Driving Miss Manhattan

“When’s the last time you were in a car?” JAL asks me. 

I’m sitting next to her as we drive away from the mall and toward her house, winding our way through back streets and side streets I didn’t know existed. 

“Um…” I have to think about it for a second. It was August, just a few months earlier, the last time I visited Florida before now, Thanksgiving time. I don’t particularly miss being in a car—that is to say, I don’t particularly miss driving one because anyone who knows me knows I take cabs probably much more often than I should. But every time I come home, there gets to be a certain day where I’m just so tired of being in the house I need to drive, and drive anywhere just to shake off the monotony of whatever the last few days in the house have been. Watching TCM with my mom or Jason Statham movies with my dad. Working my face off, lying on my bed in nine different ways trying to write an article that for some reason I’ve made due during what’s supposed to be my vacation. Sitting in the back reading a magazine in the sun. Or just sitting inside doing nothing. 

I’ve never been a person who can do nothing for extended periods of time. It’s short, two days max, sometimes two hours max, before I start to fray at the edges, snap at anyone in my wake, and make an internal “grrrrrrrr” sound that would put an angry cat to shame. 

My internal compass guides me the same place it always does, always has: the bookstore, the world’s most perfect place to wander and get lost when you simply need to just get out. My “grrrrrrrr” slowly but surely fades into a purr as soon as I place the key in the ignition. Driving down University Drive, it’s 45 mph speed limit and occasionally curving but mostly straight-shot roads if you leave the house at the right time. I change the radio to something good because I can’t drive in silence or with shitty music because that, of all things, is what’s most distracting to me. And soon David Bowie or the Pretenders or Phoenix or the Beastie Boys will spill out of the speakers (never too loud, though, unless the windows are down and it’s 1am and there’s nobody on the road, of course). Part of me will breathe, relax, unclench my jaw that I’ve been holding tight for the last few hours as I slowly make my way out the door, angry at myself for not getting there faster. I’ll feel my shoulders begin to move, my neck relax. 

People write all kinds of manifestos about driving, how it brings them peace or a sense of control. I suppose it brings me both of those things, but only if I’m driving in places I already know—I’m not a good driver otherwise, and I will not, WILL NOT take the highway because well, I’m too scared of dying. I knew just enough people or people who knew people in high school who died untimely deaths in car accidents that I don’t know if I will ever feel truly safe behind the wheel of a car. I remember one time driving on the highway with friends and clenching the wheel so tight that my knuckles sparkled white on the steering wheel, having to pause every few minutes or so to stretch my hands. But when I’m driving someplace I know, my hands perform a quiet choreography on the steering wheel, turning the thing at just the right angles almost from sheer muscle memory alone. That’s actually something I look forward to, not just the choreography but the fact that I’m doing it means I’m visiting my old haunts, a part of myself that still only lives in South Florida, and not the part I said good riddance to when I moved away.  

My mother loves to drive, my father drives faster than he should, and my boyfriend does both of those things (though the latter not while I’m in the car because he knows better). I’m happy to let them take the wheel when they want to. Driving is like a pair of shoes I like but never wear because I don’t have the occasion: they’re nice, but they mostly sit in my closet. I’m glad I have them, and I enjoy wearing them when I have the opportunity, but it’s also okay with me that I don’t wear them too often. So I’m happy to be the passenger, especially if I know someone else will do a better job driving than I will. 

I didn’t get my license until I was 17, the August before I left for college. I took driving lessons first with my parents, who made no pretenses about holding on for dear life when I was behind the wheel; and then with an uncle who was a former driving instructor and told me a car is a weapon that can kill you and needs about the length of a roller skate to do significant damage; and finally with a mild-mannered man in a VW bug who never flinched if I made an error but instead asked me to try again. I failed my first driving test because, and I swear I will never forget these words as long as I live, I “brushed a cone” getting out of a parking space, which meant I failed no matter what else I did right during the test (which, apparently, was everything). I came home and sat in the sun in my heavy school uniform, totally ashamed. But I went back a few months later after practicing, practicing, practicing, and this time had two judges in the car, one woman in training and another already certified. “Well, uh, I can’t see anything she did wrong,” the trainee said. “That sounds about right to me,” the certified one said. And so I was given my license, the same one I have today. The picture is now 12 years old and whenever I get carded at bars people give it a double-take. I’m wearing an Old Navy t-shirt in it, and facing the camera straight on, which I never do now because it makes my nose look like a faucet. Maybe one day I will get a new photo. Maybe one day I’ll drive more.

I wish I could say I missed driving when I’m in New York, but what I really think I miss is having the windows down and the music playing, the cool air rolling around in my hair, brushing past my cheeks on a long ride home on a usually busy street that’s silent at 2am save for my car. Those things happen when I’m driving, yes, but to me they were always something more. 

Wildlife

It was about 1am on Thanksgiving, when the blinds moved in my mother's bedroom, at my parents' house in Florida. At first we thought nothing of it. We were watching Milk Money, that awesome movie where Melanie Griffith plays a hooker who ends up in the suburbs and falls in love with science teacher Ed Harris. But then it happened again. And it wasn't a "it was the wind"-kind of movement. It was the movement the blinds used to make when our dearly departed cat would walk through them. Something living was behind the blinds.

