This past Sunday my father-in-law turned 71. He used to be (and quite possibly I will get this wrong) a Formula Four racer and has always had a thing for cars. In planning for this birthday, he found a Groupon for an exotic-car driving experience at the Autobahn Country Club in Joliet. The country club is exactly what it sounds like—a place where, instead of golfing, members get to race their high-performance cars on one of the private tracks. And for a few weeks every year, an outfit called Imagine Lifestyles puts on events there where reg'lar folks like you or me can drive Lamborghinis or Ferraris or Maseratis or what have you.

It was supposed to be my father-in-law, my brother-in-law Tom, and me, but it so happened that my father-in-law was ill on Sunday so he offered his slot to Laura. (Our friend Barbara Lynn was in town from New York, so she tagged along with us to the track, too.) I was very nervous about driving, especially after the quick safety-training session we had to go through, which explained all the flags you might see around the track and how to use the orange and green cones to guide you through the execution of each curve.

Tom drove a Lamborghini Gallardo (I believe that was the make). Laura drove a Mercedes SLS with gull-wing doors. I drove a Ferrari F430. Four cars would go out at a time, led by a souped-up Mustang as the pace car. My Ferrari happened to be the first car after the pace car, and I was pretty worried about not keeping up and ruining the experience for the three drivers behind me. Fortunately, there was a coach in the passenger seat beside me, and though I lagged a little through the first lap, I managed to keep up pretty well through the next two. My knuckles were white, though.

There was a video camera mounted in every car, so we each got an SD card with our cockpit video on it after the "race" to take home. Here's mine, if you want to hop into the Ferrari with me for a little spin:

After Laura's drive in the Mercedes, her coach accidentally dropped her SD card between the console and seat. They searched the car but couldn't find the card, so they let Laura take another ride, either as a driver or passenger. She elected to ride shotgun in a Corvette convertible as one of the professionals drove, so she could get a feel for what it was like on the track with someone who knew what he was doing at the wheel. Here's the video from that ride:

I've never really been a car guy, but now I can understand why someone would want to become rich just to be able to do something like this every weekend from April to October.

21

I'm still not sure quite how I managed it,
but I somehow talked my parents into giving me
the family van for two weeks that spring,
two long weeks that stretched into three.

It was my best friend Tim and me--
we'd been missionaries together in Idaho--
returning to the scene of the crime
visiting all the families we used to know.

No doubt I got the van because of that girl,
Miss Bonners Ferry, the lumberjack
who played classical piano, was a lifeguard too
and the whole reason I wanted to go back.

A nice girl for a change, good wife material,
instead of the tramps I usually chased.
Tim had his eye on her younger sister,
but those were long odds we faced.

A thousand miles I rebuffed his offers
to help drive. Insurance reasons, I'd say,
but really I didn't trust him at the wheel.
My father had treated me the same way.

Things were good in Bonners Ferry. We hiked,
climbed rocks. The girl let me hold her hand
one night, and we played duets at the piano.
Tim and I stayed longer than we'd planned.

Then one day he left his journal sitting out,
open to a page about what a jerk I was being,
always making him look bad. I asked the girl,
but she couldn't guess what he was seeing.

A thousand miles home is a long, long way
to drive when you don't know what to say.


28

I-80
Wyoming
night time
snowstorm
eastern slope
Continental Divide
15-foot U-Haul truck
  50 to 60 miles per hour
      girlfriend white-knuckled
           behind the big wheel
                swerving skidding
              on the downhill ice
           all our possessions
        rocking in back
      not quite
   overbalanced

I pump my
passenger brake
of course to no effect
snowflakes like hyperspatial
streaks in the headlight beams
    I gently suggest slowing down
            or even pulling over to let
                          me drive instead
                              but not gently
                                      enough

                              I'm an excellent
                            driver she insists
                      you should have seen
               that time I spun out in Texas
    and I didn't even run off the road

  but I grew up driving in snow
I tell her and you didn't
you have to slow
down

  it's the wrong thing
            to say and we
                            fishtail
                                            again

                                                                  one
                                            moment
                          of terror in the
          long, slow slide from
west coast to east coast

one harrowing strobe-lit frame
   from the superslow-motion
           accident that is

                    us


24

Wait, that's the one where
I lost my virginity.
Sorry, not this time.


