A Swingin' Mood

Lately, my moods have been changing more often than a neat-freak's bedsheets. They've been like a ship without an anchor, tossed about on the waves of circumstance. This past week in particular has been a roller coaster ride.

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With gas prices once again climbing past the 2 dollar mark here in happy NorCal, I was hoping that my transportation's mechanical troubles were over. But as I drove towards school one day this week, I knew that it was not to be. Pulling out of my driveway, I pressed the gas pedal, began accelerating to 55, and realized that my transmission was not shifting.

Instantly, my mood changed. From looking forward to a half hour of listening to country hits and pushing my car to its limits, I was thrown into the deepest doldrums of dollar deduction. I began mentally ticking off the greenbacks. Visions of $500, $1000, and then $1500 repairs began marching through my mind.

Sadly, I turned my car back toward home. I would just have to miss school today; hopefully the prof would understand, but I doubted it.

When I walked through the door, I was greeted with a big smile from my mom. "Class got out early? Wonderful! You can clean your room today."

Still wallowing in a slough of self-pity, I slowly dragged my feet down the hallway to my bedroom. There's a reason we don't allow guests back there. I was accustomed, comfortable even, with the sight that greeted me, but it only served to further my depression. Books and papers were piled high on a desk and dressers, clothes were scattered across the floor and bed, candy wrappers leftover from last year's Valentine's day lay heaped in one corner, and cobwebs hung from every cranny of the ceiling.

I sat down on my bed, instantly exhausted by the sight. For a good 10 minutes, all I could do was look around and stare at the mess. Finally, some resolve began to form in my little finger, and I slowly moved my hand to pick up a t-shirt that lay on the floor. I folded it and set it next to me. I repeated these actions until all the clothes had been folded and then put them away in my dresser. Turning around, I noticed something shiny lying just under my bed. I stooped down and picked it up.

Instantly, I became elated. It was my John Williams' Greatest Hits CD! I thought we had lost it in our last move, but here it was, in all of its shiny wonderfulness. Freshly energized with renewed energy, I popped the disc in my stereo and set about sorting the papers that lay scattered around.

As the glorious notes of Schindler's List and Home Alone soared through the air and reverberated against my ear drums, I mechanically shuffled the various documents...trash, school stuff, trash, bank statement, school, trash, paystub, trash, trash...wait, what's this? My hand closed around an envelope that I'd never opened. The return address said "California DMV." Uh-oh.

I quickly tore it open and began scanning the pages. "Registration overdue. Must pay $300.00 by February 2, 2009." Oh dear, that was yesterday! "Or car will be seized and impounded." OH NO! Even though my car wasn't operating properly, it was still my only means of transportation. Losing it meant being grounded 40 miles from the nearest major city. Frantic, I ran outside, only to see a tow truck leaving our driveway, my car trundling along behind it.

The notes of John Williams' music forgotten, I dejectedly sat down on our front step and cried. How could my day have gone so horribly wrong? I decided I was in need of a nap, but as I got up and turned my feet toward the front door, I remembered the mess that awaited me in my room. Granted, it wasn't as bad as before, but it was hardly conducive to rest.

Emotionally and physically drained, I decided to sleep on our trampoline. And that's what I did. Until my younger brothers came and started bouncing, ruthlessly returning me to reality.

Close Call

The other day I was driving the roughly twelve mile stretch between school and work. It was shortly after 12:30 and the lunch hour traffic was lighter than usual. I was singing along with Jason Aldean on a freshly burned disk of assorted country music and generally trying to look cool, calm and collected as I bobbed my head to the tune and adjusted my sunglasses. The road seemed to come to me and I really didn't notice much other than the white lines to my left and the base boosted sound from the speaker on my right.

I didn't care too much about my speed, but was going about five miles per hour above the speed of traffic (roughly sixty) and, if my memory serves me correctly, the zone was listed for 45. The town where I go to school has a large police presence and the road I was traveling is such a transit artery that regular patrolling is a guarantee. Still, I thought little of the authorities when I noticed a gap in the traffic ahead of me and accelerated to pass a car and settle in.

Never glancing at my speedometer, I grinned as I heard the first notes of a new Josh Turner single and started singing along with Firecracker.

Ahead of me was an intersection that is arguably the largest and most traveled in all town. It's on a road between two large higher education institutions and the cross street is a major east west route (Pacific and March, for those of you in the know). When I was no closer than three hundred feet from the light, it switched from green to yellow.

I calculated quickly and determined I could make it. Then I down-shifted and gunned the engine, leaping forward with less caution than the yellow light demanded. To my left, I noticed a red Isuzu Rodeo, making a similar attempt.

(I've always wondered about the wisdom of naming a car "Rodeo;" it doesn't speak much to the smoothness of the ride).

