I pushed on the gas pedal and jerked the wheel left. The car raced across the three southbound lanes. Oncoming traffic screeched to a halt. We pulled into the DMV center at about thirty-five miles per hour, so fast that the car cha-chugged as we drove up the entry ramp.
I slowed down as I pulled farther into the center as everyone—parents, students, DMV employees—stared at the car, wondering what idiot had just nearly caused a major accident. And there was Angelo, mouth agape, incredulous.
I brought the car to a stop. The DMV official ripped a sheet of paper off his clipboard, handed it to me, and said, “Better luck next time.”
Angelo offered his best advice on the ride home, saying that it could have happened to anyone and that I had done good and that “millions!” of people fail their driving test on the first try. He dropped me off at home. And that was it. Our lessons were over, and I was on my own.
Yet I had a reason to feel, well, not terrible. I was bummed that I failed, sure. But an ambulance? Over the next few days, as the story was told to friends and family, it was seen as an unlucky break, an unfortunate but funny occurrence. After passing the parking and road tests, an ambulance! What bad luck! I laughed, too, and made an appointment the following week to finish this silliness once and for all.
This time, I went to the DMV with my mom. She wouldn’t let me drive to the center, but she had been at ease being in the car with me when we had done a few loops around the neighborhood and made a few tries at parallel parking, most of which I aced without a problem. To make sure that, come test time, the parking would be as easy as possible, I was taking test #2 in the smallest car that anyone in the family owned: my grandmother’s Geo Metro, which was about the size of a baby hippopotamus. You didn’t so much drive this car as ride it. If you were tall enough and reclined the seat just enough, its hatchback could also serve as your sunroof.
At the DMV, it was the same familiar routine. Mom gets out, DMV official gets in and tells me to pull ahead and park between the orange cones.
Viewing this whole test as more of a formality than anything else, I zoomed the car forward to the parallel parking area. I stopped, put the car in reverse, turned the wheel, stepped on the gas pedal—
And absolutely crushed the shit out of one of the orange cones.
It was so bad that it seemed like I had intentionally run over the cone. What other explanation was there? I was in a goddamn Geo Metro. You could practically drive that car through the door of a row house and park it neatly in the living room.
Maybe it was the cockiness, or maybe it was because I was jacked up, but it didn’t matter: I was now 0-for-2. I’d failed my driver’s license test. Twice.
The failure this time was no laughing matter and was much more depressing. Instead of being unlucky that an ambulance wound up behind me during test #1, perhaps I had been lucky that first time—lucky that I had so quickly and easily parallel parked the car and that I drove around the neighborhood without incident. Now it was possible that I’d never get my license, that I’d turn into that guy, the one who lives with his parents forever, takes the bus all over town, and buys a ton of porn videos but only when they go on sale. While I wasn’t dying to get my license, this was getting bad.
I went into a funk. Following my life’s motto, “If at first you don’t succeed, immediately give up and focus on stuff you already know you’re good at,” I more or less quit driving and concentrated on, among other things, eating hot dogs and taking long naps. Family, friends, and strangers all offered to take me out for a few spins, to drive to an empty parking lot and try out my parallel parking skills. But I refused. Maybe driving wasn’t for me.
But the summer was coming to an end and school would be starting soon. Faced with another school year without a license and the embarrassment of telling my friends that I’d failed my driving test twice, I decided to give it another shot. I made an appointment for two days before my permit would expire.
I had barely practiced, so on the ride back to the DMV, with my mom again in the driver’s seat, I was not in high spirits. We were in her Ford Taurus, as I didn’t even feel the need to get the Metro again. Last time, it was a hopeful formality: let’s just take this stupid test so I can get this stupid license. This time, it was a fatalistic formality: let’s just take the test so I can fail it and be done with it.
