We Thought You Would Be Prettier

by Laurie Notaro

  The Midas Touch

  I get into a lot of bad trouble with my car, and I always wish that I had taken some kind of auto-repair class in high school instead of ceramics. In the course of my car-driving life, I have completed the impossible. I have driven my car up onto a median so far that three tires floated above the ground. I have forgotten to pull the parking brake, which caused my car to roll into the middle of the street in the dead of night until some policeman came and pushed it back and then told my dad. I have decapitated a total of three driver’s-side mirrors, lopped off by a particularly evil mailbox while pulling out of my driveway. I have driven over at least seven concrete bumpers in about ten seconds during a rainstorm when my glasses had fogged up in a parking lot and I was on a date. A pebble once lodged itself in the brakes, causing such an agonizing metal-on-metal screech that pedestrians in the vicinity turned around to determine where the screaming noise was coming from.

  In the course of this history, inevitably, I get taken by a mechanic or a service shop. It even happens every time I get my car fixed or oil changed and the golden egg of a dirty air filter pops its grimy head up and demands a replacement. It’s a game. I realized this when my sister mentioned that her air filter also needed changing every time her oil did. My other sister agreed. So did my mother. But my father, husband, and brother-in-law just laughed at us, informing all of us girls that the dirty air filter was a trick. Personally, I think self-defense classes, particularly for women, should institute programs for protection in these situations.

  “Ma’am, your air filter is mighty clogged up. Would you like to change it?”

  Prepare the battle stance, knees locked, arms up and elbows bent, fists clenched. Step forward, throw a punch, scream, “NO!”

  “Miss, the heels on the boots of your tires need renailing.”

  “NO!”

  “Lady, the teeth on your flywheel all need root canals and capping.”

  “NO!!”

  The last time an oil filter was presented to me, it was dripping ooze, looking as if it had been caught like a seagull in a tidal wave from the Exxon Valdez. I shook my head, and informed the mechanic that it looked just fine to me.

  He stared at me, speechless, his fingers tightening along the oily rim, wondering to himself if I had recently sustained a massive crowbar injury to my head. “Whatever you say, lady,” he snapped, which in Mechanic Speak means “You stupid broad. Women’s libber!”

  So when I gently bumped into a concrete parking slab while running an errand a couple of weeks ago and my car began to scream, I began to worry. It was a loud, high-pitched “Mommy-you’re-hurting-me” kind of scream. I drove the car to the closest repair shop, which was a Midas, and Danny, the pudgy-bellied manager, pulled my car into the auto bay and put his guys right to work. Fifteen minutes later, he entered the waiting room, laughing. “I have good news for you,” he said with a grin. “You’ll never guess what that sound was!”

  “A pebble,” I said quietly.

  “How did you know?” he inquired.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I answered. “Is the car ready?”

  “Well, that was the good news,” he continued. “Your master cylinder needs to be replaced. I can have the part here in an hour. You car will basically fall apart without it.”

  “How much?” I said, my worst fears confirmed.

  “It’ll be three hundred and fifty dollars,” Danny replied. “The gravity of the situation demands immediate action. I wouldn’t drive from here to your house without getting this fixed first.”

  I clenched my fists, took a step forward, and whispered, “No.”

  “We have a payment plan,” he added. “And I’ll give you a ride back to your office.”

  Sucker.

  Danny led me to his car, a fiery-red Camaro with black stripes, and I stood there, about to break the last in a set of rules I had made for myself when I was sixteen. Never wear sweatpants in public. Don’t eat more than 800 calories a day. Don’t throw your gauchos away, they will never go out of style. Never accept a ride in a Camaro.

  I thought that rule was almost flagrant, as I never knew anyone who had actually owned one, and had heard several years ago that the grand chariots of White Trash Culture were no longer going to be produced. Not only did it make my heart skip a beat, it made me shout out loud that there must be a God after all.