We didn't know what to do--what if it was something poisonous??--but eventually my mom, brave as she is, went and opened the blind, and I saw it. A slimy little brown frog, half the size of the palm of my hand, was clinging to one of the white blinds for dear life, its little frog toes spread out like one of those sticky hands you used to get for 25 cents in hard plastic bubbles from vending machines.

Growing up in South Florida, I had become accustomed, as we all do, to all manner of bugs, reptiles,  and other strange, tropical creatures, but I never, ever got used to frogs. They make my heart thump in fear the way no other animal does. Upon seeing the creature in the house, my mom and I both gasped, and I definitely screamed like a little girl. I had only visions of the story my mother once told me of one of these frogs that had sprayed poison out of its mouth and killed my aunt's dog some 40 years ago. I didn't know if it was one of these frogs, neither of us did, but we knew we didn't want to get close to it or touch it. As my mother opened the blind to get closer, the frog leapt onto the ground. I screamed again as it bounded through the air, probably more scared of us than we were of it. It made its way toward my mother's closet, and I immobilized by fear. "Shit," my mother said. "I really don't want your father to put on his shoes tomorrow morning and step in frog." She was far less scared than I was. But the frog had disappeared into the closet. "Put on the light!" I said to her. I sat up on the bed and we both looked at the closet, waiting for it to come out. When eventually the frog stepped into the closet's pool of light, it stayed for a moment and, reflexes barely able to catch up with my brain, I threw an old blanket in its general direction and miraculously the blanket landed right on top of it. "Good show, Lyss!" my mother said, only to follow it with, "But what do we do now?"

We stared down at the blanket. My mother sat down for a second to catch her breath. We didn't want to kill the thing, we just wanted it out of the house. How on earth did the damned thing get in here, anyway? The occasional gecko on the house's exterior we were used to, but they were always outside and totally harmless.

There was an extra square of carpet in the closet, close to the blanketed frog. "Why don't we make a, uh, sort of sandwich?" I suggested, moving the carpet square under the blanket. My mother did this, wrapping the whole thing in a towel and moving toward the door. She threw the whole thing on the ground outside and slowly the frog emerged and casually hopped away into the night, as if nothing ever happened.

--

Friday night is a different kind of wildlife encounter. J, Z and I are at Lagniappe, a bar of sorts in Miami. They have both since moved to the area from their previous homes closer to me, so I am seeing their lives down here for the first time, the creatures in their natural habitat, if you will. Lagniappe is their usual haunt--good for both dates and hangouts with friends, they tell me. It is not a regular bar, but in a good way--in front of the cash registers, there are both refrigerators (with white wines/bubbles) and wine racks (red wines), where you purchase a bottle and you're given glasses. Then, you go outside to the space's massive patio that's attired with patio furniture leftover from Hurricane Andrew and lit up with strings of those yellow lightbulb lights and you find a table. Barely any two chairs or tables are alike, and they're all sort of pushed together in different corners of the patio in a sort of perfect chaos. Even so, there are some tables you don't want, J tells me--of one that's empty but in a very high-traffic area, she tells me if you sit there you get everyone's butt rubbed against your head. Not really what either of us were looking for this evening. We find another in a corner that overlooks the entire patio. It's booming with people, all sitting and enjoying their wine and plates of meats and cheese. We observe, making shady comments about the people around us, often punctuated with exclamations like, "Gurrrrrrrrrl," and "Oh NO, bitch. Oh NO." It's just like old times.

The crowd gathering for the five-minute rainstorm.

At one point, tiny droplets begin falling from the sky. First they're small enough to ignore, a light sprinkling, but then the drops get heavier, louder. Everyone either stays put or gathers under the bar's large overhang, but nobody leaves because we all know it's South Florida, it will be over in five minutes. And surely enough, it is. We sit down, seats a little wet but nothing drastic, and resume our discussion.

Eventually we embark on our own meat and cheese platter. Just as with the wine, you pick out your meats and cheeses and pay for them, then the kitchen assembles them for you on a platter with sliced baguette, jam, and olives if you so desire. I chose black truffle pecorino, drunken goat, and brie alongside capicola and proscuitto, and they were soon given back to me, blooming gorgeously on a silver tray. I carried it off back to our table and we dug in. In between three or four bottles of wine we discuss the trials and tribulations of dating as a twenty-something in the Tinder/Grindr/texting era and gossip about people we went to high school with. So, yes, it's just like old times, but with more wine.

--

The day I am leaving Florida, the blinds overlooking the backyard are open. Standing there in the grass like a statue is a bright green iguana that's about two feet long. It has spiky fringe on the back of its head and dark scales around its long-clawed feet. It is positively prehistoric, and it's just hanging out in my backyard. Don't get a whole lot of that in the big city, I think to myself, recalling the pigeons and rats that make up New York's "wildlife." There was an iguana by the house one other time a few years ago, a lime green thing clinging to the screen on the exterior of the house, but it was skinny and small in comparison. This one now was definitely a small dinosaur. I snapped a bunch of pictures, shaking my head in disbelief. Only in South Florida.