You know that expression about how every happy family is the same, but every un-happy family is unhappy in its own way? I think it’s from Anna Karenina. Anyway, I have a number of theories about driving, and I’ve long cherished one stating that every good driver is just about the same, while every bad driver is bad in a unique fashion.

Over the years, I’ve collected anecdotal evidence and fine-tuned the postulate to state that entire regions famed for their bad driving follow the happy-family principle. In other words, a bad driver from Massachusetts (utter apathy towards laws of road and of physics) does not drive badly in the same way as a bad driver from Pennsylvania (estrangement from gas pedal and the use thereof) or Washington D.C. (fight-or-flight response meets soapbox derby) or, God forgive me, New Jersey (possession of T-top IROC and penis envy with intent to distribute), although I still maintain that the average Jersey driver is not so much bad as efficiently assertive, but I’ll save that argument for another column and return to the theory at hand: every bad driver is bad in his or her own way, but all the bad drivers from a given region will exhibit bad-driving characteristics similar to the other bad drivers in the region. Go out on the Garden State Parkway on a Friday night if you don’t believe me. Well, update all your insurance first, and then buy a helmet, and then go out on the Parkway. You’ve got a guy tailgating in the left lane, you’ve got a guy weaving in and out of the lanes at 80 mph, and you’ve got a guy not only following an ambulance but flashing his high beams at it. The specific examples of bad driving differ, but they share a principle common to Jersey drivers, namely that the speed limit is not a top limit, but rather a suggested minimum.

With me so far? Think it’s a good theory? Yeah, so did I. Then I moved to Brooklyn, and unless the exception proves the rule, the whole premise is out the window and down a pothole, because I have seen every imaginable variety of horrendous driving in the 718, as well as a few unimaginable varieties.

The little old lady from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, the one Ferris’s dad gets stuck behind on his way home from work? She lives out here. So do several thousand of her sisters. They drive like an Amish funeral procession — one sponsored by Concha y Toro and composed entirely of Chevy models you haven’t seen since Vega$ went off the air — except slower. But she’s not the slowest driver on the road; she’s not even the second-slowest. The second-slowest is her husband, who heard on “Car Talk” that you could conserve gas by never letting the speedometer get above 15. Her husband is the same individual who steers the land yacht into the gas station, hands the attendant two dollar bills so old that they have denatured into raggy blobs, and stands fanning himself with his trilby in the exact center of the service bay. Can anyone else pull in? No. Does two dollars of gas take longer than thirteen seconds to dispense? No. Does he spend a full ten minutes outside the car anyway, meditatively waving his hat around under each armpit in turn? Yes. Yes, he does.

But he’s still not the slowest driver in Brooklyn. The slowest driver in Brooklyn is the guy who wants you to get a goooooood look at the car as it goes by, so he’s going to help you out by coasting along at parade speed, just in case you haven’t fully appreciated the beauty (read: outrageous expense) of his vehicle. Maybe he’s driving the brand-new, forbiddingly pricy, impossibly shiny car and hoping you’ll think to yourself, “Wow, that guy is reeeee-yich,” and feel all bad about yourself for driving a non-blinding old beater. (What you actually think to yourself: “He street-parks that shit? Well, best of luck to him.”) Or maybe he’s driving the so-tricked-out-it’s-David-Copperfield average model with the platinum rims and the undercarriage lighting and the bone-rattling bass and hoping you’ll think to yourself, “Wow, that guy knows a lot about cars,” and want to give him a blowjob. (What you actually think to yourself: “It’s still a Hyundai, chief.”)

Everyone else in Brooklyn, meanwhile, is evidently trying to pass the Dukes of Hazzard: The New Class audition and the fire department’s land-speed test at the same time. It’s a borough in a hurry, I’ll tell you what, and when you’ve got an SUV the size of Rhode Island behind you, the trampoline required to enter the vehicle strapped to the roof rack, you don’t mess around braking for a left turn, because you don’t want to die, and if you slow down instead of taking the turn on two wheels, you will die. You will get flattened by the Ford Tankstar, and you will die, or the Ford Tankstar will honk at you, and the horn will play “That’s Amore,” and you will kill yourself.