  And if that wasn’t enough good news, the Pontiac Firebird was also being pulled from the lineup, though I suspect that either the Christ or his mother, Mary, tired and weary from decades of hanging from the rearview mirror and emitting a new-car smell, had something to do with that. Honestly, standing with Danny next to his car, I realized that I probably hadn’t even seen a Camaro or Firebird since the last time I drove out of my high school parking lot, but I attributed their absence to the fact that all the guys who drove them knocked up their teen girlfriends and had to buy cars that would accommodate a baby. Like a Chevy crew-cab pickup.

  It turns out that I was probably just living in the wrong part of town, which finally gives me something good to say about my neighborhood, even though most of my fellow residents wouldn’t even consider a baby car seat. After all, why put a big, bulky thing in the backseat when ten other people need to sit back there, too?

  Anyway, the announcement that the Camaro and Firebird species had a date with extinction couldn’t be met with more pleasure from me. In fact, I do recall yelping out in glee when I heard the proclamation over the radio. If they’re doing away with the Camaro, I thought then, the dark days of our civilization are definitely behind us. The potential for progress is enormous—I mean, if they quit making the Camaro, the days are numbered for Journey and White Snake rock blocks. It was a golden hope for a new society! Frankly, I had lost all faith in humankind, but it gave me confidence that we actually are progressing and evolving in an upwardly fashion. Besides, the Camaro culture has never been the same since guys stopped wearing corduroy shorts and tank tops made out of netting, anyway.

  However, as I lowered myself to ground level and rather rolled into Danny’s bucket seats, I understood that there was one sad orphan when we lost the Camaro and Firebird: A roach clip just doesn’t look as good in, say, a Saturn or a Rav 4.

  The next morning on my way to work, my Grand Master Flash Cylinder fixed, the sin of riding in a Camaro never to be washed from my history, I passed Midas. Standing out in front on the sidewalk were two men, one holding a cluster of balloons and the other a huge hand-painted picket sign that read THE MIDAS TOUCH CAN KILL YOU.

  I didn’t stop to ask, I didn’t want to know. I wouldn’t exactly have agreed, but certainly I knew, a little pure part of me that was once so proud was now quite dead, never to return.

  Drive to Survive

  When I entered the classroom for the driving school, I seriously debated if a warrant for my arrest due to noncompliance with my traffic ticket was better or worse than sticking it out for the whole day.

  I just didn’t know. Already it looked miserable. There, forty-five people in front of me in the registration line, was the best cross section of humanity any sociologist has ever seen. Included in this nuts-and-soft-center assortment were: a Paris Hilton wannabe, her explicitly low-cut porno jeans resting just below her hipbones, which stuck out like doorknobs; her friend, who stood next to her on six-inch-tall wedgie flip-flops as they chatted away, possibly unaware that they were signing up for eight hours of driver’s ed and not an open cattle call for a reality show; the old, ancient man with crazy Grandpa Munster eyebrows who was clearly involved in some deep REM sleep despite his upright position; and the tall, burly guy with a meticulously trimmed mustache who assumed the “I’m pissed” stance and who I would have guessed to be a cop had he not been in this class.

  After about ten minutes, I was pleasantly shocked and delighted when it was revealed that I wouldn’t have to wait long to see my first show. The woman in front of me, who was shaped like an oil drum and looked as if raccoons had just dug
through her hair searching for a snack, was the first to melt down.

  “Here you go, sir,” she said compliantly to the instructor as she stepped forward and handed him a copy of her traffic violation.

  “Mmm-hmmm,” he replied starkly, then looked up at her. “And the hundred-twenty-dollar fee, acceptable in a money order only?”

  “Oh, sir,” the barrel said, “I chose to be on time here this morning over stopping at the ATM.”

  “Well, that wasn’t very smart,” the instructor rebuffed. “You chose to come on time to a class you haven’t even paid for, so I suggest—”

  “OH PLEASE, SIR,” the woman actually bellowed in a gutteral, deep, desperate howl, typically only heard on the Discovery Channel when a mother watches her offspring get eaten. “PLEASE! Please don’t turn me away! I have to be in this class today, because I’m a trucker and if you turn me away, that’s my liveihood, sir! That’s the way I make a living, and if I don’t take this class today I’ll lose my license! And then I’ll have nothing! It’s my life, sir!”

