Teach Me Tonight by Dinah Washington
Throughout the course of my life, I’ve never once driven a car. I’m 28 years old, the angst is beginning to gnaw at me. True, sure, I grew up in Manhattan, where having a car is much stupider than not having one, and I spent most of my adult life in Berlin, where owning a car was equally as unnecessary, a bourgeois indulgence, if you will.
I’m no longer in Berlin, though. I spend most of my time in Montreal, with the occasional family visit to New York and LA. Montreal has a public transportation system that’s decent, but it’s by and large, especially when compared to New York and Berlin, a car city. My girlfriend’s family ridicules me as if I’m demented, mentally impaired—what happened in my fucked up evolution that would cause me to not go and get a driver’s license? I remind them, frequently, ‘I’m from New York City! Born and raised!’ This sense of pride, which gets people points elsewhere, does not work with them. ‘You’re going to want to be able to pick your kids up from school,’ they frequently lament. I don’t have any kids, I don’t want any anytime soon. My girlfriend doesn't either. Those little fuckers would destroy my life, our life, no doubt about it. Is that enough of an imperative to get a license? I’m more interested in being able to drive so that I can go to the grocery store and buy 24 packs of Perrier to have for the week, or perhaps rent a car next time I go away somewhere cool and exotic, like the south of Spain, for example. I would probably need a car there if I were to see exquisite sights and not be dependent on anyone else. Then again, my girlfriend could drive.
Motor scooters, the motorcycle’s lame, more accessible cousin, there I've been, that I've experienced. In Indonesia in 2015 and Greece in 2016 I ride motor scooters to get from point A to point B. I ride the scooters around all day, not able to believe how well I can drive without ever practicing. In both Indonesia and Greece, after a prideful Icarus period, I get into an accident. Luckily I don’t hurt anyone other than myself, only slightly. This isn’t because I’m a bad driver, I tell myself. It’s because I must have been anxious at something new. Surely, there’s no way, after some practice, that I wouldn’t be able to motor scoot around just about anywhere without getting hurt; I’m many things, but reckless isn’t one of them. I’ve been injured too many times, had too many orthopedic surgeries with general anesthesia to at this present day call myself reckless. Still, in truth, there’s a mental block when it comes to driving a motor vehicle.
Anyway: I think it's time to get my driver’s license, that I will admit. It’s one of those things in life, like learning how to swim or having sex for the first time, where the older you get the more embarrassing it becomes, the more confusing it is to those around you. If I ever have kids, it’ll be important to pick them up from school, daycare, practice, friend’s houses, all the other places kids go that luckily I’m not able to list off the top of my head. (It'd be weird if I could). And it’ll be good to have some practice driving first, before those days when I'll have kids to look after. While learning, I imagine I’ll be spending lots of time in the front of a car with a man or woman with an unconscious bias against me, them constantly wondering, underneath the surface of politeness, why I must have been so emotionally stunted to have waited this long to get my driver’s license. I know the NYC excuse won’t cut it with them, no one who isn’t born and raised in New York City really gets it. Even the droves of young, ambitious people who move to New York from Ohio, or places of that ilk, and call the city their home, and begin to call themselves New Yorkers, those lovely people, they’re always baffled to hear that so many in New York don’t have their license. They’ll look at you the way my girlfriend’s family looks at me, like something must have gone terribly wrong in your childhood, or that your parents never really trusted you behind the wheel, so must have discouraged the idea altogether, meaning, again, that there’s something deeply flawed and demented about you. And there isn’t, I always protest. I’ve bicycled around New York City since I was a teenager, never, luckily, getting into an accident. I talk on the phone while cycling, I listen to music, drink cans of coke, all that. I’m totally comfortable on there. It’s a motor that scares me. The idea that I’m not in full control of this mechanism I’m operating. There’s a simplicity to driving a car that bothers me. With cycling, the more I pedal, the faster I go. My physicality dictates the machine. With driving, the thing moves by merely pressing down on a pedal. Huh? That’s it? That can’t be. It’s too easy. Almost too good to be true. There isn’t any logical sense behind it. A horse, no, a camel, riding around on a camel makes more logical sense than getting into an on-ground, contained, air-conditioned space and pressing a pedal to get where you need to go. That’s just too fucking simple to be true. Nothing in New York is that easy, no part of New York City and growing up there, honestly, was that easy.
But I’m not a New Yorker anymore, really. I spend most of my time in Montreal. When I’m in Montreal, I miss Berlin. When I’m in New York, I like it for one day at most, the energy and elation of it all, and then I begin to have panic attacks.
So it’s time to drive. Finally learning how to drive, receiving my license, it will be metaphorical of riding away toward a new phase in life of something or other… you know where I’m going with that, obviously. To look forward, anyway, to do something new, well, that’s a scary prospect. I guess I’ll step on the pedal.