Читать книгу The Columns (Volume One) - Tracy Lorenz - Страница 8

By Tracy K. Lorenz

I passed a drivers training car today on the way into work and was impressed by the young lady driver. Her hands at a steady ten and two, eyes straight ahead, speed constant in the right hand lane; and I thought to myself “That’ll last about fifteen seconds after she gets her license.”

When I was a kid my drivers training lasted one day, the classroom part anyway. At Catholic Central they had some deal where if you played a fall sport you could take drivers training in the winter so you wouldn’t miss any summer practices. There was sort of a hand-shake agreement between the school and the parents that basically said “We (the school) will sign the papers saying that little rat-boy completed drivers training, but you (Dad) have to actually teach him how to drive.”

So I went to my one-day class and the football coach/driver’s training teacher gave us the written exam. It was a multiple-choice test that the coach decided to read out loud which made it much easier for him to give us the answers as a group. He’d read the question and then whisper the wrong answers and say the right answer really loudly like, “A, B, C, or D.” It didn’t take long to crack the code. Everyone passed with flying colors.

The driving part was a little different. We learned by basically being a delivery service. The coach would throw us in the car and one guy would drive him to Jones Sporting Goods to pick up bats and one guy would drive him back. No traffic cones, no parallel parking; it was a pretty low-stress gig. It was cool that the coach was taking it easyon us, an act that turned out to be ephemeral at best.

“The turn” was blamed on a young woman named Leslie. I don’t remember Leslie’s last name because she was a year older than I. I do remember she was a cross-country star and I remember her nickname was “Leadfoot.” NOBODY wanted to ride with Leadfoot Leslie. She got her name because she lacked the ability to push a pedal part way. If she wasn’t standing on the gas, she was standing on the brake. I rode with Leadfoot one time and I ended up taking off my seatbelt and lying on the floor in the back seat figuring that was the safest place to be at impact, honest to God. The girl was worse than Mr. McGoo.

So one day the teacher said, “Go,” and Leslie drove directly into a telephone pole in the parking lot. That’s when the crackdown began. Each student would be given one death defying maneuver to prove his driving ability prior to getting our certificate.

On “highway day” the driver had to drive to Grand Rapids, head south on US 31, exit onto 196, frogger across four lanes of highway traffic and then take the Ottawa Street exit heading south. From the time you entered 196 to the exit at Ottawa was about a quarter mile, that maneuver was so dangerous that it’s no longer legal. They won’t let you exit onto Ottawa any more. I was in the back seat TWICE for that devil-dance, four sixteen-year-old boys screaming directions at a panicked driver behind the wheel of a Ford LTD . There were no atheists in that car.

On my day of reckoning I had to drive to Five Mile Hill in Grand Haven. For those of you unfamiliar with Five Mile Hill, it’s the highest point in town and directly across from the beach. You know the hill with all the million-dollar houses? That’s Five Mile Hill.

The road on Five Mile Hill is kind of like a bobby pin opened up a little bit. One side goes straight up the hill and the other side is wavy. The road is also very narrow and the day of my trial it was covered in ice.

Going up Five Mile Hill (the straight part of the bobby pin) wasn’t so bad; it was the heading back down that got iffy. I remember pausing at the top of the hill and looking at the March storm blowing in across Lake Michigan and then the coach saiying “C’mon Lorenz, we don’t have all day…”

I’m not sure my butt touched the seat the entire way down. The road was a sheet of ice and I was driving like an episode of “McMillan and Wife” where the brake lines are cut. Had I been a little heavier I’m sure my foot would have penetrated the floorboard like Fred Flintstone. Fellow student passengers (Leo Langlois, Kevin Lloyd, and Greg Carleson) have no idea how close they came to death that day. We got to the bottom where there was sand on the road and I cruised to a stop like I’d been driving on ice hills my whole life. I don’t think my heart started beating again until mid-May.

But the coach must have done something right because in my entire life I’ve only gotten one ticket. Okay, I may have deserved a few hundred but I’ve only gotten one. That was for going fifteen over while watching “ALF” on a small TV on my passenger seat. When the cop pulled me over I had no defense and no excuse. When he asked why I was watching TV in my car all I could say was it kept me from getting too…tired.