My Embarrassing Learning-to-Drive Story

From time to time I break various Gheorghian's balls about their kids' driving.  I might shoot Juan Carlos a text when I see his daughter's car beached on the curb in front of his house, or when she almost causes an accident a block from home.  I might shoot rob a text questioning the plausibility of his daughter's story that she hit one pothole with both front tires.  They both, along with others, come to me when their kids ask for some specific car and I usually give advice that the kids don't like.  All this is to say that many of your children hate me.

I will make minor amends with this post.

I learned to drive in two of the worst possible contraptions for student drivers.  One car was a 1986 Nissan Sentra that had zero options other than a rear defroster.  No radio, no AC, nothing.  Vinyl seats, roll-down windows.  No power assist for the brakes or the steering.  Five on the floor.  You might ask why we had this thing, and the reason is a mix of stupidity and poverty.  My mother refuses still to this day to buy used cars (her rationale being "Why would you want to buy someone else's problem?" because she assumes everyone buys cars and drives them until the wheels fall off and only trades them in if they're a lemon and also refuses to listen to my explanation of the economics of off-lease cars).  She also refuses to buy into the concept of leverage (she was appalled when I financed zwoman's VW for 60 months at 0% interest no matter how much I explained that 0% interest means I pay no interest and instead put those dollars to work in my savings and brokerage accounts for five years).  Taken together with her and my stepfather's general lack of professional success, the only new car they could afford without taking a loan was a stripped down Sentra.  It looked like this but in white.

Because there was no power assist on the steering, you really had to saw away at the wheel to maneuvre the little shitbox around a corner.  Parallel parking was hazing--not only did I have to deal with the heavy steering, I had to feather the clutch to creep backwards into the spot without stalling.  My mom would take me to a parking lot and set up two garbage cans to practice parking around (parallel parking is part of the driving test in NJ).  This meant that we had to wrestle two garbage cans into the back seat (the trunk was too small and she was too stupid to use a bungee cord to hold it closed) and drive around with the front seats all the way forward until we got to the empty parking lot.  Then she would yell at me if I hit a garbage can while practicing because I would dent the can ("My garbage can!!"), so then I had to practice metallurgy and push the dent back out.

The brakes were a study in non-linear response.  The stopping power varied depending on how deeply you pressed on them so it was hard to stop smoothly.  My mother, of course, berated my herky-jerky stops and warned me that this would damage the car (TR and Juan Carlos recognize my mother's irrationality and are slowly nodding along as they read this).  So I learned to dip in hard to make it stop, and then feather my way off them to avoid making the car bob back and forth.  Just like the end of this Nissan ad, only not as cool.

The other car was also a shitbox, but completely different in character.  My father had a 1987 Nissan Van.  That's all they called it.  Van.  It was one of those blocky Japanese minivans everyone adored in the 80s.  It was silver but this is enough to give you the gist of the thing.

It had AC and an automatic transmission and power windows, locks, steering and brakes.  But it was a terrible contraption to learn in.  The driver sits directly on top of the front wheel, so you have to take turns like you're driving a school bus, not a car.  In any normal car you turn the steering wheel before your body actually gets to the turn, because the wheels are out in front of you.  But in this monstrosity you have to drive out to where you want to turn, then crank the wheel.  At least it had power steering.  I had no idea where it ended so we never tried parallel parking.

The power brakes could not have been more different from my mother's car.  If you dipped in hard (like I had to do on my mother's Sentra) the car would stop short, causing my father to spill his omnipresent caffeine-free diet Pepsi and then berate me.  His driveway was gravel, and if you've ever lived with a gravel driveway you know that stopping a car in gravel creates a little pile of gravel in front of the wheels, acting as a chock to help stop the car much more quickly than it normally does on pavement.  So if you have to routinely stop a 1987 Nissan Van in a downward sloping gravel driveway while my father drinks caffeine-free diet Pepsi, you learn how to feather the brakes veeeery carefully.  

Another charming feature of the 1987 Nissan Van is that the brake pedal is stupidly close to the steering column.  This will be important later.  Here's a bad photo but you can kind of see the proximity.

So I'm 16 years old and I have my learner's permit (you have to be 17 to get a license in NJ).  I've been practicing with my parents regularly, learning to drive two completely different vehicles as best I can.  I only see my father on Saturdays so the Van is less familiar to me than the Sentra but I'm very familiar with my father's temper and general disdain for all things relating to me so I try hard to remember how to operate the Van.

It's a clear sunny day and we're out for a drive in the Van in Tappan, NY.  At some point I failed to turn where my father wanted me to go but he's cool about it.  He points to a driveway and tells me to make a 3-point turn there, then head back to where he wanted to go.

Now, I'm being charitable when I call this thing a driveway.  Tappan is an ancient place with narrow roads, narrow houses, and narrow driveways.  It really was a paved path that some farmer put there 200 years ago so he could lead his goats from the barn to the street.  It was 6.9 feet across at best.  The mouth of the goat path was shrouded on one side by bushy weeds.  I immediately recognized the high degree of difficulty with his ask.

We're going about 25 MPH so I need so slow down but I'm also worried I'm going to spill his Pepsi.  I'm also worried about putting the Van in such a narrow slot of tarmac.  I lift off the gas and move my foot over to the brake, but I bang into the steering column.  At the same time my father yells "Jesus Christ, turn in here I said!"

So I turn.  But it's too soon because it's the Van, not the Sentra, and we weren't on top of the turn yet.  We bounce over the curb and through the shroud of bushy weeds into the goat path.  My foot is still firmly against the steering column and there is Pepsi all over the place.  My father is yelling "Fuuuuuuuck!"  I slide my foot down the steering column onto the brake but I don't slam it down because this isn't the Sentra and if I slam it down I'll put the old man through the windshield.  The goat path is not gravel though, so there is no little gravel pile to form a chock to help stop the Van.  Instead, I rely on the house adjacent to the goat path to stop the Van.  I hit the house.

"You hit a house!" bellows my father.  Over and over.  Sometimes he peppers that exclamation with "fucking" or "goddam."  I realize there's no way he will agree but I sheepishly ask "Can we keep this between us?" and he retorts "Are you fucking kidding me?!?  Back out of here before the guy whose house you hit comes out and gets our license plate number!"

So I put it in reverse and tear out of the goat path, through the shroud of bushy weeds and back onto the narrow street.  I did not hit anything and I got the car pointed back from whence we came.  I mention this to my father ("I made the 3-point turn at least") but he is not impressed.  We turn down another street and survey the damage.  There's a scuff on the front bumper but no major damage.

As soon as we get back to his house he regales his wife with this story, and she puts it in her memory bank of reasons why he abhors her stepson.  My father lives to humiliate me, and he feasts on this story for years.  As far as I know he's still telling it to people.

So if I'm the reason why you don't have a Jeep Grand Cherokee, or a vintage VW Golf, or your father suspects that you plowed over a median trying to make an illegal left turn at excessive speed as opposed to hitting a pothole, think back on this story of the time I hit a house in a Nissan Van and laugh at me as my father has done for decades.