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"How
I Didn't Learn to Drive"
From Plato's Garage
"Wah
wah, wah wah-wah, wah!"
My father sounded like the adults in Peanuts cartoons when he
was drunk.
"Wah wah-wah, wah-wah wah, wah wah-wah!"
What he was actually saying was something like, "Get in the car. Get in the goddamned car right now." It was early Saturday afternoon sometime in the spring of 1978 or so. My dad was collecting me and my sister from my mom's house for our regular every-other-weekend visit. I had heard his tires squeal and lurch in front of our tiny white tract house, so I knew he was in the throes of a hostile outburst. His second wife had just left him, and he had lost a 1964 Corvette Stingray in the settlement, so he had been on edge for a while. There was always a slurry, ominous tone to his voice when he called. Our weekend bags were packed and sitting side by side in the living room, on the three-tone blue shag carpet that my mother had decided was "neat" so that she wouldn't have to spend money changing it.
"You don't have to go," she would say every time I whined about this biweekly obligation. But she wasn't at home this time, and she knew we would never take her up on her suggestions, anyway. I was too scared to find out how my dad would react. Somehow, he managed to enthrall us for thirty-six hours every two weeks, and we sat in front of the television in a stupor, letting our eyes glaze to a fine, gauzy blur while he watched endless football games and drank gin and tonics. If we went outside or to another part of the house for ten or fifteen minutes, he would yell at us to return, reminding us that we were supposed to be spending time together. After a while I stopped trying, and the only time I got off the couch was to make him a fresh cocktail, being careful to trickle in just enough Rose's Lime Juice to impart a subtle chartreuse sheen. By the time I was twelve, my gin and tonics were beautiful and precise works of art, and of course I always performed a taste test before serving.
I knew my dad drove drunk a lot, and I'd been in the car with him several times while he sipped a freshly-made cocktail from a glass that fit neatly into the coffee-cup holder on the sub-dash console. At the time, he was driving a shiny black El Camino, sort of souped-up, sort of customized, but nothing to gawk at. He sat in it tapping his fingers on the steering wheel, engine grumbling, as we made sure the front door was locked, and trotted out across our browning patch of lawn. My sister propped her green-and-blue floral soft-sided suitcase between the back window and the wheel hump in the truck bed, and slipped into the middle of the bench seat. I stood outside for a minute and bent over to peer at my dad through the window.
"Get in the car. Get in the goddamned car!"
I threw my own bag in the open bed and got in, locking the door with my elbow as I pushed my fist into my cheek. We took off with another squeal and peeled out, which made the car fishtail a couple of times in the short space between our house and the next stop sign.
"Gawl, Dad," my sister said, and folded her arms across her chest. I felt my bones lock into place and my blood slow as we sped past the ramshackle houses and rotting pickup trucks of Oildale towards the railroad tracks. My dad lived on the other side of these, in an area called Olive Drive, named after the main drag that ran down the middle of it, between the very nice houses and the pretty nice houses in which the kids with multiple pairs of brand-name tennis shoes and good haircuts who went to Beardsley Junior High School with me lived. I was never excited about spending time with my dad, but I was always relieved to get away to his very nice house, where there was enough style, charm, and space to cosmetically diminish the undertow of sadness and anger that sucked at it. I secretly relished my gin and tonic task, and at night I would sneak out into the living room and sit in one of the big, brown leather chairs scanning magazines, looking for pictures of men in Speedos in Playboy pictorial spreads or staring at Jim Palmer's practically naked body in those full-page Jockey underwear ads. It was a guilty pleasure for me, knowing that I was becoming what my dad had been afraid I would become when he tried to make me stop playing with girls and learn how to fight years before.
I let out a heavy, trailing sigh as we waited for traffic to pass on the street that ran along the tracks, which was as close as I could come at the time to expressing any kind of negative emotion about any given situation. This was something I had picked up from my mother, and I knew it drove my dad crazy. But instead of yelling at me to speak up if I wanted to say something, he started crying. I had never seen him engage in this particular activity before, and my stiff jaw went slack as I turned to watch him. Beside me, my sister had already locked shut inside the little shell she kept ready for such situations, and she sat calmly inside it, as secret and opaque as a pearl. We idled through three or four breaks in the traffic as my dad's tears turned into sobs, and then a repetitive, urgent mumbling poured from his mouth. I remember it as the first verse of a round that he hoped we would join and counter in some way:
"Everyone's against me. Nobody loves me. You don't love me.
"Everyone's against me. Nobody loves me. You don't love me."
