IT was a grey day on Staten Island. I’d been advised this was the best New York borough in which to take a driving test: empty streets, lenient driver testers, lots of Trump supporters so busy watching the “genius” on Fox that they seldom venture out.
I’d last taken a driving test 45 years earlier in north London, at the age of 17. With a licence, and little else, I promptly drove from the British capital to Kabul, across Europe, Turkey and the Shah’s Iran, at the wheel of a VW Kombi named “Pigpen”, after the organist and vocalist of the Grateful Dead who’d died that year.
My two friends and I listened to the Flying Burrito Brothers singing White Line Fever. We thought we were pretty cool. Until the engine died in the Hindu Kush, we had to be towed to Mazar-e-Sharif, and then the repaired engine blew again near the top of the Salang Pass (3,877m). We freewheeled down, to find the king of Afghanistan had been deposed that July, setting in motion events we never paused to consider.
I turned 18 in post-coup Afgha-nistan in August 1973. Several weeks and close calls later, I was in Oxford to start college. Pigpen, by then adorned with naïve Afghan paintings, was a sensation.
As introductions to driving go, the trip offered a variety of terrain, hill starts, dirt tracks, goats and conveyances.
Cut to Staten Island in February: flat, placid and goat-free. My four kids had been on my case for a long time. Take the damn test, Dad! But, you know, there’s the theory test, and then the compulsory five-hour class, and having to turn your place upside-down to find the little blue Social Security Card you last saw 17 years ago. I travel a lot. There was always an excuse, a bad one.
Eddie, my driving instructor, seemed like a genial guy when he returned from lunch. But, we got off to a shaky start. Having adjusted, and looked in all the mirrors, I said something about the “indicators”, and Eddie said, “Huh?” and I said, “You know, the indicators!”
Eventually, we agreed on “turn signals” and got underway.
I proceeded down a ghostly avenue at a breakneck 35kmp, with Eddie entering observations at an ominous rate on an electronic gadget. I’d gotten over the bonnet/hood, boot/trunk, lorry/truck stuff — all that British-American divergence — years ago, but this “turn-signal” business had shaken me up. Failing would be ignominy.
“Pull over,” Eddie said. His geniality had evaporated.
“Over there, beside the car park?”
“Huh?”
“I mean, the parking lot.”
“Yeah.”
I was so rattled that I almost forgot to use my “turn signal”, and when it came to the three-point turn my neck had gone into such a spasm (60 may be the new 40, but not always), I could not turn my head.
We headed into a roundabout. Eddie insisted on calling it a “traffic circle”, flustering me again to the point that I almost failed to yield. Doing the parallel parking, I managed not to brush the sidewalk (pavement) with the tyres — a potentially fatal mistake, even on Staten Island.
After seven minutes, we were back where we started. Eddie said I should clean the windshield. It had been spitting rain. I assumed he meant the windscreen.
“You passed!” he said, printing out a piece of paper from his gadget like a car rental agent presenting a receipt.
“Thank you, Eddie,” I said. I did not say, “Brilliant!”
And so, I passed my driving test. This felt like a significant achievement. At 62, it was a little late, but I can drive. That’s a good thing at a time when there may be a need to escape from Donald Trump into some faraway corner of this great land.
The words of Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire have been on my mind:
“He acts like an animal, has an animal’s habits! Eats like one, moves like one, talks like one!
“There’s even something — sub-human — something not quite to the stage of humanity yet! Yes, something — apelike about him, like one of those pictures I’ve seen in — anthropological studies!
“Thousands and thousands of years have passed him right by, and there he is — Stanley Kowalski — survivor of the Stone Age! Bearing the raw meat home from the kill in the jungle! And you — you here — waiting for him!
“Maybe he’ll strike you or maybe grunt and kiss you! That is, if kisses have been discovered yet! Maybe we are a long way from being made in God’s image, but Stella — my sister — there has been some progress since then!
“Such things as art — as poetry and music — such kinds of new light have come into the world since then! In some kinds of people some tenderer feelings have had some little beginning! That we have got to make grow! And cling to, and hold as our flag.”
Thanks, Eddie; thanks to the kindness of strangers in America. NYT