Road Test

   It may have been the baby-blue Volvo wagon, just exotic enough in 1970, with it's aura of socialism and Scandinavian permissiveness to cause Deputy Inspector Brill to distrust us from the start. It might have been the flower-power decal on the rear bumper or even the bale of hay my mother carried around in the back, inexplicably, for years.  My father's note, “Buy Cream”, affixed permanently to the dash with several layers of yellowed packing-tape would have given anyone pause and my brother's pony-tail, bandana and calico-patched jeans as he sat expectantly in drifts of dog hair at the wheel could hardly have helped matters.

   Inspector Brill was from the Joe Friday school of State Troopers, without, perhaps, Friday's sense of humor and dash. He had traveled that snowy morning from Albany to Poughkeepsie in order to administer the road-test to my brother and betrayed his composure with only the faintest sneer of disgust as he brushed off the passenger seat. The outcome of this examination was never in question; from the moment they lurched away from the curb, leaving my mother and I standing hopefully in the thickening blizzard, to the ice-dance that marked the final, horrific, three-point-turn, my brother's failure was a certainty. Inspector Brill scrawled something perfunctorily on his clip-board, tore the ticket out, thrust it at my brother and debarked without a word. An angry check mark in a box under the heading, “Automatic Failure”, was all the ticket bore. No explanation, no description of points failed or needing further practice. “There was no yellow line!”, my brother insisted on the long drive home.

   There are only two things that occupy the imagination of a sixteen-year-old boy and one of them is the driver's license. By the time I graduated from permit to road-test a year or so later, everyone we knew already had a license and some of them were getting tired of ferrying us around. My brother had returned at least twice to Poughkeepsie and Inspector Brill to suffer the same ignominy and was actually considering taking the test in the City. Forewarned and forearmed, my mother and I decided my best shot would be to avoid Inspector Brill altogether and scheduled my test in nearby Millerton. I'm not sure why it seemed always to be snowing for these events, but we left the house that morning at the tail end of two days of heavy snow. The roads hadn't been plowed for several hours and we spun and slid our slow, hair-raising way towards Millerton, arriving a tad late but just in time to see Inspector Brill getting back into his Crown Vic. 

   “You're late!” He barked as our hearts sank at the very sight of him. How could he have found us here? “I have the authority to fail you for being late! Automatic fail!”

   “Please, Sir,” my sainted mother begged in an earnest echo of Oliver Twist, “The roads were hardly plowed and we've done our very best. Won't you give us a second chance?” Brill muttered something about his being able to get there from Albany and climbed into the car. I gripped the wheel and felt my face flush with a level of hatred and rage I'd never felt before. I was careful with my turn-signals, attentive to car-lengths, crosswalks and stop signs. I even thrust my arm out into the raging storm on command to demonstrate familiarity with the already archaic hand-signal. I had just begun to think that I might somehow prevail when Brill demanded that I turn left. I searched the drifts for a left; I hesitated. “Left! Now! Left!” he shouted. 

   I spun the wheel and turned hard left, riding up and over the invisible curb, planting the Volvo's nose about waist high in a drift. That bale of hay in the back came in handy, adding just enough weight to allow the rear wheels to pull us out. I didn't need Inspector Brill - silent, ashen and covered now with dog fur, candy wrappers and discarded balls of vaguely lipsticked Kleenex - to issue a command. I executed a text-book, three-point-turn and drove slowly, silently and carefully back to my ever hopeful mother. And that was my first Automatic Failure. 

  

At some point over the next two years my brother actually did take and pass his road-test in a borrowed, unfamiliar car, at rush-hour in the chaos of the FDR Drive. In a moment of inspired strategy, Mom and I scheduled my next attempt in far-flung Amenia. He'll never find us there, we reasoned, it's practically Massachusetts. Once again we set off for the appointment – this would be my mother's fifth, I think – with me behind the wheel, blue skies, dry pavement and a song in our hearts. We were early and waited, absorbed in a crossword puzzle, under a sign that read, “ Reserved For Road-Test Only”.  We never saw the Crown Vic pull in and didn't look up until Inspector Brill's shadow darkened the driver's side window. “Automatic fail.” He said, sliding the ticket through the window as we stared in disbelief. “This vehicle's registration has expired. Automatic fail.”