Just like every high school student since the dawn of the high school I took Drivers Ed when I was a junior. Now by the time I took Drivers Ed. the training equipment had surpassed old into ancient, and was now teetering on being completely antiquated. Back in those days the internet was in its infancy so I’m sure today Drivers Ed. must be like going to a fucking theme park, but I digress. Anyway when I was taking Drivers Ed. you sat in a “driving simulator” which sounds way fucking cooler than it was, remember again this was before the Internet and its technological spawn. The “Driving Simulator” was just an uncomfortable seat in front of a mock dashboard (Speedometer, Wheel, Ignition, Review mirrors, fake break/gas peddle basically everything but a shitty mock radio.) and stared at a crappy worn out movie screen. As you stared at the screen a variety of driving scenarios played out like driving in a residential neighborhood when all of a sudden a kid’s ball bounces into the road, and you act accordingly by using the fake brake. Now the fake peddles on the simulator required a good bit of leg strength to operate due to the fact the peddles where rusting most likely do to poor maintenance (the gym teacher and substitution for a real driving instructor must not of known about WD-40). In the end of all of this fantastical automotive madness passed the class and along with it earning my drivers permit.
IMPORTANT NOTE: There was a small part at the end of the class you, the driving instructor (Gym teacher) and a fellow student would get in and take turns driving an actual car . There was a secondary break for the instructor to use incase shit got out of control. With that said my high school’s Drivers Ed. interpreted this part as tooling around the school’s parking lot practicing K turns and parallel parking. The rare time I did drive on an actual street all I was instructed to do is drive down the small town’s main street (who’s speed limit was a whopping 25mph) 10-11 blocks down to the tiny strip mall and directly back to the school.
The next step in the learning to drive process was to bug the shit out of my parents until (inevitably I wore one of them down) they agreed to teach me to drive. In my case it was my it was my mother who gave in and agreed to teach me whatever I needed to know. Now the conditions around my first actual driving lesson with my mother should have made for enough sufficient foreshadowing to have called it off immediately. You see just a few mere months before the lesson my father had finally bought the sports car he had always wanted ,(and of course my brother and I were not allowed anywhere near it under penalty of…well we never found out because obviously it be bad.) My mother made the decision that it was time for lesson when my father was out of the country in Ireland ,AND that it would be quite a good thing I learn how to drive a stick shift which makes sense on paper. I say that because my mother owned a manual minivan so if I was to learn how to drive stick it have to be in my father’s new sports car.
Much like my high school driving class the first place we went was to a large and completely empty parking lot by a bunch of innocuous office buildings. Now this parking lot had a particular architectural design difference then the parking lot of my high school, and that would be the systematically placed islands with a bit of grass, small buses/scrubs and a sampling tree smack in the middle of them. The islands were surrounded by a massive cement curb that must have been at least 5-6″ high. My mom parked the car at one end of the lot, and I eagerly jumped into the drivers seat with building excitement. After adjusting the mirrors and buckling my seat belts it was time to get on with the real driving, and thats when all hell broke loose going from bad to worse to worst in a matter of split seconds.
Remember the aforementioned Driving Simulators with their corroded peddles that made then difficult to push down well heres where they came into play. The peddles in my father’s prized new sports car were the exact OPPOSITE of the Driving Simulator’s (they were sensitive and required little more then just placing you foot on the gas) and just the weight of your foot would get the car going. So needles to say the car engine roared as it revved up and took off like a Cheetah with its ass was on fire. I’m not going to say I had the wherewithal to shift gears, but I did manage (by shear coincidence) to get the car into second gear when I pulled back, jammed even further on to the gas peddle, and stomped on the clutch violently. I remember hearing my mother’s voice yet to this day I don’t have a goddamn clue what she said not a single word. I did upon hearing her voice look up and saw the end on the parking lot which we were hurdling towards as the asphalt of the parking lot disappeared beneath the wheels as if in fact the tires were feeding upon it. In this case I did the most natural thing one can do and I banked a almost 90 degree right hand turn to avoid crashing head on into the thick woods that lined the perimeter of said parking lot, but thats not all. When I whipped the car wildly to the right to avoiding crashing into the woods I accidentally clipped the corner of one of the aesthetic islands I mentioned earlier. The curb being so abnormally high turned the car instantly into a vehicular bucking bronco as it jumped the curb. The car came careening off the curb and landed with a devastating thud back onto the asphalt where the shocks seriously earned their money , and sent the hubcap flying off like a fucking frisbee. Finally at last at that point I managed to get my shit together enough to stop the car by jamming on the breaks. Frantically my mother jumped into the driver’s seat, I ran about 100 feet off to retrieve the lost hubcap, and then we sped off as fast as we could still suffering from a shell shock of sorts and embarrassed as all hell.
My mother managed somehow to get my fathers now defunct sports car to her mechanic who reported the front axle was cracked severely along with some other pricey problems due to the crashing into curbzilla. As I stated earlier my father was out of the country in Ireland at the time, BUT he was returning in a matter of days after the accident. Now as my fathers return crept closer and closer my mother started to panic a bit and was calling her mechanic frantically waiting for the car to be repaired. The bitch and bane of the repair was the mechanic had to order a certain part and was simply waiting for it to arrive so he could finish fixing my father’s car. It was a waiting game (strait out of a sappy family comedy movie) as my mother anxiously awaited the car part’s arrival at the mechanics while simultaneously she was growing much more worried about my father’s arrival home to find his car missing. It came down to the last day as my father’s trip as he was flying home the vital part finally arrived at the mechanic’s shop. My father’s flight had landed and he was well on its way home in a taxi when my mother picked up his car from the shop now literally racing the clock. My Mother maniacally managed to get my father’s beloved sports car fixed and back in the garage by the skin of her teeth with him being none the wiser.
ENDING NOTE: Since then my father has passed and as far as I’m aware he never knew a single thing about my disastrous first driving lesson in his prized sports car or what really happened to it while he was away.