“No!”
Dad rubbed his face and excused all of the rest of us. Suzie helped Nana up to her room. Nana was in the early stages of senility and needed a fair bit of help. Nobody had invented Alzheimer’s yet, so we were all ignorant and called it dementia or senility or natural causes or old age. Within a year, Nana would be in an old folk’s home. Hamilton and I went downstairs, although I stayed in the family room, so I didn’t have to put up with his horseshit. He was already fuming about how I was getting a car and he wasn’t. Jesus Christ, he couldn’t even see over the steering wheel yet!
Mom and Dad argued over this for the rest of the night. Mom’s biggest problem was that this didn’t fit her neat and tidy plans for the lives of her children. She was very proud that I was going to college, but otherwise I was still a little boy. She couldn’t have it both ways, but wouldn’t accept that. This was just like my quitting band, taking aikido, or taking home economics. You did what the school and society told you to do and nothing more and nothing less.
On the other hand, the logic was relentless. I needed to be able to drive if I was going to go to Towson State, and I needed my own car. I wouldn’t be able to get away with driving her to work and using her car, when I might have morning classes that would mess this up. By the end of the week, Dad brought home a list of cars available from the leasing company. “This is this month’s list. It changes every month, so we’ll have a new list in October. Sometimes the list is good and sometimes it isn’t.”
“What do I do if I see one I want?”
“You make a bid. It has to be at least as much as the figure on the list. If somebody else beats you, you can try for a different car. This just gives you a figure on how much they will run.”
“Do I do this now, or do I wait until I get my license?” I asked.
“Probably be easier to wait. You won’t have to horse around getting it in my name first and then yours. That would be the November list.”
I nodded. “Then that’s what we’ll do. I’ll do the driver’s ed and tests with Mom’s car, and then buy this as soon as I pass.”
He smiled. “You sound awfully sure of yourself.”
I grinned. “If Pop-pop could get a license, so can I.” Mom’s father had been a notoriously poor driver.
He rolled his eyes. “I think he started driving before they even had licenses. You’d better just hope you drive better than he did.”
“Maybe he learned driving a horse.”
Dad laughed. “That was my side of the family, not his!”
Maryland had DMV offices that were open on Saturday mornings, so we went over that weekend and picked up the paperwork and applied for my permit. I also went into town and registered with a driver’s ed school. Classes would be twice a week, an hour a night, for five weeks. I also signed up for the live training, where a driving instructor would come out to the house after school and I would get behind the wheel of his car.
This part actually wasn’t a requirement; you simply had to state you had ten hours behind the wheel. Dad washed his hands of it though. I couldn’t blame him. When Parker went for his permit, I did the first tour of duty in the car and was scared half to death, even though we were barely breaking 20 on deserted country roads. I crawled out of the car white faced and white knuckled, and Marilyn took over all further driving lessons. It got worse — Parker was the serious child, Maggie was the wild and crazy one! I never even attempted teaching her to drive!
Classes started next week. The curriculum was broken into ten one hour chunks, each on something different, so as long as you hit each of the lessons once, you got your certificate.
The driving itself was amusing. It had been, effectively, about five years since I had driven myself, but it’s just like riding a bike or sex, once you learn, you never forget how. The biggest problem I had was remembering that in 1971 ‘right on red’, the ability to turn right at a red light if the traffic was clear, wasn’t legal yet. It would come about later in the decade, although they were already starting to debate it in the state assembly. Ultimately it would be passed, and then delayed six months while they implemented it. The joke at the time was that the delay was so they could paint enough ‘No Right On Red’ signs.
After the first fifteen minutes of driving, the instructor looked over at me and asked, “Just how much bootleg time do you already have?”
I tried to look innocent and said, “Sir?”
He snorted, and pointed me out of the suburbs and onto Dulaney Valley Road. We spent the rest of the hour driving up and around Loch Raven and around some of the busier streets. It felt very good to be back behind the wheel.
The next two months moved along much too slow for my taste. I wanted to get the car under my belt before tackling my next big project, college. This semester I was taking high school physics at an accelerated pace, so I could finish it by the end of the semester. My plan was to take a semester of calculus and a semester of physics in the spring over at Towson State. Then, next year, I would somehow cram in freshman chemistry, another semester or two of physics, and at least another couple of semesters of calculus over at Towson State, and maybe an English or humanities elective as well.
Most colleges require about 120 credits to graduate with a Bachelor’s degree. This splits up to about 30 credits a year, or 15 credits a semester. That works out to 4–5 classes each semester, depending on whether they are 3 or 4 credit classes. If I loaded up now, I could conceivably earn 35–40 credits from college and graduate from high school with Towson High footing the college bill. If I was able to overload in college, I could graduate in two years or less.
Or, and this was my plan, stick it out for four full years, overloading all the way, and graduate in four years with a doctorate. This was one of my biggest mistakes back in the day. I had been a chemist and at the end of the four years I knew I wasn’t going to go to grad school for chemistry. I went and got an MBA instead. Great for business, but only a Master’s degree. If I ever wanted to teach at the university level, I would need a PhD; the Master’s only allowed me to teach at a community college level (which I had done.) I wanted to get my doctorate in either math or computers, and I figured I should be able to do it easily, if not in another four years at my final destination, then in five.
Both Mom and Hamilton were still sulking about my driving. Mom wasn’t happy that I was upsetting her carefully made plans for me to be Dad Junior, but Dad just shook his head and rolled his eyes and kept her under control. Hamilton was simply pissed that I was doing something he wasn’t allowed to do, like drive a car at thirteen. He decided to retaliate by putting epoxy on the locks on my foot locker and my steel cabinet. I showed them to Dad. Ham denied everything, but never bothered to dump his garbage can with the epoxy kit in it. He really got his ass whipped that night! I went out and bought another couple of locks and used a bolt cutter to take off the old locks. As a master criminal he left much to be desired. What an asshole!
It was all rather anticlimactic when my birthday rolled around. November 5 was a Friday, so I cut class and Dad skipped work and we went out to the DMV office in Westminster. This was a much smaller and quieter office than the main branch down in Glen Burnie. I aced the written test and then drove around the block and aced the driving test. I mean I drove around the block — that was the driving test!
This was pretty much the way it went previously. The funny part was when Hamilton did this two years later, he flunked the driving test and had to repeat it a month later. When he passed it, he thought his shit didn’t stink and basically told everyone at dinner that night. I almost died laughing when Dad told him, “Of course you passed! The examiner was your second cousin!”