Driving Me CrAzY

1

It’s curious, the way life unfolds. Take fear. Of my two great terrors in life, the first – going down in a plane crash – seemed a likely outcome one frostbitten January night when an airline jet in which I was a passenger began emitting fiery explosions from its rear as we made our descent into Logan International. Returning to Boston after a week in the Caribbean, my initial thought as fire trucks, ambulances, and other emergency crews swiftly advanced upon our airborne inferno was that at least I’d spent my last week of life in a state of daiquiri-fueled bliss on a tropical island. The comfort was minimal, given the circumstances, but that’s the thought to which I clung in what I’d assumed were my last moments on earth.

My second prevailing terror was sampled during a leisurely dip in the Gulf of Mexico one year with my best friend Tom, when, feet from my tasty flesh, a black fin emerged and sliced through the water with shocking speed. As a ghastly horror overtook my body, I hazily speculated on the odds that the great white would eat Tom first. Turned out the fin belonged to a porpoise, not Jaws, and so while neither of my fears technically came to fruition, that wasn’t the point. As far as I was concerned, they may as well have; what mattered was I’d had a taste of the very things I most dreaded.

During the summer of 2000 I had a job as the assistant account manager of a security staff at a downtown Boston communications college. The work was fairly undemanding, amounting mostly to giving bathroom breaks to the posted guards and filing paperwork. However, one particular aspect of it, as my boss explained on my first day, was that it would be my responsibility to cover a post in the event a shift ended and the incoming guard was late or, as was often the case, simply failed to show up. This wasn’t a big deal to me if I had to cover a desk post – a minor inconvenience, really – but it was with sickening dread that I learned about one other function our crew performed: to run an afterhours escort van. The van began operating after 10 P.M. as a service to students hoping to traverse the downtown campus without the risk of being mugged, raped, stabbed, having to walk past a homeless man, or otherwise imperiled in any way.

At this time in my life I could count the number of miles I’d driven on one hand, and thus the prospect of not only driving, but driving in the city positively terrified me. And if the crotch of my uniform pants wasn’t already damp at that thought, factor in the other peccadillo: driving an escort van that teemed with students. It was enough to send boundless, overwhelming waves of fear crashing upon the very core of my being.

I’d have preferred a rendezvous with a great white.

“You’ll never have to drive, though,” my boss reassured me, seeming to note the distinct look of abject terror that had frozen on my face. “There aren’t many calls during most weeknights, and Darnell – the regular driver – is very reliable. Always on time.”

How she came to this misapprehension, I later learned, was due the previous assistant account manager and Darnell being chums, and thus the former tending to cover for Darnell during the countless occasions when the latter omitted work from his schedule and instead opted to catch up on his sleep.

“Hey, is this Darnell?” I rasped into the phone in a panic-stricken voice. It had taken all of two nights for Darnell to fail to show up for his shift, and I was on deck to drive the shitmobile.

“Mmmm,” he murmured sleepily on the other end.

“Listen, are you on your way in?” I asked tersely. It was an obviously ridiculous question to be asking, seeing as I had called him on his home landline, but there are few ways to berate someone while simultaneously motivating him or her to help you out.

“Be in soon,” he drowsily grumbled. An excruciating hour passed, during which time there was no sign of Darnell. What was more, he stopped answering his phone.

Then the escort requests started coming in.


2

Just don’t answer them, I thought, panicked. Leave and don’t look back! What can they do?! This really crossed my mind as a plausible solution, to just abandon the whole situation; get the hell out of there and let someone else sort it out. Tomorrow I could come up with some sheepish “miscommunication” type excuse, and even if my boss didn’t buy it, what was the worst that could happen? I’d be fired? It wasn’t like I worked in the secret service. I was pretty sure I could land another mediocre security guard job. That was infinitely more desirable than the unthinkable task before me.

