The First Time I Tried to Drive a Car
In which I learned there's more to it than "stab it and steer."
In honor of my 4th cross country moving/road trip in the past 4 years, I’m posting the full version of a legendary life story from my memoir.
I have written a version of this story for many years. Sometimes it’s about how I achieved a nickname. Sometimes it’s a dark comedy. Sometimes it’s slapstick. Sometimes it’s a serious study about a relationship between father and son, or sister and brother, or self vs conscience.
In my memoir, it’s about the invisible influence of my brother, his protective guardian angel spirit, if you will. There is not much left of this story in the final version of my memoir - the perils and pleasures of editing.
The next three episodes my newsletter will be from the road, or projections of where I think I’ll be with some commentary from the road as to what has happened in actuality.
Until then, I’ll
Just keep writing (and driving)!
14 – Aren’t you Lynn Hornbrook’s brother?
1978. One time I got in trouble and could not get out of it. I took my sister’s car for a joyride and crashed it. At 15 years old, I did not yet have my driver’s trainee permit. It was the first time I had ever tried to drive a car. Some of my friends already had their permits.
My father had a prerequisite for me to learn how to drive.
“Before you learn to drive, you need to learn how an engine works.”
“What? There’s no way.”
“Them’s the rules.”
“That’s not fair. My brother and sisters didn’t have to do that.”
I sulked. I stewed. One gray, drizzling day a week before Christmas, I slumped on the couch watching morning game shows. School was out for the holidays and the adults had gone to work. My sister worked at the law office with my mother to earn some Christmas money. She drove in with my mother and left her car in the driveway. In the back of my mind, I mulled over my dad’s unfair decision. He rarely laid down the law like that. An Angel and Devil appeared on my shoulder about the same time. But my adolescent brain continued to sulk, especially home alone, bored on this damp day in late December.
I grabbed my cigarettes, hidden in the battery compartment of an old 8-track player in the bottom of my bedroom closet, and my sister’s car keys, with a vague plan to drive once around the block. I walked to the end of the driveway to see if any nosey neighbors were around. The coast was clear. I climbed into the car and figured out how to insert the key into the ignition. But first, I lit a cigarette. I was going to be a badass and drive that car, my father’s rules be damned! The Devil won this day.
I backed slowly and cut the wheel to turn up the street. Oh, this is easy. Hey, this is fun! I stepped on the gas, drove slowly up the street, my arm dangling out the window despite the drizzle, holding the cigarette just as the adults did. Our street curved to the right to a short stub that ended in a stop sign. Aldea Street. I stopped. All I had to do was turn right onto Index street, lined with Jacaranda trees, bare now at the start of winter, and go to the stop sign, followed by another right onto Amestoy Avenue with its slippery, moss-covered center drainage, a short distance back to my street, McKeever Street, for another right, watching for the neighbors, close friends who kept an eye out for anything out of the ordinary, another five houses up the street for a left turn back into my driveway, a round-trip of 1/2 to 3/4 of a mile tops. Going around the block required me to turn right three times.
I turned left.
The joy in joyriding lay in inverse proportion to the reality of getting caught, or at the very least, to the possibility. Everyone was at work. It was my time to shine.
The car bounced a bit too roughly over the gutters in the small residential street intersections, and it was up a small hill to another stop sign at a major wide street crossing. Louise Avenue. Louise separated our small grid of streets from the next neighborhood, a slight bit fancier. I looked both ways -- I knew at least that much from walking -- and headed across the big avenue into this neighborhood whose people I did not know, the area in which I would have to let my parents know I am out of earshot, or out of range of my dad’s iconic, well-known, long-range finger whistle, a high-pitched triplet – “wee-WEET-wee, wee-WEET-wee, wee-WEET-wee.” At that, all ballgames stopped, neighbors called neighbors, my name floated through the sky and someone somewhere said, “Hey, your dad’s whistling. Better get home.” The streets were quiet today.
I passed two cul-de-sacs on the right, one of which I would become intimately familiar with when I started dating my first girlfriend, her house tucked back into the circle against a field of electrical towers that, through a broken wooden gate, we crossed to get to the back of the elementary school, long before I even knew she existed.
The next stop sign was Encino Avenue. A right would take me to my elementary school, Rinaldi. A left turn would take me to more residential streets whose names I knew but whose inhabitants were strangers to me, being on the other side of Louise.
I turned left again.
The drizzle was a little stronger now. The road was narrow and showed only the well-manicured side lawns and windowless walls of stucco houses and garages. I was well beyond my quickly-conceived plan of driving around the block. The Devil took me where he would.
At the last possible second, I decided to turn onto Donmetz Street . . . at 35 miles per hour . . . on a narrow, slick residential road . . . while already in the intersection. I felt the back wheels skid slightly and then with two successive bumps as if I had run over a cement parking lot stall block at 30 miles per hour, I was on the curb of a corner lot with a thud as the car bashed into and stopped on top of two soft-trunked trees. My head hit the windshield, I think.
