I’ve been watching Gossip
Girl lately, which is possibly not the best thing to be doing while in my
current nostalgic funk but I’m kind of afraid to take a trip home, not only
because of the price of the plane ticket. I’m afraid to see how much has
changed.
The past twenty years of my
life have been passing through my memory: places I’ve lived and
sometimes-questionable things I’ve worn, haircuts I’ve had but this program,
with its smash cuts of Manhattan streets I walked and stores I shopped at,
delis I grabbed soup & sandwich combos from, and martinis I drank just hit
home in a new way with an episode shot outside the bar beneath my onetime home
in Brooklyn.
That apartment is now a
landmark building in an ultra-hip area. The bodega across the street where we
could only afford one sandwich for dinner to share, with the kid who used to
make our salami, cheese and pickle sandwich into a poor man’s Cuban by placing
it under the Pyrex coffee pot on the coffeemaker is gone. It’s now someone’s
fancy-schmancy apartment. The Macy’s where I bought two pair of Converse
one-stars (one pink suede and one mint green pearlized leather) for ten bucks
doesn’t exist. Instead of bodegas, there are boutiques. Instead of bodegas
there are more renovated brownstones. It’s not the same. The things I loved
about the neighborhood—the amalgam of classes, the Goodwill and the sushi
joint, the arab deli, the salvage warehouses and the housing project—have
undoubtedly been cleaned up. Gentrified. Pushed out to make way for chic shops
filled with things I once again cannot afford.
The midtown Manhattan where
I worked has been Disney-fied and green-ified—the falafel cart in front of my
office building shooed away in favor of green bike lanes, the Thanksgiving
parade route altered. I’ve even heard you can get cell service in that
once-upon-a-time place where no one could reach me—the subway.
The restaurant from which I
got the best burger in Larchmont after running the NYC Marathon has closed, my
friend from the burrito joint has moved to Belgium, one of my best friends is
painting her house to ready it for sale. If I go back, she might not be there.
Things change.
Living in this place where
some things haven’t changed in thousands of years, it often feels like I could
wind my watch back three years and be right back where I was. But I can’t. I
made choices. I’ve changed. My apartment is filled with someone else’s furniture.
My job no longer exists. I won’t fit there anymore.
I really love driving. Once
my friends and I reached driving age, I was the one who, no matter who else was
willing to take their car wherever we were going—the Hamptons, the city, the
party two towns away—I, too, would take mine. Designated driver?
No problem, but you’re gonna have to leave when I wanna go. Maybe we’ll leave the party and take a
ride to the beach…..
My car was my freedom. Driving down the highway, in MY car,
where I could listen to MY music (despite protests from friends whose tastes
ran a little more Top 40 than mine), smoking MY cigarettes, going where I
wanted to go, leaving when I wanted to leave.
My first car was a pale
yellow Subaru hatchback that a boyfriend referred to as “the egg”. We actually started dating after our
Philosophy final, on a snowy day just before Christmas when I’d locked my keys
in the parking lot of the community college’s parking lot and he
oh-so-gallantly took me to his house to wait until my sister got home and could
let me in to the house to get a spare set of car keys.
It took me to work, out to
my friends’ summer house in the Hamptons and straight back to work the
following day. It carted me and my
belongings to and from my new upstate school numerous times. It provided refuge and solitude, carted
my ass aimlessly around Long Island and the rest of the tri-state area whenever
the mood struck.
That car met its end parked
in front of my mother’s house during summer break. We lived on a corner in a town that rivals that of Edward
Scissorhand’s in terms of cookie cutter suburb. I unlocked the driver’s side door, realized I’d forgotten my
watch, and ran back into the house.
Just in time to miss the muscle car that careened around the corner,
spun around, crushed the enter driver’s side, continued spinning and drove off.
Despite my close brush with
death, I was secretly delighted. I
really wanted a new car. Well, an old car. A pink ‘70s convertible VW bug to be precise. My father helped me find it. Then he helped me learn how to drive it, with its
four-speed manual transmission (I had to stand up to jam the gearshift down to
get it into reverse). And
how to pop the clutch and make it “go” when the battery died: find someone to push the steel beast,
first gear & clutch engaged, until it reached an approximation of second
gear, release the clutch and hope the one pushing it didn’t expect to get in
and go where you were going.
Invaluable lesson, it turned out.
