The Driver Read online

“Thirty-two hours, fifty-one minutes,” he said. “Nonstop. New York to L.A.”

  “Impossible.”

  “It’s true. In 1979.”

  “Wait,” I said. “You did the Cannonball?”

  “Sascha and I began planning. But your mother…heard me on the phone. She would have left. You were so little.” He shook his head slightly. “So I told her I was going on a business trip.”

  “Hold on—”

  “Listen to me! We thought we could win. We had fuel tables, a fuzz-buster. Everything. But the car broke down. Sascha thought it was sabotage. Then your mother found out from Sascha’s wife.”

  “But…why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “Think! Your mother would have died if you tried anything like that. You remember when you wanted me to take you to the car show to see the Porsches and Ferraris? We did everything we could to stop you from having a car.”

  That was true, all through high school and college.

  “But,” he said, “there’s something else you need to know.”

  I shook my head in amazement.

  “Listen!” he said sternly, his tone hardening. “Do you know why Brock Yates canceled the Cannonball? It grew too big. Parties and bullshit. There were leaks. The police knew the drivers’ names before the start. Tagalongs. Copycats. Everyone thought someone would be killed. But there were serious drivers who wanted to continue. Secret races.”

  “C’mon.”

  “It’s true. People talked about how to keep going after Yates shut it down. How to keep it secret. Safe. No press. You have to vet drivers. The organizers must be anonymous. The cars have to leave at different times, from different places.”

  His eyes lost focus. “No one has ever beaten thirty-two hours.”

  This was the first thing he said that wasn’t a surprise.

  “Rumors,” he said, “more races…thought they could beat 32:51. Even thirty-two. Some said even thirty. Sascha said thirty-two was the wall. He told everyone we could beat it.”

  “Did you?”

  “No.”

  I was strangely relieved. If he had—and never told me—I would have felt terribly betrayed, unaware of what had driven him, ignorant of what I might have inherited—

  “But,” he said, “I heard someone came close.”

  “Impossible. That’s 3,000 miles.”

  “It’s less.” He smiled faintly. “Thirty-two fifty-one. In a Jaguar. A terrible car.”

  “Terrible.” I smirked. “But still, they had to have averaged at least—” I was as terrible at math as Jaguar was at building cars, at least in 1979. I tried to guess the size of a Jaguar’s fuel tank. “If it’s just under 3,000 miles, with fuel stops and tickets, they had to have averaged at least 100 mph, right?”

  “That’s the secret. What Sascha knew.”

  “What is?”

  “Stealth. Math. If you don’t get a ticket, 32:51…is only in the mid-eighties.”

  “Are you sure? Eight-five doesn’t seem that fast.”

  “Everyone says that. Everyone who’s never done it. Or tried.”

  This I would have to check when I got home.

  “I don’t feel well,” he said. He was lying. There was too much strength in his voice. It was completely unlike him to reveal so much at any one time without a motive. Like a good teacher, he wanted me to infer the meaning of his stories, but clearly I’d yet to make the great leap. He reached for the pain-killer button. I scrambled back through our conversation, looking for what I’d failed to grasp.

  “One more question,” I lied.

  “What do you want?”

  “What,” I said, “does all this have to do with the box?”

  “Just pictures. Sascha. Me. My pictures.” He leaned back and closed his eyes. “He…called me.”

  Sascha was dead, or at least I thought he was. “Who called?”

  “He called…” his voice trailed off. “He called.”

  I was losing him. Maybe he was lying and unwell. There was a fair chance—given his medication and treatments—he wouldn’t resume this conversation tomorrow. I had to push.

  “Who called?”

  “The Driver.”

  “The driver? What driver?”

  “I don’t know.” Maybe I’d already lost him.

  “After Cannonball,” he whispered.

  “Brock Yates…called you?”

  My father slowly turned his head toward me. “No. The…Driver.”

  The painkillers had to be kicking in. “Wait,” I said, “who’s this…driver?”

  “Sascha…I thought it was Sascha. Calling me.”

  “So who called you?”

  “I’m tired. I don’t know. He won’t stop calling me. Strange. Did you know I have the best memory? I never forget.” I nodded in sympathetic agreement, silently mouthing I know. “Because,” he said, “he never stopped attacking the wall.”

  “This…” I hesitated. “This…driver?”

  “The Driver,” he groaned, “against the wall.”

  “On one of these secret races.”

  “Yes.”

  “And why did he call you now?”

  “He can’t…he can’t attack the wall alone. Trust…who to trust?”

  “Trust who?”

  “To go…against the wall. He called Sascha. My God, was it twenty years ago? My memory…my memory. Sascha knows. Sascha knows. But no one has done it.”

  “Hold on,” I said, “when did he—”

  “Sascha wanted to go, but his wife. Your mother. Sascha told everyone we could beat it. If we’d finished. In ’79. But the sabotage. Sabotage, he said. Sabotage.”

  “So…you were sabotaged? In ’79?”