I quickly got out, shaking. Shit! There was a deep V dented into the front of the car to the windshield. I quickly crushed out my cigarette. I so didn’t want to get caught smoking again.
As luck would have it, the VW engine was in the rear. I thought, If I can get the car home quickly, I can pound out the dents. It wasn’t quite noon, I had plenty of time . . .
Before the scheme fully formed in my mind, people emerged from the house, a male and a female, brother and sister, grown-ups, definitely out of school.
“Are you okay?” They were nice and genuinely concerned.
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
“Do you have a license?”
I hung my head. I looked up from under my wet hair. The rain had increased.
“Oh.” They looked at me closely.
“Whose car is it?”
“My sister’s.” Silence. It was wet as we stood in the drizzle.
A look for recognition brightened their faces.
They said, “Aren’t you . . . aren’t you Lynn Hornbrook’s brother?”
“I am.”
“We thought so. We went to school with him. You look so much like him.”
More silence. I stared at my feet. The drizzle grew stronger, threatening to become a steady rain.
“Look, we won’t call the police, but we will take you home so you can call your folks.”
I finally spoke up. “I almost wish you’d call the police.”
They laughed. I don’t remember the car ride home. There was no getting around this one, so I faced it straight on. I called my mom.
“Hello, honey.”
“Mom, I took Lisa’s car and crashed it.”
“What?! I’ll call you right back.” She hung up on me. Ten seconds later, the phone rang.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
“You have to call your father.”
“Can’t you call him?”
“No, you have to call him. I’ll see you tonight.”
I called my dad. My mom had already called him. I could hear his anger before I dialed. He was in a big meeting with important executives from out of town, something that rarely happened at his job. He told me to sit tight, he’d be home soon.
The first word he spat through his angry face was “Trust.”
“We trust you when we leave the house to do the right thing.” He muttered to himself as he changed out of his tailored suit into street clothes that would get wet. It was raining now, and of all the things he didn’t like in this life, snow topped the list, but rain was a close second. It was why we lived in Southern California and not in Ohio.
We stopped at the hardware store for saws, a shovel, and a rake. He called AAA but a single tow truck wasn’t enough. The tree roots clutched the chassis[i]; the twisted, broken branches were enmeshed in the frame. Two tow trucks pulled the car from the mangled trees. We spent the next few hours cutting up the trunk and branches in the rain with hand saws, shoveling the mud back into the holes where the roots once were, stacking the logs nicely in the corner, and raking the yard back into shape.
We arrived home about the same time as my mom and sister pulled up. Everyone was standing in the kitchen, and I was in the center, dripping in my wet clothes. My dad was muttering some more and lecturing me about trust. Then, he did something completely out of character. He raised his fist to me, something he only did twice in my life. He waved his fist and lectured me about trust, about taking my sister’s car, which, to be fair, was designated half mine since it was to become mine when I turned sixteen (we even designated the engineless front half hers since she was less mechanically inclined even than me and the back half, where the engine lived, was declared mine). Finally, my mom, who had a habit of speaking over others, lit a cigarette and said directly, “Whatever possessed you?” Such a mom thing to say.
I didn’t tell her about the Angel and Devil on my shoulder.
On the verge of tears, I blurted out in a single breath: “Dad-said-I’d-never-be-able-to-drive-a-car-if-I-didn’t-learn-how-an-engine-works-and-my-brother-and-sisters-never-had-to-do-that-and-I-don’t-think-that’s-fair!”
“Bill, did you say that?”
My dad, caught, his anger dissipating behind a sheepish grin, didn’t say a thing.
By the end of the night, the episode had become family legend. I paid for all damages, including restoring trust with my parents, over years. I paid for the car and for repairing the yard. I bought new trees, two mere sticks at a hundred dollars a pop. All told, I was out 800 dollars, draining my bank account.
The family gathered the next night, wearing their keys on a string around their necks, a stunt instigated by my aunt who rarely passed an opportunity for a good joke. Tree-killer jokes became commonplace. A jar was set up to help defray my costs, a one-dollar fine for every tree-killer joke told at my expense. My brother-in-law, a mechanic, reasoned that I had paid for the car, so I should be able to sell it to a salvage yard for parts. Family court was convened, and despite my brother-in-law’s logical argument, I was found at fault. My sister got all proceeds from salvaging the car.
In a different family, I might have ended up bruised, a father who swung a fist, or waited in jail for my parents to bail me out, or not. But that was not what happened.
Even in his absence, my brother had cast his protective cloak around me.
About a year later, I took driver’s education and driver’s training in school. My dad taught me how to drive, how to stop my wheels on dimes set on the asphalt driveway, so I would “always know where my wheels were on the roadway.” I never did learn how an engine works.
Who is that walking always besides you
Who is that walking
Who is that walking always[ii]
The dead cast no shadows
[i] The tree roots clutch the chassis; Cf. line 19, Eliot, The Waste Land
[ii] Who is that walking always Cf. lines 1-3, Eliot, “Ash-Wednesday”
It’s your turn - share your best driving stories in the comments below. Stay safe out there.