MAACOh My God

While I do appreciate the ease of living that having a car affords me, I can’t get over the fact that they’re so expensive to maintain. When I first started driving I rode under the impression that, after the final payment was made, or if your parents bought you one outright, that was it. End of story. Even if the car was a ragged, aging, piece of junk (which mine was), there would be nothing which would demand my semi-hard-earned money. Except for gas.

As the years drove on, my tires, much like my disillusionment with the ways of the automobile world, wore increasingly thin. The first time I bought new Goodyears for my aquamarine Ford Tempo was an experience that I will never forget, namely because it was something akin to watching someone steal cash from my wallet and then light it on fire.

This week I not only had to buy new tires, but my brakes recently decided that they, too, wanted some attention. And so, like a frazzled mother with children in a toy store, I broke down and made arrangements to get two new tires, an alignment, and have my brakes serviced. The entire process took about five hours. That’s from the time I arrived five minutes late for my appointment to when they called, saying they were finished, and I nearly cried as I checked inside my wallet for the poor credit card, scuffed and chipped like it had just returned from a shopping trip with one of the Real Housewives of New Jersey.

My grandmother gave me a ride back down to the garage — this after waking up early to bring me back home the first time. It felt strange having to depend of someone else for transportation. It was as if I were missing something vital to my very existence, and I wondered how on earth someone could go through their life not having a vehicle for transportation. At the garage I walked up to the cashier’s window. I opened my wallet, anticipating a total at least as devastating as news of a nuclear attack. Really, the number she gave me stood more in the ballpark of a tornado warning, but that still didn’t stop me from cursing, slightly, under my breath.

Burning, Like Gasoline

I’ve never been one to run from the police. Blame it on my modest middle-class upbringing or the fact that I’m pretty much a coward, but the idea of taking flight after a cop spots me doing something wrong has always felt somehow akin to dousing myself in gasoline while sitting in the middle of a house fire; it’s obvious that running will only make a bad situation worse. Besides, running from the police is something people on television shows like Cops do, and if there’s one show I’m loathe to imagine myself as a character on, it’s Cops.

For the longest time I wondered what exactly might make a person do such a thing, and then, one evening, I found out.

When I got into my car, my itinerary was small and innocent enough: a simple trip into town to pick up dinner. Had I been headed to trade secret government documents or assassinate a prominent mayoral candidate, I might’ve been more prepared for driving like I was in a video game. But as it stood, it was all I could do to bother putting socks on with my shoes.

I was on a stretch of two-lane highway that leads down into what can only be described as a chasm, with an incline so steep I have to hold myself up from the steering wheel. It’s a dip that, in the winter, makes a person think about the possibility of death. Seeing as the laws of physics insist that you will go faster while traveling this part of the road, it makes no sense to me that the city has speed limit signs posted near the top and bottom of both ends. And what makes less sense is that, while at the top, you should be going forty miles per hour and at the bottom you should be going ten miles slower.

I suppose I understand our country’s stringent regulation of how fast we can drive our cars, but this, to me, just seemed cruel. Ordinarily it wouldn’t have been much of an issue. Aside from a massive six-car police speed trap I saw there once, I’ve driven this road more times than I can recount and never have I seen anyone penalized for zooming down this particular stretch of road.

When I got to the bottom of the first hill, I was going about fifty — not that it was my fault; I blame that on both gravity and kinetic energy, two scientific principles which have never done me any favors. My intention was to let the uphill part of my trip slow me back down, but before that could happen, I spotted a police officer trailing one of the oncoming cars.

There was no slowing down, and as I passed him, my mind flashed back to another time where a run-in with a police officer left me both mortified and with a wallet almost one hundred and thirty dollars lighter.

For a second, as I watched him in my rearview mirror, I thought I was okay and I let myself breathe a little easier.

But then his turn signal flashed.

Then he pulled into a residential neighborhood and started to turn around.

My eyes flicked back and forth between the road in front of me and the stretch behind me, which now seemed entirely too empty of traffic to separate me from a particularly pissed-off policeman. Still, it’s anyone’s guess as to how I avoided rear-ending the car in front of me or driving off the road to crash through the chain link fence of the local animal shelter.

When I got to the top of the hill, I realized I was still going faster than the thirty miles per hour posted behind me. Usually when I think I’ve been caught doing something I’m not supposed to, my reaction is to correct as many of my immediate faults as possible and simply pretend like nothing happened. This time was different, though, and when I came upon the next available street, I turned on my blinker.

The police officer was still at the bottom of the hill; he hadn’t even pulled out from the neighborhood, and a small part of me knew that he wasn’t coming after me. But the more paranoid part, the one shrieking, “He’s coming! He’s coming! Gun it!” had a pretty good hold on me.

And so it was that, in my head, the red and blue lights flashed and the distinct whine of a siren filled the air.

I can make it away, I thought.

Turning onto the side road, I really did entertain the idea of opening up the engine and making a dash for it. Just in case.

But then reason set in — for the most part anyway — and while I didn’t drive like a madman down a freeway or a villain in an action movie, I did keep one eye on the rearview mirror.