Just before crossing the white line and entering the large square of the intersection, I happened to glance at my speed and noticed I was almost thirty over the limit. I'd started out a tad fast, speed up to pass a car and then severely violated the applicable traffic laws during my approach to the light.

But as fast as I was going, the Rodeo was going faster. Without a radar gun, I can't be entirely accurate as it its speed, but I would wager an honest nickel that it was going on the high side of 85. Maybe even 90.

As we breezed through the intersection, two geese on a flight south, I noticed the distinctive white and black markings of a CHP officer out of the corner of my right eye. You know the type: reinforced bumper, light rack and overweight driver. I instinctively engaged the clutch and tapped the breaks to slow down, but the officer's lights were blinking and he had pulled out of his perch before I could slow below the posted limit.

Embarrassment and disappointment are the only two emotions I remember as I carefully pulled my car to the side of the road and engaged my emergency blinkers.

My first ticket.

I had been driving - seriously driving - nine months and now I would have a point on my license, my insurance costs would skyrocket and I would have to sit through a class on traffic safety - as if I didn't know all the rules I'd violated. I sighed and leaned back, waiting for the prefect to come to my door.

But the officer never came. In fact, the cop car chased down the Rodeo and a uniformed officer was knocking at the door of the red SUV when I drove by a fraction of a minute later.

I don't know how much weight I lost in those few moments when I thought I was going to be ticketed, but it must have been measurable. My heart was beating like I'd just drunk three Red Bulls while watching Mission Impossible and my palms were sweatier than T.D. Jakes after a hard sermon. As if to reinforce my feelings, my stereo was playing Keith Urban's Stupid Boy.

The rest of my ride to General Mills was about as slow as I can remember. I don't believe I ever came within five miles of the speed limit and I spent the entire time in the slow lane.

Part 3: Driver's License

The event couldn’t have been more anticipated or more dreaded. After accruing the requisite number of hours driving the car (or, at times, being driven by the car), I was invited back to the DMV office to complete my certification.

It's worth noting that DMV offices are depressing places. You get the feeling that many of the patrons come to the office to die, not renew their vehicle credential or be cleared for the road. The rules of the DMV are similar to the rules of the men's restroom: Nobody smiles, nobody looks around, nobody asks serious questions. You take care of business and leave. Don't start a conversation and do not, whatever you do, do not flirt with anyone.

It took a few minutes to process my information, during which I made a number of cutting observations like the one above, but eventually an older woman whose haggard face and cocaine wrinkles belied her pasted smile welcomed me to step into “my” vehicle and perform basic automotive functions like initiating a turn signal and pressing the brake. When she was satisfied that I understood these commands she felt safe to enter the car herself. There, strapped into the passenger side seat, her mouth inches from my ear, with both windows sealed and the car turned off she started laughing.

Her laugh was a maniacal as it was loud in the confines of the small hatchback and the closed windows trapped in the sound. Specks of spittle spattered the dashboard and my earlobe felt moistened. I desperately wanted out. Maybe I didn't need a driver's license afterall. Maybe I could just walk and take public transit the way they do in Europe. I could be environmentally and

“What’s the matter?” I asked with natural timidity. The laughing stopped.

“You wanna pass this thing?” Her voice was scratchy, acidic and thin reminding me of a female version of Marlon Brandow. I forced myself to look at my evaluator. Her eyes were dilated and her pupils enlarged, leading me to believe she had just run a line of methadone

“Yes.”

“Then shut up and drive. When I say turn, you turn. Otherwise, follow the rules of the road.”

An eerie silence permeated the car and was only pushed away when I started the engine. My older brother - the one who knew almost as much about driving as he did about women - had warned me that driving tests are like marriages in that the slightest little misstep can make for an unhappy ending. He said to move slowly, ask no questions and show some fear because evaluators like to feel empowered.

I moved through the parking lot in first gear, keeping my eyes pointed straight forward and turning my head in an exaggerated sweep of the oncoming terrain. I followed every detail of the driving manual, accenting my hand motions with finger twirls to show the woman in the passenger seat that I knew what I was doing.

The first few turns were uneventful, almost calming after my initial scare. Maybe the licensing process wasn’t so bad after all.

My brother had warned me against any attractive lull the proctor might design. It was the calm before the storm, the quiet before the smash, the last breath before the death shudder. I was to stay on the alert the whole time and never lose focus.

A bead of sweat dropped from my nose onto the steering wheel and I hoped the licenser didn't notice. Sweat could be interpreted as nervousness or discomfort with driving and nobody wants to have an uncomfortable driver certified for road driving with the full blessing of the state government. Nobody but Ron Paul and this lady wasn't Ron Paul.

“Turn left at the next stop.”

I arrived at the stop easily, and took pride in my ability to navigate the straight, unoccupied road at 35 mph. I stopped right in front of the sign and paused to recapture my focus. I looked to the left and saw no traffic. On the right side, my vision was obstructed by a protruding building, but from what I could see, there were no cars. I pulled ahead. As soon as my line of vision allowed me to see past the building on the right, it seemed a whole town's worth of cars appeared.

