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NEW YORK — Fantasy is a holistic thing. It requires serendipitously cooperative elements to be believed, enjoyed and remembered. Consider the matter of driving convertibles.

By their very nature, convertibles are dream machines. You can drop their tops on a sunny day and commune with nature as you drive. It’s the sun on your face, wind in your hair, the great outdoors. It’s why we buy convertibles.

And it’s why convertibles should not be driven in this city on an August afternoon in the middle of rush hour — certainly not with the top down.

I don’t know what I was thinking. Perhaps it was that I had longed so desperately to lower the roof of the 2010 Ford Mustang Premium V-6 convertible in my possession. It was a tightly hewn thing with a gunmetal gray body, black vinyl top and tan interior. There was something retro about it, something 1960s funky.

It was the kind of car that makes aging men foolish, beckons them to masquerade as someone other than themselves, someone younger, more hip. I wanted to drop its top so badly! But it rained every day on my drive from Northern Virginia to Cornwall, N.Y., and to many points in between and beyond — until the day I came here.

The sun shone prettily. Its actual heat was a distant thought. The air seemed clear. I imagined it to be crisp. But that was before the sun’s heat became reality, made more intense by beaming down on a hatless head in a topless car. It was difficult to be or look cool under the circumstance, especially with sweat pouring from my forehead and rolling into my eyes.

The Mustang convertible is one of the best-loved, better-known convertibles in the U.S. auto market. It is rear-wheel drive with four seats, including two rear seats that can accommodate average adult bodies on trips of 50 miles or so — long enough to take a ride to the beach, dinner or a movie, and to do so in reasonable comfort.

But there is a Mustang pecking order that intrudes on fantasy. My Mustang convertible was equipped with Ford’s decent but decidedly workaday 210-horsepower, 4-liter V-6 engine. I liked it, and I suppose most ordinary drivers would like it as well. But Mustang aficionados sneer at the car.

To many Mustang lovers, a Mustang that isn’t a Mustang GT with a big, romping 4.6-liter, 315-horsepower V-8 engine and a robust, baritone exhaust note isn’t really a Mustang. And please don’t try telling them that you are driving the V-6 because you are concerned about the environment and are trying to save fuel, which neither the Mustang V-6 nor the V-8 does a particularly good job of anyway. They will laugh at you.

Or worse, if you are silly enough to tool along the FDR or Harlem River Drive here with the top down on a V-6 Mustang convertible on a hot August afternoon in the middle of rush hour, with cars and trucks madly whizzing about you, with particulate matter of seemingly all sorts flying into your face and hair, savvy New York motorists will tailgate you, push you into a slower lane, shake their heads, laugh and shout insults, including a nastily hurled “Visitor!”

That hurt.

I never knew “visitor” could be mouthed with such hostility, meanness, derision.

“That’s not even a GT!” another motorist shouted. “You stylin’ and profilin’ in junk!”

Well, the Mustang Premium V-6 convertible isn’t junk. It’s a fun car, an enjoyable car, one that supports the fantasy of open-air motoring in acceptable fashion. But you just have to know when to lower its top to partake of what it has to offer. I didn’t. I do now.