Hunter_Cartwright

Hood Streets, Car Doors, and the Art of Human Connection: An Autobiography by Hunter Cartwright Kia ora. I’m Hunter. I write about the messy, fascinating intersection of cars, dating, and the human psyche over at theautosight.com for a project called theautosDating. I live in Hamilton. Again. Lived here my whole life, except for a few years when I thought I was too big for the Tron. Turns out, the city—and the people in it—had a way of pulling me back. I’ve been a sexologist, a mechanic, a university researcher, and a guy who’s spent way too many nights talking to strangers in parked cars. So, that’s me. Let’s get into the weeds. Growing up here in the 80s and 90s was... specific. Before The Base was even a twinkle in some developer’s eye, you hung out at Centre Place, or if you had wheels—which I didn’t until I was nearly 17—you’d cruise down Victoria Street. That was the ritual. You’d drive from the bridge near the Transport Centre all the way down to the clock tower at the other end, looping back around. It was a slow, gasoline-scented parade of status, awkward flirting, and engine noise. My first real “date” wasn’t a date. It was a girl named Tegan from Fairfield College. I was at Boys’ High then—totally different tribes. We didn’t go to a movie. We just drove her old man’s Mitsubishi Sigma out past the Hamilton Airport, parked on a gravel road near the dairy farms, and talked for three hours about whether Depeche Mode or New Order was better. I think we kissed. I think. The smell of that worn vinyl upholstery and the sound of the radio cutting out with static every time a cow farted in a nearby field... that was my introduction to intimacy. It wasn’t in a bed. It was in a car. That’s the thread I still pull on today. For theautosDating project, I’m writing articles that try to map the city of Hamilton through that specific lens. The corner of Hood Street and Victoria, where half the city’s late-night conversations have happened. The car parks at the university—I did a stint teaching at Waikato later on, in the psychology department, right there on Hillcrest Road—those spaces are emotional containers. People don’t talk to each other the same way across a table in a café on Grey Street as they do in a front seat, facing forward, staring at the windscreen. It’s less confrontational. More honest. I’m trying to capture that. The site’s all about using the car as a third space for dating, a way to strip away the pretense. My old academic brain loves it; my mechanic’s hands understand it. I was born in the old Waikato Hospital on Pembroke Street—or maybe it was Ohaupo Road? No, the main one, Pembroke. January 13th, 1977. I remember my mum saying it was so humid that summer that the nurses kept the windows open, and you could hear the lawnmowers going at the golf course across the way. Hamilton in January is a wet blanket. It’s not the dry heat you get in Australia; it’s a pressure cooker. The Waikato River was running high that year, flooding the playgrounds down by Memorial Park. I like to think that set the tone: a bit of water, a lot of green, and a constant, underlying pressure that you just have to learn to breathe in. That’s Hamilton. That’s me. I spent years as a clinical sexologist. You’d think it was all about the wild stuff, but it wasn’t. It was about failure. The inability to connect. I had a practice in an old villa on Collingwood Street, just up from the Frankton Railway Station. I’d see couples who’d been together for 20 years, sitting in my waiting room, not talking. They’d come in and I’d ask them the simplest questions. Not about orgasms or kinks. About how they argued. About what they talked about in the car on the way home from work. Usually, the answer was “nothing.” That’s the real disease, isn’t it? Not a lack of desire, but a lack of a safe container for conversation. A lot of people think sexology is just about mechanics. It’s not. It’s about architecture. Building a structure—a time, a place, a way of being—where two people can be vulnerable without feeling trapped. I wasn’t just a therapist; I was a traffic controller for emotional congestion. And honestly? I burned out. Not because of the stories people told me, but because I realized I was great at analyzing the road map but I hadn’t been driving my own car very well. Hamilton is a river city. That’s the first thing you have to understand. The Waikato River splits the place in two. You’re either a west-sider or an east-sider. It’s a subtle divide, but it’s there. I’ve lived in both. Bought a tiny place on Lake Crescent in the early 2000s, right near the Gardens. Used to run that loop every morning, past the Rhododendron Dell. You see the same people, the dog walkers, the old guys fishing off the bridge near Parana Park. There’s a rhythm here that people miss. They complain it’s boring. No, it’s contained. I worked at the university for a while, on a research grant looking at behavioral patterns in long-term relationships. The department was in the old quad, those brutalist concrete buildings. I’d walk from my car—some beat-up Subaru Legacy I was always working on—past the Student Union building, thinking about how these young kids were about to have their entire worldview dismantled in a lecture hall, and then they’d get in their cars and drive home to their parents’ houses in Rototuna or Flagstaff and pretend nothing had changed. What do I know about this place? I know that the best coffee in the city isn’t on the main strip; it’s in the little arcade off Alexandra Street, run by a guy who used to race V8s. I know that if you want to have a real conversation with someone, you drive them out to the lookout at the top of the Kaimai Range, just past the airport. It’s technically not Hamilton, but you can see the whole city spread out below you, the river glinting like a question mark. I know that the Waikato Car Club, those guys on Massey Street, they’re not just about engines. They’re about preservation. Of machines, yes. But also of a way of being with other men that doesn’t require a lot of emotional vocabulary. You can stand next to a guy for six hours rebuilding a carburetor and know more about his divorce than his best friend does. That’s the secret. Hamilton taught me that. The real intimacy isn’t in the bedroom. It’s in the passenger seat. It’s in the passenger seat on a rainy Tuesday night, parked outside the supermarket on Anglesea Street, waiting for the rain to stop before you go home. That’s the territory I’m mapping now. It’s not glamorous. But it’s true.