236 Pounds of Class Vice President by Jason Mulgrew

Author:Jason Mulgrew
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-01-21T22:00:00+00:00

Angelo offered his best advice on the ride home, saying that it could have happened to anyone and that I had done good and that “millions!” of people fail their driving test on the first try. He dropped me off at home. And that was it. Our lessons were over, and I was on my own.

Yet I had a reason to feel, well, not terrible. I was bummed that I failed, sure. But an ambulance? Over the next few days, as the story was told to friends and family, it was seen as an unlucky break, an unfortunate but funny occurrence. After passing the parking and road tests, an ambulance! What bad luck! I laughed, too, and made an appointment the following week to finish this silliness once and for all.

This time, I went to the DMV with my mom. She wouldn’t let me drive to the center, but she had been at ease being in the car with me when we had done a few loops around the neighborhood and made a few tries at parallel parking, most of which I aced without a problem. To make sure that, come test time, the parking would be as easy as possible, I was taking test #2 in the smallest car that anyone in the family owned: my grandmother’s Geo Metro, which was about the size of a baby hippopotamus. You didn’t so much drive this car as ride it. If you were tall enough and reclined the seat just enough, its hatchback could also serve as your sunroof.

At the DMV, it was the same familiar routine. Mom gets out, DMV official gets in and tells me to pull ahead and park between the orange cones.

Viewing this whole test as more of a formality than anything else, I zoomed the car forward to the parallel parking area. I stopped, put the car in reverse, turned the wheel, stepped on the gas pedal—

And absolutely crushed the shit out of one of the orange cones.

It was so bad that it seemed like I had intentionally run over the cone. What other explanation was there? I was in a goddamn Geo Metro. You could practically drive that car through the door of a row house and park it neatly in the living room.

Maybe it was the cockiness, or maybe it was because I was jacked up, but it didn’t matter: I was now 0-for-2. I’d failed my driver’s license test. Twice.

The failure this time was no laughing matter and was much more depressing. Instead of being unlucky that an ambulance wound up behind me during test #1, perhaps I had been lucky that first time—lucky that I had so quickly and easily parallel parked the car and that I drove around the neighborhood without incident. Now it was possible that I’d never get my license, that I’d turn into that guy, the one who lives with his parents forever, takes the bus all over town, and buys a ton of porn videos but only when they go on sale.

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