Baby Had a Fast Car

on teenage freedom and the broken promises of adolescent hope

i couldn’t find a picture of me in my first car (a white 92’ cabriolet) but here’s one of me at age 15 pretending I could ride my friend’s dad’s motorcycle.

I took my first driving test on my 16th birthday and failed. I also failed my second driving test so perhaps it should not have been a surprise that after passing — finally — in a third attempt — I crashed my car pulling it out of the driveway.

I hadn’t even completely left my parent’s house when I sideswiped my dad’s Pontiac Sunfire, denting the entire passenger side with my somehow unscathed Cabriolet.

To feel — for the first time — truly AUTONOMOUS only to, seconds later, feel absolutely fucked was quite possibly the defining moment of my adolescence. (I was FREE! SMASH.) It is also a story I would grow into for the rest of my life — a reminder that EVERY NEW FREEDOM would come with an eventual crash. (If not an instantaneous one.)

I think I know, like, five people who passed their driving test the first time and I feel similarly skeptical about them the same way I do with people who have only good tattoos.

It’s a litmus test for me to know who my people are and it almost always works. For some people it’s astrology. For me, it’s the blind recklessness of youth and how it did or didn’t define us. How we grew ourselves from the filth of our regret. Found purpose from our accidents. Failed and got back out there.

I wanna know where you went in your getaway cars.

What you listened to as you merged.

Whose cars you weren’t allowed to get into but did anyway.

My fascination with cars does not feel unusual for someone who has spent the last twenty five years in a city for whom cars become both your primary partner and permanent address.

Everything you need to know about me you can learn from my history of driving. Which is why the most evocative questions I can think to ask come from our experiences — specifically our formative ones — with cars.

Tell me the stories of when you flashed truck drivers from the the passenger seats of Honda hatchbacks and then got scared when they responded with waving tongues.

Tell me where you hid your drugs when you got pulled over. Who taught you how to make a bong out of an apple in the backseat. What scented Body Shop spray you used to mask the smell.

Tell me how you broke down and had to walk seven miles to the nearest payphone.

How you got back on the road when you couldn’t afford to pay the mechanic. How you thanked him with a phone number that wasn’t yours.

I wanna know who you jerked off in the backseat and where you wiped the mess.

Who you blamed your accidents on even though they were your fault.

Where you planned to drive without telling anyone. And why you never went.

And while I grew up thinking I had a thing for bad boys, it wasn’t until I was older that I realized that I actually had a thing for BAD GIRLS and bad boys were the only kind of boy who could keep up with us.

My dad never fixed his car after I fucked it up. I never asked him why. I always assumed he didn’t care about the car enough to get it fixed or maybe he didn’t want my insurance to increase — insurance he paid for — or maybe he was teaching me a quiet lesson that I was capable of damage.

That part of the deal with BEING MORE FREE is HAVING TO PAY MORE ATTENTION.

(I just called him to ask him if he remembers why he never fixed his car and he swears it’s because he didn’t care which I believe because that is very my dad. My parents are not STUFF people and I grew up in a house where things were just things and dents were just dents who cares. Which is how I roll, too, I guess.)

Anyway.

I am writing about this because of something I posted on Instagram last week with the following picture and caption

Lately I’ve been thinking about first cars and those early days of teenaged freedom.
My cousin (who is more like a sister) @docuchick got her license first (this is me sitting shotgun in her Chevy Corsica in 1996) and it felt like the training wheels of my entire life came off when she did. We’d smoke clove cigarettes and listen to Frente (Marvin the Album!) in the tape deck and go from coffee shop to coffee shop with sand in our shoes. I’m the same age as my oldest daughter, here, who will turn 16 later this year and I feel like I was just doing the learn-to-drive-so-you-can-be-free thing with her older brother (who is currently home for Spring Break driving around my old minivan which will be his for another few months before I trade it in to get something with better gas mileage for Fable.) Anyway. I think one of my most formative moments was driving a car for the first time on my own especially since I crashed mine on its maiden voyage; a metaphor but also a very literal and humbling truth and I would love to know what YOUR first car was and what it felt like to drive it on your own…

The comments that followed are quite possibly my favorite comments I’ve ever read anywhere and I’ve spent the last week thinking about why I felt so moved by EVERY SINGLE STORY not a dud in the bunch.

