Having been a life-long refusenik, an Esquire contributing editor gets behind the wheel
I’ve been late to enough parties to know when I have missed the action, and with driving I was way overdue. Learning at 49 years old, now that the automobile and its effects are increasingly reviled, has all the hallmarks of lamentably late arrival. The cool kids have left or never even came while the diehards are doubling down, drinking and kissing anything and anyone before a less carbonated age bursts like daylight through the curtains. Still, here I am at last, so let’s go.
That I am as skint today as I was then is society’s crime and nobody’s business. Writing is mostly luck and hard labour; it’s not like I can drive a cab or anything in the downtime. Or at least it wasn’t until I could. But what surprises me more than any of this is how much I came to like it at the wheel. The fundamental thing about cars, it strikes me, what they have over people and the world is that they do more or less what you want them to. Press this and that happens.
We bonded, I think, in that shared confession of disdain and I confess that if I pass my test my one regret is that I might not see him again. I doubt this is mutual. I have Stockholm syndrome of the gear stick. He has, by his own estimate, had over 2,000 students. I know that I am not that special. Especially now that I am just another person, stuck in a traffic queue.
At least I can talk about it now. At a Christmas party I mentioned I was learning. In seconds, someone had shown me a phone picture of the sign for a notorious roundabout in Hemel Hempstead. In a minute, drive chat had consumed the room. This is the kind of stuff that used to drive me to drugs. Now I can drive though, I felt strangely comfortable around it. Comfortably numbed. Another adolescent fantasy of radicalism choked out on middle age fumes.
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