  “I don’t know,” he rasped, “but he can’t find Sascha, so he found me.”

  “Didn’t Sascha pass away some time ago?”

  “I can’t remember…I mean yes. Do you know how to reach him?”

  “No.” I could have cried.

  “Yesterday,” he said, “he said…it was sabotage.”

  “Who said what yesterday? The Driver?”

  “He knows…he knows.”

  We sat in silence as I struggled to filter truth from medically induced hallucination. I knew nothing of dementia or memory disorders, but there was one sure way to test his lucidity.

  “Dad,” I said gently, “do you remember your Social Security and bank account numbers?”

  “Don’t insult me.” He recited the numbers perfectly.

  “But why this whole story—”

  “Find him. Race.”

  “Me?”

  “Beat thirty-two. It’s possible. Sascha knows how. Sabotage,” he rasped. “He knows. It doesn’t matter. Thirty-two. Just go.”

  “Dad…I don’t know anything about racing.”

  “Think you can’t, but you can. Only now. You’re so young. No children. If you ever do it.” He leaned back again, seemingly ready to pass out.

  “But…but how will I find this…Driver?”

  His eyes briefly lit up. “Un rendezvous.”

  “A meeting? How?”

  “Enough. Come back tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Rendezvous

  I was blessed with two sweet, kind, loving eccentric parents. My father’s parents were German Jews who moved to Brussels in 1934 and then escaped the Nazis and emigrated to the United States in 1942. My father helped liberate the concentration camps, returned with a Purple Heart, and founded Europe By Car, the family business. My mother escaped Communist East Germany at twenty and moved to New York in 1965 hoping to meet Elvis. They met on an American Airlines flight from New York to Paris in 1970. Henry Roy was a single, forty-three-year-old war veteran and businessman who dressed like Austin Powers. Ingeborg Schneider was a petite blond twenty-seven-year-old ex-schoolteacher, ex–au pair, ex-model-turned-stewardess who liked to wear go-go outfits and go dancing with her five stewardess roommates. They made a maturity pact before getting married and having me—he
quit smoking, shaved his mustache, and stopped wearing vertically striped pants. She stopped dressing like she was sixteen and partying with the pot-smoking gay Japanese fashion designer who’d adopted her as his muse.

  I was born nine months later.

  I had a normal childhood, lived in Manhattan, and went to good schools. I studied piano and took art classes. I graduated from New York University with a 3.5 GPA. I double-majored in politics and journalism, with a minor in urban studies, a euphemism for criminology. I volunteered for various charities and gave money when I had it. My father wanted me to take over the family business. My mother wanted me to become an architect.

  I’d always wanted to be a judge, or, if I could have made a living at it and my father had stopped telling me it was a surefire way of remaining poor, an artist.

  I was quite sure I’d be married with children by the eve of the millennium, the year I turned twenty-nine.

  Things didn’t go as planned.

  SPRING 1995

  My father had a very strong work ethic, and I had to work from the age of fourteen on. I’ve been (in very rough order) a beachboy in Saint-Tropez, a masseur to leathery French women of substantial age and girth, a hi-fi salesman on lower Broadway in Manhattan, an Urban Outfitters pant folder (later promoted to store greeter), an executive assistant at a failing record company, a protocol assistant for an unpopular New York City mayor, and a criminal investigator for the New York Legal Aid Society. I’ve also waited tables, parked cars, driven a Parisian taxi, and bartended at an Australian pub in Paris frequented by foreign criminals who’d left home and joined the French Foreign Legion to escape prosecution.

  I’d taken these jobs as a way of buying time until forced to choose a career path, all the while struggling to write the Great American Novel, when, one night in Paris, a Tasmanian legionnaire lifted me off the sawdust-littered pub floor and announced that I had a “good ’ead” and should shave it immediately.

  A few days later I was standing in the petite bathroom of my Paris sublet inspecting my hairline when the answering machine beeped in the next room. I watched the machine vibrate and move across the desk as my father’s deep voice emerged from the speaker—I had to place my hand on the device to keep it from falling to the floor.

  “My son,” he announced with biblical intensity, “I’ve been thinking about your situation for some time. I’ve decided that it’s best for you to come home and be by my side. I’ve been ill for several days and your brother is very young. The stress of raising your brother alone is causing me terrible heart problems. Only you can help me. Only you can help save the business. You must stop this nonsense about writing a novel and come home now. I can only imagine your terrible living conditions and urge you to consider your future. Of course, I would help you with a place to live and a car.”

  This might be a good deal.

  I’d wanted a car ever since my catastrophic accident on Christmas Eve 1991. A cab had broadsided my trusty Nissan and we smashed into the front doors of a synagogue on Fifth Avenue. I’d been glad my parents weren’t pious.

  I called him immediately. “A car?” I asked.

  “You want to know what kind of car I’ll get you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Aren’t you worried about my heart condition?”

  “You’ve been saying that since I was ten.”