23

Immediately after the tiny little Salt Lake City wedding,
I jumped in the Nova with Tim and his blushing bride—
not the sister. We raced straight to Evanston, Wyoming,
taking adjacent motel rooms. All night I had to imagine
what might be going on next door—which turned out
the next morning to have been nothing much. (We had
size issues, Tim whispered.) Their friend, a guy named
Bart or some stupid shit like that, met us in the parking
lot, having driven from who knows where for who knew
how long. I rode shotgun across Wyoming and sunny
Nebraska in Bart's Japanese pickup truck, all day long,
all the way to Council Bluffs, Iowa, where we staged a
second ceremony for the benefit of the bride's family.
Before the sun was up again, Bart had lit out west with
me groggy in the passenger seat, on our way back to
Utah. I could barely keep my eyes open, but late that
morning when I caught him nodding off, the adrenaline
jolted me like paddles to the chest. I begged him to let
me spell him behind the wheel. He denied having fallen
asleep, and when argument failed I resorted to Plan B.
I talked my way through that day like I've never talked
since, and never before—babbling, burbling, blabbering,
spinning stories like Scheherazade staving off death.
I even sang my heart out, and every time I saw those
eyes drift closed I cranked the volume. It occurred to
me, thinking of Tim and his impenetrable bride still in
Iowa, that this longest day of my life was my payback.
It's just a good thing that road was so damn straight.

Rabbits, I would like to sit you down and have a very serious discussion with you. I understand that the way you zigzag as you flee is an effective way to evade most predators, and has served you well for millions of years. But when your zigzag pattern is no wider than the car following you, it only causes problems in both sides.

So in the future, rabbits, when confronted by a car, please consider bending your course in a direction perpendicular to your original course of travel. Either that or next time I may just do my best to hasten the evolution of your species. And I'll feel badly about it.

One of Chicago's great selling points as a "livable" city is its alleys. Unlike New Yorkers, Chicagoans can stash their smelly garbage bins out back and keep them off the sidewalks. If they're lucky enough to have a garage, like we do, they don't even have to worry about parking on the streets, and if they do have to park on the streets they don't have a plethora of driveways to worry about avoiding. And best of all for me, walking Ella through our neighborhood's alleys inspired large chunks of the novel I'm working on.

But there's a darker side to alleys, too, which I was reminded of earlier this afternoon as I was driving over here to the Writers Workspace. As I turned into the alley that leads to the little parking lot behind the workspace, I found my way blocked by a huge garbage truck. That was no big deal in and of itself, just a little annoying, since I could circle the block and come into the alley from the other side. But there was a day a little over a year ago when I didn't have as pleasant an experience with trucks in an alley.

It was early on a sunny weekday afternoon, and I had gone to a favorite haunt called Tweet (no relation to Twitter) for a very late brunch. Tweet has a tiny lot out back off the alley where patrons can park for free, which is what I did. That block is pretty long, and as I drove in from the south end of the alley I could see a big moving truck way up at the north end plugging that exit. I wondered briefly if parking in the lot that day was a good idea, but I didn't want to try to turn the car around and hunt for street parking.

After a leisurely meal while I got some work done on my laptop, I headed out back to leave. I backed the car out and was heading north up the alley before I realized that the moving truck was still there. Oh well. South, then.

I put it in reverse, backed up quite a ways, maneuvered the car back into the lot, got it turned around, and was heading south before I realized that another truck was parked down near the south end of the alley. Great. It was parked dead center in the alley, but I drove toward it anyway to see if there might be room to get around it. There wasn't.

It was a small AT&T pickup truck, and the really aggravating thing was that it was parked just short of the big parking lot behind an apartment building—a parking lot with a wide-open gate. The driver was nowhere in evidence, but assuming that he was doing work in the building, he could have parked in the damn lot. That was when I started feeling claustrophobic. I was trapped in the alley with no way out.

