Is Driver’s Ed a Liberal Art?
Some immigrants assimilate more slowly than others. My best friend from childhood had parents from Abruzzi who lived in NYC for 40 years and never learned English—the need for it never arose. I guess I’m another sort of “unmeltable ethnic,” having been for long periods of my life an expat New Yorker who wouldn’t (or couldn’t) learn how to drive. And it has given me a very different perspective on America—the point of view shared by the legally blind, by poor folks who’ve had their Pontiacs re-pod, and backsliding alcoholics with DUIs. Call it the bum’s eye view.
In high school, my folks wouldn’t “waste” money on Driver’s Ed, to them an extravagance just shy of flying lessons. There was no point driving in college—the Gothic buildings were all within walking distance, and the rest of 1980s New Haven glowered at us across the moat like a primeval darkness full of wolves.
All of which explains why at 22 and in graduate school, I’d wander the streets of Baton Rouge with a vague but raging ache of longing and loss, on a quest for something undefined, unattainable, liberating…. What was I after? A glimpse of Plato’s Forms? A Christian epiphany? For weeks, I roamed those sun-baked, steamy roads until I stumbled upon the truth: I was looking for the subway.
When I realized this, I wasn’t even embarrassed; instead, I ranted to my friends about the absurdity of a town where the only public transit existed to ferry maids in from the ghetto in the morning, then whisk them back at dinner time. A few times I defiantly rode the bus—the only paleface on the rickety old vehicle, surrounded by tired-looking old cleaning ladies, with an occasional Indian physics grad student thrown in to spice the black-eyed peas. The ladies would look me up and down and roll their eyes, as if to say, “Well he ain’t gwine to last long ‘round here. Don’t have the good sense God gave an alley cat.”
Despite the wise advice of Cajun friends, I didn’t take driving lessons, but lingered most of the time in the dank and druggy dives surrounding campus, slogged through the ghetto to Latin Mass, and tagged along with any friend who was driving… pretty much anywhere. (“I’m fixin’ to go the landfill, wanna come?” Absolutely.) When dating opportunities rolled around, I would blithely break it to the girl that she’d need to pick me up. And I really didn’t get what a turn-off this was, why these first dates were also my last. It didn’t help that my notion of “tropical wear” was Bermuda shorts, argyle knee socks, and bankers’ shoes.
Native New Yorkers see cars not as attributes of masculine power or vehicles of freedom, but lumbering millstones that must be shifted first thing in the morning, twice a week. (One must imagine Sisyphus parking.) Finding a spot in the City is like playing Rubik’s Cube at gunpoint, and if you don’t solve the puzzle, the tickets you earn will soon exceed the value of your vehicle. At least one person I know was grateful when the tow truck finally dragged the damned thing away.
After seven years of sedentary sipping at slime-coated campus bars, I had to cave in and admit that my boycott wasn’t working: However long I held my breath, the city fathers weren’t going to dig a subway—especially since in Louisiana it would have promptly filled in with three feet of water. I found a friend intrepid enough to brave the roads alongside me and give me lessons, and took the driving test. At the time and in that town, this consisted of driving around a parking lot without knocking anyone over. I passed on the second try.
Now I was legal to pilot the crumbling ’79 Dodge Aspen station wagon that I’d bought for $250 and decorated with a Battle Flag bumper sticker, but it didn’t mean I was ready. As I’ve written here before, it took me over a year to rouse the nerve for the interstate—which meant that in my capacity as Press Secretary to a (successful) governor candidate, I drove what the campaign director fondly called “that G-ddamn Klan-mobile” on back roads that wound through bayous and burned-over cane fields, and crossed the Mississippi using ferries, since driving over bridges gave me panic attacks. But after enough long, leisurely trips along River Road, I started to get comfortable behind the wheel. I found a few entrances to I-10 that had really long intake ramps, and began to run the roads like a real American.
