Three Moments Behind A Steering Wheel

DMV

I’ve never had much luck with cars. When it comes to getting behind a steering wheel, experience has taught me to expect nothing short of personal embarrassment, and sometimes even disaster.

Growing up in the country, driving presents itself as a necessity. For those people living in major metropolitan areas there’s the ever-present option of public transportation, whereas rural youths must face either the prospect of getting behind the wheel of a quarter-ton vehicle capable of horribly killing another human being or sitting at home each evening with their parents. Ask any teenager and he’ll tell you that the former is definitely the less frightening of the two options. And so it was, with great trepidation and a burning resentment for my parents’ not living in New York City, that I too learned to take to the roads.

My high school driving instructor was a heavyset man named Mr. Harris. He worked as the school’s football coach, and so I had no idea who he was. Until he introduced himself that first day of class, he might have been any track-jacketed stranger stepping into the cafeteria where we students were waiting to whisper amongst ourselves instead of following along with our Rules of the Road booklets.

After the instructional period of driver’s education was over, my mother was the one who sat in the car with me while I practiced. Judging from the easy comparison I could make between the color of her knuckles and the white slip of paper stating against the obvious that I could be behind the wheel, I suppose it’s not entirely untrue to say that she was more nervous than I was. As a novice driver, I was gleefully unaware of just how dangerous driving could be. My mother, on the other hand, could recall any number of times I’d accidentally put my own wellbeing in danger, like the time when I was young and, shoveling hard candies into my mouth, nearly choked to death at a family gathering; or, years later, when I fell off a folding chair in my bedroom and nearly broke my neck on my television stand. This was the person with whom she was getting into a car, and yet she still took her place next to me.

Looking at my first car, I wondered what the best rejected name for the vehicle might have been, and I settled on the Ford Miniscule; it had four doors and what seemed to be a spacious trunk, but the shiny blue exterior belied (to me, anyway) how my long legs would brush against the steering wheel as I lowered myself in, ultimately coming to rest against the dashboard instrument panel as I latched my seatbelt — an unnecessary action seeing as I was so tightly wedged in I might have to use the jaws of life to get out regardless of a collision. The roof was so low that driving on gravel gave me knots on my head, and I prayed to God that we didn’t have to go over any speed bumps.

That initial nervousness gave way as the summer days marched on and I racked up mile after mile on the already well-worn speedometer. Increasingly I became more comfortable there in the driver’s seat, both because of my growing experience and the fact that my knees were now concave and molded perfectly to the contours of the plastic. My newfound confidence showed in my driver’s test, which I took early one morning, right at eight o’clock so as to avoid the long lines at the local DMV office. My instructor, a gaunt, graying man, was so impressed with my ability to back out into the far lane that he complimented me right there in the car, and in my giddy relief on our way back I nearly ran down a woman in a crosswalk.

“Now, if she’d been any closer,” the instructor said, “I would’ve had to fail you for that.”

On the way back, I played it safe. The needle of the speedometer kept to the posted limits like a recent parolee adhering to his litany of stipulations, and by the time I had my newly printed license in my hands, I looked at my mother and the subtle sense of pride that shone in her eyes, and asked her if she wouldn’t mind driving us home.

MY DEER FRIEND

I was never really afraid of driving until, at twenty-two years old, I thought I killed someone. The person turned out to be a deer, though on that late August night, the thud I’d felt could have been anything.

Sitting next to me when it happened was my friend Jessica. We were coming back from a late-night movie, just starting on the stretch of highway taking us between cities. The street lamps had ended about a half-mile back, and so we were settled into the darkness and our silence, both of us tired from working our dull jobs at a major department store. The radio settled on a Sarah McLachlan song and so it and the steady rhythm of the road lent our surroundings an ethereal feeling.

I’d taken my eyes off the road for only a second — to check the time, or maybe to look in the rearview mirror — and it was after I looked back out the windshield I saw a vague shape, something the color of a cardboard toilet paper roll, emerge from the darkness. In less than a second I felt the impact, and it took me a moment to realize what had just happened. I was thrown by the relative softness of the impact. In my head on the few occasions I’d played the scenario in my head, hitting a deer resulted in swerving all over the road, the deployment of airbags, or at least the escape of one or two choice words.

Pulling over, we stepped out and surveyed the damage: the crumpled front quarter of the driver’s side, the thick trail of antifreeze winding itself like a shallow river down the road behind us. At that time I still had no idea what it was I’d hit, and standing there in what I can only imagine was a kind of shock, my imagination went into overdrive.