I got out of the car and took a picture of the AT&T truck's license plate, so that at the very least I could call up with a complaint when I finally got out of there. Otherwise I just stalked around my car clenching my fists.

After a few minutes, though, I saw a guy with a hard hat and a utility belt emerge from a passageway over to one side of the apartment building. "Hey!" I started yelling. "Hey, your truck's blocking the alley! Hey!" Eventually I got his attention, and we had a shouted conversation over a distance of about fifty feet. Though he wasn't happy about it, he told me he'd be there in a minute to pull his truck into the parking lot so I could get by.

He took his sweet time, though, and by the time he wandered over to move his truck, I had watched with a sinking stomach as a big white delivery truck pulled into the very end of the alley, put its flashers on, and parked. Two men climbed out of the truck and vanished down the street. I yelled toward them too, but too late. They were at least a hundred and fifty feet away, and they either didn't hear me or didn't care.

"This is just great," I said to the AT&T guy when he finally came over. "We're both trapped now."

After he moved his pickup, I actually left my car where it was and squeezed past the delivery truck to see if the two men were anywhere in sight. I wandered a few storefronts in either direction to see if I could spot them eating lunch or something, but no dice. I took a picture of the truck's license plate, then went back to my car and sat behind the steering wheel listened to podcasts and stewing and trying not to panic.

I suppose there were other things I might have tried, like backing up the alley all the way to the moving truck to see if it would be willing move, but instead I just waited. And waited. I was just about jumping out of my skin by the time the two men reappeared. Twenty minutes had passed. I didn't have time to yell at them. They simply were there, squeezing through the doors into the cab of the truck, and then they were backing back out into the street. I pounded on the horn and flashed my lights and gave them both fingers, but they were gone pretty damn fast. Like they'd never been there. I drove back to the Workspace shaking with anger and residual claustrophobia.

So there you have it, the day I got boxed into an alley and couldn't get out. I suppose there are worse things that could have happened to me in a Chicago alley, but I'd prefer not to think about them. And maybe that's not so much a drawback of alleys as it is a drawback of our dependence on cars. Hmm.

It's been almost three weeks since we moved into our new apartment, but I remember it like it was ... well, twenty days ago.

Things were going great. Three strong men had made short work of our boxes, which were now stacked neatly in the truck. Laura and her mother were ready to follow the truck to the new place in her mother's car and oversee the start of the unloading. The dog and I were going to stick around for a bit to tie up some loose ends, then join up with everyone else at the new place.

Good thing I slipped behind the wheel of our car to take the prime parking space my mother-in-law was about vacate. When I turned the key, nothing happened. Not a click.

I should have known this was coming. For a week or so, the car had been taking longer and longer to turn over, the starter motor hacking like a heavy smoker. This time the battery was obviously completely dead. My mother-in-law had no jumper cables, and neither did the movers. But at least I hadn't discovered this with Ella on my hands after everyone else had left.

Still, we didn't have a lot of options—the movers were on the clock, and our car was already loaded with stuff that I wasn't willing to leave unattended for any significant length of time. We sent the moving truck on ahead, and I sent Ella with Laura and her mother to follow them. I walked a few blocks to an auto-parts store, where I bought a new battery, a socket set (since mine was already packed into the moving truck somewhere), and a portable jumper kit (for future emergencies only—it needed 36 hours of charging before it was usable).

A car battery is a heavy damn thing to carry a quarter mile, even without two other purchases to worry about, but I made it. It took me some time, what with the rusted bolts I had to deal with, but I managed to switch out the batteries and tighten up the leads just fine—or so I thought.

The car started right up with the new battery in place, and I set a course for Dunkin Donuts to pick up a dozen for us and the crew. On the way I reset all the preset stations on our radio, which had vanished along with the battery's juice. At a red light a few blocks from the doughnut shop, though, the engine started to sputter a little and felt like it was going to stall out. I was in a left-turn lane, where stalling would be rather inconvenient, so I put my left foot on the brake and moved my right foot to the accelerator to keep the engine just above idle. I made it to the Dunkin parking lot and turned off the car. When I flipped the switch that works the locks, nothing happened. The electrical system was dead again.

