Fragments From Floyd

When I drive my old beat-up stick-shift truck, I know I will never make the light at the top of the hill on Jefferson near campus--a fact I anticipate with dread. Having to start up on an incline, there is never any doubt that I will go through the same obsessive-compulsive rechecking of the gear shift to make absolutely, positively certain that somehow it hasn't slipped mysteriously out of first gear. I check it, and I recheck it again. Try as I might to just leave it be, I must be sure. And I can tell you exactly how and when this odd habit began.

I was fifteen. I had recently gotten my learner's permit, and at every opportunity, I grabbed the keys to the car--a VW Beetle. On this particular drive, it was tax season. My father was a CPA and mom helped. That meant eating out almost every night, since my family's center shifted in March and April from home and meal preparation to work and tax preparation. My mother, brother and I were on our way from Crestwood to our favorite diner in Woodlawn. Mills Restaurant, the painted sign said: nothing fancy, nothing expensive; home cooking, served with a smile by our waitress, Ruth, who saved "our table" in her section for us, knew how sweet we wanted our sweet tea with extra lemon, and saved us a slice of our favorite pie if they were running out before we got there.

The railroad tracks crossed 56th street on the edge of Woodlawn. Back in those days, there were always trains--often long--and we had to wait a few minutes for this one to pass. I was first in line at the top of a moderate rise, waiting, confident in my new driving abilities, listening to see if I could make the tac-tac-tac rhythm of the passing train sync with the backbeat of MoTown on the radio. In the dark, the stroboscopic flash of lights from the tiny crossroads flashed hypnotically between each blurred boxcar.

Finally, the red light of the caboose passed, and I was hungry. I eased off on the clutch as I had practiced so many times, balancing the clutch expertly against the accelerator. But the car did not go forward. The engine revved as we rolled backwards, gently at first, down the incline. More gas. The engine raced, the lights of town disappeared behind the rise of the tracks, and we hurdled backwards in the dark. More gas! and the engine screamed near redline, and still the car would not respond. On a weeknight at suppertime, mercifully, there were not many cars on the roads, and I coasted to a stop at the bottom of the hill. In neutral.

We laughed about this at the time, and it has been a family joke now for forty years. But the horror of rolling backward out of control in the darkness traumatized this young driver in a deep and persistent way. I check and recheck now to convince myself I am in gear when stopped on even the least hill. Because of that one mild trauma as a fifteen-year-old driver, I still re-enact the same pointless behavioral script, fearful of the terrible consequences if I make the same mistake again.

This is one of those personal foibles that brings me closer to the rest of the frail human swarm. I think of the traumas suffered by fifteen-year-olds around the war-torn world--not the innocuous scars of driving mishaps on the way to a pleasant dinner at the neighborhood restaurant. Deep, terrible psychic wounds of terror at the hand of neighbors, of hunger and squalor and senseless death. These horrors cannot help but leave lasting scars of fear, of mistrust, of hatred that last into adulthood and will not wash easily away. I think of this as I check the cold knob of the gear shift, making certain that yes, I will go forward.