The disparity in vehicle sizes is a big part of the problem around here, too. An average afternoon on the BQE looks like a battle sequence from Star Wars — AT-AT walkers lumbering down the center lane, little sand-termite cars like mine zipping between their legs — so you can probably imagine the sheer terror involved in trying to parallel-park with one of those behemoths bearing down on you. STOMP! “Go! Go!” “It’s still a foot and a half from the curb!” STOMP! “Reverse, reverse, hurry!” “Okay, okay!” STOMP! “It’s only half a block away!” “Okay, on my three, I Club it and we break for the sidewalk.” STOMP! “Aiiiieeeeeee!”

Not that the parking isn’t a big part of the problem too. I can tell you from sad experience that Brooklyn drivers spend the bulk of their time in the car either bemoaning the sweet spots they just gave up or eyeballing curbs for eligible space, so you’d think most of us would know how to park a car in under a fortnight, but I can also tell you from sad experience that the entire borough is around-the-bend-and-over-to-Bellevue OCD about parking. A woman in a Beetle with an entire block to herself will still spend fifteen minutes backing and filling and abusing her transmission to get the car exactly straight, and then she will get out with a carpenter’s level and check it, and then she will get back in the car and fine-tune it some more, and if she’s driving a big old Le Sabre and trying to wedge it into a ten-foot space, forget it. Cars backed up behind her all the way to Coney Island, and she’s doing her Marcia Brady egg-on-a-traffic-cone routine. STOMP! “Hurry up, lady, we’re sitting ducks back here!” STOMP! [Honk! Honk honnnnnnk! When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza piiiiiiiie!] “Aiiiieeeeeee!”

It’s not for the faint of heart, driving out here. God forbid you get stuck at one of the Lights Of The Damned on New Utrecht Avenue, because you will sit there for twenty minutes, waiting, aging, and behind you is the guy with the bass, putting every pacemaker in the neighborhood on the fritz and causing seismologists from Montauk to Red Bank to storm out of their labs all “why do I even bother.” Ahead of you is Bo Duke, hitching impatiently forward in four-millimeter increments and blocking the crosswalk. On the sidewalk on your left is an Italian charms man so old he counted Lorenzo de Medici as a personal friend, feeding the flock of pigeons. Not “a flock.” “The flock.” Every pigeon in the five boroughs is on that goddamn corner right now, because the old Italian man is not feeding them bread crumbs, oh no; he is feeding them fresh bread, still so hot from the oven you can see the steam, and he is therefore turning your car into the automotive equivalent of a Kinder-Egg Surprise, with pigeon poo playing the role of the chocolaty shell. The surprise? Your car was black once. On your right…hey, kid. Yeah, you. C’mere. Okay, listen up. You gotta listen to your older brother when he says to turn your wrists over when you swing, because if you don’t turn your wrists over, you’re gonna keep getting under the ball. You’ve fired sixty-eight straight foul shots off poor Betsy, that’s “how I know,” you little wise-ass. You can turn your wrists over on the goddamn follow-through like I just told you, or you can come over to my house on Saturday morning and hammer dents out of the bird crap. All right, you can go. Wait, hold up a sec — I want you to promise me something. I want you to promise me you’ll signal when you get older. You know, when you turn? Look, just promise me. STOMP! Oh, shit. I gotta go. Turn those wrists over. STOMP!

STOMP! “What do you know about a good swing?” “Whatever, just put your seatbelt on.” “Okay, oka– oh, no, it’s the ice cream truck, we’re stuck behind the ice cream truck, we’re stuck behind the ice cream truck!” “Oh shit oh shit oh shit.” STOMP! [Doodle dee doodle dee doodle doo, dee doodle doo dee doodle!] “We’re gonna die, we’re gonna die, we’re gonna die, we’re gonna die!” [hoooonnnnk] “Come on, shorty, if you want a bomb pop that bad you can run alongside the truck, let’s move, let’s move!” STOMP! “No, don’t unwrap it now, you little — God, move it! Move!” [hoooonnnnk] STOMP! “We’re gonna die. We’re gonna die! We are going to die.” [Doodle dee doodle…dee doodle doo…dee doodle doo dee…doodle.] “Oh my God, step on it, Mr. Frostee, let’s go, let’s go!” STOMP! “Ohhhhhh, God. What is he doing?” “We’re gonna die.” “AIIIIEEEEEEE!” [skeeee-rreeeeeeeeech]

[Doodle dee doodle dee doodle doo, dee doodle doo dee doodle!] “I hate that fucking song.” “Me too. Okay, start looking for a space.”

(In future installments: Double- and triple-parking, threading the needle, and bridge navigation!)

April 26, 2004

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