Like all teenagers, I was clinically stupid for the period of time extending approximately from my 14th birthday until about when I turned 18. Every teenager manifests their stupidity differently; some drink, some do drugs, some have unprotected sex. Still others got to extremes and get drunk and high and have unprotected sex with the entire football team (thanks for not letting me play football, mom).
I chose to apply my stupidity to driving dangerously. For some reason I didn't develop a proper sense of mortality (or morality, as it turns out) until late in life and thus felt invincible, especially behind the wheel of a car.
If my father kept supplying me with ammunition by ensuring I was never without a vehicle, my friends showed me how to load the weapon and encouraged me to pull the trigger. I was the only one with a license AND a set of wheels, so we used to all cram into my Volkswagen Rabbit and tool around town listening to Guns N' Roses at full volume. When we would come up behind some blue-hair that had the audacity to follow the speed limit, my friends would all gleefully sing "Da-da-da-da, dee-da - Captain BUTT-FUCK!" and it was then my duty to crank the music to 10 and tailgate Grandma as offensively as I could. If Mr. Brownstone was on, it would just make me drive even closer, to the point where I wouldn't be surprised if on arriving at the Pearly Gates I'll be shown a highlight reel of my life that includes close-up shots of my front bumper kissing the rear end of several different Chevy Novas.
I'm not proud of Captain Buttfuck. It's long enough ago that it doesn't keep me up at night any more, but I cringe to think that I was ever capable of such Grade-A assholery. I blame it on raging boy hormones.
Like all bad behavior, however, mine was a downward spiral that eventually led to an incident that forced me to remove Captain BF from my life forever. Specifically, I'm talking about the day that I parked my car on an island.
I was on my way to school, and had picked up my friends Bob and Frank on the way (names have been changed). Bob was my childhood friend, a year younger than I and a really decent kid. He was reserved, shy, and loved sports. Frank was in my grade, and was from a family of delinquents. His was the house in a beautiful suburban neighborhood with the crappy lawn and rusty cars in the backyard (and incidentally the locale for my other teenage vehicle-related blunder, but that's another story).
It was Frank that invented Captain BF, so it was not without a sweet sense of irony that he would be present on the day he died.
GN'R Lies had just come out, and that's what we were listening to that morning. As we rounded a corner and pulled up behind a small blue sedan, "Mamakin Live" begin to play. This combination of events, combined with Frank's penchant for instigation, were a recipe for disaster. He egged me on by starting in with the Captain Butt-fuck theme song, and I instinctively pressed down on the gas pedal and reached for the volume knob on the stereo.
At this point it becomes important to describe the road we had just turned onto. It is a short access street that connects two main roads. It is about a hundred yards long, wound in a slight ess curve, and ends at the top of a small hill at a three-way intersection with a beautifully landscaped traffic island dividing the outgoing and incoming lanes. As I touched the gas pedal to the floor, my hormones drowned out my brain cells and took control of the car. Deciding that tailgating didn't espouse my teeming virility enough, something in me decided to pass the car in front of us. In my mind, it would be a high speed lane change, complete with brake application just in time to pull to a graceful stop at the stop sign at the intersection at the top of the hill just as the car I had just passed puttered up slowly behind me.
Needless to say, that's not how it went down.
Anyone who's ever driven a Volkswagen Rabbit knows that they have a capacity for acceleration roughly equivalent to that of a beach ball being kicked underwater. Factor a slight incline into that equation, and you'll invariably start moving backwards faster than forward. As soon as I pulled into the left lane, I knew I wasn't going to make it. My ego (and raging hormones) wouldn't let me give up, however, so I willed the car to move faster.
Steel is resistant to willpower.
Both cars pulled up the hill towards the intersection neck and neck. The other car maintained its speed and I wasn't gaining on them; a classic stalemate.
I've always been good under pressure, even when the pressure has been applied by my own stupidity. In an instant I came up with a game plan, deciding that since I had already broken a good-sized handful of traffic laws, the best course of action would be to pull up to the left of the traffic island (in the oncoming traffic lane) and try to salvage my dignity by peeling out and around the island, beating the other car onto the main road in a flurry of glorious blue rubber smoke. Virility established - and then some. This might have worked if Fate (that beautiful bitch) hadn't intervened that morning by dusting the road with a nice fine layer of water from the rain the night before. It turns out that beating the other car to the top of the hill would have been irrelevant anyway, because by the time I crested that little hill I was going too fast on the wet road to control my tiny car into any sort of turn, either left or right. I turned the wheel, slammed on the brakes, and then watched (in the sort of slow-motion horror that so often accompanies life-threatening events) as we hit the traffic island dead on at about 50 miles an hour, jumping up into the air over the curb (I remember thinking "that was pretty cool"), burying the front axles into a flowered bush and knocking over a big white traffic sign symbolically indicating that all traffic should flow to the right of the island.
The first thing I did was turn off the music. The second thing I did was look up just in time to see the car I had tried to pass pull up next to me. Apparently the school nurses carpooled to work, because there they were, both looking over at us in amazement. One of them held up a car phone, indicating that they were calling for help, and then they pulled away.
The three of us got out of the car, shaken.
Bob jumped into a school bus that happened to pull up right then, and I didn't see him again for several years (we never spoke of the incident).
Frank and I waited for the cops, who determined that speed and the wet road were factors in the crash. I didn't tell them about the school nurses. My penalties were a speeding ticket and a bottomless source of guilt every time I drove past that traffic island. Each time the poor old woman who volunteered to beautify it would be out there replanting all of the bushes and flowers that were dug up when the tow truck pulled my car (rear-axle first, the front axle was underground) out for the junkyard.
Captain Butt-fuck died that day, and I've never been happier to see someone go. I'm just glad (and not a little lucky) that he didn't take anyone else with him.
My next car, thanks to my dad (a man with a heart made of gold and a spine made of paper), was a 1968 Volkswagen Peace Bus, behind the wheel of which I mostly behaved.
Mostly…
