Driving Stick
My friend Ken called from a parking lot in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was snowing, and he needed me, 859 miles away in Corpus Christi, Texas, to teach him how to drive a standard transmission.
"Now?" I asked.
"Yes. Now," he replied. His voice quavered a little and I thought he might cry. "I have a deposition in Santa Fe in - like - an hour-and-a-half."
His name wasn't really Ken; we all just called him that because he was handsome and perfectly shaped as Barbie's boy-doll boyfriend. We ran in the same surfer crowd, and I surfed more often with Ken than any of the others. Mainly because he was kind, not a bro, not a dude, and never the type of guy to snake a wave from a girl. Rather, he was the rare sort who'd yield it.
He was also a lawyer with a degree from Pepperdine and an impressive job at a major firm. More important, he was a male human who'd been born and raised in Texas. How had this particular skill - which I'd long imagined native Texans picked up by the age of five on a tractor - eluded Ken?
He'd arrived at the Avis desk in the small airport in time to learn they were out of automatics. When Ken said, "I don't know how to drive stick" I was pretty sure somebody smirked. The best the clerk could offer was for one of the Budget agents to drive Ken to a deserted parking lot, describing what he was doing with his feet along the way. Then it was all "Good-bye and good luck" as a second agent drove the first back to the airport.
Ken was so good-looking he was hard to look at, yet I never developed a crush or even a flash of desire, which is totally out of character for me. Was it the fact that he waxed his chest hair? That he managed to get ice cream all over his face whenever we went for a cone? That he needed to stop calling every TV show a "sitcom" - that he didn't know the term actually stood for a specific kind of TV show?
I'd taken him under my wing not like a big sister - having no idea what that feels like - rather more like a benevolent third cousin. So far my crowning achievement had been helping him create a budget so that he might one day, a couple of decades hence, if he stuck with it, get out from under the mountain of debt he'd accumulated at the ripe old age of 30. Second place was how I'd steered him clear of more than one bad-for-him girl, the sort who saw a puppy they could train on a leash.
"So you're in a parking lot," I said.
"Yeah. On a rooftop."
"How many floors?"
"I dunno. Five, I think?"
"OK, this is gonna be easy, man." I lied. "Is the car on?"
"Yeah. The guy left it in neutral."
"OK. Here's what you're gonna do. Step on the clutch with your left foot and hold it there."
"The clutch is on the left, right?"
I let out a long, slow breath. "Take the gear shift and put it in first."
"I don't --"
"--It's the number 1 on top of the knob to your right --"
"OK." "Don't - DO NOT - take your foot off the clutch until I say when..."
While I tried to stay in the moment with Ken, my ego brain was having a very high opinion of itself. Of all the people he thought to call for aid, it was me, me, he thought - nay, knew - could do this thing from SMACK in the very realm of male expertise well enough to give an over-the-phone lesson!
(It was years before I realized it hadn't been that. It was a Hail-Mary-crossed-fingers-pinning-his-hopes-on wish that I might know how - me being the only person he could call who wouldn't ridicule his emasculated ass. "Wh - wh - what? You can't drive shift? Ah, dude...").
I took him through the steps, listened to the revvings, the grindings, the Oh, shits, the stalled agains.
Finally, Rob had less than an hour for the hour-plus drive to Santa Fe.
"You gotta go, man."
And off he drove, grinding his way through 65 miles of snow and back while I rode the wave of self-satisfaction. What a great job I was doing on my brand new Buddhist practice of being a benefit to others.
That all happened 12 or 13 years ago; I find myself still lingering in the much more challenging phase two, where I try really hard to benefit others without bragging about it.
