I didn’t learn how to drive the way most people do, with a patient parent or cousin in the passenger seat reminding me to stop-not-roll at lights and corners. No, by the time I was old enough to care, I had long since proven myself untrustworthy behind the wheel.
At fourteen, I accidentally backed a tractor and its open-bed wagon off a (thankfully low) bridge — with my two younger brothers inside the wagon.
At sixteen, I rammed a trailer with a 1978 Cadillac.
At eighteen, I did it again with an old 1970s station wagon. In my defense, I genuinely did not understand that both vehicles were essentially solid steel and built like tanks.
By twenty-four, I still hadn’t learned to drive, and no matter how I pled or reasoned or explained, not a soul I knew wanted to risk teaching me. I was notorious.
The bus was more or less fine for getting me to work, until I found a better job — on the other side of town, a full thirty miles away. My brother worked there too, on the same shift I’d be taking, but we didn’t exactly get along. Love him though I did, I knew better than to stake my punctuality, my paycheck, and my future on his moods.
I needed a car. And I needed it whether I had a license or not.
So I did what any desperate twenty-something back then would do: I went hunting through the newspaper want-ads for anything I could afford in cash. That’s when I found it — a car priced at exactly $100. Too good to be true, really. One hundred dollars, plus taxes and title transfer. So I coaxed a friend into driving me to meet the seller.
Oh, that car. Even now, I couldn’t tell you its make or model. But once, long ago, it must have been a cute little sports car. The sort someone bought shiny and hopeful. The years had not been kind to it. Time had twisted it, corrupted it, placed something evil in its heart until it no longer resembled a car at all but something feral and malevolent. It had four wheels, a driver’s seat, and theoretically a passenger seat. But it wore a uniform of primer gray, and the engine had clearly caught fire at some point, leaving black scorch scars across the hood like war paint.
Still — one hundred dollars. I handed over my cash and drove it home with all the caution my not-at-all-existent driving skills could muster.
It soon became clear why the price was so… perfect for impoverished me. The brakes were almost completely locked up. I learned to stop using prayer, the car’s own weight, and whatever force I could still exert on the pedal. After a few unexpected swerves onto the shoulder, I eventually mastered the art of braking just in time.
Then came the first time I took it on the highway. A friend, a gentleman over six feet tall, jet black of skin, built like a linebacker, intimidating on sight, needed a ride home. I’d been driving a week. I was feeling cocky. So I offered.
We hit fifty miles an hour and fwooomp — the hood flew straight up. Terrifying for most people. Hilarious for God. My passenger screamed like a Girl Scout in a haunted house. I stuck my head out the window like a small, irritated terrier and yelled, “You’re fine! It’s okay!” as I kept driving until I could pull over and bungee that bad boy down.
And the oil. The car didn’t leak oil — it had an arterial bleed. Squirts jetted out around the dipstick every time the engine ran, like the thing was trying to spray its last will and testament across the asphalt.
But it got me to work. I was terrified most of the time, especially creeping past a cop and praying nothing catastrophic happened to betray my lack of a license. But somehow — maybe the grace of God, maybe the fact that He was laughing too hard to smite me — I made it back and forth each day.
Six months of this, and I was ready. I needed a license. The car was paperwork-legal — registered and insured — but I was not. So I hired a driving instructor. Turns out I’d managed to teach myself enough that he mostly had to sand off the edges. He even taught me a few advanced skills I hadn’t figured out, like how to merge correctly. (Bad mergers irritate me to this day.)
After a couple of lessons, he said I was ready. I scheduled my driver’s test, and he let me use his car because there was no universe in which my deathtrap was going to pass inspection.
I passed with a perfect score. I wasn’t even nervous.
My poor car threw a rod a month later, dying an agonized wheezing death on the side of the highway. But by then I’d saved enough money for a down payment on a decent vehicle. And honestly, the orc deserved its rest.
Looking back, that six-month ordeal taught me more than how to drive. It taught me the thing modern life keeps trying to hide from us — that competence is born from doing hard things, badly at first, and then doing them again until you do better. Not in a classroom. Not in a simulation. Not with perfect conditions and padded edges.
I didn’t become a confident driver because someone held my hand. I became a confident driver because no one did. Because the only vehicle I could afford was an orc with wheels. Because failure wasn’t theoretical. No, it was barreling toward me at fifty miles an hour with a hood that might fly up and blind me.
You don’t learn courage by being protected from danger. You learn courage by facing danger and refusing to panic. You don’t learn responsibility by being supervised. You learn it when nobody’s watching and everything depends on you doing the next right thing.
That awful car made me competent. It made me calm. It made me decisive. It taught me that if you can handle chaos with your head out the window and a six-foot man screaming beside you, you can handle pretty much anything.
A $100 monster taught me that courage isn’t the absence of fear. It’s the ability to keep driving when the hood flies up and someone beside you is screaming.
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