Driver's Ed

📝 Thanks for reading Fran Magazine, a blog by Fran Hoepfner (me). This month, I’m on vacation, so I’m pleased to run a series of guest essays by Friends of Fran Magazine™. Thank you to Fran Magazine summer intern Ishikaa Kothari for steering the ship (Fran Magazine is a boat, in addition to a blog) and please enjoy a month of other people’s writing.

Spencer Williams is a poet and writer. She was previously interviewed by Fran about her debut poetry collection TRANZ. She is also one of the infamous poets who tormented her (positive) in grad school.

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No one had ever been less charmed by me than Eric, my adult driving instructor. He stood at a squat five-foot-six, but sitting next to him as he scrutinized my driver’s permit, he seemed at least five-nine.

“Do you have the cash?” he grunted, as if I were expecting him to hand me a very illegal substance. In actuality, the process of accruing a smooth one thousand and one hundred dollars from various 7-Eleven ATMs made me feel like a pawn in a much larger scheme. As I waited for each machine to eject an awkward pile of twenties into my hand, I pictured my body as it would later appear in the surveillance footage, shuffling awkwardly as I wondered if I should buy a Gatorade or a Propel for my troubles, all the while still mourning the bright pink Sobe bottle I would have chosen over both.

“Count it out, just to be sure it’s all there,” Eric ordered. I’d already counted the pile of bills I’d stuffed in an envelope—twice—before he arrived, parking a few houses down in a little white Subaru with “Mike’s Driving School” emblazoned on both sides. Still, I counted the cash dutifully, dividing my twenties into separate piles on my lap.

“Alright,” he said, trading me my permit for the envelope of cash. “Let’s switch seats.”

I tried my best to smile normally as we passed each other outside of the vehicle, but he did not return my gaze, much less the shape of my lips. My body fit abstractly in the front seat, legs a bit too long, eyes a bit too fearful.

“If you need to adjust,” he said, “there are levers on the side. Just pump ‘em until you’re where you need to be.”

I jerked the lever rhythmically until my legs no longer bent at an unnatural, model-esque angle. “That’s it,” he said. It almost sounded sultry. “All good?”

I nodded.

“Do you know what those are by your feet?”

I nodded again. “Brakes and gas,” I said, with the confidence of someone who had studied diligently for their permit test as though it might determine a future career path.

“Correct,” he said. “And do you know which is which?”

Fuck. “The big one is gas?”

Eric thrust a puff of air through his nostrils, as I imagined a wild boar might before charging.

“So it’s the opposite. The big one is the brake and it’s very important.”

“Got it,” I said.

“I also noticed you’re wearing boots. So you’ll want to be very careful about the force you exert. You’ll want to press down hard but try to resist that urge so you don’t bury us in the back of someone else.”

I nodded, tapping the front of my boot lightly on the brake, performatively trying to gauge how hard was too hard, how light was too light. We were in park, so it was impossible to tell.

“Alright,” he said. “I’m going to slowly guide you to Buffalo State’s parking lot. Then, I’ll show you how to park, and what all the shit by the wheel means and does.”

And then we were off.

At thirty-one, I’ve lived my entire adult life as a professional passenger princess. Like those golden retrievers you see in off-road vehicle advertisements—head out the window, tongue flapping in the wind—I have made an entire personality out of not knowing anything about the container taking me from point A to point B. I’m just excited to be along for the ride, for the wind to beat the front of my skull so that the two brain cells inside of it can feel something close to stimulation. I love to gaze longingly out the window as I contemplate dinner. When the mood strikes, I’ll put my hand up to the glass like they do in indie movies, reminiscing on the life I’ve left behind but will return to after my roommate drives us to Target. I’ve memorized the nervous system of multiple cities this way, not by street name or signal, but by landmark. There’s the urgent care I went to when I sliced my finger open making an artisanal grilled cheese. There’s the local Regal theatre, of which I am a renowned Crown Club member. There’s the combination popcorn-soda store run by two married gay guys who have concocted such culturally significant treasures as “Pickle Rick Popcorn” and “You’re a Soda, Harry.” My sense of direction, as a permanent side-seat observer, is impeccable. I point, and suddenly, we’ve arrived.

Eric stared at me from behind his large sunglasses. Though I couldn’t make out his expression, I could feel the disappointment emanating from his body. I had just driven up onto the curb while trying to park on my street. The closest car was a good twelve feet away, on the opposite side of the road. Some young person, muscle-toned and sparkling against the Buffalo heat, made direct eye contact with me and smirked as they walked by.

“You know,” Eric began. “I do have a reputation in this city to uphold.”

In any other circumstance, a beat would occur, and then something like laughter would fill the space, releasing the awkward, tense rope tethering us so close to each other. But in Eric’s driving school car, stoicism was a baseline condition. Nothing was or could be funny about road safety. I imagine I will come to appreciate this strict schoolmaster approach in the near future, no matter how much it made my tummy hurt in the present.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought I had more room.”

“Well, you didn’t.”

“Yeah. Sorry about that.”

“Don’t do that again.”

“Yes. So sorry.”

“Alright, so let’s get you on the calendar for lesson two.”