Which apparently contravened the Dialectic which governs the World Historical Process, because it wasn’t three months after I’d started driving on the interstate before the Holy City called me home. I learned in April 1996 that my poor, chain-smoking mother was finally finishing her 50 year-pact with Marlboro. The lungs-for-trinkets scheme that had netted her plenty of sweaters, blankets, and hats over the years now was paying its final dividend. I sold the car, packed up my stuff, and moved back to Queens—to the building next door, in fact—to help out the hospice nurses, to straighten out mom’s IV and watch the morphine drip, drip, drip….
So my mother’s death drew me back to New York, to the same block where I was baptized, in the same rent-stabilized building. For the next ten years, I worked at a series of journalism jobs, aware that affirmative action (“Whitey Need Not Apply”) and departmental politics had rendered my degree effectively honorary. When my father looked at my Ph.D. diploma, he smiled and said “You’re a certified Post-Hole Digger.” I’d never realized that he subscribed to the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Then Dad died, too. His lifetime of manual labor, Little Debbies and Chef Boyardee ended in stomach cancer in summer 2005. Standing over his open coffin, dully reciting the Rosary, I felt the ties that bound me to the city slacken and slip. My family had relocated variously to Purgatory, or Long Island. My upstairs neighbors ran what sounded like a tap dancing school, from the number of feet which hammered on their bare wood floors all day as I tried to write—but whenever I put on classical music to drown it out, the enormous husband would storm down to hammer on my door. My sane friends were mostly wed and busy paying to keep their kids out of public school. More and more, it seemed that being unmarried at 40 in New York City meant simply that you were unmarriageable, a near-miss for the species which Darwin in his infinite wisdom had chosen to cull from the herd. I needed a fresh start, a new career, a chance to wear tweed jackets and pontificate. I needed to go.
Apparently God agreed, deciding to lift from New York its 90-year plague of Zmiraks, because he sent me the opportunity of a lifetime—to teach writing classes at a Catholic Great Books college, in a beautiful part of the country, in a state with plentiful seafood and no income tax. For the first time in my life, I could actually live in a house. My beagles would have their very own yard, and chipmunks to chase. No more need to run them after tattooed skateboard punks down crowded sidewalks—rewarding as that is.
There was just one leash that tied me still to a parking meter in Queens, and that was public transit. You see, on my birthday in 2000 I turned 36. And lost my driver’s license, thanks to what my good friend Marty the cop might call a DFR: Dumbass Forgot to Renew. I’d overlooked the four-year expiration date on my old Louisiana license—never used in the deadly, whizzing traffic warrens of New York—and now I was no longer legal. When I got to New Hampshire, it would be Baton Rouge all over again, only this time in six feet of snow.
I promised myself that I’d take the test and get my license back, but by now the old anxieties which had kept me off the roads had all come roaring back. (To give you an idea of how long it has been since I drove a car: the last time I filled up a tank, the gas was 79 cents a gallon, and Monica Lewinsky was still in high school.) I must have seen too many auto safety commercials in my formative years, because whenever I try to get behind the wheel again, my mind is flooded with images of wrecked cars, bloody windshield glass, schoolchildren I’ve run over, and the automated wheelchair in which I’ll end up for the next 40 years.
So I’ve spent a long year cadging rides from colleagues in return for various favors; I even let one parsimonious fellow prof subsist in a basement room for a nominal rent. In return, he’d ferry me to and from my classes in his aging Chevrolet. When he wasn’t around, I’d shell out $20 each way to ride in the dingiest cabs this side of Calcutta (oops, forgot the new and PC name for the place—aren’t we supposed to call it “Kaddishak?”):
• Broken down minivans with biological stains on the floor and doors that stick shut—and then fly open suddenly on the road.
• Converted cop cars where I sit in the back like a suspect, waiting for the driver to come let me out of the back door which has no handles.
• A rattletrap Cadillac steered by a garrulous, chain-smoking 80-year-old who miraculously manages to tailgate at 35 mph. (Women have been canonized for less.)
