Take the Cannoli (18 page)

In the United States of America, however, if you have reached the age of seventeen without obtaining a driver's license, you get used to The Look. Once a new acquaintance watches you buy beer with a passport, that person will ogle you with the kind of condescending, frightened glance usually reserved for unwed pregnant teenagers. Like you're not a person but instead a kind of sociological statistic, sucking the taxpayers with your moochy demands of food stamps and public transportation. I have seen that look. And, walking home from the grocery store laden with plastic bags, I have heard the voice, too, the
voice screaming from the window of a Honda, graciously advising me to “get a fucking car.”

Nothing scares me more than driving. I can't even ride a bike without mangling my digits and hitting parked cars. I've always been terrified that I'd get behind the wheel and it would turn into one of those death scenes in a Shangri-Las song with bystanders screaming, “Lookoutlookoutlookoutlookout!”

In most families, I hear, the father teaches the kids to drive. But I had been in the backseat when he was screaming at Amy not to damage the U-joints, whatever those are. I figured he already had plenty of reasons to yell at me without adding car damage to his list of behavioral complaints. So Amy tried to teach me—once. Before I even got around to turning the key in the ignition I couldn't stop giggling so she kicked me out of her car and made me walk. After that, I blocked the possibility of driving out of my mind. I'm never going to drive, like I'm never going to murder anyone, like I'm never going to like Celine Dion.

What possessed me, then, at the age of twenty-eight, to learn how to drive? Maybe I agreed to learn because the person who was going to teach me was my boss on the radio show I work for, Ira Glass. While learning to drive has dramatic, once-in-a-lifetime, overcoming-adversity consequences, Ira Glass telling me what to do is a quotidian routine. If my editor is teaching me, I reasoned, I won't really be learning how to drive, I'll be working on a story. Working on a story
isn't really life, unless your life happens to involve getting paid to talk to your parents or Burt Bacharach. Or maybe rethinking driving was just part of the general mind-changing trend of adulthood, part of the same impulse that caused me to reverse my previously held opinions on cucumbers, lipstick, and Neil Young. Or maybe the continuing-education aspect of the lessons appealed to me. After spending twenty years in school, I missed the random learning curve, how one day you're counting haiku syllables and the next day they have you constructing solar-powered hot dog roasters out of tinfoil. Being a grownup requires a twelve-month calendar, and that calendar is mostly filled up with doing things you know how to do.

Besides, I tell myself as I study the Illinois “Rules of the Road” pamphlet, it's not like I'm learning how to swim. I lied when I said that nothing scares me more than driving. At least I'll get into a car. I'm so afraid of drowning that I tend to drink beer in half-pints.

“Rules of the Road” is an alarming, apocalyptic work of literature filled with foreboding information such as “carbon monoxide is a deadly poison” and “if fire is an immediate danger you must
jump clear of the vehicle
” and “if your vehicle runs off the roadway into water but does not sink right away, try to escape through a window.” (And if you can't swim?) I am nonplussed about the erratic portrayal of non-drivers, the warnings that “bicyclists may make
unexpected moves.
” The language is also transparently right-wing, full of diagrams in which the good car is white while the “Black Car is Breaking the Law,” and then there's the
Sieg Heil
salute of a right-turn hand signal, or “the vehicle
on the left should yield to the vehicle on the right.” This booklet feels like a Wes Craven remake of Leni Riefenstahl's
Triumph of the Will
and reading it made me panic.

So by the time I'm ready to go to the DMV and take the written test, I have worked myself into such a frenzy that I feel as though I've just consumed twelve gallons of coffee. I am twitching and tapping my fingers nonstop, ready to forget the whole thing. I go talk to Ira, hoping he'll let me off the hook. He does not. Instead, he gives me a comforting pep talk about how I look “pre-throwup.”

I start ranting against what I like to call the car class. The car class runs the world! The car class is the ruling class! The car class is the class which the American world is set up for! The car class pollutes our world! The car class burns fossil fuels! Normally, I care about fossil fuels as much as everyone else in America, which is to say not at all. But I am so terrified of taking the driving test that I'm looking for any way out. As I leave for the test I feel like I'm off to join a cult.

