The car roared, wheels spinning, and slammed through the garage wall and straight into my dinning room, knocking the china cabinet over along the way. Apparently, I’d mistakenly hit the gas and now the car, without a scratch on it, sat in my dining room, making a slow, shrill beeping noise. I sat, one hand on the wheel, one hand on the gearshift, Paul Simon still playing loudly and stared blankly ahead in shock.
I am well aware of the fact that I’m a terrible driver. While most of my friends dragged their parents to the DMV the day they qualified for permits, I had no such desire to do so. I relied on my parents to drive me to swim practice and friends to take me to parties. But, with persistent nudging from my mom and dad, I faced the realization that I couldn’t be chauffeured around forever. Although still hesitant, I finally got my permit.
Had I not lived briefly in Virginia, I probably would not even have my license now, at the age of 19. Virginia is one of the few states that grants drivers licenses without an actual road test. I took every class the local driving school offered and filled my free time with lessons from Mike, the school’s morbidly obese, 300-pound diabetic driving instructor. I finished my requirements just two weeks before moving to D.C. Despite being grossly unfit to operate a motor vehicle, I received my license.
My parents forbid me from driving with anyone else in the car and driving after 5 p.m. I wasn’t allowed to listen to music because it was “too distracting.” Even with these protective restrictions, they wouldn’t have been surprised by a small accident or even two. But no one was prepared for what happened the day I got my license.
That morning, my last in-car lesson consisted of driving “Big Mike “from driving school to 7-11 for a candy stop. I felt supremely guilty facilitating this man’s diabetes, but he didn’t seem to feel likewise about letting me slip through the cracks of drivers’ ed. In fact, he didn’t even care that I could neither change lanes nor get the narrow car into its space until my third time straightened it out. “Good job, kid,” he said, shoving an entire Snickers bar into his mouth as he scribbled out my paperwork. “You’re done here.”
It was so satisfying to finally pull into my garage. I could hardly believe it. I unpeeled my sweaty legs from the leather seats and turned on the CD player. It was Paul Simon’s “Graceland”and I hummed along, smugly celebrating my success. I stepped onto the breaks and shifted into what I thought was park.
My mind swirled in a thousand directions and then abruptly focused when I noticed that my staircase was in clear view. I looked to my right where my mother sat on the couch, jaw dropped, staring at me in horror. I looked down at the pipe I had broken as water slowly flooded on the hard wood floor under the large car.
“Oh my god!” I shrieked. I pushed to scream again but no sound came out. My throat closed tightly. I felt dizzy. I could hardly breathe. I laughed maniacally as I lay my forehead on the steering wheel. Finally, I resigned myself to a whisper, “I just drove a hole into my house.”
With this realization, my fight-or-flight instinct kicked in. Being a coward, I always choose flight. Sprinting through my house, I face-planted as I hit the stairs. The wind knocked out of me, I forced myself up, making it to my room before my mother could ask if I was OK and before my father could kill me.
Obviously, the event only heightened my insecurities; for the next six months, I refused to drive again. Finally, my parents forced me to get behind the wheel, assigning me little errands here and there. They claimed I needed to rebuild my confidence. My friends, however, allowed no such thing. I’d told one person. She told her boyfriend and he told a friend. By the time I was confident-read, foolish-enough to drive again, everyone knew of my fiasco and no one would set foot inside my car. I found it almost touching that friends would drive as much as 45 minutes out of their way to pick me up.
“I’m keeping you off the road,” a good friend said as she insisted on taking me to swim practice. “This is for the good of all society. “
I just shrugged my shoulders and laughed at myself. It was all I could do, and at least I saved money on gas.
