A Driving Lesson
A Driving Lesson
by Jay Burkett
One happy, hot, sunny, chipper summer day, an experienced driver on the road, was in a bad mood.
For the last twenty or thirty miles, he had been stuck, trapped as if, behind a student driver who was driving between thirty-three and thirty-five miles per hour in a thirty-five miles per hour zone on a long tape of road with sparse wide turns through a desolate and, in some places squalid, rural area upstate (New York if you like).
At every occasional and perfunctory sharp turn, the student driver slowed down and turned cautiously, carefully, mindfully in the same direction in which the experienced driver was already going. To his increasing frustration. At every hopeful intersection, too, out of three possible directions, the student driver always elected to go in the same direction in which he was already headed.
This ceremony, this ritual played out over the last twenty, thirty, or perhaps forty miles. The road was pretty straight, though addled with a bunch of lumpy hills like the humps of a camel with a never-ending back, it was lined with tall, dry and thin undying trees, and barricaded with forbidding rock formations— the landscape itself had a quiet way of adding to the abiding malaise of endless entrapment and unbroken monotony.
The torture.
Then there was the dispiriting immiseration of innumerable intermittent little houses with sagging shifty crumbling front porches and the sprawling shrubbery of shaggy tick-infested front lawns engulfing greendirtcovered powerboats and shrouding irreparable disintegrating old cars with flaking peeling paint, over the carcasses of which skeletally loomed the occasional rusty basketball hoop with a shorn net; trailers run aground appeared to have crashed from out of the sky; an old mailbox every now and then ghoulishly gesticulated into the road like the wild arm of a half-fallen scarecrow. It was all as if the land were settled just to be flagrantly departed, and things grew just to start not dying, never dying but decomposing and decaying forever, at once.
“Student Driver Please Be Patient” it said on the back bumper in bolder and bolder type.
For the last twenty, thirty, forty or fifty miles, “Student Driver Please Be Patient” was the entreaty the experienced driver was obliged to heed.
He was obliged, because it was the courteous thing. Though after an hour or two hours or three hours maybe it was fifty or sixty or a hundred miles, driving down these rural if not strictly speaking country roads, How patient could you expect another driver who was no student, a driver in fact who had twenty, perhaps twenty-five, perhaps thirty, perhaps a hundred years of experience—how courteous could you expect him to be?
Reasonably.
Especially when at each occasional turn every several miles, this student driver had to make the same turn and go (though cautiously) in the same direction in which he was also already going, as if they both had the same destination or the student were anticipating where the one behind him were traveling and following him from in front: with the entreaty, Student Driver Please Be Patient, every time turning with the car like it were the message he were stuck behind, not even the car, a white Honda Civic—he could not feel his patience wearing thin; rather he could feel patience, like an airborne substance from without, wearing him thin; like he did not have or exercise patience, and there was a finite aerial reserve of it that, running out, was exercising him, and he did not feel he had much more of himself left to sacrifice for it, for that draining cloud.
It was not until after an hour or two or twenty miles or thirty or sixty or a hundred or so—who could say how long it had been, how many miles, how many turns?— that the experienced driver found himself hollowly— hollow in his being, hollow and cold, numb, numb with indignation— numbly narrowing and closing the gap between his front bumper and that of the student driver’s rear, like it were not him applying any pressure but an accumulation of righteous gravity was pulling the one righteously towards the other and deciding the student driver be closely tailgated.
As he applied the gas going uphill, or going downhill he eased on the breaks, soon enough the idea popped into the experienced driver’s head that he could get a bumper sticker that said, “Experienced Driver No Patience for Student Drivers,” though it would make no difference unless he could put it on his front bumper—better yet the grille of his car, a black Dodge Ram 4x4—where student drivers could see it. And if it didn’t pressure them to drive a little faster, more like a normal driver and show an experienced driver some courtesy— for once—then at least they could feel and suffer from whatever stress it might cause them.
As an experiment, the experienced driver was seeing how much narrower without them touching he could make the gap between himself and the student driver, between his Dodge ram and the Honda Civic, and he thought he saw the guy, who he imagined was the driving instructor, turn around spasmodically in the passenger’s seat, and the experienced driver smiled: now with only inches between the vulnerable tail of one car and the impatient head of the other, alone on a long strip of road with so much empty space all up and down it, but he being no place else except all but on top of, and converging on, a student driver in the middle of his driving lesson at the beginning of a hot, dry afternoon.
The experienced driver’s seething frustration by now had eddied into a calm inlet of self-pleasure heightened by the sense that there were no other drivers so there was no driving lesson taking place, not as it was commonly understood, none except between the student driver and himself. And after miles of maintaining an artful half foot distance, the experienced driver deliberately rear ended the student driver—bump—but lightly, so lightly that it even gave the student and instructor pause to wonder whether they felt or heard it, or just imagined they had.
More of a little nudge than a bump.
Then trying something else, the experienced driver accelerated and overtook them only to slow to thirty miles an hour, around five miles below the speed at which the student driver had been driving, and he maintained this for a little while before letting his speed fall to around twenty, then he accelerated back to thirty, and then suddenly he hit the breaks hard.
