Look - I should still probably learn how to drive (and believe me, no one would love this more than my boyfriend, who would get an instant chauffeur). Ryan helped me embrace this part of myself (along with many other more important facets of my identity). In a way, much of my new identity in this city has been formed in an Uber. Together, we’ve spent countless hours in Ubers, and many important moments in our relationship have taken place in the Prii of strangers: drunken makeouts, sobering fights, joyous celebrations, crushing defeats, and personal triumphs. Ryan has now been my boyfriend for a year and a half. As we rode toward an uncertain future in the back of an Uber that night, I felt a little less alone in my new city. Our relationship gradually move toward something ambiguously romantic, and then, one New Year’s Day, we officially sealed the deal: A drunken evening lead to our first kiss. We shared the same sense of humor, similar ambitions, common perspectives, and mutual passions. It turned out that Ryan and I had much more in common than our inability to wrangle an Audi. Ryan was proof that I could still find a place in this city, even if I never drove. without the ability all other Angelenos possessed. There was something comforting about talking with someone who also managed to live in L.A. “Behind the wheel” was also a place I had never been, but I lacked a doctor’s note to back me up. He came equipped with a more reasonable excuse: He had cerebral palsy, and was under strict orders from his doctors to never get behind the wheel. A few months into our friendship, he revealed something shocking: He didn’t know how to drive, either, and also took Ubers everywhere. We were both writers, and had met via Twitter. Ryan was one of the first new friends I made upon moving to Los Angeles. I felt alone and out of place - lacking a universally possessed skill in a city defined by that very thing. How to justify my betrayal of this city’s driving culture? How to convince Los Angeles that Ubering was a valid way to journey across the arteries of its car-loving heart: the 101, the 110, the 405? Not driving made me feel like an Other. I was now lost in Los Angeles, without a license. I was faced with an uncomfortable reality: My identity was no longer linked to NYC, the city of public transport. Murray’s Driver's Ed.” She was, as mothers always are, right. Then, many years later when I moved to Los Angeles, I heard my mother’s voice echoing in my head: “There will come a time when you will rue the day you skipped out on Mr. Besides, I was destined to live always and forever in New York City, a land similarly populated with people who had better things to do than drive a car. I couldn’t help it if my busy schedule as a 17-year-old musical theater diva prevented me from completing something as plebeian as a driving course. My mother, to this day, reminds me that she paid for Driver's Ed not once, but twice I played hooky both times, in favor of Guys and Dolls and Chicago The Musical, respectively. I was a teenager who valued rehearsals for the school musical more than learning to parallel park. How could I possibly have made it to adulthood without first passing Driver's Ed? “You poor, unfortunate soul,” their expressions seemed to say. If, at a cocktail party, I confessed to not driving, this fact would be met with a brand of pity normally reserved for the owners of recently deceased pets. Initially, I was desperate to keep my vehicular ineptitude hidden. To not drive is to close avenues to the most common form of small talk in L.A.: freeways and traffic and parking (oh, " The Californians"). But how could I assure the denizens of a driving city that I was, in fact, one of them?ĭriving is an essential part of the character and culture in Los Angeles. When I first moved to Los Angeles, I discovered that I could simply Uber everywhere. It is possible, in the age of the smartphone, to live in Los Angeles without getting behind the wheel. But thankfully, Uber saved my non-driving ass from permanent immobility. Drive.įive or 10 years ago, this would have been social suicide. It’s not that I simply don’t have a car, or possess an expired license, or am living under the drunken shadow of a DUI. I live in Los Angeles, and don’t know how to drive.
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