Neighborhood Where I Learned to Drive
John Mandelberg
This is the neighborhood where I learned to drive. All this is very familiar to me.
I remember driving up this hill with my father. It gets steep here, see? And you accelerate to go up the hill, and then suddenly you’re at the top and you’re still accelerating and, look, there’s a red light right there! The light was red, and I had to slam on the brakes really fast, right here. My heart was pounding, and Dad said, “See? You’ve got to be ready to brake anytime. You’ve always got to be ready.”
That street down there used to be nice and quiet, now it’s busy.
* * *
Vineyard Street, this street goes to the high school, straight down there. I took driver’s training in high school but I didn’t get much practice, I was sick a lot that year, had some other problems. Of course your great-grandmother was sick.
One time in driver’s training, I stopped when I was turning off Vineyard. I don’t know why I stopped, I just had the feeling I was supposed to stop, and the instructor shouted at me, “Don’t ever just stop like that!” So I was ashamed, and tried to press the gas pedal, but he had the instructor’s brake pressed down and I couldn’t go forward, even though he was telling me not to ever stop.
I never learned much from driver’s training at school. It was Dad mostly, and Aunt Beatrice, and sometimes my cousin Big Tom, who taught me how to drive.
I guess you never met Big Tom. Yeah. Big Tom.
* * *
This street crosses the railroad tracks down there and takes you to the smaller airport. Even back then it was busy sometimes with a lot of trucks, but not as busy as it is now, not on weekends like this.
Dad would take me down that way sometimes. He was usually quiet when he took me out driving, but not angry or grouchy. After he hadn’t said anything in a while, he might suddenly say, “OK, without looking in your mirror, is there a car behind you?” I’d say, “Uhh, you know, I’d have to look in the mirror to answer that.” He’d say, “You should know at all times if there is a car behind you. You should have been already checking the mirror every 15 seconds or so. You keep doing that, and it gets to be instinctual after a while, then you do it without thinking and you don’t have to worry about it. It gets easier. You’ll see.”
* * *
Oh, right, this is Marlowe Street. Dad would take me driving down Marlowe Street a lot. We practiced parking at the old Sears that used to be down to the south, about six, eight blocks down.
At this corner, if you want to make a right turn on red, you have to squeeze in real tight to the curb, otherwise you’ll have to wait for a green light. I’d make Dad nervous here. He’d shout, “Watch it, watch it! Don’t cut too close!” Look, it’s still like that, all these years later they never widened that lane, it’s exactly how it was.
* * *
When Aunt Beatrice was living with us, she’d take me out driving too. I got on the freeway for the first time with her. The onramp to the freeway is a ways down this street. It was before they built the connector road. I was scared to go so fast and I kept saying, “Am I going fast enough? Am I going fast enough?”
She had a big old Dodge Polara, it was actually her ex-husband’s car but he took the newer car and she kept that old monster. It was powerful, but I didn’t know how to handle it. My dad had a Plymouth Valiant, one of the last ones made. Yeah, we were a Chrysler-Plymouth family.
My aunt’s big message was about keeping a distance from the car in front. I’d stop at a red light, too far back I thought, so I would start inching up a little and she’d shout, “You’ve already stopped, just stay where you are! Don’t start sneaking up and slithering around, you don’t have to breathe down their necks! Just stay where you are!” I still think of that, every time I inch up a little at a red light. See, you don’t want to block the left turn lane for the person behind you. Sometimes you really should inch up. But I never argued with Aunt Beatrice. Well, you remember what she was like. Or maybe you don’t.
My dad’s big message was, don’t race a cold engine. “Wait till it’s warmed up before you start gunning it. You’ve got to know how to treat an engine if you want it to last for you.”
Yeah, everybody was full of advice.
* * *
This whole area, all these houses and apartments, all this used to be all empty fields. In the spring, maybe April, all these fields would be full of blue wildflowers, just packed with flowers, deep dark glowing blue. Later I found out they were lupines. I didn’t know what they were called at that time. They would last just barely until summer. Then they would die and the fields would be all brown, all dead brown straw for months and months, all summer, all fall, all winter until it rained.
