That Lonesome Road: American Truck Simulator, Disability, and the Fantasy of Driving
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I’m seven years old. My dad is inside the house screaming at my mom and I’m sitting in the driver’s seat of a Royal Red 1983 Volkswagen Rabbit on blocks in the front yard. The fantasy of driving is a refuge. I think about getting my license when I’m sixteen, speeding out of this rural swamp and never looking back. It looks like Rad Racer in my head, all parallel lines and horizon. I flinch every time a car drives down the highway that runs past our house. Everything is so loud.
I take comfort where I can, in the switches and dials on the console, in the dimpled texture of the gear stick. I slide down the seat to reach the pedals. I don’t know why there are three of them or which one is which, but I think the biggest one must be the gas. I press my foot down and imagine the speedometer rising up. It goes all the way to 85. I put all my weight down on the pedal.
American Truck Simulator has so many buttons. Does a real truck have this many buttons? The Pure Red Peterbilt 389 that I start the game with has a horn, an air horn, and something called a “light horn.” I assume I’ll need to use all three. A lot. There are at least five different kinds of brakes, and some of them don’t have default keybindings. How many kinds of brakes can I need? Should I just pick the one that sounds coolest?
I’ve never driven a car by myself. Lots of autistic people can drive but I can’t. People have tried to teach me. I’ve driven circuits around my fair share of church parking lots. The noise of traffic is just too much for me. It’s overwhelming. I lose track of where I am. I panic. I need to pause, but you can’t really pause in traffic.
The fantasy of driving is still a refuge. The fantasy of being able to drive. There’s so much comfort in the idea that I could do this thing that so many people take for granted, that I could go across town — or even to the next town over — without worrying about bus tickets and public transit schedules and the way people look at me when I ask them for a ride to my doctor’s appointment. Imagine being on time for things.
At the virtual wheel of a Peterbilt 389 I feel invincible. I will deliver this load of pallets to the other side of Tucson and I will deliver it on time. I could drive all the way to Phoenix if I wanted to. Nothing’s stopping me. If anyone gets in my way I’ll sound all three of my horns at them until they move. I will not stop. I don’t even know which brake to use. At last I have the chance to experience my dream job — driving a truck!
I pull into the warehouse as Dolly Parton sings the last few bars of River of Happiness. I’ve picked up some damage to my trailer and a $200 speeding violation, but I deliver the pallets on time. Somewhere a river of happiness flows. And then it’s on to Phoenix with 37,000 pounds of furniture in a double trailer. What more could a girl ask for?
Dolly’s singing the chorus to I Will Always Love You when I crash into a red sedan on the I-10. It spins out in front of me and I start to panic and I have to pause the game.
I’m eighteen years old in the back seat of a Bright Red 2000 Pontiac Grand Am that’s about to get t-boned. I hear my friend yell “oh shit!” and then there’s a bright light and then the whole next year is kind of fuzzy — I sleep a lot and I slur my speech and I have a headache all the time. I can’t play videogames because the screen makes my headache worse. I black out sometimes, just for a moment here and there. I’m scared to get in a car for a long time afterward.
When I’m able to play videogames again, driving in games becomes a way of processing trauma. I play GTA: Vice City and Saints Row, games where I can just recklessly crash into shit over and over. I numb myself to the moment of impact by repeatedly reliving an absurd caricature of the wreck. I learn to ride in a car without panicking. I don’t clutch my seatbelt as hard. I think about traffic less as a real and immediate risk to my physical well-being and more as an abstract system. I understand that this probably isn’t the healthiest way to deal with my fear but I do it anyway.
Something about crashing for the first time in American Truck Simulator feels too real. The sound effect of the cars crunching together is a weak thud and the game only penalizes me $180, but the sudden jerking halt to my barreling journey down the interstate puts me back in a place I don’t want to go. I take a few hours to recover before I finish my trip to Phoenix. I’m too jittery to park the trailer, so I use the automatic parking feature and take a penalty to my experience points. I don’t really know why I have experience points, but I anchor myself to the abstraction. I don’t know how to drive but I know how to level up.
