Native Manhattanites, it has been said, are a fairly strange breed. I'm not talking about the New Yorkers who wait on line to buy freakin' cupcakes at Magnolia in the West Village or who regularly attempt to dine in the meat-packing district, I'm talking about the people who were born here. You don't see them lining up to get into hip eateries, bars and clubs. That's because they know better. In a city with this many options -- even in our current era of soulless gentrification and neighborhood homogenization -- there is never a reason to wait on a line, unless, say, the Ramones are playing in a rare post-death appearance. Manhattanites know their city. Waiting on lines is for tourists.
By the same token, if you were born in Manhattan, you're often saddled with a pronounced disadvantage. Want a fairly accurate test to suss out who is a native of this island and who isn't? Ask them how old they were when they got their driver's license. The truth that they actually grew up in rural New Jersey will pop out like a jack-in-the-box, revealing their studiedly weary New Yorker persona to be a flimsy sham. Lots of natives have simply never gotten around to getting a driver's license. They don't need'em. Who can afford to keep a car in the city anyway? And where would you go if ya did?
Being one such individual, I was ignorant to the established rules of the road for most of my life. Sure, I left the island of Manhattan. I even went to college in the Midwest (where there aren't any subways or taxis). As it happened, however, I always managed to score a roommate with a car. So, again, I didn't really need a driver's license. I got a permit at one point in the 80's, and spent a summer out on Long Island, severely fuckin' up the shift of a relative's car, but because I didn't have any formal training, I was never eligible to take a driver's test for a license. The permit expired, I forgot what I'd picked up and life went on.
But life, as we all know, gets more complicated as it progresses. In swift course, I found myself out in the world without a skill that most folks had mastered before they were old enough to drink. My snobby rationalization that "real New Yorkers don't need driver's licenses" was wearing rather thin. What had once been a point to blithely boast about was now becoming a source of embarrassment. I was helpless at something that normal people took for granted. This had to change.
In 2001, I married Peggy, an incomparable young woman who shared a similar dilemma. It wasn't that she didn't drive (she did -- and she even had a license!), it's that she was British, thus prone to driving on the wrong side of the road. In the late summer of 2003, we found out that Peggy was pregnant. More than ever before, all signs pointed to me needing to learn how to drive with all speed. By this time, my similarly inclined sister, Victoria (also quite late in learning to drive), had already taken the plunge and taken lessons a couple of years earlier (having long-since decamped our beloved Manhattan for the loathsomely leafy byways of Westchester). I figured that any driving school that managed to survive my raging hellion of a sibling was clearly the school for me, so I signed up with the same instructor who trained Victoria. Pleasantly, he didn't scramble for safety when he found out I was her brother.
I started my lessons in February of `04 (if you're strenuously bored, you can read a vague play-by-play discussion of my progress by clicking right here). Ray, my instructor, was the coolest of customers, who didn't so much as flinch every time I narrowly missed clipping someone's rear-view mirror off or came within a mouse's breath of an oblivious bicyclist. Whilst irresponsibly tear-assing around Lower Manhattan, Ray and I would chatter away about a variety of subjects, punctuated by gaspy stabs at the break pedal and the squeal of Ray's long-suffering tires.
After several life-threatening sessions out on the mean streets and open road with Ray, we sped out to Staten Island where - much to my amazement - I managed to successfully pass my driving test (although my ham-fisted attempt at parallel parking almost cost me the whole shebang). As abjectly humorless as the test-administer was, he didn't hold that particular failing against me. A couple of weeks later, I got my very own driver's license in the mail (customarily replete with one of the worst photographs ever taken of me). It was official.
But while I had my new license, I still didn't own a car, and was thus in peril of swiftly falling out of practice. To combat this, I spent the ensuing summer commandeering my mother's failing Ford Taurus out on Long Island. Driving around the sleepy lanes of a small town isn't really that big a deal. You could probably do it drunk or sedated (as I'm dead sure many of the town's residents routinely do). I was honestly more comfortable driving around the streets of Manhattan. I know the thought of driving around NYC give lots of people an ulcer, but that's where I learned. For a start, you're rarely going that fast, and once you're conditioned to the notion that something could pop out at you at any second -- another car, a bicyclist, a pedestrian pushing a baby carriage, a crackhead on a skateboard, a pantsless, machete-wielding wino, etc . -- it becomes second nature. Driving around Manhattan doesn't trouble me at all.
It's driving on the highway that gives me the fear. Friends of mine who've driven since they were pre-pubescent never understand this. They maintain that driving on the highway is the easiest thing in the world. I beg to differ. If you make a mistake on the highway, you're invariably going to be doing it at a much greater speed than if you were driving on a city street, thus the ramifications of that mistake are going to be costly, if not probably fatal. I hate driving that fast, I hate changing lanes and most of the time, I vehemently hate my fellow motorists. When I'm behind the wheel of a car driving on a highway, I am very decidedly not in my happy place.
But what good is having a driver's license if I'm not going to drive outside of New York City (I mean, wasn't that the whole point?) Now with two kids constantly in tow, Peggy and I can't really rely on the train, the Hampton Jitney or the kindness of friends and relatives anymore when it comes to getting away from the city. We're determined to master our respective fears and acclimate ourselves to driving on the highway. As such, we rang my dear friend Ray back up and signed up for some refresher courses on highway driving. In all candor, however, we're never going to master our fear until we actually bite the bullet and just do it (and with two screamy kids in the car, that might be one daunting feat). But until then, we're slaves to our apprehension and prisoners of this island. Again, this has to change.
So wish us luck, but maybe step a little livelier when you're crossing the streets these days, as I'll be out on the open road and sometimes get the 'gas' and 'break' pedals mixed up. And don't worry, I'm not going to let my kids wallow in ignorance about driving for most of their lives like I did. Oliver's already getting a head start.
Recent Comments