Our lessons would continue in this vein: I’d make an egregious error on account of my newfound lack of depth perception and altogether novice-status, Eric would take my fuck up as a personal affront, and I’d try desperately to win him over again before our 45 minutes were up. When I attempted my first parallel park, I nearly knocked over someone’s mailbox by backing into it. Eric, trying but failing to control a visible impatience with my clumsiness, grabbed my wheel with a force that felt erotically charged. The veins in his hand pulsed near the knuckles, and I could make out the vivid blue pathways traveling up and down his arm. On rare occasions, when Eric would offer a brief but potent “great turn” on account of my admittedly great turns, my pussy would instinctively twitch, clamping onto the residual echo of his two syllables. Either way, we continued to edge each other: I would withhold any indication that I belonged behind a wheel, and he, in turn, would withhold gentle instruction.

Gradually, I was beginning to learn the rhythms of Buffalo residential road life. Stop signs populated seemingly every street corner, and many were veiled by the drooping branches of unkempt trees. An overabundance of speed humps on the west side of town jostled my skeleton with such a frequency that I was beginning to worry about CTE. However, I no longer held my breath when I merged into traffic or when I made a right turn on a red light. My parallel parks no longer felt like almost accidents. Finally, around lesson number six (out of fifteen), Eric turned to me as I completed, with something inching toward confidence, another three-point-turn on an empty street.

“So now’s the time you’ll want to start thinking about completing your NYS licensing course. It’s five hours on zoom and they give you a certificate at the end, after which you’ll need to book the road test.”

My course took place on a Sunday morning. Not bothering to mask the evidence of my thirties on my face, I awoke, slightly hungover, ten minutes before the Zoom call began. Each square held in frame, a vaguely non-binary Gen Z teenager, with the exception of two more adult-looking students. The instructor, a man named Dave I would describe as extremely fifty-six years old, began to take attendance.

“The Spence is in the house!” he barked. I smiled painfully. The one rule was that everyone had to have their cameras on for the entire five-hour period. Shutting off would result in a loud, angry beeping sound that would continue until the camera turned on again. After he was done announcing each student like they were about to enter the UFC octagon, he made us go around the Zoom again and talk about our hopes and dreams post-graduation. To the two other older students, excluding me in the process, Dave said, “y’all are probably already living out your hopes and dreams! But for the rest of you, why don’t you tell me about your dream college! Spence, why don’t you start us off.”

“I’m thirty-one.”

“What did you say?”

“I’m taking a gap year.”

“A gap year! Well, we all deserve one of those, don’t we?”

As we inched toward the final hour of the course, which included nothing beyond video modules concerning dead teens, alcohol, medication, and road rage, Dave solemnly asked us for a moment of silence. He wanted to “commemorate all the dead kids who died while recklessly texting” with us and pray that we would not make the same mistakes.

“It is our duty,” he said, with the air of an evangelical soapboxing at a public park, “to come together for driving against the powers that be.”

Though he did not elaborate on who the powers were, he did leave us on a hopeful note.

“Y’all know the song ‘Shine Bright like a Diamond’? There’s a lyric there when she says, ‘I chose to be happy.’ I chose to be happy. That’s what you all did by taking this course today, for starting your driving journeys. Today, you all chose to be happy. And you deserve to be.” And then, before we could thank him for his inspirational words, he ended the call.

For years, the fact that I couldn’t drive did not hinder my mobility. It’s not like I had anywhere special to go, or the salary to afford vacations in places so remote the only way in was by secluded dirt road. I’ve been lucky enough to live in cities that require little in the way of Silverados, the car I keep joking will be my first on account of its metallic BBL. When I lived in Iowa City as an undergrad, I could walk from my apartment to my movie theatre job to the campus library in fifteen minutes tops. The grocery store was a five-minute walk away from my toilet, as was the local Buffalo Wild Wings’ underrated and eclectic cocktail menu. When I lived in Jersey City as a graduate student, the beloved PATH train allowed me to traverse to campus and back with minimal psychic damage. And then, when I moved to Buffalo to work on a PhD, I found a quaint, congested neighborhood to satisfy all my Californian needs within a two-mile radius: various chai lattes, leftist bookstores, niche fusion restaurant tapas (plural?), marijuana, and wine of non-organic persuasion. However, other more practical needs proved to be more difficult to acquire. In Buffalo, a city so spread-out it feels like the suburbs no matter which direction you go, the closest 24-roll pack of double-ply toilet paper (I refuse to use one-ply on principle) is currently 4.3 miles away from my door. So is hand soap not made out of bee cum, or lizard milk. As I begrudgingly inch closer to 32, my material needs are shifting toward the geriatric, which is to say, the practical. I no longer want to walk for miles with my groceries leaking from the worn corner of my tote. I no longer care for the sun to burn my forehead as I figure out how to maneuver a bag of ice three miles to my freezer before it melts. I no longer want my shoes to disintegrate in a matter of weeks. What I want, as awful as it sounds, is to be fast, and to be a bit furious too. I want to cathartically scream in my car, with no one around, fists balled on the dash. I want a passenger princess to call my own. I want to circle the block, throw things in the trunk, and collect French fry containers on the floor. I want the spectacular loneliness of the American highway. I want to go, and come back, and go, and maybe never come back. But first I have to pass my road test.

Anyone else have any driver’s ed love stories? Or have you done something brave lately, a.k.a something that you thought you would never ever do? Or anyone especially good or especially bad at parallel parking

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