You’ve got to know when to hang up those car keys and just walk away
By Joel Deutsch
“Nobody with a good car needs to be Justified.”
–Hazel Motes, the self-blinded preacher in “Wise Blood,” by Flannery O’Connor
All my life I was crazy about cars, starting with the family
Studebaker designed by Raymond Loewy that looked like one of the
World War II fighter planes I drew all over my school notebooks.
Within days after turning 16, like every other middle-class
American kid growing up anywhere but Manhattan, I got my driver’s
license and took off. And so began a vast archive of car memories,
moments and places recalled through bug-spattered. rain-streaked,
sun-dried glass. I assumed the trip would never end.
But, unknown to me, the encoding in my DNA was relentlessly
transmitting suicide instructions to my eyes, one of a class of
genetic retinal pathologies called retinitis pigmentosa. Which led,
after a few decades of normal vision, to a state where I could no
longer see at night or make out faces clearly from more than a few feet away,
and that under bright light.
For reading and writing, there were optical magnifiers and a
computer program that enlarged the text on my monitor. For driving,
though, there was nothing, no clever new adaptive technology, no
compensatory strategy, nothing but the prospect of relinquishment.
I couldn’t imagine a life without wheels. So, holding my breath and
trusting to luck and reflexes, I stayed on the road, a little
too long.
The phone on the night stand rang, shattering my last dream of the
morning.
“Hullo,” I mumbled, peering over at my clock radio with the jumbo
two inch high red LED display. Just past 6:30.
It was the woman from the Substitute Unit of the L.A. Unified
School District, brisk and focused as a taxi dispatcher.
I didn’t know how much more substitute teaching I could take. I
couldn’t make out the students’ faces beyond the front row. I
couldn’t, without assistance, read roll sheets, notes from the
office, textbook passages or [handed-in assignments.
But even more upsetting was the sheer ordeal of simply getting to
work. By this time, my eyesight was severely compromised. Traffic
signals had started vanishing and reappearing~the whole signal box,
not just the bulbs-as if conjured in and out of sight by
mischievous sprites. Street signs were unreadable. Cars loomed up
at me out of nowhere, and pedestrians materialized in the middle of
empty crosswalks.
The woman from the Sub Unit read my assignment from a sheet on her
desk. I was to fill in for an English teacher at a middle school
halfway downtown.
Straight into the sun. Another harrowing commute.
Why, you might reasonably ask, would someone with vision so
impaired persist in driving? Romance. Practicality. Pride. Denial.
When I was a teenager, I had a stack of Hot Rod and Custom Car
magazines that dwarfed everything else in my bedroom bookcase. I
pored lovingly over the pictures: the burly postwar Fords, the lean
mid-’50s Chevys, the gleaming bodies shaved clean of jutting
Detroit chrome, the running gear pumped up and re-machined to burn
the rear treads off a set of Goodyears in a single standing start.
The cars in my real life were less fierce, less perfect. But so
what? They started, they ran, they carried me down the highway of
dreams. Like the ‘41 Chevy coupe I drove to Mexico from Ohio in
1966, vaporizing a quart of oil every hundred miles all the way to
San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato State, and back. Like the VW
microbus with its salt-rotted floorboard that carried me over the
Bay Bridge into San Francisco a year later during the Summer of
Love.
Now I had a 10-year-old Tercel that took me anywhere I wanted to
go, with the tape deck blasting Los Lobos or Mozart or Coltrane.
Driving wasn’t everything, just life, liberty, the pursuit of
happiness, and the promise that I would never, ever grow old, that
I would not fade away.
If I stopped driving, what would I do? There is just a beleaguered
fleet of buses roaming L.A., trying gamely to run on time and
connect at enough points to be useful. True, there are also two new
light-rail commuter lines and the halting start of a subway system.
But the rail service, by design, has little to do with in-town
travel.
Ask an Angeleno (who drives) how far it is from here to there when
both ends of the trip are within the metropolitan area. “Twenty minutes,” goes the most
common answer, with the inevitable addendum, “unless it’s rush
hour.” Car time. But if you don’t drive, a morning doctor’s
appointment in Beverly Hills, a business lunch in West Hollywood, a
five-minute stop at an office supply store on the Miracle Mile and
a trip to the supermarket become agenda items spread over several
pages of a weekly calendar.
I had always assumed that you rode the bus in L.A. only if you were
not a player, not a contender. Riding the bus meant being sucked
into a symbolic, bottomless vortex of personal failure. I was
terrified.
I did stop using my car at night, which often meant staying home
alone. But that was the lowest I was willing to bow to
circumstances.
The question arises as to whether an individual with impaired
vision is morally obligated, even with some functional sight
remaining, to stop driving. There are some people with RP who even
insist that their retinal pathologies make them safer drivers
because they are forced to be more vigilant.
