Driving Academy Diary

A dog who cannot drive. Photograph by Nicolaia Rips.

August 19, 2024

My twenty-sixth birthday. A sad one. My godfather, Tom Crisp, is dying in a hospital in Morningside Heights. I want to focus on anything else, so I focus on this: I do not have my driver’s license. I promised myself at sixteen that before I turned twenty-six I would get my driver’s license, vowing that I wouldn’t end up one of those cautionary New York tales of gelded thirty-year-olds crammed into the bucket on a road trip. At the time, I felt a decade was more than generous. I was so optimistic at sixteen that I was the first of my friends to get my learner’s permit, which I then renewed beyond the point of propriety. A twenty-six-year-old is a foreign agent to a sixteen-year-old: someone who bears a vague resemblance to you. It is someone to punt your problems to—someone who passed their driving test.

 

August 26

 My godfather Tom passes away.

 

September 1

I enroll myself in a driving academy and ride an electric Citi Bike over the Brooklyn Bridge to Hasidic Williamsburg. There, I am confronted by a store that advertises tax returns, copies, faxing, and legal services. There is no mention of driving. Not one to judge a business by its sign, I double-check the address. This cannot be the right place, but somehow it is. The class costs $400. It was the cheapest class I could find that wasn’t out of the back of a van. Included in the course: three driving lessons, access to the mandatory five-hour class, and, at the end of it all, you are ferried to your road test by one of the school’s instructors. My teacher, Fernando, guides me through the wide lanes of Williamsburg, sporadically directing me to pull over, turn left, turn right, parallel park, or make a three-point turn. I keep forgetting which pedal is gas and which is the brake, so I resolve to just go really slow. Fernando’s complete lack of anxiety is bone-chilling.

 

September 5

My second class with Fernando. Unlike the process of getting a GED, driver’s education doesn’t differentiate between adult learners and teenagers. In this sense, driver’s education is all-inclusive.

 

September 8

Final class. I also take the five-hour class in person, where I dreamily consider all places I would go if I had my license—Philadelphia, D.C., the Hamptons. Then I think, God, I don’t want to go to any of those places. I realize that the real reason New Yorkers don’t learn to drive is because driving implies leaving New York City. New Yorkers hate to leave New York. I do not feel ready to take my test. The only thing I have driven so far is myself crazy.

 

September 15

I am driven out to Brighton Beach at 8 A.M. by Fernando, along with several other hopefuls. I hit the curb while trying to back into parallel parking—an instant failure. I was asked to parallel park on a cut curb, so I didn’t even feel the curb when I ran over it. I explain this to my boyfriend over dinner. He looks at me like my brain has been switched out with an identical replica Jell-O mold. “Apparently,” you’re never supposed to be “feeling” for the curb.

 

October 2

I go to a party in a Chinatown apartment. People ask me, “What’s up?” I can’t say, “One of the most important people in my life just died,” so instead I say, “What’s up is that I’m trying to get my driver’s license.” The party people are sympathetic. Most idiots, they tell me, have their driver’s license. In fact, any idiot can get it! This does not inspire self-confidence. It’s like telling a baby that every other baby in the world knows how to use the toilet. It simply increases feelings of inadequacy in babies. When you can’t drive, the world is your oyster, but you have a shellfish allergy.

 

October 31

For Halloween I go as someone who has their license. Up until college my godfather Tom handmade all of my Halloween costumes. I put a dash of Wite-Out on my permit and write over it, “license.” I think it’s clever. I show my cousin, and he is disappointed, “I thought you had that already.” Clever is when something isn’t funny.

 

November 1

I realize my five-hour pretest class has elapsed. To take my road test again, I will have to start over completely and take it again. This is another fifty dollars and another five hours of my life. This time I find an online provider that has been approved by the DMV, and I decamp to my couch to take it.

The five-hour class is broken up into fifteen chapters and fifteen modules. Each chapter is doled out in five-to-seven-minute increments followed by a multiple-choice quiz of the same length. Only once the allotted time has passed can you click to the next page. You could be the Usain Bolt of reading, and it wouldn’t matter. It is not a test of learning; it is a test of five hours.

The timing of the test creates a hostage-like atmosphere. A trip to the bathroom or a poke around the fridge is suddenly set up against excruciatingly asymmetrical intervals. At moments when I am most vulnerable, the website forces me to reconfirm that I am still paying attention, which, of course, I’m not. During the five hours, I half-complete a lot of tasks. I do half my laundry and try to make a chickpea salad but have no chickpeas. I send texts to everybody I know but then don’t respond when they text me back.

“Make yourself necessary to someone.” This is the phrase the website keeps asking me to type into the box, to ensure I’m still active. I type this phrase approximately a billion times. I am forced to answer questions that I don’t know the answer to, like where would I like to live: the mountains, the forest, or the sea. I don’t know! I’m not sure if I want to live in the sea forever. My longest-held plan was to get my license by twenty-six. Whatever hidden agenda this online prelicensing driving school has, I’ve succumbed to it. At this point in my life, I would succumb to a Fig Newton. I ponder: What does driving have to do with being necessary to someone? Am I unnecessary to someone because I can’t drive?

