Crying on the Subway. No atonement ritual is more wholly and instantly fulfilling. Confession, Yum Kippur, not even the Lemonade Cleanse can purge the devil as effectively as the moment you let out that soft yelp and the buckets of tears that follow while moving unsteadily at 60 mph on the subway track, surrounded by strangers who don’t even notice. Sometimes the experience changes (for the worse) when they do. No matter how well intentioned that woman was who wrote you a poem about the beauty of life and handed it to you before she exited at her stop, it’s the experience of letting out every raw emotion without a single care, or even a thought really, for vanity. Of feeling perfectly comfortable and ALONE, as though you were in your bathtub, while you are in fact, in commute. It’s a treat we only get in the big cities, and I wonder if the tubes of Paris and London offer as satisfying a service, with their cushioned seats and emotional restraint probably making it rare, and less visceral.

I recently completed my 2nd trip to California, which lasted over a month. I had no idea how much I missed that blue letter A. The moment it came bustling down the tube, I couldn’t wait for the doors to open and to rush inside, giving one of those much feared, germy subway poles a little kiss. Mike would never grace my lips again if I did, so I restrained.Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of awful experiences to be had on the train, and I don’t deny them. Once I unknowingly sat in a seat covered in vomit, another time a man cornered me and told me in explicit detail all of the thoughts he would be having about me when he masturbated that night, and then there was that mugging attempt at Broadway-Layfayette at 12 noon on a Tuesday. But mal-instances aside, I love that goddamned subway. I never knew just how much I did. I took it’s convenience and life sustaining service for granted until I spent a month doing something I fear more than anything in the world: DRIVING.

Scary Time 1: After taking my borrowed Volkswagen Jetta to the Mexicans for a standard wash n wax, I drove away my clean, pimpin wheels feeling like the Queen of California. I can do this shit! I was headed down the 101 south, to Hollywood. All of a sudden, as I’m following my cousin on the freeway, I put my brake foot all the way to the floor, and the car doesn’t stop. I’M ON THE LA FREEWAY WITH NO FUCKING BRAKES! The panic button goes off. I start waving to Mitch (my cousin / guardian angel) in the car in front of me. He gives me a big smile and thumbs up for weaving through the pm traffic so successfully. Little does he know I’m about rear end his Jaguar at any moment. I try to find a shitty car in another lane to get behind instead. It’s bumper to bumper, so there’s no way that’s happening. I try to call him on his cell, but he doesn’t pick up. I start screaming, as if someone can hear me, while simultaneously trying “pause” the car every time the people stop. We get off on our exit, and at the next light Mitch makes a left hand turn. Though there was an SUV in the oncoming lane ready to continue, but I follow Mitch’s turn, since I CAN’T STOP. I wave to the suv and give a cry face, hoping he’ll understand. Mitch pulls over, and comes back to his wife’s Jetta, where I’m crying, screaming, and shaking my hands in the air as if I’d just burned myself. Mitch looks at me, then into the car, and says “Jessica, your emergency break is on.”(Apparently if you drive down the road with your emergency break on, the breaks heat up and stop working. Thank god for traffic, for if I was going the standard LA 85 mph, I might not have the chance to write this.)

Before you hit the comment button with the intention of writing YOU RETARD!, let me remind you of my driving history. Until this past April, I had not had my foot on the pedal in almost 10 YEARS. I stopped driving the summer after my high school graduation, at age 17. Seriously, you forget. You get scared (ok I get scared.) You hear stories of 10 thousand dollar damages and splattered body parts, and freeze up at the thought of being responsible for it. So before heading over to the City of Vehicles, I had to relearn how to operate this nastiest of machines (I have a self-diagnosed condition of “mechaniphobia.”)So what did I do?? I took driving lessons IN MANHATTAN. At the Manhattan School of Driving, you get 5 hours of private instruction for 200 bucks. Worth every penny. I had Yoda as a teacher (well, he’s really a Philipino dude named Peter), and trust me, I needed his confident, soothing, soft spoken voice as much as I needed a break on his side of the car. My nerves were a wreck. On my first day, I was sitting in the drivers seat, not remembering which pedal is stop and which is go, and I’m supposed to pull out in the middle of 23rd and Park Ave. I almost had a heart attack until I heard Yoda/Peter’s voice instruct “Now signal, now mirror, now check your blind spot…” and my hands and feet just went into motion. I was so proud of myself. And after only 15 mins, I started seeing the city in a whole new way. Sure I’ve been in plenty of cars in the city, but being in that seat gives you a whole new perspective. One of which, is the ability to see up all the women’s skirts. I’m definitely a new kind of pedestrian now. Not only will I not dart in front of cars before the lights change, but I’ll also be careful of how I walk over the crosswalk. If that girls leopard print panties are distracting me, then I can only imagine what the men are thinking when they should be looking at the road. (Safety, ladies!)

Distractions. That is really my biggest problem. The only thing that still scares me. When you are driving, that’s it. There’s no multitasking. No reading, no makeup, no eating… just fully focused attention on trying not to die. My brain doesn’t quite work that way.Scary Time 2: It’s around 11:30 am, and I just booked a commercial. I’m fucking ELATED. I may just be fucking invincible, right?? Well that has to be what I was thinking. I have to run to a meeting, and before leaving the house I make myself a huge thermos of hot tea. I get to the car, and the thermos doesn’t fit in the cup holder. Whatev, I’ll just REST it on there. Nice one. As I’m making a turn onto the Pacific Coast Highway, the thermos spills over and I’ve got hot tea all over my jacket and myself. I instinctually look down to wipe it off and throw my now scalding jacket to the other seat. I end up making the turn too sharp, and cornering a car in the oncoming lane at the intersection. BOOM. Seriously, when people fly in from JFK, they should take our licenses away.

How fucking stupid could I be? Right in the middle of a goddamned turn onto a highway? The damages weren’t all that bad, but they cost almost as much as I made for the commercial. That wasn’t my biggest concern though. My biggest problem were the subsequent nightmares and self loathing that followed. I really thought I had a handle on this. That my fear of operating a vehicle wasn’t going to keep me from opportunities. But I became too scared to touch the keys. Mitch told me to just calm the hell down and get to my meeting, that I wasn’t taking the freeway for a couple of days, and that EVERYONE gets in car wrecks. Hey, I got mine out of the way. There’s learning curve everyone has to suffer through. Perhaps $200 worth of private instruction really isn’t enough.

I’ll be in LA again next month. Also, I’m now a proud member of Zipcar. So all of you in the metro areas, alert the media and hold onto your children, because I’m the road.

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