I suppose that’s how it happens, then. Instinct. Bad judgement. Whatever one wants to call it. All I know is that now I feel closer to those people, the ones on TV. The ones who might as well be burning themselves as they burn rubber, trying to get away.

Get Your Tickets Here!

As with a lot of people I know, I get nervous around police officers. It doesn’t have anything to do with any past crimes or illicit secrets; my life, if it were used as the basis for a cop movie, would be entirely boring and would not make any money at the box office. In essence, I’m a boring person. And while I’ve never done anything that would warrant their tackling me in a crowded department store or chasing me down on a high-speed getaway, I still feel like I’ve done something wrong, that I’m guilty.

When I come across a police officer out in public, I’ll wonder what he’s doing or looking for. Most of the time, I’ll see him pick up mouthwash or a snack food of some kind, but still I wonder if he might be on the lookout for someone. An arsonist. A murderer. Thieves with their pockets loaded. And I’ll steer clear, imagining a scenario in which I’m mistaken for the culprit and brought down face-first for a meeting with the floor. Worse still is the mysterious notion I sometimes have that I’ve actually done something wrong and simply don’t know it. There are chunks of time I simply cannot recall — they’re hazy, translucent like a thick sheet of plastic — and I wonder, Was I sitting at home on the Internet, or was I out robbing elderly shopkeepers?

Part of my fear, I suppose, stems from the fact that I’ve already broken the law, so maybe I’m predisposed to criminality. What else am I capable of? I have to wonder. The other part comes from the various encounters I’ve had with men in uniform.

My earliest recollection of a police officer comes from a time, one afternoon, when I was with a few of the kids my mother watched as part of her in-home daycare. I was maybe nine or ten, and the kids I was with were around the same age. We were sitting in the car, waiting for my mother to pick up a few things from Venture, a now-defunct department store chain. She’d told me she’d be right back, and we’d been sitting in the car for no more than ten minutes when, in the middle of a bout of rowdiness, a police officer drove by and saw us sitting in the back seat. Less than five minutes later, the officer was standing at the window and asking where my mother was. Nervous, I told him that she was inside, and when he then asked how long she’d been gone, my sense of time vanished, and I had to think. I suppose in saying, “Um, thirty minutes?” I was slightly overestimating, and I realized this as the officer’s face tightened.

“That long?” he said.

He left for the building, and when my mother came back a few minutes later she was flustered and agitated. “When we get home, your dad isn’t going to hear a word of this,” she said, her eyes slits in the rearview mirror as she started the car.

Years later, when I was a teenager, my high school had a police offer that would stay on full-time to patrol the building and keep everyone in line. This was not long after the school shootings at Columbine and Jonesboro, and so not only did we students have the underlying fear that our small-town school might be next, we had a disgruntled, stone-faced man with a gun roaming our halls.

Even then, I felt awkward. Passing by Officer Ewing on the way to lunch or science class, I’d look at the floor, thinking that if we made eye contact he would maybe slam me into my locker before searching it. I imagined him calling me “Punk” or “Scumbag” or any of those other TV cop names for criminals. Although I had nothing to hide, and no secrets to keep except my brewing desire for any number of the varsity basketball players, I felt just as edgy as if I’d lent my locker to a known terrorist or drug kingpin, and whatever unseemly items they’d stored in there would be pinned on me in the next unannounced round of drug-sniffing dogs.

In reality, my run-ins with police officers would come later, once I planted myself in the driver’s seat. When practicing with my mother, it was my tendency to drive slow enough that I might simply step out of the car should something happen. The needle on the speedometer skirted the number twenty like a prom queen avoiding a member of the math club, and I sat hunched forward, my eyes always on the lookout for the loose dog or toddler I was sure I’d run down. Once I had graduated from practicing and bought a sportier car, the tendency to play it safe fell away, and, animals and children be damned, I would fly down the streets, passing cars as if I actually had somewhere to be.

Maybe the change had to do with my mother no longer being in the car with me, but regardless of her absence, whenever I would eventually have a close call with disaster — choosing the wrong moment to try and pass a car on a two-lane highway; misjudging the time I had to pull out in front of an oncoming truck — I’d fight the feeling that had plagued me when I was sixteen. I’d do my best to ignore the unsettling feeling at the pit of my stomach until I more or less forgot about it. Things got worse when I started my first year of college and found myself navigating the highways of a new state whose motto might as well have been, “You’d better keep up.” It took me a short time to acclimate, but once I got into the mindset of a Missouri driver, there was no stopping me. Suddenly, doing seventy-five down country roads was no problem. Changing busy lanes with only inches to spare? I could do it while swapping CDs from the player.

With such a quick rise to mastering the roads, it seems appropriately karmic that I should have been taken down a notch or two just as suddenly. For my twenty-first birthday, my friend Jessica took me out to dinner. At the time, she didn’t have access to a car, and so I drove the two of us over to St. Louis, and when we were done eating we came back to go see a movie. By the time we were done, it was close to eleven o’clock, and on the way home, we passed a parked highway patrolman. I had time to notice the glint of light along the side of his cruiser as we passed by at something close to fifteen miles an hour over the limit, and I watched through the rearview mirror as the point where we’d passed him slowly, eternally shrank into the distance. Just as I was starting to think that I’d somehow skated by unnoticed — maybe he was napping or my speedometer had simply been playing a cruel birthday joke on me — I saw the red glow of taillights, suddenly there on the skin of the darkness like a pair of bright welts.

