Speeding for no reason

I read the below piece for SummerScreen Brooklyn, before their screening of 10 Things I Hate About You (1999).

Note: I did the math and it turns out I was actually 17 in this story but the spirit of it is the same. The provisions on driver’s licenses in California don’t get lifted until you’re 18, and speeding through school zones is always illegal.

I got my driver’s license when I was 16, which, now that I’ve had some time to think about it, was a mistake. Parents always like to remind their teenage children that despite what they may think they are not invincible. I don’t know about invincible but I was 16 and as far as I was concerned I was on a fucking roll. I passed driver’s ed, I passed the DMV driving test, I was killing it at Honors Spanish 2, and I’d heard there was a girl on the debate team asking about me. If I wasn’t invincible, well I was certainly coming close.

November 2003 was definitely not the first time I broke the law in my car and it surely wasn’t the last but it’s the first time that really stands out to me. When you’re a 16 year old in California, your driver’s license is a provisional one. One of the rules says that if you are 16 you are not allowed to drive around anyone under the age of 20 unless you have someone over the age of 25 in the passenger’s seat to supervise. On this particular Friday in November of 2003 I fit myself and 4 of my friends, none of whom were over the age of 25, in my car. Looking back at it now, it’s a smart rule, designed to keep groups of teens from egging each other on in the car, thereby reducing the risk of reckless activity on the road. It seems foolproof, but the rule did not take into account three very important details–

1) The Matrix: Revolutions was opening on that Friday.
2) I was the only one in my group of friends with a license.
3) We really, REALLY wanted to watch The Matrix Revolutions and we weren’t about to let something like provisional license restrictions get in our way.

All this is to say that even before I pulled out of the school parking lot what I was doing was 100% illegal. And it was about to get even more illegal. Driving like a regular, law-abiding citizen it would take a little over 15 minutes to get to the movie theater. Of course we were running late, so to get there before previews, I had to drive us about 5 miles in roughly 10 minutes.

The thought of death never even occurred to me, which is why, I suppose, I was able to get us there in a very intense 6 minutes. For those six minutes I was like Apollo in his flaming chariot hitting 60 on the surface streets, I was Prometheus descending from Mount Olympus in a pre-owned Honda Civic with a CD player, I was whatever the fuck happened at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. In that car, for those six minutes, across 5 miles and 2 school zones, the faster we went the more time seemed to slow down, and I knew in my heart what being young forever truly meant. In my mind I was untouchable, but in reality we were all just lucky that no one got hurt.

My parents warned me about feeling invincible, but it only now occurs to me that that warning was also for the sake of the other people who had the misfortune of crossing paths with this version of myself– someone who would risk the lives of himself, his friends, and the hundreds of drivers and passengers on that 5 mile stretch of roads in East L.A. in order to watch an afternoon screening of The Matrix: Revolutions.

After the movie we all came to an important agreement: The Matrix: Revolutions wasn’t worth breaking laws and potentially injuring ourselves and others like that, but I did get us there pretty fucking fast and that was kind of cool. For the rest of that afternoon I basked in that special glow that comes from surviving your own stupidity, content in my knowledge that while there was a lesson to be learned, I still had all the time in the world to learn it. I was 16 after all.