In my case, denial was abetted by a sympathetic ophthalmologist and
the California Department of Motor Vehicles. I managed to get my
driver’s license renewed solely on the strength of a note from the
doctor attesting to my fitness to drive. This in the face of my
inability to decipher anything below the top two lines of the DMV
eye chart.
I had the Beverly Boulevard route to the school pretty much
hammered from long experience. Whether I could see the traffic
lights at first glance or not, I knew which cross streets had them,
and I’d become pretty good at telling the color of a light by
watching traffic.
I made it through all the major intersections-La Brea, Highland,
Vine, Western-like a champ, talking myself down the road. The
lettering on the store signs, the big ones I could still see, went
from English to Korean to Spanish.
At Vermont, I took a right, went two blocks, and there was the
school. Praying that a phantom 18-wheeler wasn’t bearing down
through one of my blind spots to pulverize me in mid-turn, I took a
left into the street and began to peer along the curb for a parking
space. Across from me, headed the other way, was a short line of
double-parked cars, parents dropping off their kids. I couldn’t
have been going 10 mph.
Suddenly. The sickening thud of my front bumper hitting flesh and
bone. My right foot coming off the gas and slamming down on the
brake pedal. The car stopped just short of an airborne boy, maybe
12 or 13, levitating a few inches above the pavement as his
unzipped nylon school bag launched itself from his shoulder and
spewed notebooks, pencils and personal effects all over the street.
The kid lay sprawled in a heap on the pavement. A car door slammed
somewhere off to my left, and then a woman, his mother, was
kneeling beside him, crooning and fussing, her face a mask of
incredulous fury completely at odds with her tender ministrations.
By the time I managed to turn off the engine and get out, she had
helped him hobble back to their old Toyota sedan and lowered him
onto the back seat, where he sat with the door still flung open,
dazed and splay-limbed, holding his back. It never even occurred to
me to go and see how the boy was, I felt so shaken, so ashamed, so
uninvited. I just stood next to my car, watching as people emerged
from nowhere. Someone went to a phone and called 911, and then
sirens came speeding toward us up the avenue.
The paramedics lifted the kid onto a gurney, asking him questions
and taking his vital signs. As the mother stood behind the
ambulance watching them shove the gurney inside, I finally got up
the nerve to approach her. She was talking in Spanish with a man
who had come over from the auto body shop across from the school.
“Lo siento, señora,” I said. “Lo siento mucho. I’m very sorry. She
wouldn’t even look at me. The man from the body shop wasn’t so
reticent. “I seen it, man,” he snarled. “You seen him and you just
keep going.” And I thought, yes, that’s exactly what it must have
looked like.
They took the boy to a hospital emergency room, and the bystanders
drifted away. I found a parking space and waited on the curb for the
LAPD, who showed up an hour later to take the accident report.
“I just didn’t see him,” I admitted, which was true. The officer
didn’t ask me anything about that, but simply said the kid shouldn’t
have jaywalked in front of my car, which was also true. She got my
signature, tore off a copy of the report for me, and drove away.
Somebody told me they knew in the school office what had happened.
If I wanted, I could go home. I did want to go home. Desperately.
I got back into my car, fastened my seat belt, started the engine,
felt how much I was shaking, and turned it off. I went into the
office, borrowed the phone, and got my friends Adrian and Gina out
of bed out in Marina del Rey. Adrian drove me home, with Gina
following, and put the Tercel back in its space behind my apartment.
I filed reports with my insurance company and the DMV. Then I called
the school district and requested that I be called only for
assignments that were a walk or a direct bus ride from home. The
request was denied. So much for substitute teaching.
The next few weeks, I spent a lot of time in my apartment, only
leaving home for errands I could accomplish on foot. I tried taking
the car out one more time to the neighborhood Laundromat. But even
that short trip, eight blocks up and back, unnerved me.
So, finally facing facts, I put the car up for sale and surrendered
my driver’s license for a California ID card, which looked, photo
and all, exactly like my license and bore the same number they had
given me 25 years before at a San Francisco DMV office, next to
the Golden Gate Park Panhandle, where the Grateful Dead played for nothing from flatbed trucks amidst the aromatic eucalyptus trees, and everything was new and infinitely possible.
No one ever contacted me about the accident. Not my insurance
company, not the school or the DMV, not a personal injury lawyer. I
felt justified in assuming-thankfully-that the boy wasn’t hurt too
badly.
But still, every time I think about it, my hands remember the weird,
rubber shock of the impact through the steering wheel, and I see the
whole thing all over again. The boy bouncing off the hood of the
Tercel in slow motion. The books flying. The gurney sliding into the
open mouth of the ambulance. The rage and disbelief on his mother’s
face. Some things, some of us only learn the hard way.
Lo siento, señora. Lo siento mucho.
This story previously appeared in The Los Angeles Times, in Not Fade Away, a multimedia website created by San Francisco’s Exploratorium, and on the Macular Degeneration support Web site .