I don’t really feel confident behind the wheel again until I hit a long stretch of highway on a run to El Centro with 29,000 pounds of nuts. The sun sets over the desert. The road feels like it belongs to me and my humble burden of nuts. I could go anywhere. Into the gay casino in Nevada’s town of Reno, Kentucky Gambler planned to get rich quick.
I keep crashing. I crash a bunch, which is to say I sort of bounce off of things and keep going. The consequences are minimal. Every time I knock over a speed limit sign or clip a sedan or get distracted and crash into a moving train at eighty miles per hour it makes me a little less anxious. Eventually it doesn’t make me anxious at all. I revel in my newfound freedom. These are my highways and I am their reckless spirit. I burn through the night with all three horns blasting like the archangelic trumpets of the Final Judgment.
I take three different buses to get to my doctor’s appointment. The whole trip, there and back, ends up taking five hours. I have to take off work for it. The noise on the bus is overwhelming, even with earplugs. Everything smells like smoke and body odor and I feel like I’m going to scream. Some guy on the bus is talking too loud about lying down in a nest of fire ants and I can relate. I put my head down and close my eyes and try to focus on the sound of the engine, the rough-smooth texture of my purse, any stable pattern I can latch onto in a sea of horrible noise.
Sensory overload affects my ability to orient my body in space, and I keep getting lost and walking into things. I flail my arms wildly at a bus going in the wrong direction, thinking I’ve missed my ride. The bus driver waves back and smiles but doesn’t stop. People stare. Whatever. I make it home eventually, exhausted and disoriented and covered in bruises. I just want to sit in a dim, quiet room and haul this 31,000 pound trailer of meat from Phoenix to Las Vegas.
The long drive is an escape, but it’s more than that. It’s a way of imagining an accessible world and in doing so conceptualizing accessible futures. What would a world in which I could freely move between cities look like? What would it feel like? How would I choose to move through that world? My rear view mirror becomes a kind of Foucaultian mirror through which I see myself projected from the heterotopian site of play to the utopian imaginary of accessibility. As I ponder this, I drift into the passing lane and clip an ambulance. Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.
In American Truck Simulator, my movement is constrained by the game’s systems. I choose jobs from a list based on the length of the drive and the payout. I’m not terribly concerned with profit, but I have to make enough money to cover my crash penalties and speeding violations. On a whim I decide to drive off the highway and see how far I can get into the desert. I make it probably less than a hundred feet before I crash into an invisible wall. I feel a brief pang of disappointment in myself for breaking the game’s illusion of freedom
I do seem to be getting a little better at driving though, and I start to feel more aware of this uncanny desert landscape. I keep hoping to see a hawk fly overhead or a desert hare leaping through the sagebrush, but this is a world inhabited primarily by machines. The sparse AI traffic drifts in and out of my field of view. I honk at passing cars using various combinations of my three horns but they never honk back. I can still see that lonesome road stretched out before me. The road that led me out of his life.
The systematic limitations of the game provide a means to reflect on systematic inaccessibility in the world. I wonder if the silent cars can travel down the roads that are mysteriously blocked to my Peterbilt 389. I wonder if their drivers have lives in the weird simulacra cities and towns that dot the landscape. I wonder what happens to them after I crash into them. Are there passengers in their back seats who get traumatic brain injuries and have migraines for the rest of their lives? I don’t feel like a part of their world but like someone moving through it, a ghost hauling cargo from one node on the world map to another, a trail of inexplicable destruction in my wake. At last I have the chance to experience my dream job — driving a truck!
Movement itself becomes a kind of restriction, a way of separating myself from the world of the game rather than inhabiting it. The more I push against the game’s rules, the more I feel them pushing back. The world shrinks into the cab of my truck. I realize that there are at least seventeen dials and meters in my front console and I don’t what most of them mean, if anything. I wonder if the real-world experience of driving can feel isolating like this, a reduction of movement to abstract systems and rules. There’s some comfort in this too though, in the insulation it provides from the world and its noise. I center myself between parallel lines and watch the desert sunset in my rear view mirror. I don’t hit anything this time. I really am getting better at this.
