I have never cared about cars. They do not interest me. They never have. An ex-girlfriend once asked me what car I would buy if money was not an issue. My answer of “an Attak Trak” was neither understood nor appreciated. I come from deep-woods Maine trucker stock, so this ought to embarrass me on some level, but my father always drove some variety of company-issued four door sedan when I was a kid.
Outside of where the gas goes, I’m pretty sure he had no idea how it worked or how to fix it if it stopped working, so neither did I. While the other kids would litter their brown paper bag book covers with hand-drawn imaginings of their future 4-cylinder chariots, I envisioned a satisfying future where the Ellsworth Public #2 bus continued to service my transportation needs well past graduation, picking me up from work and waiting patiently while I stopped into the grocery store to snatch a quick box of Multigrain Cheerios (which the adult me would eat religiously, as I presumed all adults did).
Apparently, however, you can’t ride the school bus for the entirety of your adult life, no matter how good your references. So my mother took it upon herself to try to teach me how to drive. At the time I wondered why my mother was spearheading Operation: Ludicrous Insurance Premiums when all my preferred forms of media had almost uniformly declared driving lessons to be a father’s province. As an adult I can now appreciate the reasoning. My father and I, like most fathers and sons, share similar traits, the most charming of ours being a crippling perfectionist streak and an Agitation Meter that redlines almost immediately at what psychiatrists commonly refer to as a “brain aneurysm”. My father attempting to teach me how to drive would likely have ended in a Thelma and Louise-style cliff jump for mutually-assured suicide.
Not that it really matter which parent tried to teach me the ways of the road. My mother’s earnest attempt died in the first ten minutes. She had taken us a ways down the quiet main route near my house then had us swap positions. I – being unnaturally stoic and reticent about my feelings, even by average male standards – had a hard time expressing the overwhelming magnitude of my terror. I simply did not trust myself behind the wheel. This was because I have – since my youngest days – been afflicted with what terrifically misguided people have entitled “an overactive imagination.” That term, by and large, conjures images of solitary children having animated conversations about back issues of X-Men with their invisible velociraptor friend Big George. What it really means is that, prior to easing into the driver’s seat of my mother’s car, I had already envisioned approximately 39,000 different ways my inaugural flight would kill, maim, mutilate or emotionally traumatize both of us within the first 3 miles. I dealt with it the same way I dealt with most problems at that point in my life – by stalling it to death.
“Okay,” said my mom. “Put it in drive.”
“Wait!” I swiveled around in my seat. “I think someone’s coming.”
“No one’s coming.”
“Shhh…I can hear them.” We waited. No one came.
“Jesse?”
“Wait…I think it’s a big one…It’s a long way off…but it’s coming…”
No car ever came, nor did I ever manage to “put it in drive.” Eventually it got dark and we went home. By this point my secret was out and my parents were now aware that I was completely terrified of driving, which they dealt with rather reasonably by waiting until I was old enough for Driver’s Ed and letting a licensed and insured professional handle it. I took my Driver’s Education course at the local YMCA. My training regiment included a mixture of class work and hands-on road work facilitated by a revolving cadre of instructors united in their love of proper highway etiquette, aviator sunglasses and mustaches (even the women). I had always been blessed with the ability to quickly memorize rules, facts and sequences (as well as the lyrics to the theme songs of most of ABC’s TGIF Friday night lineup), so the classroom portion was relatively stress-free. My time on the road was another matter entirely.
My primary road instructor was the father of a classmate. For lack of a better descriptor, he was very Wilford Brimley-esque. His heavy eyebrows, bushy mustache and rolling jowls seemed almost scientifically engineered to maximize his scowling potential. I was inordinately fascinated with his enormous bronze belt buckle in the shape of an indeterminate mid-western state (Wyoming? South Dakota? Alberta??), the study of which required long, questioning stares at said instructor’s crotch, which somehow set a markedly hostile tone for our mentorship.
Despite being a driving instructor for many years (or maybe because of being a driving instructor for so many years), my road sensei had no patience for nervous types such as myself. “Calm down!” he would routinely bark, operating under the mistaken impression that screaming things like “Loosen up, damnit!” would have anything other than the reverse of the intended effect. Once, after being told to “take a right at that intersection up there” and promptly turning into someone’s driveway instead, Wilford threw his hands up in resignation. “This is supposed to be fun!” he roared, jowls aquiver, aviators akimbo. “This is the part kids like!” “Right,” I replied in a measured voice. “I could certainly see that…” Meanwhile, a confused man with a hose was peering through the windshield, obviously hoping the strange car in his driveway was an unexpected acquaintance and not some idiot teenager and his beleaguered driving instructor.
Somehow I made it to my road test without getting punched out. I took my test in my mother’s red GEO Metro feeling that its compact design would be a benefit when it came time to parallel park. In comparison to all my other massive deficiencies, parallel parking was my most glaring. Despite weeks of pummeling rubber trash cans in my parent’s driveway I still couldn’t manage a passable park job in less than 47 moves. It didn’t end up mattering. My examiner - a gruff woman dressed in a blue jumpsuit weighed down with such an impressive array of buckles, clips and hooks that one must presume she parachuted into work that day – appeared to be in a hurry. After ten minutes of random right and left turns through my mostly deserted hometown she pointed towards a single car sitting alone along a quiet curb.
“Parallel park behind that Toyota.”
“Really? There’s no car behind it.”
“Pretend there is.”
So while I may be terrible at parallel parking I’m fantastic at pretending. The imaginary Batmobile behind the Toyota was unmolested during the course of my ultra-smooth 2 move park job and – after agreeing to be an organ donor and promising not to illegally transport black bears across state lines – I was awarded a driver’s license by the state of Maine.
That was fifteen years ago. In the interim, I’ve driven across the country multiple times, spun out on icy off-ramps, blown out tires on the interstate, been stranded in actual, literal Purgatory (cleverly disguised as Utica, NY), and killed many, many stupid pigeons. I’m not sure that I’ve gotten any better at driving, but I have come to accept the role of the automobile in my life: it’s what takes me to work and brings me to my loved ones; it’s got a holder for my coffee and a backseat for my dog; it’s what moves me from place to place, event to event. I very truly wouldn’t be where I am today without my car.
That being said, if the old #2 ever extends its route through Rhode Island my car is toast.
