David Sedaris Doesn't Drive

This comforts me somehow. I don't know why. I'm not a wildly popular author with one of the finest-tuned senses of humor in the world with a quirky voice. I'm a convicted drunk driver. We're not even close to being of the same world. Yet it comforts me just the same.

I didn't get my driver's license until I was 20 and going into my last year in college. This was unheard of in southern California at the time. Now, there are more restrictions--kids can drive at 16, but I don't think they can drive with anyone else in the car for ages, certainly not their friends. An armed guard, maybe.

Then, however, you skipped the morning at school on your 16th birthday, and drove all of your friends to the beach that afternoon. It was a middle-class neighborhood, but kids got cars for their birthdays.

My 16th birthday came and went with a learner's permit fading in my wallet. My parents tried, they really did. My father patiently tried to teach me to drive a stick shift, which introduced far too many actions for my brain to handle at one time. My mother, worried that I was about to hit the cars on the right side of the street, cowered near the passenger door, begging me to move more toward the center of the road.

The summer before my senior year in college, however, I was determined to get it done. I was living with my boyfriend at the time (very scandalous). He had a little blue Toyota Tercel. Hatchback. No radio.

The weekend before my appointment to get my license, we went down to Laguna Seca to a Grateful Dead show. On the way back (the following day, totally sober), boyfriend suggests I drive, as practice, for the test the next day.

I get us all the way up to Palo Alto without incident. Right before we hit the off-ramp, boyfriend notes that now is the time to be careful, that most accidents occur within two miles of home. I successfully downshift on the off-ramp, but to this day, I'm not really sure what happened next. I think I tried to slow down, and hit the clutch instead of the brake? At any rate, with a carful of guys screaming "brake, brake," I plowed into a pick-up truck in front of me. The Tercel was no match. The hood bent into a ninety degree angle. No one one was hurt, but in a million years, I couldn't tell you how mortified I was.

I did get my license the next day. My dad bought me a Datsun B210 four-door coupe. The boyfriend and I were through soon thereafter. And my driving career began.