In New York, the cabs have video monitors that offer stock quotes and Bloomberg business news. Why are the taxis up here so broken down and depressing? One of the drivers clued me in: “Apart from DUIs and visiting businessmen, most of our customers are on public assistance. Once a month, we take them to cash their welfare checks and buy some groceries. Otherwise, we spend a lot of time picking up bottles of Smirnoff for alchies and delivering them—you know, for the guys who don’t like to leave the house.”
That made up my mind. I can’t spend one more year riding the food stamps and vodka express. My roommate/driver has moved away, leaving me his car in lieu of rent. It’s gathering pollen in the parking lot at the college, waiting for me to wangle a license, insurance, and plates. Every week now, I cab it downtown to a slightly seedy driving school and sit with the 16-year-olds waiting for driving lessons. A little humbling, but it beats sitting in the perp’s seat en route to giving a lecture about Chesterton. Hands down.
Comments
I was a little embarrassed of my utilitarian non-luxury car when I picked up an old college friend who has gone into investment banking from the airport. He scoffed. He lives in NYC, probably makes close to seven figures, and doesn’t even own a car.
Very nice reminscences there John, and further practical reinforcement of my sad decision in college not to pursue an academic career.
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If one is brought up in an un-American hellhole like New York or San Francisco it is possible to regard being carless as perfectly normal and respectable. One has no appreciation of cars and regards one as an appliance or something. Having been brought up in greater Los Angeles, I firmly believe that you are what you drive. Now let’s hear it from the bicycle enthusiasts.
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Great, funny post!
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Well, Zmirak, you missed out on of the greatest joys of all time. Accordion Carts.
I was born in Baton Rouge but my father, who graduated from LSU soon wanted to move us away from our crazy drunken cajun relatives, Al Bundy’s mother in law was more well like than my fathers MIL, so onward to Texas we went after a short stay in Denver.
Alas, the wide open parking lot of the first air conditioned 50 shop indoor mall in Texas, due to blue-laws, were a vast expanse of concrete open for all to drive upon on Sundays. I learned to drive a 1957 Triumph Tr3 with stop signs for floorboards that long ago rusted away. If you didnt drive back then, well, you took the ankle express which would surely make you the target of some tobacco chewing hicks as they flew past.
I digress. Empty parking lots soon became grounds for the latest juvenile destructional adventure of the day. Accordion carts.
You begim by selecting the best cart you could find at K-Mart, one without wobbly wheels and bent frame. Then having selected the perfect specimen the monkey, the elected fool would hang out from the rear passenger side window, would hang onto, the shopping cart while the driver of the vehicle aimed toward the light pole of choice at the terminal velocity of 60 miles per as anything above this speed and the cart become near uncontrollable and often and hit the when released..dad wasnt happy when this occured. Once speed attained and the cart didnt go into mach tuck ,it was then guided toward the light pole, at the last possible minute the monkey would say ‘NOW” and the driver would veer sharply to the left while the cart was released into the light pole.
It was interesting to see a shopping cart less than half its original length. Aye, even more to see shoppers oggling the mysterious accordion cart, perfectly collapsed upon itself, yet still rolling on four wheels. I doubt they ever figured out what really happened.
We could of made a heckuva driver out of you Zirmak. Heh.
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This may be the single creepiest article in the “same planet, different worlds” category that I’ve ever read.
I just got a ‘04 RX-8 GT, by, I have to believe, God’s Providence. I was looking to get a new truck, and had pulled the money out of savings. Went to just about every dealer in town trying to find a small truck with the right characteristics, and then, at the Mazda Dealership, there it was. Only $1000 more than the truck that I was looking at. I actually went home and thought about it overnight. When I got up the next morning, my brain was screaming “idiot, get the car” and I swear I heard Angels in the background going “ahhhhh, ahhhh”. Got to the lot, said “I’ll take it and pay cash” (boy did that get their attention) and the Angel voices got louder. Now I’m borrowing my female coworkers and going whipping through the Loop traffic at 100 MPH, just casual, like it’s nothing. Those of you who have never driven a rotary, it is something else, smooth, effortless, it just spools up faster and faster, 8000 RPM’s and it is like flying..ok sorry I got carried away.
