Ejected...and Killed

I took my driver's educcation course at a Christian school about a mile from my house; it had large, intimidating eagles with Bible verses around htem on the platforms of all the staircases. My class was an assortment of high school children with summer birthdays guided by Mr. Perry, the old man slightly tinted glasses who had been teaching driver's ed since the year my mother got her driver's license, whcih was approximately 1974. He reminded me a bit ofan aging Henry Fonda with the same space between his front teeth and the flat, Great Plains inflection in his voice. The similariest ended there, really. Mr. Perry did not have the seemingly innate empathy of the old actor's face and also had copious amounts of ear hair. We all made fun of him when he was not in the room, but were also slightly terrified of him, mostly becuas he seemed convinced that things like pulling through a parking spaceof parking more than four inches from the curb were not only legitimate crimes, but sins.

When it came time do do my first hour of supervised driving, I stood alone outside the white church like building, having insisted that my parents simply dro[ me off and leave because I was sixteen and underestimated the creepiness of being alone in a parking lot. After a few uncomfortable minutes of pacing on the sidewalk, Mr. Perry pulled up in a navy blue Chevy Impala with yellow "student driver" banners all over it. I said a pleasant hello, and he only nodded, gesturing me into the stripped down car. After about twenty minutes of adjusting my seat and being told what windshield wipers were, I tenatively drove out into the road. I crept at around thirty mile an hour, growing more comfortable with every stop sign I did not run and every mailbox I did not hit, until, with abuot twenty minutes left in the hour, Mr. perry guided me into an area not far from my house. We rolled past a telephone pole that marked a turn my family took all the time, when Mr. Perry sighed. "one f my students had an accident by that telephone pole."

Thinking it was just a poor attempt at small talk, I nodded, refocusing on the road, but my instructor continued in a punctuated, overly-dramatic fashion: "New Year's Eve 2002...it was dark out, hewas tired...maybe thre was some black ice on the road, and he was just goin too fast...slid off the road up against the telephone pole...He was ejected...and killed."

I stared in front of me, equally uncomfortable and appalled, so much so that I nearly forgot to make the left turn towrds the chuch school. When I finally got out of the car--leapt might be a better description-- Mr. Perry told me that I did all right. "You've got nohting to worry about," he said. Well, except for dying on a telephone pole, I could not help but thinking, and tried to shake it off. But, it wouldn't go away, probably because Mr. Perry managed to have us drive past one or more sites of his past students' demise every single practice hour. they were always ejected...and killed. The one time we did not pass a crash site was when we drove to Manchester ot practice on the freeways and in city traffic. Instead, he told us that a house we stopped by had been rebuilt after a devastating fire in which two brothers had died; the older brother had run back into the smoldering building to save his younger sibling, and both of them ended up trapped inside. Mr. Perry's macabre stories officially moved form passing strange to absolutely absurd in that moment. If he was tyring to terrify us into heeding the rules of the road, it did not work. all of us in the class soon found a gothic humor in the constant repitition of the phrase "ejected...and killed." Mr. Perry's ear hair must have interfered with hearing our snickers when he launched into his formulaic, pause filled, William Shatner like accounts. Somehow it just never occured to him--after all those accidents--that he was just a bad driving teacher.