The Steering Wheel is in the Front Seat for a Reason, Though I Have No Clue What It Is

Everyone who has ever driven a car knows at least one certified back seat driver. At least one resides within every family tree, hanging from it's branches like chestnuts, or perhaps just like regular old nuts. These are the people who will shout directions as loudly as possible from the back seat of your car while you are sitting at an intersection. The only rule for this shouting exercise is that more than one person has to be shouting at the same time and all of the instructions must be different. While there may only be one actual certified back seat driver, all the rest of them are practicing wannabes and absolutely none of them actually know where they are going or how to get there.

I have been in the driver's seat enduring this kind of turmoil myself, and let me tell you, it is not easy nor is it fun to be driving on unfamiliar territory whilst hauling passengers who all know exactly where to go and are trying to out shout each other in the back seat. The back seat drivers all had something in common with me…none of them really knew which way to go either, but all were willing to volunteer their expertise. I stopped at a beauty parlor to ask directions, and for once in the long journey, nobody in the back seat volunteered to help out.

Inside the beauty parlor I asked a woman with gobs of white goop all over her hands, which way to get back on the freeway. She wiped off her hands on a towel, got a pen and some paper, and proceeded to instruct. This, I was to discover, was another back seat driver wannabe. Oh, she knew how to get there all right, but she for darn sure, was not going to tell me. “Turn right as you leave our lot,” she advised, swinging her hand in the general direction of the parking lot….or Texas. “Then go straight for two blocks until you get to the rail road tracks, cross them and turn left and go straight until you pass a school building. If you pass the school you have gone too far. Turn around and go back.”

A pause….a very long pause….the kind that authors like to describe as “pregnant”. I guessed that at that point her dissertation, for some strange reason, was over. I decided that prompting was in order if I wanted to go any further than the local high school. “And once I've passed the school and turned back? I assume there is a preferred road I should have taken somewhere along the way.” She blinks and the spell, whatever it was, perhaps caused by the fumes from the bleach job occurring in the corner, is broken. “Oh. Right. Take Fortune Drive all the way to its end and you will see the sign for I 75.

I smiled and thanked her, and it was at that point that the back seat drivers occupying the “maintenance” chairs with various hairdo's under construction, all spoke up at once. “No, not Fortune Drive! Take Oak Avenue!! That one leads directly to I 75.” Another shouted over her, “no, take Cedar Street for two blocks, turn right on Oak, then left on Chestnut. That is the quickest way to the turnoff.” A very recently blonde woman way back in the corner, from whose head the most fumes were radiating, stood up and shouted above everyone else….”Which freeway is she looking for again? I only know how to get to I 75 from here.” Then she promptly sat down and shut up, never apparently, to speak again.

I gritted my teeth and attempted another smile, which totally wiped the grin from the hairdresser's face. For a moment there she looked a little frightened, as if Jack the Ripper had just strolled into her shop. “Just go down Fortune Drive like I told you.” She showed me the world's worst impression of a road map, complete with scribbles for the rail road track, the forbidden high school and the mysterious Fortune Drive, which none of the other women in the shop had apparently ever heard of. The paper looked like a monkey had drawn it while hopped up on bananas. I said, “thank you”, took my (ahem) map and left the building.

I was doomed and I knew it. I was never going home again for as long as I lived. I would spend the rest of my life in a vehicular purgatory, driving around in circles, forever looking for the elusive freeway that supposedly would take me back home. I got back in the car and shoved the “map” into someone's lap and turned the key in the ignition. This was the cue. The voices in the backseat started to question, then speculate, then instruct. I started to make the turn the woman had specified, only to find myself in the parking lot of the business next door. I looked up to find six startled pairs of eyes watching me from the windows of the beauty parlor.

I reversed direction and tried again, with the chorus in high gear behind me. I followed the directions best I could and actually found a rail road track. My hopes soared. I began looking for Fortune Drive. Three trips past the all too familiar school later, I still had not found the drive in question. I stopped at another business, this one apparently operated solely by a twenty-something woman reading a book and looking bored. “Where is Fortune Drive?” My voice quavered. “I'm trying to find I 75 so I can get home.” I must have looked particularly desperate. She closed up the book and set it down.

“You wouldn't happen to be from the game bird show, would you?” She asked with an unimaginable certainty in her voice. I was surprised but I nodded yes. “How'd you know?” She laughed. “I've had six people come in here already this morning asking that same question. It seems they all stopped at the beauty parlor over on sixth street….”

Well, to make a long story short, there was no road called Fortune Drive as it had had it's name changed about five years previously, and when I found the road in question, it led directly to I 75.…and home.

The moral of the story? Never listen to a backseat driver…especially if she is high on bleach fumes and living five years in the past.