Only by swerving into a roadside lemonade stand just in time, the student driver narrowly avoided hitting him, though at the risk of almost killing a group of screaming Girl Scouts and their scout masters. The experienced driver (a grizzled middle-aged portly man in a dark sweatshirt or a black tee shirt with a reddish brown beard, a florid face, and a fierce blue gaze in a dirty ball cap with a steeply round bill) turned in his seat and shot the student driver and her instructor (the student turned out to be a young Korean girl with a wide face and perfect complexion) a baleful look. He did a u-turn, and took off in the direction opposite of which they had both been driving for so many miles, as if the apotheosis of venting made his destination unimportant or irrelevant, or immaterial, and he decided to retreat back the way he had come.
“What do you think’s that guy’s problem?”
“He’s a road rager. We should have pulled over when he started tailgating us. He’s gone now. Let’s go.”
When the student driver got back on the road, it coincided almost immediately with the experienced driver’s return. Having crested a distant hill, he was a rapidly enlarging black bug like a hurrying beetle in the student driver’s rearview mirror, bearing down on her furiously.
“Driving lesson huh?” The experienced driver said under his breath as he tore down the road in his black Dodge, “I’ll give you a driving lesson. I’m gonna give you a lesson you’ll never forget.”
This time he smashed into the rear bumper.
“Should I pull over!” The student cried.
“No. Too dangerous. Keep going. I’m calling the cops. Drive! Drive faster!”
“Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?”
When the instructor raised his phone to speak, the back bumper was struck much harder this time, and he dropped his phone.
“I don’t know what to do!” the teenage Korean girl panicked.
“Drive! Drive! Just drive!”
“They should hire me to give driving lessons,” the experienced driver said under his breath in his Ram, tightening his brows at the panicking figures of the student and her instructor in the Honda. “I’m sure they have no course for how to handle a guy like me, no chapter in any handbook, no experience.”
He drove up alongside and ground his fender against that of the Civic, listening to the grinding noise like he were making music. He lowered his window.
“You want a driving lesson!” He cried out. “I’ll give you a driving lesson!”
He succored himself on their terrified and helpless expressions, then rolled up the window like the driver of a tank closes the top hatch. Fiddling with the Spotify, “Student Driver Please Be Patient,” he said mimicking a whiny female voice. “What if I’m not patient though?” he said reverting to his normal tone under his breath. “What if I’m not? A student might learn more from experience with a very impatient driver. There’s a lot of impatient drivers out there like me. They’re asking for it anyway. They think that because they’re beginners they can crawl for miles and hours at a stretch with impunity, with no consideration for the rest of us like we were all a part of the lesson too and we all were here driving on the road purely for their benefit like stock characters or extras on a movie set. It’s the other way around. The truth is you’re only allowed to use the open road as a practice ice skating rink or a bunny hill at our discretion, because the open road is not a bunny hill. If the rest of us experienced drivers are not in a patient mood to let you use our roads at your own pace, then it’s you who needs to defer to us. The same goes for old people. Old people who drive too slowly. You too can either pull the fuck over or speed up. Assholes. And cyclists. I bet the habit they have of riding all together betrays a guilty conscience; they’re thinking safety in numbers, because they know some of us won’t tolerate how they hog the road, which they know is not a bike lane. They’re lucky one of us doesn’t fucking run them over in their retarded neon colors, and always shouting self-important bullshit at each other and sticking their fingers out before making a turn. I’m an experienced driver, I’m capable and alert, and I’m done waiting for you, and damn anyone who carries your water for you. And if you want to learn how but you’re afraid to drive a little faster, then I can teach you. I'll give you a driving lesson like I am here, free of charge. It’s my privilege. It’s my social responsibility as an experienced driver. For democracy’s sake.”
Blaring, “You Got Another Thing Comin’” by Judas Priest—”Hold life I’m gonna live it up, hold flight I said I’ll never give it up”— the experienced driver overtook the floundering Student Driver in a fantastic dust cloud, the slow clearing of which corresponded with the vanishment of his pick-up along with the rock and roll music.
Though before she and her instructor could calmly breathe again, before all the dust had even settled, the Dodge had wheeled around in the distance and then it was barreling down on them once more, this time aiming straight for the hood of their car.
“If you think I’ll sit around as the world goes by,
you’re thinkin’ like a fool cause it’s a case of do or die
Out there is a fortune waitin’ to be had,
If you think I’ll let it go, you’re mad
You’ve got another thing comin’”
“You want a driving lesson? I’ll give you a driving lesson,” the experienced driver said under his breath tightening his grip on the steering wheel, savoring the idle Civic coming closer and closer within range.
The student and her instructor both sat paralyzed in their seats and screamed, and in their terror, they made no effort to avoid the impending head-on collision, and shut their eyes tight for the impact.
A jolt, the sudden violence of which was indescribable, shattered the windshield and activated the hysterical airbags. With his momentum and superior mass, the experienced driver in his Dodge Ram proceeded to push the Honda civic up the road. Though over the airbags neither instructor nor student could see him, and they were too scared and overwhelmed by the chaos to listen either, he was yelling how this had to be the most important driving lesson anyone ever got.