A Long Drive for Someone With Nothing to Think About
When I was in grad school at Rowan, I found the personal essay, and really loved the form for its ability to take two things and juxtapose them in ways that didn’t feel like they’d work. Part of the fun was making them work. One of the first essays I wrote was about getting my driver’s license, which I connected to the unfortunate death of one of my closest friends throughout high school, Josh.
Today marks 10 years since his passing. A full decade. Wow.
After I wrote this essay, I submitted it on a whim to Rowan’s Denise Gess Literary Awards, where it took third place in Creative Nonfiction. This meant I got to read a truncated version of it aloud in front of an audience, which I was incredibly nervous about. I wasn’t sure how the piece would come across, or if it’d make sense. One of the weirdest moments of my grad school career was reading it at the ceremony that night, looking out into the crowd while I read and seeing tears on faces. People crying for a boy they never knew. That’s the kind of impact Josh had.
Here is the full essay, which I haven’t re-read since that moment. I think about Josh almost every day, and I still have and cherish the picture of him and I at our hotel in Disney World on senior trip recreating “The Creation of Adam.” A framed version of it has moved with me from my parents’ house to two apartments, currently sitting in my living room on a table next to me. I miss him.
The automobile. Possibly humanity’s greatest achievement. The car brought us beyond the industrial revolution, ushering in a new age and means of personal travel. In the western world, the car has been used to introduce teenagers to adulthood, with just about every one of my high school friends and myself included, clamoring for our driver’s licenses when we hit the tender age just in between being a naive kid and being thrust into the world to forge the paths of our lives.
I was the youngest in my group, my birthday coming in August, right before the grade cutoff, so I was about a month, maybe just weeks older than people who were a full year below me. As they all trickled into their first steps of adulthood, being given cars or sharing them with their parents, I got to reap the benefits of having peers who drove. We would take late-night trips to Wawa, or go to a buddy's house to drink beer and smoke weed and hookah in his basement. All while coasting through the last year of my non-adult teenage life, I was focused on partying with my friends and enjoying what childish freedom I had left. Because even though adulthood, to a kid, is the ultimate freedom, there is still liberty in not having to abide by the responsibilities that accompany it. There is freedom in thinking “we have our whole lives ahead of us.”
“What could go wrong?”
One of my closest friends throughout high school was named Josh. He knew practically everyone in my school, all two-thousand-something throughout four grade levels, but I was honored to have him in my tight knit group. We did everything together throughout our collective senior years; buying food, hanging out, huddling in a limo to prom with our dates. He was one of my first friends when I got to high school, that hadn’t been carried over from my previous schools. As I said before, I was the last of us to get my license, so I depended on these friends to drive us around up until then. Josh had a late-90s model BMW which was a lot of fun to ride in, but not as much so as our other friend’s Dodge Charger. I was the odd man out with the Hyundai Santa Fe when it came time for me to start driving, but it was what I had and I loved that car, almost as much as the Kia Soul I have now.
Driving, to me, as a newly-licensed teenage driver, represented free-spiritedness, wanderlust, or whatever other symbol of rugged individualism. Now, sitting behind the wheel of a large automobile just isn’t as freeing as it used to be. When out on the road these days, I find myself in constant worry of what street I turn down that might come to define the remainder of my life.
Greentree Rd.
After I got my driver’s license, I was given my parents’ 2001 Hyundai Santa Fe. 2001 was the first year it was manufactured and also the year we moved from Pennsauken, New Jersey, a town on the outskirts of industrial Camden, to suburban Turnersville. That car was the first my parents had bought after our move, and it stayed in the family for fifteen years, all the while not even eclipsing the long-mythologized 100,000 mile mark. Although it surely took enough of a beating throughout the near two decades we had it.
New Jersey has this wonderful probationary license period where you’re only allowed to have one other person in the car with you for the first year of driving, which isn’t very free-spirited to me, but whatever. No matter if you drove a Mustang, or a stretch limo, those backseats better have no assprint in them for that year or else the man was cracking down on you. I was in marching band all throughout high school, which I wasn’t fond of until my junior and senior year when I was convincing my non-square friends to join the band, probably one of the “square”-est programs a high school could offer. So on a Thursday night, two weeks into my last 180 days as a high schooler, we had just gotten done playing third fiddle behind the cheerleaders, who had just gotten done rooting for the football team, who had just gotten done getting their asses kicked on a rainy night, and a school night no less. I always hated having a game and then school the next day, getting home at 11PM earliest, and waking up bright and groggy seven hours later, utilizing a zombified stagger to get to homeroom through the half-mile long school corridors.
