Mind Picker: Tunesday : Drive My Car

Drive My Car

(Lennon-McCartney) Performed by The Beatles

Asked a girl what she wanted to be

She said baby, "Can't you see

I wanna be famous, a star on the screen

But you can do something in between"

Baby you can drive my car

Yes I'm gonna be a star

Baby you can drive my car

And maybe I love you

I told a girl that my prospects were good

And she said baby, "It's understood

Working for peanuts is all very fine

But I can show you a better time"

Baby you can drive my car

Yes I'm gonna be a star

Baby you can drive my car

And maybe I love you

Beep beep'm beep beep yeah

Baby you can drive my car

Yes I'm gonna be a star

Baby you can drive my car

And maybe I love you

I told that girl I can start right away

And she said, "Listen baby I got something to say

I got no car and it's breaking my heart

But I've found a driver and that's a start"

Baby you can drive my car

Yes I'm gonna be a star

Baby you can drive my car

And maybe I love you

Beep beep'm beep beep yeah

I mentioned my high school chum Andrea last week, so I'm going to make her the theme this time. I remember she was in my grade nine homeroom -- which was French -- so I don't know if Cora (my bestest friend) was in there too (but she was required to take one year of French, too, wasn't she?), and however it happened, we bonded over a mutual love of the Beatles. As I said before (and as Mallory has proved to be still true with the way her friends split up the members of One Direction), since Cora and I already had our favourite Beatles (Paul for her, Ringo for me), Andrea was allowed to choose John for herself, and although we had known Laurie longer, she got stuck with George. The four of us were inseparable that year.

Old and unedited, straight from my photo album, taken in Cora's room

Andrea was from an Italian family and they lived lakeside almost an hour north of me (and yet we all went to the same high school?). Lakeside was important to her father, who owned a sailboat, and the community they were in was way more upscale than recreational. As a lawyer, her Dad had dough, and their house was an open concept modern beauty -- I remember being super impressed by a leather chaise lounge that sort of floated apart from the rest of the living room furniture; but my fascination was mostly due to a mental comparison to my own home's tired old sprung-spring couches.

I'm thinking the following all happened one weekend but I might be running several weekends together in my memory: We decided to have a big sleepover at Andrea's, and what my parents wouldn't have known was that her parents weren't going to be home (I think they were on some Caribbean vacation at a time when no one went on Caribbean vacations). When we got there, Andrea had borrowed a film projector and the film reels of some Beatles videos (Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane and the concert at Shea Stadium) from her local library. They were really cool to watch (our library didn't have films let alone projectors) and beaming the images onto her white bedroom wall and screaming along with the girls in the concert's audience, we knew this was going to be the best weekend ever.

At one point we walked over to her Dad's law office -- which was obviously closed -- but since Andrea had the key, we let ourselves in to play with the photocopier. That was the first time I had ever done that and I was properly impressed by the handprints and smooshy faces we made. While I have since seen people making bumprints with photocopiers on sitcoms, I feel the need to point out that that never occurred to us collectively; if it had occurred to one of us individually, it was never mentioned.

This was probably all on a Saturday and we would have gone back to Andrea's house in late afternoon. We started listening to the record player and on the inner fold of some Beatles double album, there was an old interview with the band, and when asked what their favourite drink was, every one of them said scotch and coke. So, alone in the house and with a full bar, the four of us started drinking scotch and cokes -- which I remember to be just as gross as it sounds; what I wonder now is: since Andrea's parents were loaded, were we mixing expensive scotch with coke? No clue. Hope not.

Being all of fourteen, it didn't take long for us to get tipsy and then we had a brainstorm: since Andrea's parents had left us money to get pizza, we decided to go out and eat the pizza at Andrea's family's favourite restaurant. And since it was now snowing outside, we decided to drive there. At fourteen. When none of us had ever driven a car before.

Andrea's Mom's car had been backed into the garage, so it was super easy for her to pull it out onto the street, and since she had made this trip hundreds of times with her parents, Andrea actually had no problem driving to the restaurant -- other than a few fast corners on the ice that sent the rest of us tumbling around the car and squealing with laughter. She parked on the street no problem and the four of us stumbled, giggling, into the restaurant, and I do remember the four of us pulling it together because people may have been staring at us. People Andrea was afraid might be recognising her.

We ate our delicious dinner, and slightly more sober, were more furtive getting back into the car; more nervous as we fishtailed around corners; more scream than laugh when the tires began to slip. I think we may have taken turns at the wheel but I don't remember this as an individual experience at all: we got drunk and we took a car out in the snow. I do remember that it was Andrea who insisted on taking responsibility for backing her Mom's car back down the driveway and into the garage. The other three of us got out for guidance as Andrea performed the beginning of a perfect three point turn to line the rear of the car up with the driveway, but whether she gunned the gas or slipped on ice, she drove off the side of the driveway, where she plowed into a snowbank and got the rear bumper hitched on a split rail fence. Damn it!