Then the fields would turn bright fresh green from the new grass and the lupine sprouts. Then suddenly one day you’d go by and all the fields would be deep dark glowing blue from the lupines, and the same thing the next year, and the next year the same. Now it’s all houses and apartments, this whole area.
Here’s where Dad took me to practice left turns. He asked, “How do you think you’re doing? What in particular gives you problems?” And I said, “Left turns, I guess.” And he said, “OK, we’re going to do nothing but left turns today.”
I’d turn left at this street here, Castille Avenue. Castille Avenue was already busy, even in those days. The connector road to the freeway hadn’t been built yet, so there was lots of traffic even in those days.
This traffic light wasn’t here back then. I’d get in the left turn lane and just watch the traffic coming on with my heart pounding. After a while Dad would say, “OK, you could’ve gone right there.” I’d say, “No, the cars were coming too fast” and he’d say, “Well, it’s up to you. We can sit here all day if you want.”
Then I’d floor the gas pedal and shoot into the turn, just barely missing oncoming traffic, and he’d sigh and say, “That wasn’t a good choice.” We’d go down this next street, there used to be an old dairy or a dairy warehouse down here, and we’d circle around and come back and do it again.
See, the dairy isn’t here anymore. These buildings are all new. I don’t remember any of this.
* * *
This street right here, Foothill Boulevard, starts curving to the east, and goes past the cement plant. Then it runs out to the foothills and goes all the way around, into the mountains, then across the desert. You could drive to Vegas on this street. Here it’s just a regular street, just straight and flat with houses like all the other streets. You’d never guess how far it goes and how it would curve.
My dad never took me driving out on Foothill, because he didn’t have that much time for me. But Aunt Beatrice took me that way sometimes, or her son Big Tom when he was here. Another one of Aunt Beatrice’s big messages was tapping the brakes lightly before you stop. “Tap the brakes! Let ’em know you’re stopping, give ’em plenty of time behind you to slow down! Just tap the brakes, tap ’em!” I still think of that. I still do tap my brakes when I’m coming up to a red light.
* * *
After I got my driver’s license my dad started working weekends and nights to make more money. Later I could see that he wanted me to drive so I could take over more of the errands, take Mom to her doctors’ appointments and do the grocery shopping and so on, because she was getting sicker. But he never put pressure on me, he never said, you’ve got to start driving Mom to the doctor because I need to be making more money. He never said anything like that, it just seemed that he wanted to help me learn how to drive.
After I had my driver’s license, and Dad was working more, it seemed I was busy all the time and always thinking about other people, especially my mother, and never enjoyed life anymore. So sometimes when I thought about this and resented it, and felt pity for myself, I thought back to the year before when I was learning how to drive, and that year seemed the last time lots of people, Dad and Aunt Beatrice and Big Tom, were all caring about me and helping me.
* * *
My dad would have me drive to the medical buildings on the weekends when there were no cars there, and I’d practice parking. “On weekdays you have to stop here and pay for parking,” he said. Or at the other building, he said, “On weekdays you take a ticket right here, and then you show them the ticket on your way out and pay at that window.” That was unusual in those days, because in this neighborhood there was free parking almost everywhere. He said, “Try to park as close as you can. But if it’s too far, you can go in to the doctor’s office first and ask for a wheelchair. They’ll let you borrow one. She’ll complain, but you’ve got to look out for her.”
Once my dad asked me, “Where do you want to go today? You should know better than anybody else what you need to work on. I’ll let you choose.” I said, “Someday I’d like to go out Foothill Boulevard, as far as it goes.” He said, “Well, we don’t have time for that today. Maybe some other time. Why don’t we drive down Marlowe Street and practice parking at Sears.” I started the car, feeling rebellious, and juiced the gas for a second and he said, very stern, “Don’t race a cold engine. Didn’t I tell you never to race a cold engine?”
* * *
A few months later, in the winter, Big Tom was back and he took me out in his car on Foothill Boulevard in the morning, past the cement plant. Now the sky was gray and the hills were bleak and brown, looked dead and stony. I could tell he was angry about something in his own life, and I felt depressed. I got the feeling that my whole life was going to be bleak and dead and stony, because too many things were going wrong for me already. It started to rain a little, and I said, “How do you turn on the wipers on this car? Is it the same as the Plymouth?” But I turned them on too early, and they just smeared dirt all over the windshield and turned it all muddy. Tom was disgusted and I felt ashamed.
