There's No Thrill Like the One You Get from Sneaking Your First Drive

From Road & Track

(From the June 1999 issue of Road & Track)

Most of my friends were lucky. Their dads (and sometimes their moms) took them driving before they were 16. It was an American tradition in small-town, Midwestern America, like getting a boy's-model when you were 12.

Typically, their dads would take them out to a safe country road with no traffic and let them operate the car at low speed to get a feel for it. Some of my friends were allowed to do slow laps around the city park in the fall and spring, when the pool and play­ grounds were still closed for the season and the park was empty.

But not my dad. No sir.

He believed in following the letter of the law. "It's illegal," he would say. "Anyway, you'll be taking driver's ed in another year and you can drive when you're 16."

And there I was, the car nut from hell, straining at the leash and half crazy to get behind the wheel of a car.

At that point in my life, age 14, I had spent about six thousand hours (actually measurable with a stopwatch) sitting behind the steering wheels of various cars and wish­ing I could drive. I sat in my parent's cars in the driveway; I sat behind the wheel of my friends' parents' cars in their driveways. I hitchhiked to wrecking yards and spent en­tire Saturdays sitting in every single car that had a seat and a steering wheel, operating brakes, clutches and shifters and purposefully gripping their wheels.

And when I wasn't actually sitting in a car pretending to drive, I was in my room, reading about driving, poring over car magazines. I wanted to drive so badly that I went around for years with a strange, low-key headache of frustration, like a smoker who's lost his cigarettes. Or, worse yet, never had any.

But my dad would say, "You have your whole life to drive."

And I would suppress the temptation to check my pulse and say, "But I'm alive right now."

So of course there was only one thing to do, and that was sneak a drive.

The opportunity came one cold, rainy autumn weekend, when my folks drove their 1962 Ford Fairlane from central Wisconsin down to Chicago to see a musical. It was The Sound of Music, as I recall, the post-Broadway version, with Florence Henderson playing the part of Mary Martin, who, as everyone knows, was the real Baroness von Trapp, unlike Julie Andrews. Anyway, they left me to take care of my 2-year-old brother, Brian, and to watch the house. Heh, heh.

They also left my dad's current "clunker," a turquoise 1954 Studebaker station wagon, parked in front of the house. As they drove off in the Ford, I waved goodbye, then zipped upstairs to check my dad's catch-all drawer, where spare keys were kept, along with his Lions Club gavel and American Legion hat: Elroy, Wisconsin, Post 115.

Ha! The Studebaker keys! (To imagine my facial expression at this point, you have to picture Sidney Greenstreet examining the Maltese Falcon.) I immediately called my pal, Pat Donnelly, to tell him the good news and he said he'd come over that night.

It was the perfect night to go for a surreptitious drive, windy and cold with a driving rain. The neighbors would be very unlikely to hear or see us leave. I checked on my brother, who was sound asleep, and estimated-using the flexible teen moral yardstick-I could be gone about 20 minutes without feeling too much guilt about leaving him alone.

My dad's Studebaker wagon was not a great car to be driving, but it was a car. The 3-on-the-tree column shifter was notoriously worn and balky, and even experienced adults had trouble shifting it. To complicate matters, the shift knob was gone and my dad had covered the sharp end with a big gob of wadded-up masking tape. Cool.

Also, the engine-Studebaker's normally peppy V8-was on its last legs and could barely make it up hills. And there were many hills in my hometown. If the road up to our house had been a ski run, it would have been marked with double black diamonds. Our football team was the "Hilltoppers" and our school mascot was a Tyrolean mountain climber with an ice ax and a rope over his shoulder. The whole town just made you want to yodel.

And that night, the hills were alive with the sound of engine music. The Studebaker started right up, coughing and chuffing on five or six of its eight cylinders as usual. I released the hand­ brake and we were off.

The drive was uneventful, except that the old wagon wouldn't make it up the very steep Western Avenue, and this street was our shortest escape route from town and into the country.

