Photos By Michael T. Regan

Down in the heart of South Philly, just a block from Pat's and Geno's, there is a hole-in-the-wall business that takes you back in time. Not too far back—this ain't Amish country—but far enough that when you return to your little Honda Civic you think, "man, I am such a pantywaist."

Billy D's Muscle Car Specialists, on the 1300 block of Passyunk Avenue, is compelled by the realities of the market to work on any sort of car that customers bring in. But cars are not the passion here. Cars are the passion here. Dig?

There are three guys you need to know at Billy's. First, of course, there's Billy D. The D is for DiDonato. Billy DiDonato has been running this auto body and detailing shop for nearly 25 years. He's a serious businessman who understands that part of his business is to stand on the sidewalk and engage in loud conversations with customers and neighbors. This work has treated Billy well. He drives a big, shiny red Dodge truck, and sitting in his garage at home is a blue '56 T-Bird, which he does not often feel the need to drive.

"It's on a carpet," says an employee.

The employee is 24-year-old Matt Newsham. Matt looks like someone has doodled on him with a tattoo needle. He has spiderwebs on his arms, a bar code on his neck. It's a real tough-guy look. But Matt couldn't be friendlier—there isn't a joke he won't laugh at. He grew up around the corner, at 12th and Wharton streets, but wasn't the kind of kid who had posters of muscle cars on his wall. In fact, he wasn't into cars at all until he got his first one—a 1981 Camaro Z-28—and was pissed that he had to pay someone else to fix it. After training as a mechanic, a friend from the neighborhood got Matt a job with Billy D, who promptly retrained him as a body-work guy. Now he doesn't work on engines unless he has to.

The third guy is Donny Spurio. If you walked in here and just saw Donny, you might think you were in a West Coast chopper garage. Donny has a big, bushy white beard, and he wears all black. But Donny is a car guy. They say he could build an entire car from scratch—and he agrees. Donny's not an employee here, but he comes by and fixes the shit that nobody else wants to do. He sold his own shop a few years back, and now he's kind of like a traveling automobile wise man.

If Billy tells you not to get Donny started with the stories, believe him. I didn't. I said, "I want to hear stories." Big mistake. Donny proceeded to tell me about a '67 Plymouth that, it seems, was in startlingly bad shape. He listed parts that needed replacing for about 10 minutes. I kept waiting for a plot twist, or a punch line. It never came. The list of malfunctions was the story. Donny then launched into a tirade about the "glorified parts changers" who fix cars now. He lost me pretty quickly, but not before raising an important point: Today's car culture just isn't that sexy. Technology, say the guys at Billy D's, has taken the romance out of the automobile.

"It used to be just metal moving with gas," Matt says wistfully. Now, says Billy, all the computerization and lightweight parts "take the driver out of driving."

"You know what it's like?" he asks. "You don't know anybody's phone number anymore. You just push a button that says 'Donny.'"

But there are upsides to the new technology, too. "Now, anyone can drive a fast car," Matt says.

Around here, this is not considered a public health hazard. Driving fast is a good thing.

"Everybody should drive," Matt says. "Driving's fun. Everybody's caught up in, 'Oh, I gotta drive here, I gotta drive there. I gotta sit in traffic.' Nobody loves their car. You just spent $60,000 dollars on a luxury car—enjoy it!"

On a recent Wednesday morning, a Corvette and a Camaro rest in one of Billy D's two garages, as well as a '78 Volkswagen GTI covered in a layer of dust so thick that someone has spelled out "get me done" on the windshield. These cars—owned by a fireman, a bartender and a wealthy collector, respectively—are the cars the guys at Billy D's really respect. But they aren't getting any attention just now. Instead, Billy is preparing to climb underneath a Benz, and Matt is at work on a Toyota Matrix hatchback with a nasty scratch of yellow on the side.

The owner, it seems, drove into a pole. But Billy, ever in support of the driver, sees it differently.

"The pole hit her," he says. "It hit her, and then it gave her the finger."