The Southwest Voice

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     Midway thought the class, the teacher introduced an unexpected hero: the truck behind the man. In its old age and heavily-dented condition, the truck kept him relatively safe. “Well, she goes zero to sixty in half an hour, but she’s all I got.” He spoke of his truck the way you might a giant tortoise that was your only means of transportation. “It gets me places, but I wouldn’t take my date on it. The good thing is that I can’t get pulled over for speeding if I wanted to. I don’t lose sleep when she picks up more dents.” This was shared as though it were an advantage.

     More importantly, the truck seemed to shed light on the teacher’s unexplained character change, the one responsible for making him teach traffic school. “Sure, as a young man I would have pounded on you for making eye-contact. But, now I hurt in too many places. I’m a virtual cripple.” He had apparently lost his job after an industrial accident. Now, he and his truck resembled each other the same way many couples do after years of marriage.  

     Tossing the DMV guide onto the desk, the teacher explained how he had recently perfected the art of driving without a rearview mirror. “It’s not my fault. It just fell off. Technically, you can drive in California without one.” I leaned forward in my seat. Maybe this man taught traffic school for the usable insights. It was the equivalent of the employee discount, an electrician that knows all the shortcuts.

     Now I was listening. Perhaps there would be benefits for me, as well. I might even find out about the teacher’s missing sideburns.

     When he told us more about his truck, I began to doubt its safety. “And remember, drivers are under no obligation to let you onto the freeway. So, when merging, you had better drive with the flow of traffic, unless, of course, you happen to be driving an older … truck.”

     The radio in the teacher’s truck didn’t work, too. “I don’t care. If I want to listen to the radio, I just bring in a boom box.” Boom box?

      Several years ago, a friend from work drove me home in his seventy-four Maverick, a car covered in rusty dents. Sitting in the passenger’s seat, I reached for the radio and noticed a large crack in the frame. “Oh, don’t bother,” he said. “It doesn’t work.” He opened the glove compartment and pulled out a large tape recorder. After he banged it on the hood twice, it responded with what sounded like Russian marching music. “They go through my car all the time at night. I don’t mind. I just can’t stand it when they leave the door open and I find dew on my seats in the morning.”

     “Is that what this note on the dashboard is about?” I asked. The note had faded ink and read, “Please lock door on way out. THANK YOU.”

     These “visitors” had apparently tried to jack the stereo. But, the job was abandoned, either because they were amateurs or they just grew frustrated with the car’s apparent worthlessness.

     That’s the good thing about having a stereo worth more than your car. It takes attention away from your precious ride.

     “Mostly they steal the incidentals. Money and stuff,” he said.

     To my friend and my teacher, there was a simple beauty in having a car you didn’t mind wrecking. To them, a car was simply a means to get from one point to the next. Today, a car represents anything but transportation. You see it everywhere: movies playing on video screens, transformer trucks that convert into SUVs. Cars have become comfort machines, offices, and home theaters. The typical car is so loaded and plush that its interior can resemble a coffin. And these are not even the luxury cars. Sadly, many of these same cars will become coffins on the road.

     My friend Cheryl was driving on the LA freeway with her family when her six-year-old daughter pointed at a video screen playing in the car ahead of them. “Mommy, what are those people doing naked?” In explaining the movie as delicately as possible, Cheryl avoided the word “porno.” 

TO BE CONTINUED