MTV's Pimp My Ride

It's just after 9 a.m. on a weekday morning, an hour when many Angelenos have only begun sipping their venti chai soy lattes, but in a graffiti-splashed warehouse near the runways of Los Angeles International Airport, already the trance music is turned up so loud my jeans are vibrating down my waist. Apparently energized by the relentless boom-boom-boom, a crew of pierced and tattooed mechanics in blue work shirts is swarming like hungry ants over a gutted car carcass. Crowded with them onto the vast work floor are shop tools, strange auto-body parts in various stages of completion, and a melange of four-wheeled curiosities--including a brand-new Bentley Arnage T stretched to limo proportions, a one-off Chrysler 300C convertible with TV screens for rearview mirrors, a Ford pickup on goliath tires, and a purple Hummer H2 packed with 12,000 watts of stereo amplification and more speakers than a retirement dinner.

The music pounds; the grease monkeys continue their attack. Soon, like the gleaming, wildly customized "whips" parked nearby, the gutted carcass will be transformed. Impossibly soon, in fact: The tattoo crew has to finish it in less than a week.

Welcome to West Coast Customs, the frenetic, sleep-deprived home of MTV's smash-hit show "Pimp My Ride." Unless you've been hanging out in the International Space Station for the past year, you know the show's premise: MTV viewers lucky enough to own truly dreadful vehicles get their sad "buckets" whisked away and "pimped"--transformed into over-the-top, megadollar masterpieces--by the sorcerers at West Coast in just two weeks.

It's a grueling assignment for the 28-member WCC team. "Today is actually pretty slow," says "Mad Mike" Martin, 35, West Coast's shop supervisor and one of PMR's biggest stars. "We're only doing customer cars plus a concept car [an HHR show vehicle for Chevrolet--see sidebar], so I'm only working 12, 14 hours a day right now," he says. "When we're doing a car for MTV, that'll jump to 20 hours a day. It's nonstop." Then Mad Mike (as in "mad scientist," not "angry") does what he seems to do all the time: He smiles. "But I love it when people throw hand grenades at me all day."