I'm sure he threw in some more colorful phrases, but all I recall is my father repeating these lines while he sobbed and rocked his back against the seat in a steady rhythm. This was something his little sister had done when he was a kid in this parents' car, and according to him, it had always driven him crazy. Just as I was about to say something about this ironic coincidence, he peeled out again, across the street and through the gravel that separated it from the railroad tracks. My sister clunked against his shoulder and I held on to the door handle so that I wouldn't squish her between us as the right wheels went up onto the tracks and the left ones crunched along the gravel. His wailing died down and his tears dried up and his neck got all veiny and red as he struggled to keep the car steady on this completely insane path he had chosen, and I saw that he was zapping all of his emotions into this black El Camino and the crazy way he was driving it. Even though I knew I was in danger, all I could feel was jealousy. I wanted to pour my own anger into a big, black machine and let it crunch up everything in its path.
I noticed my sister was crying by this time, or seeping rather, sitting there stiff and bug-eyed, compulsive tears forming rivulets on her cheeks. I slung my arm over to grab the steering wheel, but my dad swatted it away and jerked the car back down onto the street right in front of a truck. The swooping baritone of its horn reached out at us and arched away as the driver swerved, hiccuping sideways on his back wheels before gaining control. The three of us were silent the rest of the way home. My dad parked the El Camino in his sweeping driveway, and stumbled up to the front door. When he couldn't find his key, he punched his fist through one of the variegated rectangular glass panels that lined the entryway of his house, and reached through to turn the doorknob.
"Oh, fuck," I said, deeming this a perfectly appropriate time to try out a new word that I had been toying with in my head for a couple of years.
I don't remember what further words were exchanged between the three of us, if any. My sister took him into the bathroom to flush his hand under cold water and wrap towel after towel around it to stop the bleeding while I made him a gin and tonic. I think he was already dating his current wife when this happened, and I suppose she came over and took him to the hospital or something. My sister supervised the sweeping of the broken glass and the swabbing of the blood that had splattered against the door and the wall and the windows. I sat in front of the television and looked at my reflection on the empty screen, and for the first time I realized that I couldn't wait to drive. I had already gotten tired of relying on my parents to cart me around everywhere I wanted to go, like every teenager does at some point, but now I was burning up to peel rubber and weave through traffic and drive on the railroad tracks if I wanted to.
When I was fifteen, I took a private driver's training course so I could be ready to take over my mom and stepdad's brown Pinto the moment my next birthday arrived. My instructor was a typical Bakersfield chick with feathered blond hair and severely rouged cheeks, who used her own Red Trans-Am for my lessons. "Stop gunning the gas," she would say to me every ten seconds or so. "Stop going so fast."
By the time I had turned sixteen, I had already skipped a bunch of every-other-weekends, and my dad had calmed down a little since he had been somewhat happily ensconced in his house with his new wife and her daughter for the past couple of years. He spent a ton of money building a black-bottomed, free-formed pool with a natural diving rock in his half-acre backyard, but what really enticed me over to his house was the fact that he let me use their new 1982 Chevy Camaro Berlinetta when I was there. It was black and fast, with a sleek new body style that made it look more European than American, and a cushy, contoured driver's seat that felt like a hybrid of technology and flesh. The first I drove it, I went out to an oil sump party some people from my high school were having, which consisted of a bunch of kids getting piss-ass drunk and feeling each other up in the backs of cars among the ruins of the old oil fields that stretched across large portions of land north of Bakersfield.
I don't know why I went, and neither did anyone there, because the party was full of people I didn't even talk to at school. I took a six pack of Coors from an ice chest that was perched on the tailgate of a big red pickup truck and sat alone in the black Berlinetta, where I downed the whole thing in about ten minutes. Then I drove as fast as I could on the two-lane highway that led out of town, wets to Interstate 5, passing semi-trucks without looking for oncoming traffic, singing along to Blue Oyster Cult and Led Zeppelin on Bakersfield's album rock station, KKXX, and screaming at the top of my lungs every so often out the open window. When I got home around 3:00, I passed out on the couch, and no one said a thing the next morning.
That evening, while I was tenderizing tri-tips for one of the Sunday barbecue get-togethers I loathed even more than the football games that were still required viewing, my dad told me he would be around if I wanted to talk him about anything. I nodded and didn't' say a word.
I never did talk to him, really, about anything, either before that or after that,. Everything I had to say to him had leaked out of me, down my leg through the gas pedal into the inner workings of that black Camaro as I hunched forward and strained eyes to keep from seeing double on that two-lane highway the night before. We were obviously both very good at driving this way, and I felt a perverse connection to my dad because of it. I also had a sneaking suspicion that neither of us really knew how to drive at all.
Copyright ©
2000 Rob Campbell.
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