Terrified that Andrea's neighbours would hear the commotion, it took us probably an hour of pushing and digging and pouring down salt and spinning of tires and bouncing the bumper up and down and every other thing we could think of to get that car unstuck and back up on the driveway. But we did it. And this time Andrea backed up perfectly straight. And despite our certainty that someone must have seen us -- someone at the restaurant or some neighbour watching out a window -- that someone would tell Andrea's parents about the whole sordid thing, despite waiting to be murdelated for doing the stupidest thing any of us had ever done, we totally got away with it. No one must have seen us, or at a minimum, no one understood that they were seeing four fourteen-year-olds out drinking and driving, narrowly avoiding killing themselves or someone else. Talk about stupid.

When I think of Andrea now, I think about that weekend. She was a girl with a huge heart and a huge laugh and a love of life that brought everyone up. After I moved away the next year and the girls would write me long collective letters, Cora once wrote me privately to say that while snooping around her Dad's law office one day, Andrea found a packet of love letters written to her father by some other woman. Andrea didn't know where her loyalties should lie -- tell her Mom or not -- but eventually, Cora wrote again to say that Andrea's parents had split up. And that's a lesson I had to witness repeatedly before I really got it: the big lakeside house and the sailboat and the leather chaise lounge and the Caribbean vacation don't equal happiness; but of course, neither does the small house in the crap town with the sprung-spring couches; we are not what we own in either case. And I'd also like to add that I always found the cheating and the divorce extra creepy because Andrea's father was a hairy little ogre of a man, kind of like Carla's first husband from Cheers, and I never understood (besides his money of course) how he got even one attractive woman to fall in love with him.

Tangentially related: This past weekend, Dave and I were at his work function. For a "fun treat", salaried employees were invited to what they thought was a dinner with a live video feed to a pig farm (fun!), but when they arrived, it was actually a murder mystery and the executives were all suspects. Dave's character was a closeted gay man, and as I had assumed beforehand, he needed to be part of the group greeting everyone as they arrived, making sure people understood the game and what his clues were for the mystery.

This left me standing around with people I don't really know, since most of the people I've been introduced to before were also characters and had to be milling like Dave. As I was leaning miserably against a post, a man -- husband of an executive who had abandoned him -- began talking to me about spending the day building a boat shed for his buddy, and as I had no one else to speak with, I listened and smiled and nodded politely. When Dave rejoined me and said we should find a table, this man -- Darrell -- pointed out that there was room at his table, so we plunked down beside him.

Even throughout dinner, Dave and Darrell's wife would need to get up and wander around the other tables, so I sat and pleasantly smiled as Darrell showed me all the pictures on his iPhone -- mostly pictures of glasses of beer or the keg fridge he has at home, punctuated with, "Oh no, we never drink". It was all strange and surreal, but Dave kept bringing me more bottles of beer, so I began getting a wry kick out of the whole thing. At no time did I ever say anything about myself to this man (except for answering when he asked how long Dave and I have been together and where we met).

When Darrell's wife Colleen mentioned something about their girls, I asked how old they are, and she replied 12 and 14. Darrell piped up, "Yes, God help me. Almost two teenaged girls."

I said that my own girls have never given me a day's trouble and Colleen said, "Neither have ours. And when I think back on all I got away with at their age, I can't believe just how good they are."

The lone other woman at our table agreed that her girls -- older even than my own -- never got up to any trouble, which surprised her because of all she got away with without her parents knowing, and I chipped in with, "Yeah, I can't believe all the things I did and never got caught, and honestly, I don't think I'm just being naive when I say that my own kids haven't done half what I did."

And then this Darrell guy -- who doesn't know me at all -- turned on me and snorted and said, "Oh, I'm sure that you did get into trouble. You don't need to tell me."

I could only laugh -- pleasantly -- because he had nothing to base that statement on. Yet it was true nonetheless. No way either of my girls got drunk and drove around in a car at fourteen. (Unless, of course, I'm as blind as my own parents were. But I don't like to think of that.) Although I always resented having been moved across country and away from Cora, Andrea, and Laurie, when they would write to me of their adventures going clubbing underaged into Toronto or on debauched camping trips with Cora's brothers and their friends, in a way I was almost relieved to have not been around anymore: there was no way my parents would have allowed me to go along on these adventures and I hate to think what my teenaged years would have been like if I had been the lonely loser of our group, home again on a Friday night, bristling at my short leash.

At least by moving to Alberta I eventually met Dave. Can't regret that!