By now, I had become familiar with the staff at the Colonial Avenue DMV, and the same DMV official who sat in on my first test got in the car for test #3. I didn’t take this as a good sign, and my expectations sank even further; perhaps instead of driving up to the designated area to parallel park, I should just floor it and run over the cones, then get out of the car, slam the door shut, and scream, “There! Are you happy? That’s what I think of your fucking cones and your stupid test!” Maybe even kick the car and stomp away.
But I collected myself. I drove up, stopped, and backed into the parking spot. Then I pulled out of the parking spot, left the DMV center, and drove around. I pulled back into the station and stopped. Then I was handed another slip and told, “Congratulations.”
I’d now have to change my life motto. “Expect nothing, and you will be disappointment-proof. And if you succeed—hey, would you look at that.”
For the next week, I was the belle of the ball. It was all accolades and congratulations. It had certainly looked hairy there for a while, but now, back at school, a newly minted junior, I was officially licensed to operate a motor vehicle by the State of Pennsylvania. Badass.
My mom was happy that I wouldn’t be hitting her up for bus tokens at age forty-one. Kyle and Flem were pumped because now it was my turn to drive aimlessly around the suburbs of Philadelphia looking for house parties. But no one, including me, was as excited about my getting my license as my dad. My father and I finally had something in common aside from our gender and our last name: we were drivers. The biggest love in my dad’s life was cars. And, I guess, his children. But also: cars. Up to that point, his eldest son had not appreciated this love, as he was too busy appreciating eating hot dogs and taking long naps. But now, maybe having a driver’s license could be a turning point. Maybe his son was a car guy but had never realized it. Maybe now we two would spend hours in the garage, talking torque and transmission fluid or, I don’t know, other cool-sounding car terms. Or maybe it was just that he was happy his son wasn’t an embarrassment and finally had a goddamn license.
A few Saturdays after I got my license, my dad called and said he had a gift for me down at the pier and asked if he could pick me up during lunch. My dad was a longshoreman, but he was also a mechanic. In addition to the normal longshoreman duties (whatever those were), it was up to him and his crew to fix whatever was wrong with the machines and forklifts and trucks that kept the pier humming.
My dad had always been a fixer and tinkerer, something he picked up from my grandpop. My Grandpop Mugs was known for going for a walk to the store and coming back with, for example, a broken refrigerator, which he would fix up and either keep, give away, or sell. My dad was the same. If something was broken, he’d want to fix it, whether it was a car, a home appliance, or something he’d never seen before. In my case, when something’s broken, I just buy another one—AND DON’T TOUCH THE BROKEN THING BECAUSE IT MIGHT EXPLODE SO JUST LEAVE IT THERE AND LEAVE IT BE AND DON’T EVEN GO NEAR IT.
I had a pretty good idea of what this gift was. I figured I was getting my first car. I assumed it would be a clunker, salvaged from some scrap heap, possibly two different colors but, knowing my dad, with a working radio and an engine that would get me where I needed to go. And I assumed it would be American, since, according to my dad, if you bought a foreign car you might as well go ahead and join the KGB and just get the whole thing over with.
After my dad picked me up and we arrived at the pier, we walked into the garage where he worked. I saw a long row of machines and forklifts and cars in the shop, all in various stages of repair. As we walked along, I wondered which one was mine, thin
king that at any moment, my dad would stop, point to a car, and say, “She’s all yours” in some real macho dad way, just like you see in car commercials. But instead we kept walking and walking all the way down the row, until we got to the office, a trailer at the end of the garage.
My dad said, “Over here,” and we walked to the side of the office to an area no bigger than a shed, where my dad pulled off a blue tarp to reveal my present. It was a motorcycle.
It was a fucking motorcycle.
“Congratulations on getting your license.”
It was a fucking motorcycle.