Even as he pulled onto the road and started toward me, I clung to the notion that he was headed to a burgled department store. One might think that the flashing red and blue lights would have shattered such a notion, but denial can be a powerful thing for a young man who thinks he’s invincible. When I realized that he was coming for me, I slowed down, easing onto the shoulder of the road and wondering what to do. With something like panic I kept my hands on the steering wheel, not wanting the officer to mistake a move for my wallet for a try at a loaded pistol. In my head I went through every episode of Cops I’ve ever seen. I considered all the things that people in these kinds of situations tend to do — throw open the door and bolt out onto the highway; engage in an escalating argument with the officer about the truthfulness of his radar gun; find the most conspicuous place for a nickel bag of pot — and made sure that I did everything to differentiate myself from those people.

Next to me, Jessica groaned. “Aw,” she said. “Happy birthday.” I make a quick glance in her direction, and I noticed upon her face a look of grim solidarity. I’m not usually the kind of person to throw someone under the proverbial bus, but I couldn’t help wondering if there were some way I could pin this whole mess on Jessica.

“Officer, she took me out for my birthday, and I didn’t think I was going to have to drive. It’s been a long night, and I’m so sorry that I didn’t realize the speed limit was so slow through here. We were talking about the great birthday I’m having, you know? And I guess I just couldn’t wait to get back home.”

In the end though, once the officer, a man in his early thirties, took my license and shone his jumbo, cucumber-sized flashlight upon it, any bright ideas I’d come up with about betraying my friend dissolved. The officer considered my license for a second, and after stepping back to his cruiser to, I don’t know, scan a database for my befuddled mugshot or arm-length rap sheet, he returned and handed me my identification back. “Let’s slow it down a little tonight,” he said, in a voice that implied humor was an alien notion, and excuses would not be tolerated. “I’ll let you off with a warning. Consider it a birthday present from me.”

About a year later, I was on my own, driving to work, when I passed a police officer and was promptly pulled over for going something like seventy in a fifty-five mile per hour zone. The irony of the matter is that, that day, I was on schedule and actually had extra time before I had to leave. I’m not sure why I’m consistently late, but when I do manage to be on time, I’m elated and filled with a sense of accomplishment. The extra time came in handy, then, seeing as I would spend what felt like a half hour in my car, idling along the side of a road that seemed all the more popular today. While waiting for the officer to get out of his patrol car, I counted the number of passing vehicles, and once the pairs of eyes glancing over at me tallied up in the twenties, I just sat there and looked down at my lap.

When he tapped on my window, I rolled it down and smiled up at his weathered face with my best what’s-a-guy-to-say? look. He asked me how I was doing today, and I said I was doing fine. Then, like an idiot, I asked him how he was doing; maybe I was just being nice, but more likely I was trying to get on his good side.

“Do you have any idea how fast you were going back there?”

I pretended to think, as if the image of the speedometer hadn’t burned itself into my mind once I realized I’d just shot like a bullet on meth past a cop. “Maybe … um … sixty-five?”

“Can you tell me where you were headed in such a hurry?”

“I was … oh … on my way … to work,” I mumbled, so low that he had to have me repeat myself. I said it again, croaking as if the past ten years had never happened, and I was twelve again. My name tag from work was lying in one of the cupholders, and I retrieved it, kneading it with my fingers and presenting it to the officer like an offering of proof.

“Well,” he said, “I clocked you at about sixty-nine. Unfortunately, I’m going to have to give you a ticket.” And after asking me if I had seventy-five dollars, maybe stashed in the glove box or in one of my canvas sacks branded with money signs, he nodded when I told him I didn’t have enough cash on me to take my license back. Instead, he tucked it into an elongated black pad from which he tore a yellow piece of paper. On it were all the details of my embarrassment: my name; my car; the speed and circumstances of my illegality. After explaining where to go to get my license back and pay my ticket, he left me to the rest of my day, and I drove off feeling off-put and unmoored.

These days, while my nervousness around police officers is as strong as ever, I can say that passing by a parked patrolman is getting easier to do without breaking out into sweat. Anymore, I take to driving like a grandmother. It’s not as exciting as plowing down the highway, but it’s certainly cheaper. Though I’ve worked my way into a slightly better car, I drive it like a conestoga wagon, ambling down the streets and trying to ignore all the sighs, glares, and horn honks that try to push me along.

When I do pass by a cop, going all of thirty miles an hour, I’ll glance over and think, See, I’m obeying the law. I’m being good. As if they don’t have other things to do, bigger criminals to catch. Like the guy who torched the hospital burn ward, or the person stalking rest stops with his hidden switchblade. Or the anxious-looking man behind the wheel of a car, shambling along the highways with the continuous, pestering thought, Did I do that?

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.