DRIVEN

In July of 2017, around the time that Season 1 of Ozark aired, my OkCupid profile, otherwise peak vanilla, spat these sparks:

Q: What does your typical Saturday night look like?

A: Driving around backwoods Arkansas in an unmarked van with a bunch of Mexicans in the back.

There really were Mexicans: EFL teachers, in-country for skills-enhancement programs run by one of my employers, the Spring International Language Center. The 16-seaters were also owned by Spring International—not technically “unmarked,” but the company decals were small and not easily spotted. Why backwoods Arkansas? Forty-five minutes of speed traps, cow pastures, and Kum & Gos, the actual name of an actual gas station, separated Washington Regional Airport from Fayetteville, where I was going to school. Flights from Mexico often landed after 8:00 p.m.

One year earlier, I’d wandered into the company’s headquarters uninvited and asked the executive director if she needed volunteers. She’d offered me $20 an hour. The job was part-time, one of several I was working to plug the holes left by a salary of $12,500—the before-taxes market value of shepherding four undergraduate classes through their ABCs, as assessed by the powers that be. Even strapped for cash, I was prepared to chaperone those foreigners for free because I felt like one of them. Homeschooled for sixteen years, still a few social cues short of assimilation, I was as much a foreigner in Arkansas as any white male with a North Carolina birth certificate could be.

There may have been another reason, too, that I signed up so readily for hours behind the wheel of a four-ton vehicle with an abysmal turning radius—another reason that did no more than all the others to enhance my sex appeal. Simply, it was a form of exposure therapy where I was the one getting paid.

Status, freedom, independence, adventure, and animal magnetism—all are evoked by cars in the American imagination; but in my less American imagination, those steel and rubber steeds have played a different role, as lung-crushing reminders that we are all mortal, and that we hold each other’s mortality in trembling, sweat-slickened hands. An ill-timed blink, a casual tap of the wrong pedal, a premature cut of the wheel—any involuntary spasm or minute miscalculation, I knew, might condemn me to a life compressed beneath the knowledge that I’d ended someone else’s.

Thirty hours in a windowless classroom in Enka High, just clear of the outskirts of my hometown, did little to dispel these fears. The exotic phonetics of that unincorporated community’s name, derived not from Japanese, as I once imagined, but from the initials of the Dutch synthetic silk manufacturer Nederlandse Kunstzijdefabriek, which established a subsidiary southwest of Asheville in 1928, bely the small town’s rank provincialism; but that provincialism had been duly noted by the specialists behind our driver’s ed course. The curriculum was clearly not designed for me, the tremulous child of two crypto-narcissists, raised on the margins, sure that things were my fault long before they even happened. Nor was it designed for Amos, the one other homeschooler learning to drive that summer, the elder son of two committed transcendental meditators, whose discipleship to Denis Kucinich coexisted uneasily with his brief, exclusively verbal, but nonetheless startling fits of rage, which sent tremors through his waist-length hair and lanky frame while his face, the distended face of a chipmunk that had run afoul of its religious elders and been stretched like silly putty on the rack, twisted and reddened and loosed little spittle storms. We were not the target audience. The target audience was the rat-faced kid in greasy jeans, ball cap cranked back on his lice-ridden skull, who met the commandment to rotate one’s body in full while reversing, a hand on the back of the passenger seat, with spluttering mutiny:

“Maybe if I got a girl with me. Get my arm around my girl.”

“You will not get your arm around your girl.” Our beleaguered instructor stood between us and the whiteboard, corn-fed, mustachioed, muscled arms akimbo, big feet planted urinal-wide. There was a smolder in his eyes, a special gravity that sunk his words into our souls, a keen mortality salience that I respected. “You will not. You’ll pay attention to the road.”

“Only way I’m going to put my hand there’s if I get my arm around my girl.”

The rest of us, docile and disregarded, gawked and yawned and cracked our knuckles, mesmerized by the pettiness of this worn-out showdown: wisdom against folly, experience against ambition, master against student, father against son. Only in two venues—my home, and the pages of Paradise Lost—was the former sure to keep the upper hand.

“How about if she don’t want your arm around her?” Summoning all his authority, every last iota, our Ron Swanson lookalike made his final stand against the forces of chaos; but he was no match for the kid’s whip-quick tongue:

“She better know she wants my arm around her. Better know she’s my girl.”