Up until I was in seventh grade, my dad had a motorcycle. And he loved it. And I loved it. When my brother, sister, mom, and I were living at my grandmother’s house while my parents went through their divorce, my dad would sometimes pick me up at night, put me on the back of his motorcycle, and take me for a spin. We’d ride around the neighborhood for a little while, but our ride always had a grand finale. My dad would steer the bike to a desolate stretch of Delaware Avenue, which was then lined with abandoned buildings but now has a Home Depot and a Lowe’s, and about four Burger Kings. We’d stop, and he’d rev the engine. And then we’d take off down the street, doing well above the 35-miles-per-hour speed limit, as I held on for dear life and shrieked with joy. It was like riding a roller coaster, only I was holding on to my dad, who happened to be driving the roller coaster. Though it only lasted a few seconds, it was the most exhilarating thing I had ever done. Hell, it’s probably still the most exhilarating thing I have ever done.
I realize that if someone had seen our little drag races, someone like, for example, a Department of Family Services official or my mom’s divorce lawyer, it would not have been a good thing, either for my dad or myself. But that was my dad. Many kids, when their parents are getting divorced, will get to eat extra ice cream and stay up extra late when they hang out with their dad. I got taken on drag races.
The possibilities were endless. Predictable, but endless.
Then one day, the motorcycle was gone. When I asked him what happened to it, he said only that he “got rid of it.” There were a number of vehicles that had come in and out of our lives, and I assumed this was because of the nature of my dad’s job—that mechanics traded in cars every so often like other people might buy a new winter coat or a new pair of jeans. But I could tell that the motorcycle was different, and that when it was gone, he missed it. And for whatever reason, he never got another one.
Yet here, in front of me, was my very own motorcycle. And it was a real motorcycle, too, not one of the crotch rockets that you always see ninjas riding. Nor was it a glorified bicycle trying to pass itself off as a dirt bike. It was a blue Kawasaki KZ 650. Not a hog, but it had balls. It was used and it looked like the previous owner rode it from drag race to whorehouse to fistfight all across this great land we call America. If it could have, the bike would have looked over at me, snarled, spit on the ground, and said, “What are you looking at, pussy?”
I loved it.
My dad said he was still working on it but he couldn’t keep it a secret any longer and wanted to show it to me. It would be ready the next weekend, and we could start riding it then. He then answered my unasked question, about the bike being non-American. “I picked it up for free from Billy Draper.* It needed a little work, but it’ll be ready to go. And it’ll have some balls.”
I was stunned. It was the greatest gift I’d ever gotten. My friends universally agreed with this assessment. The consensus was that a) I had the coolest dad ever, and b) if I couldn’t get laid driving a motorcycle, I would never, ever get laid. Despite my obesity, long hair, and clear braces, my friend Jim cautioned that upon getting the motorcycle, I should prepare myself for the hailstorm of pussy that would soon descend upon me. A hailstorm of pussy. Upon me. I agreed. One thousand percent.
But while the new motorcycle was lauded as the greatest gift in the history of gifts (teenagers category), I recognized that it was more than a present. For most of my life, my dad had been hands-off. And I mean this in a good way. He was not the type of dad to put me in a Harvard onesie as a newborn despite never having set foot on the campus. Nor was he the type of dad to buy me a set of drums at age four because, man, he and his buddies had had a really tight rock band when he was younger, a band that he had to give up once my mom got pregnant with me so he could study accounting at the local community college to find a more stable gig. There was never any pressure from him to be or to like or to do anything a certain way. It wasn’t like he addressed my birthday cards to “Justin”: my dad worked a lot, but, aside from the occasional baseball game or outing here and there, he was around and available for consultation. But he was never all up in my bidness.
However, it was very clear to me that this motorcycle was, for the first time, an attempt to be hands-on. By giving me this motorcycle, was he trying to live vicariously through me? Or was it something else: his last-ditch attempt to man-up his son, to set me on the path of partying and pussy and steer me away from teaching pottery at the local women’s center?
So as awesome as it was, it was a gift with a catch. This was more than a present for finally getting my license. This was a Hail Mary pass.
Though I had some bumps when learning how to ride a bike, I eventually mastered it. And though, more recently, I had some difficulty with my driving test, I was soon comfortably driving around on my own. A motorcycle was nothing but a cross between a car and a bike, I thought. So, really, how hard could it be?