We got back to the school, rain still beating down into the earth, wetting the grass, the cars, the roads, and soaking us as we hauled the equipment back into the band room we called home, just months removed from a fire that tore through its ceiling, started by an exploding light bulb. I was already giving a girl I had a crush on, Sarah, a ride home, which was cool even though she only lived a thirty second drive from school, which didn’t leave me much time to get her to fall utterly in love with me, when my firecracker headed friend Bob, a bit of an absent mind but a good pal nonetheless, begged me for a ride home. Thirty seconds from the school, and two weeks after being awarded my driver’s license and first piece of liberation from childhood, I slid on the wet street right into the ass-end of a woman’s SUV. Luckily for me, she was the nicest woman who had ever just gotten done getting her car rammed into from behind that I could’ve asked for, but she was also the mother of a kid on the football team who had just gotten done getting their asses kicked.
If anyone has ever had someone get out of their car and hug and console you after you just plowed into it then you know that can be a really fucking confusing experience, especially if it’s your first car accident, and especially when you’ve had your license for barely a fortnight. Thank God, or whatever celestial being makes sense to praise, that we were all unscathed aside from my car, which rolled out a ton of pomp and circumstance for what was an otherwise uneventful crash. Her car was mostly unblemished, with just a small scratch along its rear bumper, while my airbags had nearly blown mine and Bob’s faces off, and my radiator was punched in, flooding smoke into the cabin.
Now here came the red and blue flashing lights of a police cruiser, cloaking the dreary world in a haunt of primary color. If I weren’t in pure shock I’d have told my friend Bob to beat it, and stayed there with Sarah, looking like a good boy and probably the only newly-licensed teenage driver who followed the cinderella period rules, but my body was betraying me. Two tickets and a whole lot of yelling from my parents later, I was taking the bus to school for the next month, while my beloved blue Santa Fe was getting worked on, and Sarah started dating another one of my friends not long after.
Buena Vista Dr.
By the end of senior year, my friends and I were all long ready to graduate and move on from high school. We had roomed together in Disney World, where our school’s senior trip always takes place, like clockwork. In between endless floods of early spring tourists through the Halls of Mickey, we actually had some fun while we were there.
One particular day I had waited nearly an hour to ride Space Mountain with Josh. I was never one for roller coasters, or rides in general, but when in Rome; Orlando anyway. Space Mountain is one of those dark rides where you can’t see a thing, and the whiplash is supposed to be entertaining. A cursory search on YouTube shows what it looks like to go through the coaster with the lights on, exposing the proximity at which your head is always an outstretched-neck away from some piece of unforgiving metal scaffolding while your meat-body is traveling roughly twenty-eight miles per hour. This actually was entertaining, though, due in part to Josh somehow sneaking a plastic lightsaber onto the ride, and whacking a new piece of the aforementioned scaffolding with every corner we took through the black abyss. He knew very much how to have irreverent fun, and turn even the worst days into something magical.
After our graduation ceremony, which was nearly delayed to July, thanks to the endless abundance of snow in the New Jersey winter of 2014, those who signed up out of the 600-plus in my graduating class spent the night at Dave & Buster’s in Philadelphia. This was a yearly tradition at Washington Township High School, which was supposedly done to keep kids from drinking and driving and avoid tragedy, a noble cause. My friends and I smoked in the school bathroom as a last hurrah, like the rebellious degenerates we were, and got on the plethora of school buses departing to D&B’s, which many of us had never been to. We spent our time eating sliders, “gambling” in their PG-13 table games room, and trying out every arcade machine we could in the span of several hours.
I lost track of Josh every few minutes it seemed, as he worked the room like a standup-comic past their prime in Catskills motels, but that’s just the way he was. Everyone knew him on a first name basis, and I felt cooler just to know and hang out with him regularly. D&B’s had a lot of driving games, the ones that came with a chrome plated eyesore of a full-body controller resembling a “motorcycle” or “driver’s seat” that vibrated with every turn of your low-poly character. The ones where crashing came with no repercussions. Where you simply got back on and started all over again, defying death.
