Learn to Drive, Son.

Defensive driving class was a long six hours. I expected to be in a room with a drop-tile cieling, watching safety videos and learning about the points system. I did not expect the air conditioning to be permanently set to “Baltic” or for the building to smell strongly and unmistakeably of poop. Had some brazen DUI student taken a dump behind the drywall out of spite, I would have been impressed, but not surprised.

My instructor showed up a few mintues late, having been pulled over on GA-400. Glad I’m not the one paying for this, I thought. He was from Togo and worked another job at a psychiatric institute downtown. About an hour into the class, I realized that these two lines of work aren’t as disparate as they initially seem. As he is neither a cop nor a judge, I didn’t feel the need to argue my citation with him, but just about everyone else gave it a shot before it was all over.

The instructor had us go around and say our names and our “offenses”. My classmates looked deceptively normal. A pretty, pregnant school teacher. An elderly German couple. A Yoga Instructor. Georgia State students. All with 15 points on their licenses. I wasn’t sure what to say when it was my turn. “My father is an attorney who managed to move my court date back two years,” is another way of saying “I’m a rich white girl who can’t do anything for herself,” so I just said “interstate accident.”

Truth be told, I don’t really remember what happened. I was cited with an improper lane change, and somehow my SUV ended up under an 18 wheeler that ultimately drove away. I remember speaking Spanish at one point. Whether the family of illegal immigrants who called 911 before speeding away out of fear was real or a figment of my concussed imagination, I guess I’ll never know.

Three hours into the class, it felt like a lost cause. Most of the time I drive as if everyone around me is on Meth and there are cops everywhere, specifically trying to catch me for something. The only time I’ve ever been pulled over, I was on a small island on the Georgia coast, being tailgated by a police car. He sped up. I sped up. Was I between him and something important? An elderly person setting off their own alarm system? And why on earth was that asshole holding a hairdryer? Wait, shit. Lights came on. Motherfucker. Fortunately, I kept the profanity to myself. I got off with a warning that remained wadded up in the back of my mother’s car for days. When I found it again, I noticed that the cop’s name was George Bush.

In the end, defensive driving class wasn’t worthless. I now know how to get out of a car submerged in water, escape from the inside of a trunk and effectively beg my way out of most traffic citations. Of course, in about a month I’ll be back in a city where I’d rather be drawn and quartered than get into a car. I miss the New York public transportation system dearly. Granted, the subway map looks vaguely like two fighting squids, and I’ve spent hours underground because of “service changes”, but for the most part, it’s pretty mindless. Not the case in Germany, where there are no turnstyles, just your stamped ticket and your word that it’s valid.

Disguised police officers often check tickets in train and subway compartments, and in Berlin, they’re hard to spot. Gay guy in cutoff shorts and rollerblades? Guess what’s in that fanny pack. Elderly Muslim woman? Her, too. The fine for “Schwarzfahren”, riding without a valid ticket, is about €40,00, but there are ways to get around it. A friend of mine who is also American, but works in Germany, was caught in the spring. He pretended not to speak any German or have any cash, so the officer copied information down from his American drivers’ license and had a ticket mailed to his permanent address in the States. Pretty easy to ignore.

Wow. Lying to strangers is one of the things I do best, I thought. If I study abroad here… I imagined my father checking the mail in Atlanta, all kinds of possibilities filling his head as to why I was so popular with the German government. As it turns out, I am neither as cute or convincing as I would like to think. A few days later, I got caught in Magdeburg and I had no excuse. The policemen were in uniform and looked like poorly drawn Soviet cartoon characters. One was about 5′ 4″ and the other was about 6′ 3″. Neither of them had seen a dentist in decades.
 ”Fahrschein, bitte.”
“Oh, God, I’m so sorry… I don’t speak any German.” 

I wish I could say this ended in a nugget of slick acting and monlinguistic victory for America. I just felt like a complete asshole. Instead of a fine, they gave me a warning in very weak English. For a moment, I missed George Bush with his hair dryer. Mostly, I missed the ability to roll up the window and drive away. When an East German man wearing half-jeans-half-khakis (the mullet of pants) is laughing at you, you’ve hit a whole new low.