The Thing About Driving — A Personal Story

Michelle Ko
Aug 27, 2017 · 7 min read

“The thing with driving, though, is, I don’t have a car,” I told Peggy when we were on 101 to LA for the collegiates. But the thing really was I was going back to Hong Kong after graduation where I didn’t have to drive, and where, I also didn’t have a car. We were in the backseat of Henry’s SUV, but he didn’t say anything because he had heard me bring that up too many times, always more jokingly than with real intention. But Henry wouldn’t know my nagging internal conversations about driving; it was the only way to get around LA where he was from, and the company he was working part-time for gave him the SUV so he could drive to San Jose where the office was.

“You can borrow my car,” Peggy said. “In fact, I can just teach you how to drive.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, it’s really not that hard. But sign up for the written test first, then we can just use my car.”

It wasn’t what I expected and I was stunned for words, so I asked her how long she’d had her car.

“6 years,” she said precisely. “I bought it second-hand from a graduating student and she’s had it for a while already.”

“How good does it run?”

“It was good until it broke down. I spent almost as much as I bought it for to fix the thing.”

“What broke down?”

“Just last month the car died right after I got off the highway, just went completely still. Turns out the transmission was dead and I spent 26 hundred replacing that. And before that there were random things here and there, and then the hydrogen battery had to be replaced too because — I don’t know it was just defective or something.”

“Shit, that’s what, 5 grand?” Henry broke in while I was still trying to link up the names with what they actually do.

“About that much. But Honda just settled a class action on Civic Hybrid batteries, so my warranty got extended and I got a battery for free.”

It was March of 2012 when the court approved the settlement, but Honda filed an appeal so the claims was delayed. Anyway she got the battery for a while, and then Honda issued a recall for defective airbags in 2016 for her 2005 car. I found out later that the transmission broke down again after our graduation. They told her she was given a faulty one the first time around and that she was lucky that thing didn’t “blow up”. Her dad got her a new car in the end.

“You could’ve just gotten a new car,” I remember telling her then, as if I knew anything about buying a car second-hand, or first-hand, or maintaining one or getting rid of one. I imaged myself driving to the car wash Henry said was cheap but good near the In-and-Out, but the idea was immense and the details vague.

“I could have, but I don’t know, it’s my first car and I want to keep it for as long as I can.”

So I was this close to actually learning to drive, but the thought of risking not so much my life but a big part of Peggy’s scared me. I never brought up driving to her again, but then I could’ve asked Li for her car if I really wanted to. We used to play doubles before she graduated, and I’d been in her car more of late because she needed the company and I had the time.

She’d pick me up from Muay Thai all the way on First Street, or around the corner from my place near Berkeley High, and we’d cross the San Francisco bridge and up Fell Street to this Canto place called Mango Dream. When she heard I’d never been there because I didn’t drive and the Golden Gate Park was too out of the way, she took me three weeks in a row and I made up on all the baked seafood rice and mango and sweet rice dumplings on shaved ice for the past four years.

While I ate she’d run down the list of uninspiring things at work, and recap in detail what happened (in real life and in her vivid imagination) about her on-and-off boyfriend during the past week. And on our way back she’d suggest we drop by Trader Joe’s and pick up a six-pack, usually Guinness on my call because she didn’t actually drink and didn’t prefer beer anyway. I’d offer her one of the small glasses I liked to use but she always drank from the bottle. Chin on knees and back to the frame of my bed, she’d tell me, her voice so calm it sounded bored, that she still played that online game in hopes of running into the ex-boyfriend, and that instead of taking part-time accounting classes at Golden Gate University she wished she had taken art history and worked at a museum instead of in car accessory merchandizing. I told her she should pick up painting again, but she just sipped from the bottle and said maybe that was also why all her boyfriends ended up being jerks and maybe she’d known all along.

A case of self-esteem, I concluded simply, and she nodded in agreement. Then she’d sleep in my sleeping bag in my room, on the carpet I scrambled to clean up that morning that would’ve otherwise been un-vacuumed for the past year. Because why keep up a place you’d leave soon, if not a friend you probably would never see again. That lasted maybe a month, perhaps two. It was a weird time as breakups and pre-graduations always were, but it was perhaps weirder for me to watch her drive, a completely different person behind the wheel. Confident but never aggressive, and impeccably precise at every turn. I wonder if it was just me who was unspeakably scared of the vast machine and its immense responsibilities, or simply that her certainty stemmed from the road nicely paved and the navigation authoritative. The thing with watching her drive is, I could never see myself that collected behind the wheel, despite all my neatly contained theories about who we were and how we were trying to get there, and the reassurance of a job offer that I would grow up when the time came.

And the job did take me many places in different people’s cars, where it was also just a job for them to drive me places. But I was in a friend’s car once since I came back. We drove up a hill and parked among the many couples and groups of couples who came to watch the sunset. But we weren’t a couple, in fact, we were barely friends. He was just someone I discussed movies with, and a few times we had gone to watch movies we didn’t want to see alone. We hiked up a bump on the far end of the line of cars, where there was a rock that looked out to the sea and the observatory. I asked him if he knew anyone with bipolar disorder like the movie we just saw, but he wouldn’t know that I did and that it scared me thinking about both what I could and couldn’t understand.

The conversation drifted to the guy he tried to recruit as partner in his start-up who had bipolar and dropped out of college. Then we talked about his start-up and how he couldn’t give up his job now because it was interesting too and because he had worked hard to be where he was and because it was a good place to be. The sky was morphing from pink into deep crimson and the wind was getting stronger. I was waiting for the observatory to light up, and then it struck me it wouldn’t because that would defeat the purpose. So we headed down and he drove me home.

“So I take 20 driving lessons, and 4 hours of written exam classes and I’m good to go?”

“No, it’s 10 classes because it’s 45 minutes each but you have to take 1.5 hours each time.”

“OK, so 10 driving classes? Do I start now?”

“You take the written test first. You can take the 4 hours of classes in one go –that is if you want to take it — and then you take the test. And remember to show them this receipt when you go. After you pass the written, you come back to us and we’ll arrange for the driving lessons.”

“What if I failed?”

“You come back to us.”

So the package was 10 driving lessons, 4 hours of theory on road safety and car mechanics, online test exercise, tips on acing the driving test, special tour of the test route, and 3 extra hours of practice driving after passing the driving test. You pay at the driving school and part of the money goes to the Transportation Department, $510 for the driving test form, another $510 for the learner’s license and $38 for the “tava fee”. Then the Transportation Department mails you a letter and some receipts that you bring along with your ID to the written test, and when you pass you go back to the driving school and start taking classes a few months later because the earliest driving test date is in 4 months. Then you take the driving test, pass and take 3 more hours to actually learn about the roads outside of the exam route. And then you get your license.

And then — and then you figure out about getting a car. But I suppose that’s a different story from learning to drive, and that’s OK too.

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