Rolling Down the Driveway

Not me and my brother in the 1960s

Once upon a time there was a rental car in the driveway of our home on Long Island – the house I lived in from about the age of three to the age of five. The rental car belonged, temporarily, to my father. That is, he had driven it home from work, I think. And there are two important aspects to this fact. The first is that, although I am at a loss to describe the particulars of why my father had gotten into the habit of driving rental cars home from work at that time, I am certain that it was a habit, albeit a temporary one. I believe this because we were allowed to play in it. And because there were rules aforethought. For example, we could pretend to drive, but we could only touch the steering wheel and the turn signal. Not the lighter. Not the shift. Not the radio. And not the brake. So much for foreshadowing.

The second aspect to the rental car was that although it was part of a habit, it was still fairly new and magical to us – exciting and intriguing enough in those pre-cable-television, pre-video-game, almost-dawn-of-electricity times we lived in, to want to entertain ourselves with it on a Saturday morning.

So Andrew and I climbed in and one of us “drove” while the other sat in the passenger seat (the “death seat”, my friend would later call it after the jaws of life cut him out of it one day in Connecticut, and then we’d switch. And what did “driving” consist of? Mostly turning that enormous steering wheel as much as we could (and it was enormous in those days, those recently fin-less, newly seatbelted, somehow un-padded dashboard days), and flipping the turnsignal up and down, as we shifted across whatever we thought America was.

Which leads me to a word about geography. Our house was accessed by a very steep driveway which was perpendicular to the street we lived on. At the top of the driveway was a plateau, on the right side of which was the garage, which was attached to the house. So, practically speaking, you backed out of the garage onto the plateau, and then turned to head steeply down the driveway to the street, which itself sloped steeply from right to left. My father had parked his rental car “nose-in” on the plateau; apparently, he’d simply driven it up the driveway and parked. So it pointed towards our backyard, and away from the steeply sloping driveway behind it.

Now, I cannot say I was scared when the car first began to roll down the hill backwards. I cannot say with clarity exactly what feeling I had. But some part of me instinctively likens it to that moment when you lean too far back in your chair, when that infinitesimal organ in your inner ear flips the balance switch and says “uh-oh”. A tiny panic of great foreboding. I cannot say what Andrew’s reaction was. On the one hand, he tends to be less emotional than I am. On the other hand, he was two.

I do remember bouncing, however. And I remember slow motion, like astronauts in a flight simulator. I can see Andrew floating and bouncing along the bench of the front seat. Me bouncing from the front seat to the back seat and back again, as if we were traversing ten miles of bad road, instead of rolling gently off of the newly blacktopped plateau at the top of our driveway and down the steep incline unstoppably towards the perilously steep street below.

There is, as with all stories of this kind, some disagreement about what happened next. Or rather, about how what happened next happened. But someone (me, Andrew, Maradona) turned the steering wheel, diverting the car sharply to the right, careening it off of the driveway and across the front yard that our parents were planting ivy in, and into a tree, which, as far as I am concerned, was planted by God moments before, solely for the purpose of stopping us that day. Had it not, or had we not turned, we’d have accelerated down the driveway and either crashed into the house across the street, or roamed left and headed further down the street, gaining speed, gaining momentum, bouncing and bounding like members of Apollo, coming to a sudden crashing halt somewhere less forgiving than the Pacific Ocean.

And yet, somewhere in there, I have this dim, split second image of my father. He is standing in a sweaty t-shirt and some horrible, paint-spattered pants. His hands are covered in dirt up to the middle of his forearms. He is wearing those classic tortoise shell spectacles he favored during the Johnson administration. And he is looking at me in just the way I looked at the television when the towers came down. What exactly am I seeing? How does this make sense? What part of this story have I missed that will make it make sense to me? Is this what incredible means?

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