I am a terrible driver. Those who know me well know this to be an inherently a part of who I am as my freckles or my metaphors or my double-edged exclamations of the word “Terrific!” I am a bad, bad, driver, and I should not drive. Period.
I think that it’s too bad that more bad drivers can’t own their deficiencies in this area. I mean, I’m good at other things; we all are. People are so comfortable confessing that they can’t cook, or that they have gruesome penmanship, or perhaps that they’ve never been very good at table tennis. But driving? For some reason, there’s a stigma. I’ve never met another self-proclaimed driving failure. In fact, it appears that the worse a driver is, the more he/she has to say about all the other motorists out there.
“People in this city just do not know how to drive.” Everyone in every city says that same thing. So I’m here to break down the shame and silence around poor motorism, and just own it. It’s true. I have driven in your city, and I do not know how to drive. I am a bad driver. I am worse in the rain. I am deadly in the snow. If you want to get somewhere with me in a car, let’s share a cab, or you can pick me up. Because I don’t want to be behind the wheel, and to be honest, no one else wants me there either. I AM GOOD AT OTHER THINGS.
Needless to say, I have to drive all the time for work. It’s part of the travel package: long flight, nice hotel, rental car, near death driving experience. Once again, I want to remind you: I AM GOOD AT OTHER THINGS.
My most recent trip to DC was a great example of why I shouldn’t drive. Although the trip was otherwise a great success, the driving part was a disaster from start to finish. I picked up the rental car at the train station, and they didn’t have the one I’d reserved. So, they offered me (with no other options) the “Free upgrade” into a much bigger car with a much bigger blind spot that I was guaranteed to be able to park absolutely nowhere. Because in addition to being a bad driver, I am a VERY BAD parker. But, I was tired and late and needed to get places, so I agreed.
The giant town car itself smelled like gym socks or jock straps or something else vaguely reminiscent of the boys’ cabin at summer camp, and it made me feel a little bit nauseous. Luckily, it was about 90 degrees and 150 percent humidity, so as soon as I started to drive, the smell just cooked right into my nostrils, as it had already baked into the upholstery, and the gross-smelling Sweatmobile and I became one and the same.
Sweatmobile and I started driving through the streets of DC, where, for some reason, all roads lead to the White House. Always. I don’t know how I always end up so lost and then found at good ol’ 1600 Pennsylvania, but I can tell you that there are very few places where I am unwilling to make an illegal u-turn, and that smack in front of the White House is one of them. I think that it could be construed as an act of terrorism or something else, and I can only fend of the Secret Service with my secret powers of jock-strap olfactory weapons for so long. So, I looped all the way around the White House not one, not two, but SEVEN TIMES over the course of my 24-hour stay in our nation’s fair capitol. (I did manage to pull off the illegal u-turns in front of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the EPA, and the Daughters of the American Revolution headquarters. And aside from almost mowing over a few VERY old DARs in pearls and pantssuits, I did just fine).
After cutting off a few taxis and careening through a crosswalk full of senators, Sweatmobile and I finally seemed to be headed in the right direction. Of course, it took me an extra half hour to get to my hotel because every time I got in one of those roundabouts, I had to drive around and around it in circles for 10 minutes before summing up the courage to swerve Sweatmobile’s not-quite-nimble tank-like trunk across three lanes and out of the roundabout. Finally, I arrived at my hotel, shaken and white-knuckled and wishing for a Metropass, and I only had a few minutes to pull myself together before I had to head back out to my event that night.
Of course, I got lost, but it wasn’t quite as bad this time, the ruckus of rush hour having ended, and the tree-lined streets of Maryland feeling quite idyllic, in moments, as I rolled through stop signs and stopped vaguely to think in the middle of the intersections. Since I drive pretty much 40 miles an hour everywhere, all the time, I had some awkwardly profane interactions with the cars behind me on the highway, and maybe got a fist-shake or two as I careened through the school zones, but overall, it was a pretty uneventful trip. I arrived at my destination, and parked deftly in as few as 30 moves, leaving my Sweatmobile propped up on someone’s lawn and lurched awkwardly out into the residential street. Later that night, I offered a ride home to my organization’s president, who commented cheerfully that my car smelled like a locker room, and was gracious enough to ignore the red lights I ran and the near bus-collision in Dupont Circle.
“You’ll probably want to go ahead and turn out of the roundabout here,” he suggested carefully, after a few laps around, and I did one or two more circles for good measure and then screeched to the right and landed us in front of his hotel.
In the morning, I took the Metro. And I had a great work meeting, and then I put together a stellar outfit and wrote a really nice letter to a friend. Proving, as I said, that I am GOOD AT OTHER THINGS.