  “You got this ticket a month ago,” the instructor, who in this line of work clearly had heard it all before, said. “You haven’t driven past or seen an ATM in that whole time?”

  The barrel stopped for a moment, searching, searching, searching, but obviously couldn’t find a comeback, so she returned to her comfort zone of shameless begging.

  “Oh please, sir, please, sir, I got in last night at four A.M., dropped off my load at Wal-Mart, got two hours sleep, and then came here. I’ve got to be in New Mexico tomorrow, so I really have to be in this class,” the trucker explained, and, honestly, I did start to feel a little sorry for her, and at least sleeping in a truck explained her lack of attention to detail when it came to her grooming skills. Believe me, no one’s going to mistake the back of my head for Nicole Kidman’s, but if I had to freshen up at truck-stop restrooms as a matter of routine, I’d skip the hairdo procedure, too, in favor of not catching a venereal disease or quite possibly the whole rainbow of them by touching the faucet.

  “On your allotted forty-minute lunch break I strongly suggest you make a trip to Circle K and get yourself a money order,” he said sharply. “Or you won’t be making any more trips anywhere.”

  “Thank you, sir, thank you, sir,” the barrel replied, backing away and, oddly, bowing at the same time, as if she had just had an audience with King Solomon or the Pope. I was torn between yelling at her, “You come back here right now and kiss his ring!” and “Stop that! You’re giving this ordinary city employee a false sense of power that will increase the chances of him abusing it for the next eight hours of this class!” I was afraid, however, that that might be just enough to make the barrel bond to me for the rest of the class and therefore make her unshakable, since the extent of her human contact was apparently rather limited. I took that time, instead, to keep my mouth shut and scout out a seat far away from the one where the barrel plopped down.

  Aside from angering the emperor by handing him my traffic ticket instead of laying it flat, I escaped mostly unscathed and found a seat on an aisle and waited for class to start. I had already heard the rumblings of the “So what did you do?” conversations, in which each offender (particularly the males in this class) tried to outrank each other on the renegade traffic scale by going the fastest or brazenly running a red light. For people such as myself and everybody else in this class who is too chickenshit not to show up for traffic school, this is the pinnacle opportunity to exercise criminal bragging rights, since most likely speeding two miles over the limit in a school zone is the most horrible offense average citizens ever make, unless, naturally, one day we kill our spouse. Regular career criminals don’t have the time, patience, or need to go to traffic school, because chances are when they got pulled over, there were either several kilos of cocaine, a couple of stolen DVD players, or the remains of a victim in the trunk.

  Frankly, no one took the trouble to ask me why I was doing time in class, and I was a little bit relieved. Although I would fall to the bottom of the heap in the pecking order with the badass red-light runners by confessing, “Oh, it’s silly. I was on a cell phone and wasn’t paying attention, so I entered a crosswalk whilst pedestrians were occupying it,” I was prepared to bring out the big guns if needed. So far, I apparently looked harmless enough not to be considered as competition, but should it come to that, I was ready. I was totally ready to break out, “Yeah, there was that thing with the crosswalk, whatever. But that’s not what this is really about, you know. What I’m doing time for really in Karma Speak is hitting an illegal alien on a bike ten years ago, tossing him like a Frisbee onto my hood, and watching him peddle away on his mangled Husky three-speed because somebody mentioned something about deportation,” because if I had to, I would. I would.

  Finally, the class started and before we had even turned the first page in our workbooks, the Pissed-Off Guy raised his hand.

  “Let me ask you something,” he said without the instructor even seeing him. “I’m making a left-hand turn, right, and the guy in front of me goes on the yellow, but he waits too long so I have to go on the red, I see the photo radar flash for ‘running the red’ and a cop pulls behind me and writes me a ticket. I got two tickets, and I didn’t even deserve one!”