In the end, I’m not sure what impelled me into the van. The thought of my conscience being burdened by a would-be passenger who was instead raped and mutilated in the Boston Common, perhaps, or maybe it was simple laziness, not wanting to have to find a new job. Whatever the case, I grudgingly took the keys and climbed into the big, old, dirty van. I slid the key into the ignition and turned, and the vehicle rumbled to life. Shit, here we go, huh? I thought. Maybe it won’t be as bad as I think… Then I backed up and instantly plowed into a light post.

“Oh my God!” I shouted.

This was an absolute nightmare, and I hadn’t even started yet. I shakily got out to assess the extent of the damage. The good news was that the back of the van was pretty dinged up already, so some additional minor damage was likely to go unnoticed. The bad news was that the rear taillight was lying in pieces on the ground. It was that moment of sinking realization when you understand you’ve committed a bad faux pas for which there exists no way to brush it under the rug. How the hell am I going to explain this?

My walkie-talkie squawked to life in the van. It was the dispatcher, wanting to know why I hadn’t picked up the two kids from Brimmer Street yet. And she just received third call from Beacon Hill.

“I’m on my way,” I groaned, feeling overwhelmed and vaguely suicidal.

Take two. The van had a surprising amount of pickup, something I learned as I steered out onto Tremont Street and promptly shot across three lanes of light traffic, accidentally cutting off several cars in my attempt to get over to the right lane. Horns blared, and I felt deeply ashamed of myself.

To make matters worse – if that were possible – it was a muggy summer night, yet I had the van’s heat gusting at full blast. None of the controls seemed to be working. I didn’t understand it; the heat knob was pointed at off. If was OFF, damn it. What the heck was going on? Was there some trick meant to be obvious but that I was stupidly missing? Was it broken? Why was I so confused? Fumbling around with the dashboard climate knobs at a now heavily trafficked intersection was pretty much the last thing I needed to be doing. That is, of course, discounting the circumstance of being in this predicament in the first place.

Sweating profusely, I aimed the vents in the other direction so at least they weren’t blowing directly at me and tried to think how to get to Brimmer Street. Saying that Boston is a very complicated city to navigate gives a bad name both to the words complicated and very. It’s essentially a tangle of winding, one-way roads inhabited by predatory, usually drunk drivers, buses, and at this time of night, street cleaners. There are a few dead-ends thrown in for good measure, as well as some surprise streets where it seems like you’re on a normal backstreet until – surprise! – you get emptied onto a highway; this later scenario being exactly what happened to me.

Having circled the block before heading toward Beacon Hill on Charles Street, I took a left on Beacon Street. I knew I was approaching Brimmer, but with my stress levels and the dark, ended up missing it. “Damn it all,” I moaned with an audible sigh. “Can anything go right?”

Taking my next right, my hope was to circle back around, or at least to make a U-turn and backtrack, but to my unimaginable horror found that, not only could I not turn around, but the street I’d turned onto was a one-way ticket to Storrow Drive – the Boston expressway that runs along the Charles River.

A dismal turn of events this was. “Oh no,” I whispered balefully.

Scared, lost, bathed in sweat from my roasting furnace of an escort van, and suddenly stuck on a busy, unfamiliar parkway, I felt the crushing weight of having been assigned an insurmountable task that was nonetheless essential to complete. It just seemed so inconceivably futile.

I ended up taking an exit that deposited me in the neighborhood of Mass General Hospital, swore out loud, and continued pressing onward. My misguided hope was that I’d turn a corner and miraculously stumble upon Brimmer Street. Unfortunately, I ended up in Government Center, which, if you’re familiar with Boston, you know to be nowhere in the vicinity of Brimmer. This had somehow gone from bad to worse; the students were probably livid by now. Assuming they weren’t too preoccupied being held up at gunpoint and subsequently disemboweled.

I hadn’t cried in quite a few years, but after working my way to the waterfront and getting angrily honked at again, this time for going straight in what was evidently a left turn only lane, a good cry seemed like my only sensible course of action.


3

“Can you smoke in here?”