Well the point is I literally cannot imagine any American male NOT doing that if he had that perfect intersection of means and chance. Fry crying out loud, when I was in HS we had a guy in our Driver’s Ed car do a panic stop on the access road trying to merge into I-5 traffic his first time, and we were so pissed off at him for embarrasing us we switched him out with a chick (ok, as I now understand, “manly girl") in the girl’s car. Ok so I grew up rural. Still, I cannot conceive, I mean, really, how can you NOT want to get behind the wheel and haul ass? You haven’t lived until you’ve done 130 on crappy Interstate roads, trying to keep it to the pavement while keeping a real sharp eye out....
Come on man, live a little.
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I almost got side-swiped by a man living out his fantasy of driving fast on an interstate. He was in a brand new Dodge Ram pickup and swerved from lane to lane, dodging cars as they neared his beastly truck.
While he was in a blissful state of consciousness, I was coming down from the adrenaline rush one gets when they think they’re going to die.
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Good choice PaulN, The Mazda truck I had didnt have the Wankel engine. The RX-7 was very quick as well.
The Wankel engine is better than a piston pounder in many ways.
Ever see the magnetic Wankel engine?
http://www.cheniere.org/misc/wankel.htm
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The more I read Zmirak’s posts the more I feel we are a lot alike. We are about the same age, had our dad’s die of the same merciless disease and shared a certain Mopar affliction. I too had an Aspen, a ‘77. A brown 4 door, vinyl roof, with a slant six with so little compression left in the cylinders it would happily zip over and start even in the minus 40 degree winter weather of Edmonton. I hated that car with a passion, but as I was then suffering through a period of prolonged poverty for which I hadn’t taken any vow, it was all I could afford to run for a full three years. I began to get an inkling of what I was in for a few days after I bought it. It was the only car I owned that actually slowed down going downhill. I was still at the very bottom of my mechanical learning curve at that time, but even I realized that something was amiss, probably brakes. The briefest post drive inspection soon revealed a front right rim too hot to touch. The saving grace of that old pig however, was the cheapness of replacement parts, $19 for a reman front caliper. Two bolts and it was out. About 15 minutes to do the job, including the cussing. It was a cold blooded old beast though. It took about 5 miles of driving before it would respond to the throttle without farting back through the carburetor. It was a weird sensation, pressing down on the gas got you falling revs, then a pop pop bang and a jerk, sort of like stepping on a ballon. Annoying as hell and ultimately fatal to the car as we shall see…
It was hopeless for traction. I swear it would get stuck in a fog bank. One memorable incident saw me giving the car a severe shovel chop to the right front fender, ala John Cleese in Fawlty Towers, after getting stuck in the snow on on of Edmonton notorious unplowed side streets, leaving a deep crease in the rusty metal.
Winter had its other tortures as well. Being a ‘77, it had no defroster lines in the rear window, just a fan. Maybe such a device is useful in the southern states, but when the mercury falls in Canada, it can take a good 20 minutes of driving to get enough heat into the motor to even notice. Trying to defrost a rear window with -40 air is pretty much useless. Luckily, I happened to find the last remaining DIY rear window defroster kit in Canada, and installed it. Sadly, this was in summer, so I really didn’t get to use it much before the end came. I did manage to hook it up backwards however, which caused much laughter when I showed my handiwork to my brother and nearly left my palm prints in the searing hot rear window. The wiring on that car was suspect anyway. The horn didn’t work when the ignition was on, yet would brap annoyingly as the key passed through the “accessories” setting as I started it. I didn’t feel like shutting off the motor whenever I wanted to blow my horn, so I decided to fix it. I didn’t know how strong of a shock your could get from a car horn. Trying to troubleshoot the horn while your fingers buzzed annoyingly was a complete PITA, so I decided I would just rely on good driving and my middle finger from then on to keep me out of trouble. Other highlights of Aspen ownership was the incessant clacking of the tappets, even after adjusting them, a maintenance chore I was sure would unlock the vast, hidden reserves of power hiding within the mighty six (HA!) The torn vinyl roof, the sun-split dashboard and rear seat showing its yellowed foam stuffing, all somehow mirrored the decrepitude of my own life at the time. The cracks in the window were mandatory for any Alberta automobile, but they were made much worse by the full-body punches applied to it whenever I was feeling particularly frustrated by life when behind the wheel.