There across the divided highway was a bar. A small, ramshackle place with a lit sign next to the parking lot entrance, its glow was a dull yellow, the same color as urine on a white tile floor, and at its top, adorning an arrow pointing to the door, were a row of light bulbs flashing in succession, one after another. From the distance I couldn’t see the name of the place, but, squinting, I made out a few figures exiting the building. They were nothing more than shadows, really, and in my dazed state I imagined them drunkenly donning tan-colored fur jackets despite the heat, ready to make their way from the bar to the settlement of houses there to my right, on the opposite side of the road.

My god, I thought. And I turned to look back at the road, at the spot where whatever I’d killed lay in the dark.

By this time Jessica was on the phone, calling her mother to let her know we were in an accident.

I didn’t want to look at the shape lying in the road, afraid that I might be right, that I really did run down another human being. But then I heard Jessica use the word “deer” and it made sense. I could even remember, albeit vaguely, the quick image of the animal and its surprised, reddish eyes seared into me like a spill of hot coffee on my lap.

After what must have been an hour’s worth of phone calls to the police and AAA, we were rescued by a few of our friends, who took us home after Jessica phoned and told them what had happened. Crammed into the backseat of their car, I couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened. Every red light we came to on the twenty-minute ride back reminded me of the eyes peering out at me from the darkness. I felt relieved at the fact it wasn’t a person, but at the same time knowing that I had taken some creature’s life weighed heavily on me, and as I rode in silence I uselessly swore that I’d never again drive a car.

BOATING

One summer my car was in the mechanics’ shop, and while I was waiting to get it back my father loaned me the Grand Marquis that belonged to my mother when she was alive. If my first car had been like squeezing myself into a soapbox racer, this beast was like sitting at the helm of the Titanic. The first time I drove it I knew, as if from a premonition, I was going to wreck into something. I was certain that if someone were to get in my way they’d be a goner; no miracles of modern medicine could stack up against the blue-gray bumper the width of a small cottage. Piloting the car was an exercise, and by the time I returned home that first day I felt like I’d been practicing for a yacht race around the world, my arms sore and my back cramping.

About a week before my car was back in working order, I took the Grand Marquis to pick up some groceries. With the uneasy familiarity I was developing with the car I managed to avoid any manslaughter charges, but once I made it into the parking lot of a local Target department store my luck failed me.

The store was busy that day and the parking lot was full, so when I spotted a place to set down anchor I reacted quickly to grab it before someone else did. I spun the steering wheel like a sailor navigating rough, choppy waters, and, too late, realized that trying to turn on a dime in something roughly the width of a conestoga wagon wouldn’t work. There was a van settled into the adjacent spot, and as the front of the Grand Marquis came closer and closer to the van’s bumper, I pressed on the brakes. But braking in this car was like winning a brawl with a single punch: if you didn’t do it hard enough the first time, you were finished. I did slow down, and when I tapped their bumper, I sat there for a second. I hadn’t even rocked forward, as the car was so big it simply absorbed the shock.

For a few long seconds I sat there and thought about what I’d done. Then, the coward that I am, my mind turned to a singular notion: fleeing before anyone saw me.

I was about to shift into reverse and set sail when I looked up into the van’s windows. They were tinted slightly darker, but with the sunlight shining through the front windshield I could see two sets of young eyes staring at me, horrified.

Ordinarily, the thought of spooking young children might make me laugh, but there, sitting as I was like the incompetent helmsman of a shipping boat run aground, I only felt a swallowing sense of guilt.

Oh shit, I thought.

In my sailor-like attempts to find some matching four-letter words, I failed to notice the owner of the van step around from the far side. His sudden appearance startled me when I looked up from my hands, rubbing my pant legs as if that might somehow get the red off of them and absolve me from my wrongdoing. The man was older, a grandfather obviously, with white hair and a tucked-in shirt that bulged slightly at the stomach. His wife — whom I hadn’t noticed before — stayed in the van, and all I saw of her was her reddish hair and the stern look of annoyance that she shot me as she rolled her window down. I imagined she wanted to listen in on what I can only assume she hoped was going to be a severe thrashing from her husband.

Summoning myself back to reality, I stepped out of the car. The first words out of my mouth were an apology, as I hoped to soften him up a little before he started kicking my ass. Instead, the old man was pleasant enough. He was nice in the sense that he never once called me a moron to my face, which in retrospect would have been entirely within his rights. I gave him my insurance information, but like a fool I didn’t think to ask for his. Luckily I never ended up needing it. Later, I would look back on that seemingly obvious misstep with all the clarity of a lesson learned, but. right then, standing there next to an elderly man’s wrinkled bumper and under the expectant glare of eight little eyes, all I could see was another reason why, I swore to God, I was one day moving to New York.