And then, it started to hail. I heard little pings and dings on the top of the car, and saw the white dots bounce on the windshield. There’s almost never any hail in this neighborhood and it seemed very strange to me. Big Tom said, “Just keep going, it won’t last.” But then there were booms of thunder, and the hail fell harder and louder, and then suddenly there was a tremendous roar and the hail poured down so thick we couldn’t see the road. The hail was pounding and thundering on the roof, and all we could see out the windshield was solid white, all jumping and heaving like thick white curtains in the wild wind. Big Tom said, “Better pull over.” I couldn’t even see where the edge of the street was, but I steered to the right, and stopped. There wasn’t any other traffic on that part of Foothill because we were so far out.
We sat there just amazed and shocked. It was the weirdest thing I had ever seen while driving. Everything around us disappeared, the road and the brown hills and the sky were completely invisible. It seemed almost like we were locked in a metal box that was sinking to the bottom of a snow-white ocean, and the waves were roaring and pounding over us but we were dry and could still hear the popular rock songs of that year that were sputtering along on the car radio. We knew all the songs of that year very well that day, but I can’t remember now what they were. Then Big Tom said, “Better not waste the battery,” and reached over to turn off the ignition.
Then we sat in the car in silence that didn’t seem to belong to any particular year, and I felt wrapped up in a twisting white dream that seemed to last forever. It seemed there was not any other future to worry about, but I was comfortable wrapped in my cozy white cocoon, just awed by this single endless simple experience and not needing to go forward or backward or anywhere. I knew that if I was in danger, Big Tom would protect me, but I also knew I didn’t have to ask him or do anything for him, he was just there. I wasn’t waiting, or thinking, I was just alive.
After a while the hail stopped, then we could see out the windows to the hills. Then the rain stopped, and the sun came out. We drove back to the cement plant, then passed all those empty fields where the houses and apartments are now. It was winter and the fields had been all dry and burnt and brown before, but now after the rain they were already budding in tiny bright green sprouts, like the fields were covered with moss. So I knew that in a few months the lupines would be back, like they always did come back every year, like they always used to come back.
When we drove up the driveway, I saw Dad peeking out the window with a very nervous face, but when we came inside, he pretended he hadn’t been worrying, and said casually, “Oh, you’re back.” I said, “Wow, we got caught in a hailstorm! Big Tom told me to just pull over to the side of the road. Then we waited for it to clear up. That’s why we took so long.” He said, “That was wise of him, that was good advice. If it’s unsafe to drive, just pull off to the right till it clears. It always does eventually.”
* * *
OK, here’s where we used to live. That’s the house, right there. The yellow one, it’s yellow now, but it used to be dark green, or gray sometimes. It used to have larger windows, looks like somebody replaced the windows. There used to be a big pine tree in the back yard but I guess it’s gone now, you’d see it over the roof if it was still there, so it must be gone.
When Aunt Beatrice was living with us, she parked on the driveway, right there, on that side. If I was driving the Plymouth, I always had a hard time turning into the garage, just squeezing past that old Dodge Polara. But when she wasn’t there, maybe out shopping, or looking for a temp job if Mom seemed to be doing better for a while, I could make a big sweeping curve and power straight into the garage. Usually Dad would say, “Careful, careful, not so fast!” when I did that.
One time, one of the last times he took me out driving before I got my license, the Dodge Polara wasn’t there. We always kept the garage door open when we took the Plymouth out, so without stopping I made the wide turn and shot straight into the garage, perfectly, without going too fast. And I looked at Dad, but he wasn’t even paying attention, he was thinking about something else, looking serious and sad. Then he seemed to wake up, turned to look at me like he was surprised to find himself in the passenger’s seat, and smiled very briefly. He said, “Well. That was very good. You did well today.” He nodded and smiled a little more, then he said, “Yes! That was excellent. You’re going to be an excellent driver.”
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