This is what I focused on on our first day of motorcycle lessons. Once again, we were at the pier, in a large garage that looked like an empty airplane hangar. This offered some relief; I was afraid that I might be taught to drive the motorcycle in front of my dad’s coworkers. The pressure of my dad teaching me to ride was one thing, but lessons in front of a dozen dad-like (read: manly) mechanics was quite another.
I felt amazing when I first got on the bike. I had sat on my dad’s motorcycle alone, and it had been fun to sit there and pretend to be driving. But this was not pretend. I was no longer a little kid making vroom noises and turning the handlebars this way and that. Soon I would be driving this bike. On my own. The idea was thrilling. It kinda made me hard.
Time is one of the few things that can change others’ perception of a teenager once his reputation has been established. A quiet kid can grow up to be a rock god; a funny guy can turn into a serial killer; the star/stud quarterback can win a Tony for his portrayal of Raoul in The Phantom of the Opera. But teenagers often get pigeonholed, and that reputation usually sticks. Life is not the movies, after all; the “ugly” girl doesn’t take off her glasses and immediately become the most beautiful girl in the school, nor does the captain of the chess team pick up a football for the first time and throw it seventy yards. In high school, for better or worse (usually worse), you are what the majority of people think you are.
But when my dad turned on the engine and started revving up the bike while I sat on it, alone, I knew that this motorcycle was a perception-changer. I could picture myself, the once-unassuming guy known for his self-deprecation, rolling up to parties on his motorcycle. As everyone turned to look, I’d sit there on the running bike and rev the engine a few times, and then three women would instantly orgasm. Then I’d rev it a few more times, even louder now, and my penis would grow seven inches and my balls would become roughly the size of softballs (but much, much harder), and then I’d rev the engine a few more times, loudest of all, and by now all sorts of hot chicks would be dropping in ecstasy all over the place. And then I’d nonchalantly shut the bike off, step off of it, and walk into the party like it was no big deal. Then I’d probably hit the bathroom to make sure I didn’t have any bugs in my teeth. Because it had been kind of a long ride.
As the bike came alive, I realized that my balls were now on top of a several-hundred-pound machine capable of going over one hundred miles per hour. It was like sitting on a thunderbolt. How could this not be a game-chan
ger?
My dad explained that riding a motorcycle, like riding a bicycle or driving a car, came down to three mechanical functions: go, stop, and steer. The last was the easiest, as the handlebars move the motorcycle just like on a bicycle. I quickly learned that the other stuff was not as easy.
I won’t get into too much detail about how a motorcycle operates. I couldn’t understand it then, and I don’t understand it now. (Also, this is not a “How To Drive a Motorcycle” book.) But what I was looking (or hoping) for was a handle or pedal for the gas and a handle or pedal for the break: one to go, one to stop.
I learned to drive a car with an automatic transmission. I got in, turned the key in the ignition, and pushed the gas pedal to go. The harder I stepped on the gas, the faster the car moved forward. When I wanted to stop, I eased up on the accelerator and applied pressure to the brake pedal. The harder I pressed, the more quickly the car stopped. Pretty straightforward stuff.
This was not the case with the motorcycle, which had a manual transmission. Cars with a manual transmission were unheard of where I grew up; in a city, with a stop sign at the end of every block, it wouldn’t make much sense to have to shift gears every five hundred feet. So when I got the motorcycle, I couldn’t drive a stick-shift car.
In addition to the manual transmission, the acceleration and deceleration of a motorcycle requires the use of all of one’s limbs. In a car, you use your right foot for both the gas and brake pedals. So that’s one limb for both going and stopping. On a motorcycle, your left hand controls the clutch (I had no idea what a clutch was, and it needed to be explained to me). The right hand is the accelerator. The left foot shifts gears. The right foot is the brake for the back wheel. And oh, I forgot, you also have hand brakes. And, oh, you have to look out for traffic and to make sure no one throws an unopened can of soda at you while you’re driving.
236 Pounds of Class Vice President Page 10
