Drive My Car
When I originally wrote this story a few years ago, I wrote that I wish I knew where Jared — the one who could drive my car — was. I found out today that he committed suicide when he was 25. This breaks my heart for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that he saved my life in so many ways at a time when no one else could or would. I wish I could have been there for him in his time of need. He was such a truly good person and I wonder sometimes if this world just isn’t made for the truly good.
I celebrated his life this morning by turning “What Is And What Will Never Be” by Led Zeppelin up to 11 in my car and singing along with wild abandon. I would encourage you to do the same, no alcohol required. On to the story….
I will never understand why kids today don’t care about driving. They don’t seem to be excited about getting their licenses or even really care about learning how to drive. I guess it’s because of the ability to talk to people on a myriad of different social media platforms, but it still baffles me.
When I was a kid, I could not wait to drive. My grandmother had a 1965 Impala that she would let me drive around parking lots as soon as I was old enough to reach the pedals, and my dad always told me I could have it one day. I would sit in it and dream of it being mine and going anywhere I wanted.
Driving was freedom, driving was awesome, driving was the teenage American dream.
When the day came for me to drive, I didn’t wind up getting that Impala. My father had neglected to think about the fact that it didn’t have seat belts. I did, however, get a car of my very own long before any of my friends did.
The story went a little something like this: somewhere around 7th or 8th grade, my mother started getting really sick. She went to a lot of doctors, but no one could find anything wrong with her. I’m not sure what the final diagnosis was, but she somehow became convinced that her tonsils were the issue. She found a doctor who would remove them. I say found, because I’m not sure if they ever really need to be removed. At any rate, one night not long after this procedure, she started hemorrhaging from her throat and I rode in the back of my father’s Mercedes as he drove her to the hospital, going well over 100 miles per hour the whole way. It was both exhilarating and horrifying.
According to my mother, this was the year she almost died. I say “according to,” because my mother is not a very reliable narrator, even in present tense. I have no one else except my father to back up this story, and we were both susceptible to her version of reality.
At any rate, it was determined that as she was clearly unwell, she could not drive me to and from school or to other after school activities, and thus, the best thing to do was to buy a 14 year old a car and get her a hardship license.
Understand that hardship licenses are usually reserved for kids who have to work to support their families, not kids whose mothers may or not be faking sick in order to get attention from an alcoholic husband who has just gotten sober and is spending a lot of time at meetings and not with her. That didn’t stop the state of Tennessee from issuing me one.
The car I received was a 1980 Honda Prelude, in my opinion, still one of the best cars ever made. I would own one right now if I could. Mine was navy blue, with a sunroof, sheepskin seat covers, and a manual transmission. It looked like a little blue potato on wheels and I fucking loved it.
My father, far too stressed to teach me himself, recruited young people from his 12 step program to teach me. I didn’t understand the strange relationship between these people and my dad. All I knew is they had a lot more patience teaching me to drive stick than he did.
I was a fast learner, as I desperately needed to get the hell out of that house. Although getting sober was a good thing for my father, it changed the dynamics of our household. It was like the rules had changed overnight and no one gave me the new rulebook. I decided I didn’t want to play the family game anymore.
My parents were both smokers and one thing they didn’t care about me doing was smoking. I guess they felt it was hypocritical. I started smoking and driving and listening to music. This was my escape from their insanity.
Incidentally, if you can smoke and drive stick, you are a bad ass. I am convinced that if all teenagers had to drive cars with manual transmissions there would be no more texting and driving accidents.
It wasn’t long before I was hanging out with people who had access to alcohol and those people became my new friends. I think they also liked that I had a car. I also discovered that if I played it just right, the guys who worked at the gas station where I filled up my car would sell me 40 oz bottles of beer. That was amazing.
There was nothing better in my life than driving around in that car, drinking a 40. I do not condone drunk driving, but at night, deep in the country, with the sunroof back, and good music in the cassette player, I felt alive and that I might even be OK.
I never wrecked the 1980 Prelude, but at some point the 1980 Honda was replaced with a 1984 Prelude (boxier, pop up headlights) and I managed to mess it up twice, completely sober. I drove it into a field drunk one time, but there was no damage.
I’m not sure when or where I met my friend Jared. He was a year older than me, but we had a lot of mutual friends. He was the kind of guy I could trust to take me to say, my cotillion, get drunk with me, and not get handsy. He was a good guy. He was also one of the only people I would let drive my car.
He had a sixth sense for when it was time to take the wheel -- or maybe he just noticed me swerving a lot. “Jared you can drive my car,” became a common drunken refrain for me and to be honest, he may have saved my life some nights.
It wasn’t that he wasn’t driving drunk, he just wasn’t driving AS drunk. That’s an important distinction.
We would sit in that car and drink and listen to Led Zeppelin II. He only tried to kiss me once and we both laughed it off. I’ve often wondered where he was and tried to find him via the usual social media routes. I found out recently he killed himself when he was 25. I will never complain about being 50 again.
It is still a mystery to me how my parents never figured out how much I was drinking and why they never took those car keys away from me. I was too careless to cover my tracks well and I’ve never been a good liar. I was never grounded and I never lost my driving privileges, for better or for worse.
I still love to drive and I’m a great driver, if I do say so myself. I own a much nicer car now and Sport mode is the bomb. I recently drove my husband and my in-laws to Ft Lauderdale at an insane speed in an insane amount of time in order to catch a cruise ship I thought we would surely miss. We didn’t.
There are still times, especially summer evenings, when I’m driving home from work or the store, with the sunroof back, and I think, this would be a great night to park in a field, drink a bottle of MD 2020 through a straw, and smoke a pack of cigarettes, and listen to the second side of Abbey Road. I don’t, of course, but I think about it. And then I come home and kiss my husband and dog and thank the gods for Jared and for the grace of a universe that saw fit to keep me, and everyone else on the road around me, safe.