So I had to back all the way down this long incline-not exactly the low-key exit I'd hoped for. We picked a gentler hill and soon made it out of town on County Highway O past the Elroy cemetery. Hilltoppers, indeed.

Gales of rain lashed the windshield and the headlights made two feeble tunnels into the foggy darkness. The worn wipers seemed to be smearing Wesson Oil on the windshield. It was a wretched night to be out, but we were driving.

The steering was loose and the car wandered, but I had surprisingly little trouble shifting or using the clutch, even on hills. I'd been practicing for so long, everything was exactly as I imagined it would be. To be perfectly honest (if not very modest), I could drive this car, first time out, more smoothly than either of my parents could. Rehearsal is everything.

After about eight miles, I still hadn't hit anything or been stopped by Jack Weger, our local chief of police, so I figured I'd used up all my allotted luck and turned around for home. We came down Academy Street with the brakes squeaking and creaking, and I carefully positioned the car in front of the house, just as I'd found it.

Lights off, handbrake on. Done. My first drive in a car.

Pat said, "Well, you did it," then ran home in the freezing rain.

The keys went back in my dad's dresser drawer, I changed into dry clothes, checked on my brother (still asleep) and that was that. The perfect crime. My parents came home from Chicago on Sunday night and never knew a thing.

But when I came home from school on Monday afternoon, my mother met me at the front door with a wry expression on her face.

"One of the neighbors tells me you've been driving our car," she said.

I looked at her, expressionless, while my mind raced, looking for a way out. Surely none of the neighbors could have heard or seen us on that dark night, with the wind roaring in the trees and 50 feet of visibility. Perhaps one of them had seen my dad driving earlier in the week and thought it was me. Maybe it was a case of mistaken identity.

"When?" I inquired, brilliantly.

My mother's jaw dropped in disbelief. "When? What do you mean, 'When?' You mean you've been driving more than once?"

"No, no," I said, waving my hand and dismissing the very idea.

"It doesn't matter, when. You aren't supposed to be driving our cars at all."

I nodded agreeably, as if to say, "Okay, thanks Mom, good safety tip."

She stared at me for a long minute and shook her head. We'd had many conversations like this over the years. She had a mind like a steel trap and could detect a crime or a cover-up from a mile away. She also had a good nose for cigarette smoke and alcohol. It was like living with Sherlock Holmes.

I, on the other hand, did not have a mind like a steel trap. I had a mind like a badly constructed rabbit snare, made with twigs and string by a Cub Scout. I could not tell a lie. Not very well, anyway. Every time I tried, I looked like an idiot.

"Yes," I finally admitted, "I took a short drive in the car."

"With Pat Donnelly," she added, to refresh my memory.

I nodded. "Yes, with Pat Donnelly. But I did all the driving," I quickly added, as if that were somehow better. Pat was only 13, after all.

"Well, I'm not going to tell your father. He'd be furious. But I want you to promise you won't drive our cars again until you get your license."

"I won't," I said.

And I didn't.

But at least I had a real drive, and no one can take that away. They still can't.

Funny thing being a teenager. There's a long tradition of "Don't ask, don't tell" that probably goes all the way back to the dawn of time. On one hand, your parents want you to be safe, honest and upright, but if you are completely candid with them and loyal to their wishes, you have no life. The sad truth is, if we always did what our parents wanted us to do, we'd grow old without a single good story to tell.

Cars, cigarettes, motorcycles, romance, late night drives . . . sometimes I think they're all just mechanisms to split us off from the nuclear family, like amoebae subdividing, so we go off and start lives and families of our own. They are nature's way of getting us kicked out of the house. Maybe my stolen drive was just the beginning of that gradual split, the tip of the wedge.

Would I do it again?

In a minute.

But if you have kids, don't tell them I said so. They have to learn how to do it themselves, without taking it too lightly. "Parental" car theft should come from the heart.