By a combination of basic city knowledge, determined driving, and dumb luck, I had eventually worked my way back to Charles Street and consequently – finally – found Brimmer. During the time it took me to get there, the number of prospective fares had swelled from two to four; temporarily dropped to zero; then ticked back up to two. My first accounted for charges were Clint and Bobby; respectively a pale, effeminate blond kid and a bearded, self-described pothead.

“No,” I said of Bobby’s query, hearing the snap of his lighter. “The van is school property.”

“The van is a piece of shit,” Bobby said, as though this fact somehow negated the no smoking rule. He took a long drag of his cigarette and exhaled so that a cloud of smoke drifted over the dashboard, ricocheted off the windshield, and eventually found its way into my face. “Dude, it’s like a fucking oven in here. Do you have the heat on? It’s the middle of summer!”

“Took you long enough,” Clint chimed in.

“Oh yeah… sorry, had some… technical difficulties,” I said with a stiff laugh. Now the stakes were raised: there were live spectators aboard my vehicle of annihilation. Though I couldn’t guarantee for how much longer live could be considered an accurate description.

“Yo man, you ever bang a chick who’s a lot older than you?” asked Bobby from the passenger seat. Clint sat sullenly in the back, evidently put out by the wait.

“What?” I asked, waving the smoke from my face while at the same time swerving to avoid a double-parked taxi. Clint yelped.

“An older broad,” Bobby repeated, flicking some cigarette ash out the window. “You ever bang an older broad? I’m not talking about an eighty-year old, bro, just like, a cougar, you know?”
It was clearly the type of question people ask when they’re not genuinely interested in your response but instead trying to create a lead-in for their own story. Bobby waited a beat, and when no reply came, said, “Yo, so get this… I was banging this chick, you know, and she was like a fatty or whatever, right? But I’m all wasted, so I don’t give a fuck, but in the back of my mind I’m goin’, ‘yo, this is fucked up, this honey is like in her forties.’ Like, you know? That’s like my mom’s age and shit.”

“Oh yeah?” I chuckled nervously.

“Hey guy, do you know where you’re going?” This from Clint, who had apparently noticed and taken issue with the seven point turn I was conducting in the middle of a one-way street. It was not an unreasonable question, yet I wasn’t about to have my credentials undermined by McCauley Culkin here.

Having expected such a question, I had my noncommittal response ready. “Hey, I’m the driver,” I barked. “What do you think?”

Bobby went on, seemingly unaware of Clint’s aspersions, “Yeah dude, so this chick was like a beached whale, man, if we had a kid together that’d be-”

It was around that time that the van jumped a curb. We were all jostled hard as it careered up onto the walkway for one wild minute before lurching violently back onto the street, bouncing up and down as if equipped with hydraulics. If this sounds a little like I’m blaming the van, as though it suddenly seized control and drove itself onto the sidewalk, it’s because this was also the impression I was also hoping to give my fares.

“Damn automatic transmission,” I muttered loudly, as if that explained everything. My ears were ringing from Clint having screamed in the back seat.

“Jesus Christ, man, you know how to drive?” Clint asked, clearly shaken. It occurred to me that the screaming was a bit overdone, and so when our eyes met in the rearview mirror I glowered darkly at him, thinking to myself that this would be the last time I ever ferried around someone who majored in theater. Though in retrospect, I supposed I couldn’t really blame him. Here you are, just hoping to get safely back to your dorm room, and the campus escort – after having arrived over an hour late – proceeds to take you on a death-defying hell ride. And then lobs you a toxic glare when you have the audacity to object.

Bobby, clearly having the time of his life as he roared with laughter, clapped his hands together. “This shit’s the bomb, dude.”

Bobby then resumed prattling on with his story, completely oblivious to my manic fixation with the road before me. I’ve never quite understood this. When I’m telling a story, the millisecond that my audience betrays even the slightest clue that I have anything short of rapt attention, I will be instantly both aware and dejected. But then there are people like Bobby, who blather on incessantly no matter how blatantly preoccupied or uninterested you appear to be. I had the sense that my head could detonate right there in the driver’s seat, explode into a million little pieces, and Bobby would continue gabbing to my headless torso.


To be continued…