“Stop!” My evaluator yanked the parking brake and we screeched to a halt in the middle of the right-hand lane. Cars whizzed passed opposite us and I got a new lesson in finger obscenity from the passing traffic. Fortunately, the right lane stayed clear - or I would have been united with my instructor and a little vehicular steel in violent fashion - until I was able to squeeze into the lane and complete the turn. By the time I was safely driving along the road, my heart was beating like over a hundred and sixty beats per minute, I was sweating like Shaq at halftime and involuntary whimpers were escaping my mouth despite a good faith effort to hold them in.

My evaluator pulled out her clipboard and made some aggressive scribbling notations that were as illegible as they were large. I tried not to look at what she wrote and continued into the DMV parking lot, wiping my nose on the back of my sleeve. There, parked in the expansive government parking lot, she smiled at me with the same evil grin she had deployed at the beginning of the exam.

There, in the confines of the parked car, across from a heavily painted ugly woman, I thought about life and blind turns. I had a series of profound and marketable thoughts about the futility of trying, the sovereignty of God and just driving in general. Unfortunately, I forgot all of them when she opened her mouth to speak.

“Young man?”

“Yes?”

“I'm going to let you pass...”

She said a lot of other stuff. Something about inching forward to check around a building before barreling ahead and some advice about saving my clutch by not riding it, but I was too giddy to listen. I hugged the evaluator with sincere affection and then sprinted out of the car to tell my father.

I've been driving now for a period of several months and I have never gotten closer to being in an accident than when the DMV official was sitting right next to me. You can't fault my timing.

Part 2: Dangerous Driving

When I sat behind the wheel of my family's clunky van, a couple of my younger brothers strapped dutifully in the back, I understood from my father’s worried look and my mother’s perpetually expressed concerns that there was a lot more to driving than pushing the accelerator peddle. Back then I had just been granted an “Instructional Permit” (my mother always stressed Instructional) and was charged with fulfilling several hours of supervised driving (my mother always stressed the supervised).

A Permit is a not a license to drive. It is, however, a license for your parents to do some crazy and tyrannical things in the name of safety while you drive. Remember that, boys and girls.

My father started me out on his '03 Ford hatchback, a car I would eventually purchase, by taking me to a deserted parking space and handing me the keys.

The hatchback, affectionately named the Screaming Yellow Zonker, is a manual shift, meaning it is a car designed like a union: easy if you're already initiated, hard if you are just getting started. Sitting to my immediate right was a black stick shift. I'd seen my father fiddle with it, but I hadn't the foggiest idea of its utility. On the floor were three pedals, a forward or accelerator, a stop or brake and a smaller pedal whose purpose was known only to the car itself. We called this third petal the clutch, because it is to be deployed in harrowing circumstances.

Starting a manual car from a standstill is like riding a bull, only the fun doesn't stop after ten seconds. In my experience that first day, a stick shift will react in one of two ways to a stop start. The first is to die with a loud shudder. The second is to move forward with a series of motions that are eerily similar to something Jim Carrey might do.

I don't need to go into too much detail about that first afternoon of driving; the retelling is making me blush and who needs to hear about all that anyway? It'll suffice to say that my father wore a neck brace to work the next day and my backside was pretty sore too.

It was a couple weeks after my first interaction with driving that I found myself in the situation described in the first paragraph of this post. My mother was persuaded to let me drive only after several rounds of heated conversation. My father was ok with letting me drive and I wanted to prove myself. My mother was convinced I would wreck the car and slaughter all the passengers and thought it wise to wait a while. In all fairness, I probably would have killed everyone, had my parents not intervened, but let me tell the story.

My drive down our driveway went something like this:

Me: “OK, so I'm going to turn on the ignition now, OK?”

Mother: [Sitting behind me] “Honey?”

Father: “You're good.”

Me: [Starts ignition]. [Adjusts radio channel]. [Releases brake]. [Puts car in reverse].

Mother: [Very calm] “OK, so when you back up, you need to make sure you are watching where you are going, you don't want to smash anything without seeing it first.”

Brother in back: “Actually you don't want to smash anything. Period.”

Mother: [A little agitated] That's enough back there. No backseat driving.

Me: [Chuckles].

Mother: “Honey, maybe he's not ready to drive the family yet.”

Me: [Regrets chuckling]. [Pulls car out of garage and depresses close button on garage door controller]. [Puts car in drive and begins toward main road].

Father: “Blinker.”

Me: [Issues left turn signal].

Mother: “OK. Now take your time here, son. Cars move along this road at sixty miles an hour. If you don't see them coming they might smash into you smelting us all into tiny ball bearings.”

Brother in back: “They might even do that if you do see them coming.”