In Chicago, the Department of Motor Vehicles is the Jonestown, the Heaven's Gate, of the American mainstream. And, just as I never really got lawyer jokes until an attorney made me cry, I finally understand all previous DMV humor—those lines
are
long. Other than the fact that the song on the radio when I come in is “Killing Me Softly,” it's pretty uneventful. I pass the test, pay twenty bucks, receive a learner's permit.

The next morning Ira picks me up for my first lesson. He is parked in front of a fire hydrant, a bad sign. We go to an elementary school parking
lot and I get behind the wheel. I should point out that it is Saturday morning, so I'm not about to bump into or over any six-year-olds.

I am In the Driver's Seat. How I loathe that little colloquialism. I reach to the right for my seat belt, perpetual passenger that I am, and grab hold of the air. I don't know if my feet should be touching the pedals, how much my legs should be bent. I ask Ira what I'm supposed to see out of the mirror, as if reflected glass were some kind of crazy, newfangled technology. I don't know which way to turn the key in the ignition. Ira patiently answers my questions, pointing out which pedal is the brake, which one's the accelerator. He tells me to give it a little gas. My foot nudges the pedal with the delicacy of a Don Rickles punchline. “We just lurched forward like in
Star Trek,
” Ira points out.

I drive in circles. Round and round, over and over. Ira notices that every time I make a turn I stick out my tongue, “like a little kid concentrating really hard on drawing a pony.” I make more circles. I turn left a little. I lurch left a lot. It is hypnotic. I am coddled. I am encouraged. My instructor coos, “I'm so impressed. Sarah, you're doing so well.” Then, “Don't hit the handicapped people!”

It reminds me of learning to play the piano: In the beginning you look at your hands as much as you look at the sheet music. The difficulty isn't decoding the notes, it's doing it in time, without stopping to think about every little move.

After half an hour in which I play the driving equivalent of “Chopsticks,” Ira takes over the wheel again to take us to the next parking lot. I look out the window as he drives. Never in my life have I viewed
the nation's roadways through the eyes of a driver. Suddenly, our lane appears so narrow and fraught with danger. My beautiful city of orderly boulevards and responsible fellow citizens has turned into some film noir back alley where you can't trust a soul, where even the parked cars look like they're packing heat and they don't care who knows. Ira, formerly hatless, is now tipping his fedora at a skirt in a doorway, though around here a dame's pretty smile gets you nothing but the jaws of life.

Ira drives past Rosehill Cemetery, exclaiming, “Perfect! No one around. No one you can hurt anyway.”

I drive past mausoleums and headstones, past graves dating back to the Civil War. Lucky bastards, to live in an America before cars. It occurs to me that some of the occupants must have died in car accidents.

I sigh. I'm bored. I'm no longer nervous, but I'm not really concentrating. I don't feel like myself. I feel stoned, like someone other than me is skidding in the snow. And then, out of nowhere, another car.

Ira screams, “Signal!”

“I can't.”

“Signal!”

I'd forgotten there would be other cars involved. I have problems of my own without worrying about the other drivers. Not just their actions—their actual existence. Now that I'm nervous again, I start giggling. When I'm scared, I laugh. A lot. Another truck passed us in the cemetery and I drive straight off the road. Ira, helpful teacher, points out that I drove straight off the road. He calls me a coward. I tell him
that, on the contrary, I was protecting the other car, that driving off the road was a
heroic
move.

I'm such a brand-new driver that I have no habits. Five minutes after I lurched away from the truck, a Buick passes and I am magnetically compelled toward it. Ira grabs the wheel and swerves us away, screaming, “Slow! Slow!”

After an hour in the cemetery, he decides I'm ready to drive among the living. To celebrate, he pops in a tape.

