Back to my sophomore year. I was young for my grade and I was not
going to turn 16 until the end of the year but I was able to start
drivers education a few months before my birthday. Drivers education
consisted of a class every morning from 6 to 7 for six weeks and then
half way through we started driving out on the practice range. My
class was taught by the Japanese teacher who was also the coach of
golf I think but either way he had a niche in the regular day time
school and had a couple of kids who he would hit it off with and the
rest of us could piss off for all he cared. I was up every morning at
5 getting pretty for my day at school then I would have my mom drive
me to class where I would learn less in a hour than I could have read
in 15 minutes and then I had to go to regular school and then go for
a hour of circle driving practice after school. It was awesome. The
thrill of operating a motor vehicle made up for every single drop of
tedium I had to endure. The practice lot had drills for going
front-ways and stopping, it had ones for going backwards in a figure
8, going backwards in a 't' shape. We practiced parallel parking,
diagonal parking and going in circles slowly. By the end of of
practice I was going crazy with boredom and had mastered the skills
to pass the test way before the troglodyte that was my alphabetically
assigned in car partner had. He was a meat-head jock who was a little
on the dim side with a arm slightly twisted by a birth defect which
made any turns with a turn to the left extra tricky for him. I would
have sympathized with him if he was less of a jerk but he was so
arrogant and rude I decided to take the advice of those great
philosophers the Beatles and live and let die. Until him dying was
dragging me down. On the final day of range driving we had to all go
through and prove our competency on each drill and I was absolutely
cruising the field but my halfwit sidekick was doing them all wrong
and I couldn't leave until he passed his test. So when the coach who
watched the field from the booth thirty feet overhead called over the
radios for a driver switch I told my slow-clip Robin to hold tight
and I would drive his backing drills for him so we could get out of
there. The coach was impressed by my partners new found skill in
driving backwards. He passed and we got to leave second to last at
the very low cost of a lifetime of public and personal property risk
for anyone who was unfortunate enough to be around that cheater when
he backed up a vehicle.