“Maybe she don’t want to be your girl no more.”

“She better get the hell out of my truck, then.”

“You are idiots.” Not a retort, but a mantra, growled every morning as he prowled before us, fist clenched around a paper cup of coffee. “You hear me?” His words would roll in our ear canals, clicking like billiard balls. Then the chaser, irrefutable as rotgut: “Only an idiot would get behind the wheel of a two-ton vehicle knowing there’s a bunch of other idiots on the road. You look around you next time, you take a good look at all those idiots out there, and you ask yourself, Can I trust an idiot? Can I trust that idiot to see that I’m merging?”

Lest we conclude that our fellow idiots’ insentience excused us from sending appropriate signals, he would pivot then, barking, “Some folks can’t be bothered to lift a finger! Literally! One single finger! That’s all it takes to put your blinker on!”

He would reach for the looped cord and drag down the projection screen, on which gruesome images were soon to shimmer, the shattered, ineptly reconstructed faces of idiots who’d failed to lift their fingers.

The shame of failing my behind-the-wheel exam—never mind its being on a technicality, clumsy parallel parking, a tire too far from the curb; and never mind that I had passed the written test with flying colors—was no less potent than if a child’s mangled corpse had ended up beneath my wheels. It was the nearly invincible alloy of multiple shames: not just the existential mortification of turning out to be more dangerous than all the other idiots who’d passed the test and hit the road; but also the piteous cringe of the creature poorly fitted to its evolutionary niche, reminiscent of the first and only time I wrote a check that bounced, premonitory of the day when I would drop my taxes in the mail, then realize, halfway home, that I’d forgotten to address the envelope. The American bureaucracy was nominally my native habitat, and yet I was forever exiting through the entrance, entering through the exit, checking the wrong box, signing on the wrong line, and scratching my birthdate in place of today’s. There could be but one explanation: incompetence. By nature. By definition. For sixteen years, I’d been conditioned to believe that mine had been the best, most comprehensive education any child could have. This was still the truth I lived and breathed, the standard by which I was judged. Those judgments were harsh ones.

One week later, I took the test again and passed, but my self-perception had already been cemented. Never again would I relax behind the wheel, sure that the vehicle would buck out from under me and dismantle an innocent bystander’s bones.

My first attempt at bootlegging exposure therapy, desperate to lay claim to some of that deftness with which others drove, ended ignominiously, with the intoxicated owner of the orange Fiat 500 making me relinquish the wheel after I nearly steered us into oncoming traffic. More shame—worse this time, for there were additional witnesses: six other freshmen, all crammed into the tiny car, all shouting drunkenly in my ear as I veered toward the headlights, the orange tape, the traffic cones—but still, I resisted the urge to take the bus to the nearest DMV, hand over my license, and explain that someone, somewhere had made a terrible administrative error.

In my first year with Spring International, I was told bluntly by a middle-aged woman from Guadalajara, “You’re the worst driver I’ve ever known.” She’d never been jolted by so many curbs.

For the record, though I’ve had my fair share of close calls, backing into parked cars, scraping paint on concrete pillars, stopping abruptly and taking light hits from tailgaters, I’ve never been in a pileup like those projected on the slides at Enka High. My parents, by their early thirties, had driven under the influence on multiple occasions, and they’d each had an accident, leaving cars totaled. I’ve never driven drunk or left a car totaled. Unless you count the time a friend asked, with her signature tactlessness, “So, are you really that bad at driving?”, then promptly turned left into a green light and took a direct hit to her right fender, I’ve never been in an accident. Since 2016, I’ve ferried vanloads of international students around northwest Arkansas and used my personal vehicle to crisscross the highways stitching that state to North Carolina, Missouri, Colorado, and Florida, sometimes driving twelve or thirteen hours at a stretch, but I’ve never taken a life, or derailed one.

I drive carefully, defensively, conscious that I am an idiot, ever mindful of the great and terrible power vested in me by the Department of Motor Vehicles, and of the correspondingly great and terrible responsibility. I look both ways. I put my blinker on. I rotate fully while reversing. And I do not use my phone.