In addition to the faulty
battery upon purchase (for much too much money), it had the classic VW Beetle
heating system (read: virtually non-existent). The engine was in the back. Below the back bench seat were pipes directing air from the
engine through holes right about where my passengers’ calves were. This was meant to warm the entire
car. When the tubes carrying the
air rotted, you could just take a coffee can, slit it up the side, squeezed to
the size of the original pipes and pop ‘em where the originals belonged. It was a somewhat futile fix, as with
either original or coffee can pipes, the heat never made it to the front
seat. In cold weather, I had to
scrape ice off the inside of the
windshield.
Still, I loved that
car. It was pink! It was a convertible! It was a stick shift! It was pink! It also began to bleed oil. I started traveling with cases of oil on the rotting floor
of the back seat, right next to the fiberglass I’d intended to fix the
floorboards with but never got around to, during my trips to and from my
upstate college. I finally had to
leave it there, torturing my mother as it ruined her driveway until the day
that kid came and asked if he could buy it (and the oil and the fiberglass) for
his girlfriend. I was about to
start student teaching and needed a reliable car, more befitting of my
position. Really, I needed
something that would help me be taken more seriously by the middle school
students that I looked a little too much like.
Enter the oh-so-practical
Toyota four-door bought with my mom.
Such a sensible ride for a teacher of English. I drove that car through six house moves, three job changes,
one towing by the NYCDOT and a major break-in that stripped me of hundreds of
dollars of clothing during a stop in NYC to see Bob Mould at Irving Plaza
between a day of work, a trip to Boston for the weekend and more work on Monday. Eleven years, a hundred and seventy
thousand miles and one broken trunk lock later, I bought my first car all by my
self.
I loved my Mini Cooper. It wasn’t pink, but it was mine, bought
after a torturous break up when I was facing living on my own and all that that
meant. And the breaker-upper
thought it was totally unnecessary.
I maintain it was exactly what I needed.
I drove to DC. I drove to Long Island. I drove upstate. Sometimes multiple times a week. That brand new car, which its unlikelihood
of breaking down (and it’s Mini-provided roadside assistance if it did) was my
life saver as I went from work, to home, to the friends who let me sob my
heartbreak all over them, to work again.
I drove to my job in
mid-town Manhattan. Every day for
seven years. I sat on the West Side Highway, smoking my cigarettes, listening
to my music, fielding phone calls and emails from work, having conversations
with my friend M. in her car that was always just up ahead in the line of
traffic heading home until she hit the deadspot on the Saw Mill where
Westchester turns toward Putnam.
One summer day, all of NYC,
Westchester and, I think, most of the Eastern seaboard lost power. No trains, no subways. Good thing I had my car, into which I
stuffed five other adults and drove them all home, through various
neighborhoods of Manhattan, the Bronx and Westchester.
When we decided to move to
Italy, I had to sell my car. It
was actually sold after I left and it was what made the move feel final. Sure, I’d given away, sold or packed up
most of my belongings to be shipped across the ocean in a container but it was
knowing that when (if?) I go back, my car isn’t waiting for me at JFK.
I don’t drive much
here. Besides the facts that our
car is bigger than I’d like, a smallish station wagon-esque beast and that I’m
not on the kooky, incredibly expensive Italian-style insurance plan, truth is I
just don’t like to drive here. The
roads are too narrow, too poorly lit, inefficiently signed and often lead into
some medieval town built for people on horseback with surprising dead ends and
impossibly right-angled corners.
Did I mention our car is too big?
And then, there are the drivers.
Much has been written about
Italian drivers. Suffice it to say
that they all seem to think they are Fernando Alonso, speeding through Monaco’s
Grand Prix course, overtaking cars at every turn. As V. says, often, when I scare him by bracing myself for
impact as headlights head toward us in our own lane, while someone else is driving so far up our trunk we
can’t see their headlights in the rearview mirror, “I’m sorry but people are
trying to kill me here!”
For someone who enjoys
driving so much that I once contemplated a job as a truck driver (until I
realized I wouldn’t want to be broken down on the side of some road in the
middle of the night or sleeping in the cab at a truck stop), the fact that
driving in Italy is a non-stop battle to remain alive instead of the exercise
in freedom of adventure it should be kills me.
If only I could pick up the
multi-laned US highways and the drivers that don’t pass into oncoming traffic,
drop ‘em down over this country, get in a little old pink Fiat 500 and go……
