-velour edges and tuck-and-roll centers. The contoured dashboard is also draped in velour and is outfitted with a color TV and a VCR.

G) So-called suicide doors, with hinges at the rear, have been shaved of their handles and keyholes. Inside, they are decorated with hot pink neon lights and water-filled glass columns. When air bubbles circulate through the columns, says Jhagroo, “it looks like the doors are boiling.”

H) Gold-plated hydraulic scissor lifts raise the truck bed more than 10 feet.

I) The truck bed, decorated inside with wall-to-wall coffin-pleated upholstery, is topped by a “turntable” camper shell than spins. The tailgate (not visible) is cut in half on the diagonal and opens like two triangular saloon doors.