Everyone else: [Glares at brother in back].

Me: [While everyone is still looking back, pulls forward into traffic]

Too busy to credit: “Wait!” “Did you look both ways?” “Was that a Hummer?” “Easy on the gas!” “You need to tell me before you turn!”

I consider that first trip a major success. The van received only one additional dent, I never smashed a curb, I was actually in control of the car at a few points and, to my knowledge, I was never flipped off.

After the ride, my mother used the First Aid kit's epinephrine pen to revive herself and my father offered that he would take the wheel on the return trip.

Despite the setbacks, I had accomplished something. I had driven the family and now had the requisite number of hours to attempt the physical driving test. I was ready.

Part 1: Written Test

With vacation comes the opportunity to dig through last semester's notes and cull some worthy funny stories that were passed over earlier for publication now. The unfortunate and unavoidable consequence of this post facto research is, of course, that the episodes are a tad dated. The piece to follow was started in early February, but then put aside for some terribly important reason that I have now forgotten. Anyway, the driver's test is a timeless coming of age adventure and I'd be remiss if I didn't share my experiences with the Faithful CN Few.

This series of posts is dedicated to my friend who just passed the exam.

Driving. At 16 it's a rite of passage, an entrance from younger boyhood to older boyhood. It's the freedom to take your friends around town, risk your life and burn a few Jacksons on gas and a few Benjamins on insurance. It's sixty miles an hour at night on a deserted road with your lights off. It's a couple of dents, an obscene gesture and a snazzy bumper sticker. It's America by way of Japan.

Only in my family, the passage doesn't happen at 16. Because of insurance costs and a maternal distrust of anything with four wheels, my brothers and I had to wait until after our 18^th birthday to pursue our non-pedestrian dreams. And when I did get the green light to drive, I discovered the process is not as simple as Grand Theft Auto implied.

A couple of weeks after I attained legal adulthood (when insurance costs take their sharp decline), I scheduled an appointment at a local government office whose name in the phone book was as ominous as it was wrong: Death May 'Vollow (DMV). I was informed during a fifteen minute phone conversation with a computer that I would have to pass two tests: A written and physical driving exam, both of which would require my absolute dedication, preparation and resolve.

I'd heard the test was based on a monstrously difficult collection of arcane data that had as much to do with actually driving as putting together a car from scratch. One of the main characters in Adventures In Odyssey – a radio program I used to be addicted to, but have now been clean of for over a week – failed the test in dramatic fashion and I have a couple of friends who failed the test, one of whom failed it twice. These tales of woe and embarrassment were enough to point me to the books and within a couple of hours I figured I knew everything there was to know about the American transit system.

I wondered, as I was studying, what the importance of Eisenhower's establishing a national highway or the history of Oleander hedges was. Those of you who have taken the test probably think I'm a blooming idiot (or maybe another kind of idiot), but the actual material that was going to be on the test was never told me beforehand and the 1940s era driving manual I found at the public library gave me few pointers.

My confusion notwithstanding, the test turned out to be a piece of chocolate mousse. Had I been hungry I would have eaten the test for lunch. I made the test my farm animal. I bench pressed the test. I mean, seriously; I've had harder medical examinations. Here are a couple sample questions...

1) A giant squid is consuming an office complex by the interstate on which you are driving. What should you do?

a) Pull out an automatic weapon and save hundreds of lives by wasting the squid.

b) Obey all applicable traffic laws and phone the appropriate authorities when it is safe.

c) Disobey all applicable traffic laws and do not phone the police.

2) A black Ford GT wants to race. What should you so?

a) Remove a knuckle duster from your glove compartment, exit your car and beat the tar out of the GT driver.

b) Obey all applicable traffic laws and phone the appropriate authorities when it is safe.

c) Gun your engine to show the GT you mean business and then win the race.

3) Four cars arrive at an intersection at the same time: You, a Ferrari, a Toyoto Tundra and a firetruck. Who gets to leave first?

a) The Ferrari, because the most valuable car has the Right Of Way.

b) The firetruck.

c) Order of departure can be determined via hand motions and honks at the intersection.

Actually the second question was the only one I got wrong. I knew – everyone knows – that knuckle dusters are street illegal in California and I am not foolish enough to answer that, but a man has got to protect his turf and no GT is going to squish my pride. When I debated the merits of my response to the DMV receptionist she smiled, showing lipstick stained teeth and shook her head. I got the feeling appeals were as common as they were unappreciated.

The point is that I studied for a couple of grueling weeks and passed the thing without breaking a sweat. If you're looking to pass, my advice is to just go in raw. Studying just distracts from the obvious nature of the questions. You don't need to prepare much to succeed at a test designed to be passable by illegal immigrants who don't even speak the language.

The first part of my driving adventure was complete, but celebration was unwarranted; the worst was yet to come.