Of course, the mechanical locking system still worked, so I was able to get out of the car. I bought my dozen—priorities!—then came back to the car and raised the hood. The problem was staring me in the face. I hadn't tightened the positive lead well enough and it had jiggled loose somewhere along the way. No problem. I slipped it back onto the post, tightened it up a little more, and closed the hood. Back in business.

I tried to maintain a sedate pace, not wanting to take a chance on knocking the connection loose again. It's about a five-mile drive from the old place to the new, and the fastest route is to take Western Avenue north for most of that distance. Western becomes an overpass for a few blocks to jump over its gnarly intersection with Belmont and Clybourn, though, and there's some awfully rough road at the start of the front slope and the end of the back slope. I tried to take it gingerly, but halfway up the rise all the instruments on the dash board died out for an instant. The lead was off again, though it had likely bounced up and come back to rest touching the post. I couldn't pull over on the overpass. No choice but to maintain my somewhat low speed and try not to let the engine stall again.

That went well enough until I crested the overpass and saw traffic stopped ahead at the red light at the bottom of the slope. I gently pulled to a stop behind the car ahead, and I tried my brake-and-accelerator trick from before, but I still stalled out. Just as I was turning the starter key in vain, the light turned green.

Again, no choice. Good thing I had the window down already, because there is no mechanical handle for it. I stuck my arm out and waved the traffic behind me around. I couldn't put my flashers on, so I just hoped a) that I could be quick, and b) that the drivers coming over crest behind me would be paying attention. I popped the hood, ran around the front of the car, raised the hood, jammed the loose lead back down on the post, slammed the hood, raced back to seat, and started the car.

I turned off Western at the first opportunity and took smaller streets the rest of the way. I kept my speed around 20. My hands were clenched on the wheel. But worst of all, I had lost my reset radio presets again.

I made it to the new place fine, but it took a while for me to unclench everything. I had missed the most exciting part of the move, when the three dudes had to hoist our couch straight up over the railing of our back deck on a rope to get it into our second-floor apartment. But that's okay because, boy, watching that would have reduced me to a bundle of crazy nerves.

I'm happy to report that this was the only remotely ominous occurrence that day, or since. I tightened up the battery lead a whole lot more, and it's been absolutely fine since then. We love our new place, and being here has made all the difference in our outlook on this city. Even Ella likes this place. She and I are sitting on the back deck right now, and squirrels are running back and forth along a power line strung down the alley just above our eye level. And it doesn't look like that power line is going to jiggle loose.

Laura and I bought a 2000 Honda Accord LX early this afternoon. Less than three hours later, there was a boot on the left front tire.

Chicago.

No, not in the sense that we're running back to New York City with our tails between our legs. But we are going to become car owners for the first time in 13 and 15 years, respectively. It stings.

If you visit Chicago by car, please note that it is illegal to fail to display a front license plate. If you drive a car like the one we occasionally borrow from the in-laws, souped up with a special turbo grille in front that doesn't allow for a license plate, you just might get a $50 ticket.

We did.

After the various indignities of the day and long night, some of which were heaped upon me by others, some of which I heaped upon myself, I was finally on my way home from work last night at 2:15 am when the cab I was riding in stopped in the congestion that develops there after the east end of the Queensborough Bridge and was promptly rear-ended by another cab.

The speeds were low and the damage to the back bumper was negligible, but from my point of view it was like someone had slammed a refrigerator into my back. I got out of the cab and checked myself out, but I seemed to be okay. Nothing obviously injured. The cab drivers didn't fight or anything, but mine gave the other a stern lecture about tailgating. Both were very concerned about how I was.

I wrote down both medallion numbers just in case.

As we continued home, my cab driver complained of some neck pain. My back hurt, and my teeth ached, and my upper arm hurt a little, but it was difficult to sort out injury from shock and nerves. At home, Laura prescribed Advil and scotch. Mmm, Talisker. It helped me sleep, but of course it has not made waking up so easy this morning.

Back to work. Via subway.