I got to drive a car a few weeks ago. I was so rusty, I smacked the side window on an unmoving wall. It made me realize how many months it’d been, and suddenly all I wanted to do was drive. Of all the things I left behind in Southern California, I didn’t expect how much I was going to crave driving. It’s not so much the driving, though — I don’t need to spend any more time praying that the freeway divider stays far away from me. What I actually miss is car speakers. I miss singing at red lights. I miss rolling the windows down and yelling into the wind. I miss giving a performance in the passenger seat and gossiping with my friends down the highway. I miss being in cars because I miss my friends, and I miss car music. 

My whole family was relieved when I stopped driving. Some of them claimed that the roads weren’t safe until I was off them. But I think I’m a great driver — I’ve technically never been in an accident and if I’m dropping you off, I’ll sing you a show. I’m going home in a few weeks, and I can feel the roads calling to me. I have my playlists ready.  But until then, this is my tribute to what I miss from back home. A love letter to driving on the Pacific Coast Highway, to the songs that don’t sound the same in earbuds, to the friends that drove me around, and to the cars with the best speakers. 

 

Definitely Getting Ice Cream. January, 2018.

“Tskkk,” Rachiel whispered, tapping her step-dad until he stopped banging on the steering wheel. He ignored her. 

“Jimmmmmmm,” she said, asking on behalf of both of us to stop his off-key sing along to the early 2000s pop radio. She gave up and I laughed. I was used to the after-school car rides with Rachiel’s step-dad. This was our routine – everyday, thinking this was the day Jim was actually gonna hit that car he just swerved around while he sang to his dad music.

When Rachiel got her first car, she immediately named it Hima, after bourgeois Himalayan salt. Hima smelled like new car, and had the type of gas pedal that brought you to sixty-five in three seconds flat. It was such a nice car. I was allowed to drive it exactly one time, and it was a beautiful, beautiful three minutes. The first day she had it, we didn’t even leave her parking lot. We just sat, and reveled. No more rides with Jim. 

Hima had great speakers, and Rachiel had good playlists. We were still such nerds, but our music was loud as hell and we would go through the light when we damn well pleased. I am incapable of sitting still to any music —  for hours in the passenger seat, I would put on a show for Rachiel, jumping and screaming to all of my teenage music loves: Noname, Tyler the Creator, Still Woozy, Childish Gambino. Rachiel was incredulous at first, but not even she can stay quiet if The Strokes play. Rina Sawayama? Forget about it. 

People tell you that with a car, you get freedom. With a car, you grow up. With a car, Rachiel and I just lost all of our shame. Even with the opportunity to be anyone, go anywhere, all roads led us to becoming just as corny as Jim. In that car, we danced, screamed, belted,  and cried our way through all of our awkward teenageness. 

Probably going to Claire’s – March, 2020

Bethany has a golden-vomit paint job and seats with more Goldfish in them than a preschool playground. Bethany was McKell’s family car, and she had a very specific old-car smell, described by some as “garage, but more carpet.” She’s vintage, she’s confident, she’s bold —   and she would swerve into the school parking lot everyday at six am to drop McKell and her siblings off at school. 

McKell ran one of the most successful babysitting businesses around. The oldest of many children, she was experienced, responsible, and with a network of church families, she was connected. She knew she had the perfect setup, and she used it. She made money this way, but also gained something arguably way more valuable —  for late night gigs, she got the car. 

Driving home from babysitting, McKell would go along the beach, reveling in the uncontested aux cord and the time to herself.  After first period one morning, she walked up to me, grinning, and said, “I baptized Bethany.” I stared at her, confused.

“What?” I asked. 

“I took her over a hundred last night.” 

I didn’t believe her. “How the hell did that bucket not fall apart?” McKell just grinned, and said she felt like she was flying along the ocean. 

When I asked her about driving for this article, I expected to hear about the metal she would blast, or that one time we hit and run a delivery truck running away from winter formal. But McKell told me about a different night, one that she had never fully explained before. 

It was late, maybe one 0’clock in the morning, when McKell headed home. She started driving down the PCH, listening to “Burn” by David Kushner and “Wrecked” by Imagine Dragons. She kept going, past the tree-lane apartments that marked twenty minutes away from home, past the Mexican restaurant that marked another forty-five  — she just kept going. There was so much shit happening in her house, and in her words, she “needed the illusion of freedom.” It was 1:30 in the morning, then 1:45. McKell  was silent. With just her music playing, she kept going. It was 2:00 am when her mom finally called, telling McKell to come home. McKell hung up, without any of the answers she needed, and finally turned off the PCH. She started on  the freeway back home. 

There’s no ocean on the way back home. To come back home, you turn off the PCH and get onto the 5. Suddenly there’s nothing, no one. It’s just minutes passing blankly on the freeway, bringing you closer and closer to the real world. 

Coming home from practice- August 2019. 

Everyone could point out Gabe’s baby blue Audi in the school parking lot. It was a good car — nice seats, good speakers, and a kind, blonde-blue eyed driver from Tennessee that would laugh if you asked if there was an aux. Gabe thought his car was perfect even though it was old enough to only play CDs, and, in my memory, had only one CD: “Ring of Fire,” Johnny Cash’s Greatest Hits.

My first memory of Gabe is him, the new kid in school, hearing his thick Southern accent tell our entire English class about how he’d cut down a tree with just his bare hands and an ax over the summer. A class full of yellow-bellied  suburbs kids with baby-smooth hands stared blankly at him. A couple hours later, I saw him again, and he was playing a trumpet with a comb in his hand, ready to straighten any hair that got moved out of place without missing a beat. 

Gabe used to drive me home all the time. And every time, without fail, we would listen to Johnny Cash. I would make my voice go as low as it went, singing,  I went down, down, down, and the flames went higher and he would laugh at my bad Southern accent. 

Both of us chatty gossips, Johnny Cash was always accompanied by conversations about flings and dreams and school and life. It was fun. Gabe became a different person in the car, more confident, more calm. In California, on the other side of the country from where he grew up, the only place that was completely Gabe’s was his car. He would drive around, often at night, for hours, just to have his own place. I asked him why his drives were always accompanied by that Johnny Cash, and he said, “I literally felt like I was cast into a ring of fire of my own with no friends for thousands of miles. Like in ‘Boy Named Sue’, I felt alone and different. I was an outcast. Those songs gave me comfort.”

Gabe doesn’t really listen to Johnny Cash anymore (“Tell them that now I mostly listen to heavy metal and Mastodon) but the lessons of the late night car rides stayed with him. “Johnny Cash definitely helped me become my own person. It’s very cliche, but having that time in my life definitely made it easier to accept that I was bi.” 

Gabe moved to Tennessee last year, almost impossibly far away. But we still talk all the time, about love and life and school, until his reception gives out, cause he’s usually in the mountains of Tennessee, just driving. 

Kids from the suburbs — we don’t have teenage romances in subway cars, and we’ve probably spent too much time wandering aimlessly around Safeways to be completely sane. We wander around mazes of identical housing divisions and dream about going to concerts in the city. Kids from my town — we grow up driving, blasting music, and yelling at the In-N-Out drive through machines. We grow up driving away from our first heartbreak, towards our first jobs, and until we’re too cheap to pay for more gas. When I go back in a weeks, I don’t know where or why I’ll drive. But I’ll have a playlist ready, gossip to tell my friends, and my mom’s Blue Subaru. It doesn’t matter where I end up.