Was it because of the universality of TEENAGE GIRLS GETTING FREE? Was it the excitement I could feel in every word — a sort of muscle memory reminder of the first time — as girls — we WERE in control. PHYSICALLY, I mean. Cuz like those were our fucking feet on the pedals. Our chipped nails digging into the steering wheel. That was OUR music labeled PARENTAL ADVISORY we got to blast with zero criticism.

Or was it because I instantly recognized that THIS is what people mean by “youth is wasted on the young.” Not because any of us MISS being young but because we miss the HOPE we felt before we knew better. Because you don’t realize, in the moment, that there are so many feelings at that age — that you’ll never be able to replicate.

Because in those days, on our maiden voyages down country roads or through suburban sprawl, we really fuckin hand-to-god thought that BEING A WOMAN meant BEING FREE. And that this was just the beginning.

When we had a feeling we could be someone. Be someone. Be someone.

Holding fast onto a hope that anything was possible. To massage the wind with silver-ringed fingers. To introduce ourselves to intersections with BAD RELIGION a half a mile before our cars were even visible.

But more even than that, the common denominator of every single story was a nostalgia for the idiosyncratic. No one missed their perfect Mercedes with power steering. At least no one who commented did. Instead it was all clunkers with their leaking fluids and sagging upholstery. It was ashtrays and windows that didn’t close. It was stories about all the fucked up shit we used to do in those days. And how beautiful it was TO BE GIVEN RESPONSIBILITY without REALLY KNOWING what that meant.

Every single comment was its own expansive love story about teenage girls with broken machines they rejoiced at having control over.

It reminded me of, well, everything.

God, I spent so many years living in that space of fearlessness. Of driving and crashing and driving and crashing until reality hit and I had to slow down. Get a safer car. Drive slowly. Be an adult.

As a parent of two teenagers (and two who are months away from joining them) I have this sort of duel perspective of remembering how much it meant to me to drive myself while also being perpetually terrified by the thought of my kids doing the same.

When Archer started driving, it was the single scariest parenting phase of my life and I wrote the following:

… Six-months of me and him down canyon roads and freeway off ramps, downtown drives and me parked behind the CVS outside the Wilshire/Western subway station, waiting for him to appear at 5pm in the parking lot. My boy in the rear-view, silhouetted by golden hour as I climbed over the center divide and waited. Asked him how his day was as we buckled our seatbelts against the sound of his playlist’s hiccup, ignition’s twist. 

There is no greater metaphor for letting go than climbing over the cupholders onto the passenger side. And trying to explain when to turn the wheel to parallel park. And being frustrated because we’re both learning how to sit in each other’s seats…

It was watching him drive away for the first time that prepared me for his leaving a year and a half later but I still thought thank god I don’t have to do this again for a while.

But… here we are.

About to go again.

Since she was little, Fable and my song has been Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car. I remember thinking, when she was small, and we would sing it together, that one day she would be in the driver’s seat and now she’s about to be.

Which is why I got to thinking about cars and the teenage girls who drive them in the first place.

And as someone who used to be a teenage girl, I want to throw my hands in the air and fucking HOWL in her honor. I want her TO FEEL THE SAME FREEDOM IN MY BODY that I felt in those days but also…

Tell me that you’ll drive safe and call me if you need anything.

Tell me that you will be more responsible than I was when I first learned to drive.

That you will be more focused on the road than your playlists.

That you will always check your blind spot even if your’e driving the kind of car that flashes its rear view mirrors.

That you will only speed a maximum of 10mph over the speed limit even if you’re on an open road.

If you’re gonna hotbox the car make sure whomever is driving is … not partaking in the hotboxing.

Don’t let a stranger change your tire if you’re alone. Don’t pay anyone with your phone number.

It’s different for daughters than it is for sons. Her list of warnings looks different than his did. I cannot raise her without acknowledging my experiences at her age and often find myself in a hall of mirrors, remembering bits and pieces of my teenage-dom in the distant reflection of hers.

She is such a different teenager than I was and I have tried my best not to project my fear onto her lack thereof because in order to be FREE one has to be FEARLESS.

Which is why, once again, the comments here are so powerful.

All of these formerly teenaged girls looking back on their version of their daughter’s nows. A generation passes and everything changes.

And the driving that once represented — for so many of us — a source of freedom has now been replaced with the urgency of responsibility. Getaway cars as grocery getters.

But I have to believe that behind all of the ways we have grown up, we’re still carrying around with us the little girls who couldn’t wait to climb into adulthood, rev our engines and show the whole wide world what we were made of.

Including the daughters who are just now learning to drive our cars.