“123456!” yells Jonathan Richman. “Road runner, road runner, going faster miles an hour.” He remembered. It's one of my favorite songs. We bicker a minute about what it's about—he says it's about driving, I say it's about listening to the radio—as I slowly navigate a residential street and pull up to big, noisy Western Avenue. The song is so blissfully distracting that I find myself keeping pace with the music and not the traffic. And four cars, in a kind of convergence of hate, honk a big welcome to the car class.

Ira assures me that it was a good first day, though I'm so shook up I drive us straight to a bar where I down three whiskeys. He drives me home.

The next morning Ira shows up for my second lesson. He is ready to go. His readiness is not shared. I refuse to get back into the car. I might never get into a car again. I tell him I can't drive, that I feel removed from the whole thing, that I wasn't driving, I was doing a story.

“You drove for two hours,” Ira counters. “But somehow you still think you haven't driven?”

“Well, driving just isn't something I do. I guess I can see that physically, yes, I was doing it and I remember being there and all. But I just felt like that was my evil twin or something.”

Ira, trying not to lose his temper, reminds me, “Yesterday, when you and I were in the car, everything was just fine.”

“It's only right now you're getting on my nerves.”

“That's what I was going to say! Sarah, you're getting on
my
nerves. You are. I just can't believe this. You can actually drive, and maybe this is just very boy, but I showed you how to drive. Now you're turning around and you're telling me that it never happened.”

Being irrational can get so inexplicable. I put my foot down: “I don't want to drive. And since I have driven—it feels like I would imagine it feels to have an affair. I feel like I've cheated on myself. You know while you're doing it that that's what you're doing and you can feel yourself touch this foreign object. And the next morning you just wish the whole thing had never happened. You just hope no one ever finds out.”

I'm deflated. I need encouragement. Ira launches into an America the Beautiful litany about hitting the road and Dean Moriarty and how “driving
is
America and how there's a fundamental idea of what it is to be an American that's bound up in every on-the-road song and movie and story that I have ever loved, like it's waitin' out there like a killer in the sun, just one more chance we can make it if we run.”

I know he's desperate when he starts singing Springsteen, but it doesn't work. I give him this incoherent spiel about driving through
“the Monument Valley of the heart” on the “highway within.” Not to mention the more pedestrian (ha-ha) argument that American freedom includes the freedom
not
to drive. Besides, Dean Moriarty might have been behind the wheel but the Kerouac character in
On the Road
spent most of the book in the backseat being driven cross-country like the writer he was. He was probably too busy taking notes.

So Ira doesn't get me with Jack Kerouac. He gets me with Jack in the Box.

“Drive-thru,” he says.

“Drive-thru?
Really?
”

I know that most people think of the drive-thru as a visual and gastronomic blight. But my sister and I are obsessed with them. Our dad wouldn't go through drive-thrus when we were growing up. I think they make him nervous, partly because he's always been a little deaf. He only approves of fast food when it's served on the fancy trays. So we think of drive-thru as an object of desire, full of thrills denied to us so cruelly for so long.

Ira asks, “So what's it going to be? Do you want Burger King or Mc-Donald's?”

I want to go somewhere on the right-hand side of the street.

Three left turns later, I pull into the drive-thru lane of a Burger King. I cannot believe my luck. I drive up to the menu and the voice takes our order. And he doesn't just say, “Drive through, please.” He says, “Drive through, please,” to
me.
It is a simple transaction in which I hand the guy some money and he hands me some food, but I am
giddy. When he says, “Enjoy your food,” I feel like he really means it. It is the best crappy sandwich of my life.

Then I drive off into the sunset. Well, technically, it's afternoon, and I head east, but still. I exit onto Lake Shore Drive, the most beautiful street in America. I merge.

MY
ROCK 'N' ROLL FANTASY
is that occasionally, every now and then, a song I like comes on the radio. It's a simple dream, I know, and every so often, once or twice a year, it actually comes true. I get all I need from pop music song by song. That's how I like it best—two or three minutes of speed or sorrow coming out of speakers with so much something that the world stops cold.