Cellphones, according to a study I came across some years ago, are significantly riskier than chatting with a passenger. Why? The passenger can track the traffic’s ebb and flow and go silent when the idiots thicken, reducing the cognitive load of the driver. Not so with the voice on the phone.

This study floated back into my mind when I married a woman who’d once strung along a scam caller for over an hour—the cover story was that someone had stolen her identity, used it to secure a driver’s license, then committed a series of crimes—before bursting his bubble: “Wow! The DMV gave someone a license under my name? Even though I’m blind? That’s a problem!”

She carries us in many other ways, but she can never be our designated driver. There’s no one else in our household for me to hand over the keys to, no matter how tired or sick I may be, or how acute the fear. The day we got married, exposure therapy was far from my mind; but it was equally far from my mind when I walked into the headquarters of Spring International. In both cases, recognition came later.

“We think of driving behavior as a proxy,” said the therapist with whom I was paired at the University of Arkansas student health center, young and plump and dressed in purple, head cocked, eyebrow raised. “It gives us a window into other aspects of a person’s personality. So, this driving anxiety of yours…it’s interesting.”

I couldn’t begrudge her this “interesting,” though really nothing new had been revealed—had I not come to her seeking relief from anxiety writ large—for I, too, had felt the offbeat thrill of seeing rote abstractions, learned in classrooms, correspond to patterns in the world. Fresh out of grad school, now with her own office, amid her paperweights, bric-a-brac, photos, and ferns, this baby therapist had just come face to face, perhaps for the first time, with a fragment of textbook trivia embodied by a living, breathing, flesh-and-blood being.

If she’d been older, wiser, further removed from the scantrons and lecture halls, perhaps she would’ve pushed a little further, beyond that onanistic “interesting.” Perhaps she would’ve dug the point in, twisted, and unearthed what lay concealed.

How many times have I given up? How many times have I renounced that which I most desired, even that which I knew to be my prime vocation? While planning for my future, I only took art into consideration, not security, respect, provision, or sustainability. In my first semester of grad school, an MFA in creative writing, I swore off writing. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I resolved, once and for all, to stop looking for love, the final capstone in an edifice of self-denial that I’d long been building.

It was from my mother, a woman whose still acids run deep, a mission-less creature of softly murmured doubts and subtle self-disintegrations, that I learned the all-consuming art of giving up; and yet, for all her long and meticulous tutelage, I’ve learned imperfectly. She’s succeeded at failure, succeeded completely. My acts of self-sabotage sum to mere pathetic imitations.

Though I never took an interest in money, I now find myself running a business. Though I renounced writing, the business is an author support platform. Though I resolved to stop looking for love, I am doing all this with my wife. Though I never witnessed satisfaction in the home where I was raised, I am finding it now. Though I never witnessed joy, I’ve tasted joy.

Most of the decisions that have brought me here appear, at first glance, to have been my wife’s, or others’; but then there’s the fact that I renewed my license when the time came. That I’ve continued driving, despite the fear, the guilt, the shame. That I’ve continued to put myself in situations where I must drive.

No one chose that for me.

It’s almost beginning to seem that I am, after all, a willful person. A determined person. Even an ambitious person.

My ambitions, if that is what they are, have weathered every attempt on them. Denied, they haunt me. Quashed, they respawn. Repressed, they show themselves to me obliquely. Mocked, condemned, they still find ways to maneuver me into proving myself. They crackle. They whisper. They demand recognition. They call on me to commit to them consciously.

Head cocked, eyebrow raised, I peer back at their restlessness, their seething, unkillable energies, nameless, faceless, slick and black as engine grease, knotting down there in the cut-open guts of me, as agitated as a colony of millipedes beneath a suddenly upturned stone:

“Interesting.”

Mekiya Outini is an author, editor, educator, and MacDowell Fellow. He’s published in The North American Review, Fourth Genre, Chautauqua, MQR, The Brussels Review, Modern Literature, Mount Hope, Eunoia Review, The Stonecoast Review, DarkWinter, Lotus-Eater, Men Matters, Gargoyle Magazine, and elsewhere. He and his wife, Itto, are collaborating on several books, running The DateKeepers, an author support platform, and co-hosting the podcast and YouTube channel Let’s Have a Renaissance.