 

November 25

I book my test. It’s a little under two weeks away, in a small town upstate near my godmother’s house. My godmother is my mom’s best friend, and my godfather was my dad’s best friend. They are not related to one another. I had been planning to go visit her for a relaxing weekend upstate and then decided to seize the opportunity to make it miserable. Since failing my first test, I have not practiced in any way, nor was I planning to. I book the test because I am fluent in my own stagnation; the only thing that has ever motivated me is a deadline. I am hopeful for the first time, which is a mistake in the hard-knock world of adult driver’s education.

 

November 28

Time to kick into gear. My boyfriend sets up wood logs in the driveway of his parent’s house in New Jersey for me to practice; the logs are supposed to demarcate the front and backend of a car. Using these two logs I am supposed to visualize the whole scenario—the car, the curb, the sidewalk. The only thing I can see are two logs in the way. He explains to me that parallel parking is just simple math. See, if you pull up, and then pull back, and then line up the mirror of your car with the mirror of the car on the street, and then pull back again, and cut the wheel to the right, and do not forget to signal, and put your hand on the back headrest of the passenger seat, and look behind you, really look, and see your boyfriend’s parents wondering what you’re doing in their driveway, and why their son is in love with a girl who would be the first to die in an apocalypse situation, and then reverse a little, but not too much, so that the back-right window triangle aligns right above the car in front of you’s taillight, and then cut the wheel to the left, and don’t forget to signal, and then reverse even more, until you’re almost straightened out with the car in front of you, then, well, then, if you do all that, then you are perfectly positioned to knock over a log and maybe dent your boyfriend’s parents’ car’s fender.

 

December 2

My godmother lives in a beautiful town bookended by a dilapidated mansion and a large graveyard. We borrow her Toyota highlander. My mom and I drive down the main road, and park at a wimpy sign that advertises the start of road testing. There are a couple other cars already waiting, filled with people under the legal drinking age and their families. When it’s my turn, my mom gets out, and the instructor, a woman wielding a clipboard like a glock, gets in. We ride off, leaving my mom on the curb. During the test, I drive past a sign advertising Crisp Architects (a sign that Tom is watching over me). I start to cry. This does not endear me to the driving instructor. I have driven this street many times and never seen this sign before, but that’s exactly what signs are like—they’re not there until you need to see them, and when you need to see them, it’s too late, and you should’ve put on your turn signal half a block ago. I miss my turn. Then the driving instructor and I have a contretemps over parallel parking. She tells me to park starting behind the vehicle, not mirror to mirror, as I had practiced. This kicks off an icy sweat. Combined with my tears, the car turns into an aquarium, filled with an all-consuming humidity.

 

December 3

I wake up with a cold. I don’t check to see if I passed the test because I know I didn’t. Instead, I treat myself to my yearly gynecological appointment. Always the first in breaking vaginal news, my gynecologist tells me that she’s seen several women this year who have had significant pH changes resulting in bacterial vaginosis (BV) because their boyfriends went on the “Liver King” diet. My gynecologist and I have that kind of rapport; I ask how her daughter’s college courses are going, and she tells me about other women’s BV. In the examination room, I read reviews of driving sites in adjacent towns. None rise above the three-star threshold. Why are driving instructors so cruel? For older drivers, getting a license goes from being a teenage rite of passage to a smoke alarm about years passing and dreams abandoned, as well as a lack of support, family, money, and time. If you don’t have access to someone with a car in New York who will teach you, it’s nearly impossible to get enough hours on the road to drive comfortably. Determined to drown in this shallow well of incompetence, I open Facebook. There’s always something sad happening on Facebook, like the anniversary of a wife’s passing or someone trying to sell a toaster.

 

December 4

Finally, I check my road test results. I had been pushing it off, unwilling to cede to the inevitable. When I click on the results, I see that my gut is wrong. I passed. I reread the web page four times. I send it to my friends. I send it to my parents. The number of demerits to fail the test is over 30. I had exactly 30 demerits. I passed (barely). I passed (on a technicality). I passed! Things make exquisite sense. I did something essential, like graduating high school, all the regular things you would post on Facebook about. I have the urge to post on Facebook or sell the toaster that’s been sitting on the floor of my closet.

 

December 5

When I was born, my parents took a cab back from the hospital to their apartment. In that car there were three people in addition to the infant me—my mother, my father, and Tom, who held me the entire way. I was the newest baby he had ever held. That was my first drive. Life is about making yourself necessary to someone.

 

Nicolaia Rips is the author of Trying to Float: Growing Up in the Chelsea Hotel and senior editor of i-D magazine.