Driving at 120
An old girlfriend called me up at noon. She said, "I'm getting married at three o'clock at the courthouse. Can you come?"
I knew I would have to get permission from my bartending job. But I also knew that three o'clock in the afternoon is a great time to take off in the restaurant business.
"Yes," I replied.
Six months later, the same woman called me from Georgia.
"I"m breaking up with my husband. Can you help me get my stuff out of our house?"
"Are you sure?"
"I've got my sister helping me with my divorce." Her sister was a lawyer. This was serious. "I am not staying with him. No matter what. I could really use a friend to help me make the trip."
"Okay." I would have done it for any friend in need. And she seemed to be really in need. I had hoped for a happier marriage for her, obviously. But if she had been a guy, I would have done it. No fair to dodge out because she was an old girlfriend and I had thought her husband seemed nice.
She drove an Oldsmobile Omega, a crappy car. But she met me in it. She had a plan. This was the sedan into which we would pack all her earthly belongings.
“You’ll like it,” she assured me. “I’ve gotten used to driving fast.”
I made a skeptical noise. When we dated, years ago, she had not been thrilled when I took cars above 95 mph. She had shown absurd confidence in me, though. She had watched me drive with just my legs and laughed. We had talked about cars a little, sometimes.
I had forgotten her father was a mechanic.
When we got onto the highway, she pressed the pedal all the way down. I watched the speedometer, which only went to 85. The needle pressed up against the bar at the far right around where the number 100 would have been. The needle was trying to go higher than the meter allowed it to display. How fast were we going? For a while, I didn’t know. I couldn’t.
She started passing cars on the highway like they were standing still and she was going sixty. That’s a weird feeling. I’d gotten to 105 before. I’d gotten above 110 once. But that had been when I had a highway to myself and under ideal conditions.
This felt way, way different.
“Holy shit!”
I had to repress the instinct to grab the panic handle on my upper right. At these speeds, nothing was going to help if she made a mistake. And as she weaved in and out of cars standing still, like we were driving at highway speeds through a parking lot, I began to relax.
She was good at this. She was making no mistakes.
Her father had been a mechanic for thirty five years. He’d ‘fixed’ her car a bunch of times. Whatever he’d done to this little sedan, it was for sure more powerful than the manufacturers specified.
“I try not to ever hit the brakes,” she said. “The sound they make worries me.”
“Okay.” I hadn’t want to hit brakes at high speeds in my parents cars either. It felt dangerous, as if I might fishtail at a hundred.
She talked with me about her strategies for driving through this highway parking lot. Her eyes scanned the traffic as far forward as she could see, usually a quarter mile.
“The cars up close are kind of irrelevant,” she said when I mentioned it. “I’ve already made my decisions about them.”
“What about when the gaps are changing?”
“That’s a problem,” she admitted. Primly, as if it were their fault, she added, “I wish they wouldn’t do that.”
My alarm subsided into a state of heightened awareness. The air noise outside meant we could hear each other but the other road noises seemed distant. I didn’t know what I could do if there was a problem but my body was ready to react. In the meantime, I watched as she compensated for changes in gaps as one car tried to pass another, as usual, unaware we were barreling down on them at twice their speed. And I learned.
Partway through North Carolina. she announced, “I’m tired.”
“My turn?”
“I’m going to pull into this gas station up ahead. I’ll pay. And then you drive.”
“How fast were we going?” I wondered for the hundredth time.
“I don’t know,” she replied. “Pretty fast.”
About two years later, the same young woman made a similar drive down the east coast. This time, she got caught in Virginia by a speed trap.
“I tried to cry my way out of it,” she confessed. “But it didn’t work this time. They didn’t even reduce my ticket much.”
“What did they clock you at?” I asked.
“Just one hundred twenty. But that’s plenty. I’m suspended.”
When I got back on the road, I had no clear idea of our previous speed but I knew what felt comfortable. With an eye out for cops, I pegged the speedometer needle to the right.
After five minutes of this, my ex laughed at me. She had lost her patience.
“Press the pedal all the way down,” she said.
“But that’s passing gear.” Her car, like most automatic transmission vehicles, had a kick-ass passing gear. In my driver's education class they had told me it was only for emergency use.
“I drove all the way through Maryland, Virginia, and most of North Carolina in passing gear,” she pointed out. “It’s my car. I say it’s fine. Put the pedal down.”
I pressed the pedal all the way to the floor.
Before, I know from my experiences in other cars I'd been over a hundred-five. That was nothing. When I hit passing gear, the car leaped forward. The sound of the air changed.
Right away, my ex started to coach me how do drive through the avenue of parked cars while we were going sixty miles per hour faster than them.
“You’re not looking far enough ahead,” she said. “You’ve got to know how you’re steering through them farther in advance.”
“Okay, okay.” I concentrated. This was like skiing. I had to hit my marks.
After a while, it was easier than skiing. I wasn’t tired, for one thing. I was hitting my rhythm. We kept an eye out for cops. She urged me to go faster until there was no faster to go. Eventually we hit Georgia, she took over, and we rolled into her neighborhood next to the army base.
Cursing, she directed me to load up her car. She had to make choices about what to leave behind. And then we were done. We started the drive back.
I got to drive through South and North Carolina.
Sometimes life gets fast. I don’t mean physically, not usually, but everything gets to be too much. Deadlines come up, one after another after another. And there’s no control over some of them. Life becomes reacting, moving from one crisis to the next, and grabbing enough time to savor the gaps between. You want to look as far ahead as you can but you have to react to the things close up.
And I remember that drive, the other cars as obstacles, and the speed.
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