Delsea Dr.
In September 2017, a week into my last full year of undergraduate studies at Rowan University, and suspiciously close to the date of my first accident, I had just finished class and was making my way home. I stopped for gas at a place by the college, and put on a song I found on one of my favorite TV shows ever, Freaks & Geeks. “No Language In Our Lungs” by the band XTC began playing as I exited the gas station and made it thirty seconds down the road. My last thought was no- before I saw a gray-metallic blur hurl across my lane from the adjacent lot, just feet from the nose of my automobile, leaving me milliseconds to react. In an instant, I was breathless after the loud flash, feeling lungless as I exited the car and saw pieces of colored shrapnel scattered across the road. Bad things happen in September.
I don’t know if it was more comforting or exacerbating that the person I hit was in a similar state as I was, and thankfully a kindred spirit in the form of a woman who was driving behind me took control of the situation. She got me to call 911, and took me to a patch of grass on the side of the road, where I sat until the ambulance and my parents came. A ride to the ER and a chest contusion later, I was ok, but my beautiful Santa Fe was totaled, gone for good. Kaput. I still have the bag of everything I took from the car before it was sent to be compacted by the insurance company, full of burnt CDs, our old garage door opener, and some pens, sitting in my closet.
It was sad to see the machine in such a state of disrepair, bulging and splintered at its front, missing headlights and metal and cogs and gears that propelled it into motion. That’s how I felt at that moment, broken and dejected, even though I had my physical health, thanks to major improvements in vehicle safety over the past few decades. Afterwards I wished, instead of a living breathing organism, to be a plastic simulacra, able to crash at speeds higher than anything a human being should be driving a car at, and come out unbroken. But I drew the shortest straw, human, while my spirit was shuffling around the in-between, for better or worse, lucky or unlucky. Though the pain that comes with being human is pain that exists in many different forms, this is also a blessing, because it keeps us tethered to the Earth, to the same ground that gets soaking wet in the rain.
Fish Pond Rd.
After our last hurrah at Dave & Buster’s, we piled back into the pack of yellow school buses as students for the last time, while the morning sun began to show through the twilight, accompanied by a slight drizzle. We expressed how drained we all were, and I talked to Josh about what shenanigans we’d find ourselves in next. After all, we partied hard over the school year, we’d of course have to outdo ourselves in the summer. After graduation and summer vacation, we’d be thrust into adulthood.
My friend Josh lived one hundred miles per hour everyday, and even at seventeen years old, he was something of a folk hero in our town. Everyone knew him, and everyone loved him. Like Henry Hill walking through the restaurant in Goodfellas, he was greeted by everybody we encountered, recognized all across a town of 50,000 residents.
I’ve never seen him look so peaceful as he did at his funeral, his face powdered and made-up to protect us mourners from seeing the scarring across his head from when it broke through the driver’s-side window of his BMW, shortly after sliding across rain soaked asphalt, nose first into a truck. The crash occurred the day after Halloween, just months after our high school graduation ceremony, a date I have tattooed across not just my mind, but my body as well, in his remembrance. I will carry a piece of him with me until we meet again. He threw a banger of a party that Halloween, but we didn’t know it would be his final time on this Earth. The next day he was driving through town and that was the last we would ever see of him alive again.
Washington Township must be cursed. At least five or six people I graduated high school and interacted with on a daily basis, and even more from countless classes before ours, have left this planet, freer than the spirit of newly-licensed teenage drivers, with a staggering percentage coming from car accidents. None of them have stuck with me like my friend Josh’s though, we were so far from living the rest of our lives together. I couldn’t imagine my best friend, who I spent just five years knowing but had already built a lifetime of memories and stories to laugh about, in his half-life at nine years old.
Lord knows in the funeral home, where pictures of him with his friends and family were stuck on particle board sheets placed by the entrance, many tears were shed. Enough tears to soak down into the Earth, to wet the grass, the cars, the roads. When I dreamt of him for the first time just days after the funeral, we met by the swing set of a small and lonely playground, where he told me everything was going to be okay. I like to think that it wasn’t a dream, but a sign.Life at its worst, feels solitary and hopeless, almost like a long drive for someone with nothing to think about. But at its best, I like to think it feels like the times I got to spend with my friends in high school, free from the shackles of pain and loss, whether behind the wheel, or in the passenger’s seat.