The end finally came one cold day in late February. I was coming home from work, tired, angry and feeling like life in general was completely pointless. The car was doing the usual pop pop pop BANG cold misfiring. I had had enough. I put it in neutral, floored it till it screamed and dumped it into drive. The differential let go with a mighty crack. From then on, the car would no longer go forward after taking a left turn. If ever I had to take a left, I immediately had to swerve right to regain propulsion, with whatever horsepower the six had left (about 40hp I reckon). This was an obviously unacceptable and dangerous situation, so I did what anyone would do, I dug my motorcycle out of hibernation. Riding to work in the -18 weather with snow blowing across the road certainly got me a few surprised looks, but spring came mercifully early that year. The car was sent to the scrapyard, collected for free by a man and his truck. In the fall, I bought an old Ford Escort. I was rear ended on the same night it passed its safety inspection, which was just as well, as it began to smoke heavily when winter came around, and left me stranded on the highway one frigid winter night when the carburetor froze up. As it was a write off from the accident, I got all my money back from the other guy’s insurance when I had to decommission it when it was time to re-register it.
Both were still better cars than the 1970 Fury I started my driving career with, however.
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Dr. Zmirak, should your Vermont adventures lead to anything like Mr. PaulN’s thrills and yet you still feel incomplete, there remain your New York roots; by which of course I mean that summit of vehicular challenge, the street battles of a hackey.
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Funny as hell, Mr. Z. Did ya ever get a drive-through Daiquiri while in N’Awlins?
http://stuffcajunpeoplelike.wordpress.com/2008/04/03/12-drive-through-daiquiri-shops/
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rcg. Mr. Z. lives in New Hampster not Vermont
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Very good post.
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Driving in Louisiana. Getting pulled over while decelerating from 125mph+ (clocked at 92 in a 55) coming off the Lake Ponchartrain causeway in a new sports car with the meager trunk stuffed full of guns, a semi-irate hunting dog in the front seat and still a thousand miles to go til I hit Fort Benning.
A short, pleasant conversation about dogs, fun cars and the rigors of life in the Infantry, followed with a solemn promise to “slow down in your parish” and off I was, scott free. Good times.
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I think merging onto a busy interstate is a bit like jumping out of a plane. The first time, you’re scared ****less, but you just grit your teeth and do it. Before long, you don’t even think about it again.
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Be sure to put on another Battle flag bumper sticker.
Driving is dangerous, and we’re not always alert.
However, trains and subways make me more anxious: what sort of affirmative action moron is at the helm? At least with a car one’s fate isn’t entirely left to another.
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Driving in Atlanta made me anxious, to say the least, lol. I never left the right lane of the in-city interstate when possible.
I’m cautious, but I haven’t had a ticket in ten years. It pays to err on the cautious side.
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I find Zirmies experiences enlightening.
Yet I also would like to see his views on finance. This person, Richard Bitner, author
of the book Confessions of a Subprime Lender: An Insider’s Tale of Greed, Fraud and Ignorance. has an audio file, interview of his book, here: http://www.financialsense.com/fsn/main.html
I am interested to see how the folks at Taki mag view the economy today.
Thanks. Like your work Zirmak.
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Scouting report from L.A.
Just in case you are ever offered the opportunity to move to the West Coast: Los Angeles is very doable these days without a car. Downtown is actually starting to get a night life, and the city does have a subway system---although it lacks the density that creates the pushing and shoving in the NYC subway system.
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If you’re as funny in person as you are in pen, and I lived in Merrimack, I’d drive you to work every day. The only catch is you’d have to listen to my toddlers go on about Dora the Explorer.
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