When I was little, I loved race cars. I never missed a Memorial Day broadcast of
the Indianapolis 500, heard Chris Economaki in my sleep and thought of Watkins
Glen as a dream world where everyone drove Formula 1 cars to work, weaving
their way through the streets at unsafe speeds.
I imagined a day I’d drive like Jackie Stewart, shifting gears, revving
my engine and blasting down the road.
This dream died slowly, year after year, as the steady parade of family
cars in our driveway mocked my hopes for something better. There is no faster way to neuter a young
man’s primal urge to go fast than teaching him to drive in an ‘82 Chevy Malibu
wagon; I wanted to be Bo or Luke Duke and ended up more like Driving Miss Daisy.
Since
earning my license, I’ve opted for safe cars with tame engines and great gas
mileage, rejecting the idea that driving could be more than getting from A to
B. I’ve never learned to operate anything
other than an automatic, owning cars where turning the key, pressing the gas
and choosing either the Jefferson Starship or the Wang Chung CD were my only
concerns. This fact raises hackles in
those who swear by the manual transmission.
“Any guy who can’t drive a stick shift is instantly unattractive to me,”
a freckled female friend said to me in college.
Upon learning I couldn’t drive a standard, my sister exclaimed, “You
don’t know how to drive a manual transmission?” uttered with the inflection of
someone saying, “You don’t brush your teeth?”
But a
man can change, and I found just the person to help me. Like a prophet emerging from the smoke of a
thousand screeching custom tires, a savior has arisen. Carmine Tomas, a man who bleeds motor oil, a
man who once burst into tears at the New York City Auto Show’s Ferrari booth, a
man who drives fast, fancy cars with passion unmatched, offers to teach me the
lost art of the manual transmission.
We
agree to meet in an abandoned parking lot on the outskirts of town. Carmine advises me to, “Wear thin-soled shoes
to maximize your sense of the pedals. No
man clogs.” His advice is unnecessary –
if I know anything, it’s not to show up for male-type stuff in clogs. But then again, the first car I bought was a
Subaru station wagon, so he has a point.
Carmine
arrives in a slick white 2012 VW Golf R with fancy tires, and we begin. “Patience is the key,” he says as he points
me to the passenger seat. Like a shaman
of the stick shift, Carmine preaches as he drives. “I see this as a societal issue. We live in an age of automation, where
everything’s done for us. Driving a car
like this is one of the few ways to interact with something mechanical. You’re about 15 to 20 years too late for this
lesson because the manual transmission is disappearing. We need to save the manuals!” he shouts, and
for a moment I’m not sure he remembers I’m in the car. I say nothing and watch his feet and hands as
we zip through the parking lot.
This
mystic of the manual transmission is like my spirit animal, but instead of a hawk
or majestic elk, Carmine is my Spirit Dude, a man who drives loud cars, grows a
thick mustache overnight and cooks a Chicken Marsala so tasty you’ll curse the
mere existence of the Olive Garden as a blight upon humanity. Brother Carmine continues. “We’re a few years away from a driverless car,”
he says with real contempt, looking genuinely forlorn at the thought of
Americans completely disengaged from the road.
“Driving a manual car allows us to transcend the everyday
experience. And it’s really (adjective
redacted) fun,” he says as he parks and hands me the key.
I get
in the driver’s seat and Carmine instructs, explaining, “You’ll learn to
feather the clutch,” and “Feel for those engagement points,” reminding me about
the interplay between the pedals, telling me to “listen to the car.” But feathers and listening skills mean as
much as the resale value of a ’74 Pinto if I can’t get this car into first
gear. “You want to be as smooth as
possible. Give it some gas,” he says as
we start moving. Slowly but surely, with
my Spirit Dude coaching me, I learn first gear into second, second into third,
third into fourth. The car responds to
my movements, and we zoom around the empty spaces.
A bit
later, Carmine points me to his secret race track, a quarter-mile straightaway
far from any homes, a place where he’s been known to “exercise” his
automobiles. We head to this undisclosed
section of an unnamed part of the state, and I drive that VW like I’m Steve
McQueen in Le Mans. First into second then to third and fourth
and then, to both our surprises, I slide the gear into fifth, my feet and hands
working together as the pistons fire. I
downshift into neutral as we reach the stop sign. “And you haven’t stalled once!” Carmine
exclaims. Just then, my confidence
overflows, and I stall the car. Ten feet
later I stall again, but Carmine mentors me back to success.
We’re
off into traffic, taking three long loops through neighborhoods, my shifting getting
smoother by the quarter mile. I stall
three more times trying to get the clutch-gas equation down as impatient
drivers wait behind me, but on the whole, I nail it.
Minutes
later we’re in Carmine’s garage as his sons stand watching. “Mr. O’Shea did a great job.” He turns to me and says, “I trust you – you
could drive the kids anywhere in my car.”
The boys wince slightly and slowly back away unconvinced as Carmine
leads me to a beautiful black car in his barn.
“This is a 1988 BMW M5 with a motorsport-derived, hand-built inline 6,
custom wheels, lowered suspension, and tuned exhaust,” he says. The only words I can conjure are “shiny,”
“cool” and “boxy.” Carmine even talks prettier than I do.
He
takes the wheel, and we drive to the secret straightaway where he shows me what
controlled powerful driving is really like.
My torso slams flat against the seat as Carmine shifts with deftness,
the car’s engine responding, the tires hugging the pavement as we defy local
speed ordinances. He demonstrates something
called “throttle blipping” as well as a maneuver where he uses his right foot
on both the brake and gas at the same time.
“This is what we call ‘heel-toe’ driving,” he shouts above the engine’s
sultry din. “You blip the throttle so
the revs will match where the car wants to be in second gear. You want to get
the car to the limit of adhesion, so I do the heel-toe for smoothness.” I think
he’s speaking in tongues, but like any decent convert, I sit, listen and nod.
I’m
rewarded with the keys, and I put my lessons into action, driving that car well
enough to make Jackie Stewart’s tartan angel wings flutter in approval. I cruise around the parking lot islands,
shifting from gear to gear seamlessly.
For a few minutes I’m one with the car.
I don’t hear Carmine’s encouragement, just the engine and my body in sync,
the memory of an ’82 automatic Malibu fading further and further in my memory. I get it now, and Carmine’s right - we need
to save the manuals. Anyone want to buy an
’06 Volvo wagon? I’ll throw in a Wang
Chung CD for free.