  Oh, no, I thought, we’ve made a remarkably early groundbreaking start on the “I Did Not Deserve This Ticket and I Was Wronged” segment, which I deplore. Honestly speaking, this is not my first time in traffic school but my second, although considering it’s my second ticket in twenty years, I hardly consider myself a driving menace. Well, unless I’m on a cell phone, when only the people at least up on the second or third floors or those on roller skates are safe. Anyway, the point is that I’m familiar with the attempts of fellow classmates to try their “case” in front of the class and the teacher by telling their story, and I’ve never really been sure why. Even if the instructor, on a chance slimmer than a vomiting Olsen twin, agrees with you, he is not going to dismiss your ticket, mainly because he’s not a judge. He’s not going to let you walk out of class and let you have your Saturday back because, well, he’s not a judge. And, if you really think you’ve been that wronged and your case is that solid, the place to be is not in traffic school, it’s in front of a judge—at the time and place noted, by the way, on your ticket.

  Now the Pissed-Off Guy, demonstrating his story, complete with hand movements (including the finger quotes around “running the red”), waited for the instructor’s verdict, completely unaware that if everybody in the class—despite the great temptation that it is to testify in front of strangers—held their “I Was Wronged” tale of woe and unjustice, we’d get out of class about ten minutes after roll call was taken and we went over what red, yellow, and green mean. But no, no, no, the Pissed-Off Guy needed validation that he’d been screwed twice, setting the stage for about sixty other stories to be told.

  “I was in the intersection already on the yellow,” he explained again. “So I don’t see why I’m here.”

  Thankfully, the instructor, skilled at handling such meanderings, looked at the Pissed-Off Guy and said merely, “Well, that’s too bad. This lady over here”—and then he winked as he pointed to a woman in the third row—“put all six of her kids in her van and drove to McDonald’s and she got a ticket! Why’d she get a ticket? She forgot that she drank a fifth of vodka that morning—didn’t you?”

  The lady laughed.

  From the second row, Grandpa Munster snored, the only indication that he was still alive, since his eyebrows hung over his eyes like dead vines.

  “Let’s talk about driving under the influence, because in this class we’re going to learn how to DRIVE TO SURVIVE!” he continued.

  “Give me those keys!!” Grandpa Munster called as he woke with a start.

  For the rest of that morning, we learned about how much liquor it actually takes to blow an “impaired” score on the Breathalyzer, which was, frighteningly, very little—according to my st
ate law if you kiss a person who’s just had a beer, you’re too drunk to drive. One glass of wine is enough to drag an average-sized woman to the pokey and assign her a public defender, and the first thing that came to my mind was that after this class was over, I was going to clean out the closest Krispy Kreme and devour it all in one sitting if that’s the way the game is played. That’s right, if an average-sized woman can’t drink one glass of wine with dinner without becoming a felon on the way home, I don’t even know what the point of living is, so there was no other choice but to expand myself to the size of a tract home. To make matters worse, the instructor went on to explain how drinking coffee, downing a cup of Listerine, or enjoying a refreshing mint before the cop gets to the driver’s-side window will not help lessen that score, and that all of those things had just been taking up unnecessary room under my car seat for more than a decade. The cherry on the cake was that we learned that by refusing the Breathalyzer test, the suspected drunk person not only gets a one-year suspended license but an automatic DUI as well.

  A man in the back row raised his hand.

  “That’s not exactly true,” he said. “I’m a prosecutor in Kingman, and that’s not the law.”

  “Oh, thank God,” I mumbled to myself. “If it’s anything short of a carafe, I’m getting the surgery to get Carnie Wilson’s leftover stomach implanted.”

  “It is a suspended license,” the prosecutor said. “But it’s not an automatic DUI.”

  “What’s the law on left-hand turns and red lights?” the Pissed-Off Guy called from across the room.

  “My boyfriend got a DUI, and when we went to court this week they lost the paperwork!” Paris Hilton blurted out from the next to last row. “They won’t find it, will they? He can’t go to prison, he can’t! I need to use my phone!”

  “Shhh, shhhh,” her friend said, putting her arm around her to comfort the crying girl as the guy who sat behind them stared down their ass cracks.