There are cruise lines on the streets of Santa Fe, and they’re not bus routes.

Tommy Elrite, 23, drives the cruise lines in his 1966 Chevy C-10 pickup, its primer-gray paint giving it a battered look that successfully conceals the souped-up guts of what he says can “blow away every car at the stoplight.” OK, maybe.

“I go cruising in it, I go racing in it, I pick up girls in it — it’s the ultimate utility vehicle,” he said of his pickup.

The cruise lines are the big avenues in Santa Fe that the hot-rodders and their wannabe cousins — the dudes in their more-sound-than-fury economy cars and compacts known as tuners — rumble up and down most fair-weather weekend nights to see and to be seen — and, of course, heard. Unlike tuners, hot rods usually have V-8 engines, and they’ve got to be Old School.

Tommy’s brother, Billy, 21, defined that as anything built before 1987. He’s in the process of remaking a dull-red 1981 Chevrolet Camaro.

“The older the better,” Tommy said. “They’re just cooler.”

The major cruise line, naturally, is the biggest, widest, meanest, most heavily traveled street in the city: Cerrillos Road. But there are others: Agua Fría, Rodeo Road and a onetime favorite hot spot until the police closed it off: at Don Gaspar and Alameda.

“You go downtown cruising in one of these old cars, you’ve got everyone looking at you,” Tommy said. “It’s like when you walk into a room with a pretty girl. It’s for the attention. That’s why we paint them as pretty as we do and make them loud — the louder the better.”

The kind of paintjob Tommy wants would cost $2,000 he doesn’t have.

When he bought the pickup on his 14th birthday nine years ago for $1,500, “it was a gutless wonder” with its original 250-cubic-inch straight six. He earned half the money by digging ditches all summer for his dad, Tom, who owns Territorial Plumbing Heating & Electric. His dad then chipped in the other half.

That’s how kids do it if they love cars, have to work for a living and don’t have families with disposable thousands to spend on them. Tommy and Billy — native Santa Feans — are plumbers at their dad’s shop.

Over the years, Tommy has converted the pickup into something General Motors never meant it to be: a hot rod with a 350-cubic-inch V-8 stroker that had been a 305 until it was re-bored and stroked. Then Tommy dropped in a five-speed transmission from a 1984 Camaro to get that power to the ground. He added bucket seats for a sports-car flavor.

“It cost me blood and sweat,” he said of the truck. “That’s all I have — I don’t have $40,000 to build a hot rod, so I have to lean on guys who know how to get the different parts that you need. That’s how you build a hot rod without money. But sometimes it takes a couple of hundred dollars. Like it cost $1,100 for the tires and rims.”

He’s put $3,000 into it so far.

Tommy named the pickup Jessica, after a girl he knew in high school who “had great hips, like the truck,” he grinned. And because “hot-rod guys name their cars. They usually use girls’ names because, just like girls take time, energy and money, so do cars.”

The teens and twentysomethings cruise because there’s little else for the restless young to do in Santa Fe, where, Tommy said, “after elementary-school age, we’ve pretty much done everything twice.”

“The cops hate cruising even though it’s been going on longer than they’ve been alive,” he said, complaining that the police chase them away when they congregate, American Graffiti-style, at a Wendy’s or Sonic. “If the cops don’t want us cruising the streets downtown, why don’t they give us a drag strip somewhere, like on Airport Road or at the airport?”

But the Santa Fe Police Department doesn’t have a policy specifically against cruising, said spokesman Capt. Gary Johnson:

“Unless they’re disturbing the peace or are being disruptive, we don’t intervene,” Johnson said by phone. “Most of us are local officers, and we used to cruise the line also when we were teenagers. There weren’t a whole lot of things to do.”

Tommy’s dream car?

“Jessica with a $50,000 check in the glove box,” he replied without pause. “I’d put every penny into it.”

Richard C. Gross is a Santa Fe-based writer and editor. E-mail him at drive@sfnewmexican.com.