Lara and I were listening to the oldies station in my blue Buick Skylark (affordable luxury), laughing hysterically, driving double the speed limit down a long back road in Foxboro, when all of a sudden during the chorus of “Mr. Postman”, my beautiful blue Buick shimmied off the road and into some woman’s forsythia bush – my first accident.
Yellow flowers adorned the hood and windshield of my car on the rainy summer day in 2000. Lara and I checked ourselves for injury and because I had never been in an accident where I was driving. I reasoned, “well, I didn’t hit another car or someone’s child, so I guess I’ll just leave. The bush isn’t destroyed, its just … bent.”
I thought I was so clever.
“No one will ever know.” No one would have known if I hadn’t left my front license plate on the woman’s yard. Five minutes later, my pager vibrated the harried vibrate that can only come from mother who has been contacted by the police concerning her son, Captain Clever. If she could have dialed a special code to my pager that read, “You are dead to me,” she would have.
Apparently, the brush with the bush wasn’t enough for me. Over the next year and a half, I would be cited and decorated on many occasions by various police officials for my “exemplary” driving techniques. This included, but was not limited to, driving into ditches, disregarding any notion of a so-called “speed limit,” proud displays of my middle finger, use of the horn as communication device – all leading up to the demise of the 1980 Buick, which I had dubbed “The Justice-mobile.” To this day, whenever I drive past the intersection on Blackstone Boulevard in Providence, R.I. where I slammed into the back of a nice Russian man’s car, totaling the Justice-mobile, I cross myself as though in Church; a private gesture between God and I to ensure that such an event shall never occur again.
God had a different plan for me, a punishment plan, in fact. To pay for my sins while operating the Justice-mobile in all its mayhem, a curse of death had been put on the next two vehicles I inherited, causing my poor father to indulge in a prescription of Zoloft to quell the bouts of blinding rage which I inspired with my phone calls at 2 a.m. informing him, “Daddy, there’s something wrong with the car.”
I graduated high school with an honorable resume which included five moving violations, three accident reports, and one state-policeman’s video tape which featured the officer ripping me out of my car and barking at me for unsheathing my glorious middle finger to a family of four.
My mother is still trying to get her hands on a copy of the video even four years later to show at family parties or to my new boyfriends.
I was preparing for my first semester at the University of Massachusetts when I was informed of my date with destiny. I signed up for the re-training session offered by the Department of Motor Vehicles at Smith College and on a brisk day in October of 2001, I entered the set of the exciting reality television show, “The Degenerates of Society.”
I had met my competition for “most dangerous motorist” of my classmates at that fateful re-training session. They were drunks, drug dealers, prostitutes, gang members, and everything I have ever wanted in a talk show right there in a small classroom.
I was clearly the least dangerous out of all of them, or the most dangerous depending on how you look at it, for my infractions occurred while sober, making me the minority in the group. I sat next to a gang member named Tre, who I immediately fell in love with when he showed me his tattoos and switchblade; the thought of a boy in a full sweat suit walking me to class and calling me “shorty” sends shivers up and down my spine even now.
Our teacher arrived and broke up a fight between Tre and some really ugly guy in a suit and tie who was drinking Poland Spring Vodka from a flask and shouting racial slurs (I swooned as Tre spouted off slang I had never even heard). This was the best day of my life, or the worst depending on how you look at it. I didn’t want to spend eight hours talking about driving and re-living my driver’s ed classes from high school, but when I met Yolanda, Tre, Robert, Xou, Susie from Southwest and all of my fellow dangers to the community, my heart was full. The icing on the cake was Morty, the ringmaster of our circus of evil.
Morty was a good old boy from the north end of Boston who didn’t give a crap about any of us, and we loved him for it. Morty was a no nonsense guy, he cared about two things: driving and giving us 20 minute breaks every five minutes. Truly, if there was any man who was going to teach us how to drive better, Morty was not him, and that’s why we loved him so much. Never has a Saturday moved so slowly. We talked about aggressive driving, actually using your turn signal, and why we should leave our weapons at home.
Although the whole experience was regrettable, when I walked out of that room of shame, I was free of my debt to society, and I had made some connections if I ever needed some one’s legs broken. I didn’t realize that I had actually gleaned something from the session until the semester had ended and my mother was driving me home. She was cut off by some ill-advised motorist and unleashed a borage of obscenities, to which I replied “Mom, that’s aggressive”. We looked at each other with shock on our faces. “Is this my baby boy?” my mom’s face read as we drove down the Mass. Pike past the man she had just said five versions of the “f-word” to.
Later, I returned to my throne, the driver’s seat with new confidence. To this day, I catch myself going the speed limit, and it’s during those times that I stroll (or drive recklessly) down memory lane, hearing the voice of Morty ring in my head as I pass my true love, Tre, knifing some kid who owes him money.
A tear rolls down my cheek as I realize that my life is different now. I have not received a citation in four years, except for that one I got over break that I am fighting in court in a couple weeks. I will stand in front of the judge and defy my detractors with a glimmer in my eye and a solemn promise, “I am a reformed driver.”
Thomas Naughton is a Collegian columnist.