  “I had a heart attack last week.”

  “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “I didn’t want to worry you.” This was very suspicious. “Come home,” he said, “and we can discuss your car.”

  “Are you going to be okay?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I suspected my father was exaggerating because he thought (correctly) that my still-unfinished nine-hundred-page Great American Novel might never be completed while I spent my days smoking in local cafes and picking up long-legged French girls too easily impressed by a young American with a laptop.

  He’d had three heart attacks in ten years.

  I bought a ticket home the next day.

  SUMMER 1999

  There are moments in each of our lives when something so dramatic happens that one can barely remember what life was like before. These moments reshape the prism through which we see everything that follows. These moments define the chapters in our lives, and how we react to them defines who we are.

  This is why we must now discuss the first time I saw Rendezvous, the greatest car-racing movie of all time.

  I was standing in a sparsely populated club in New York called Void. A twenty-foot-wide screen hung on Void’s rear wall. A projector flickered. The following appeared on-screen, in French:

  No special effects of any kind were used in the filming of this movie.

  The speakers thumped with a beating heart, and a decades-old blurry image appeared. A camera had been mounted on the front bumper of a car speeding up a ramp—its engine howled and its tires squealed as the driver turned onto a wide boulevard lined with trees. It was dawn in some foreign city. As the driver accelerated, the lane stripes bled into a single line and out of the mist appeared the Arc de Triomphe, centerpiece to the world’s most dangerous intersection—the Etoile. With ten major boulevards and six minor streets intersecting in a single twelve-lane traffic circle without traffic lights, it was…

  Impossible. This had to be staged. It couldn’t be done.

  There had to have been spotters, side streets closed off, assistants with police tape and funny little megaphones waving one arm overhead to hold back the onlookers.

  I was sure to spot them if I looked. And I looked.

  I felt like those people who, on May 7, 1824, heard the first strings of the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth, or maybe the first college kids in 1969 to lower the record needle through a haze of pot smoke onto Led Zeppelin I.

  These examples are really too obvious, because, as the driver drove into the Arc de Triomphe–Etoile intersection at 100 mph without slowing, nearly hitting three other cars before turning onto the Champs-Elysées, I knew that I was seeing something seemingly impossible yet very real, something very very far beyond what had previously seemed feasible—something absolutely, utterly unrepeatable.

  The car barreled down the Champs-Elysées at over 120 mph and ran a red light.

  This was Russian roulette with five out of six chambers loaded.

  There was no music. No special effects. No editing. There were only two characters—the driver, whose every feeling was expressed through the engine’s howls, tires’ squeals, and the split-second decisions he made as the car cut left and right through the wide boulevard and narrow streets, and Paris itself, revealing new dangers as the sun rose through the mist, the city allowing the first inhabitants to emerge as the driver defied the red lights, nearly killing those few who dared cross the street.

  This was a snuff film on wheels.

  For nine minutes I stood paralyzed, utterly speechless, until the driver stopped the car in front of the Montmartre cathedral overlooking the city. Out of the haze a lone beautiful blonde climbed the cathedral steps toward the camera. The driver entered the frame, face unseen, kissed her, and the screen went black.

  Before I saw Rendezvous, plans for my final hours totally precluded any form of dangerous sports like car racing. After seeing Rendezvous, it led to a single question.

  Could I make my own Rendezvous?

  This more than captured my imagination—like a ghost it hovered beside me as I tried to sleep. It interrupted my conversations such that my attention wandered even from the Czech model I’d once thought it so important to take on a date. We might be married today if only she’d understood the why. I must have sounded like an idiot to her, but it wasn’t the language barrier. Her confusion made it easy to delete her number from my phone.

  As to why, well, the first half of the answer would be comprehensible only to those who’ve seen Rendezvous. The second half of the answer, the part that has earned me friends I’d otherwise never have m
et, that was the part best understood by the types of people I’d made fun of as a kid.

  Why was I going to make my own Rendezvous?

  Because of what my father said. Because of Rendezvous. Because of The Driver.

  Little did I know this would be only the first of many dumb questions I’d ask myself, and attempt to answer in a car. Until I’d seen Rendezvous I’d always assumed a car was something one bought and drove within a given set of limits—first, basic traffic law; second, one’s skill. Rendezvous showed a car to be something else, and way more than, as many people joke, an expression of the owner’s manhood.

  A car isn’t just an expression of our taste and finances.

  How many times have I walked past Cipriani on West Broadway, home of innumerable husband-hunting, fake-breasted girls who work in public relations, only to see a handsome young banker pull up in a brand-new red Ferrari F360? The model/actresses swoon. The driver sits with his friends and explains the options he chose this time—carbon brakes, racing exhaust—and how he couldn’t get it exactly the way he wanted. He talks about how fast he drove downtown from the Upper East Side, four miles away. His friends are impressed until one remarks that he’s soon taking delivery of the even newer F430. “A lot more power,” the friend brags, flashing his Panerai diving watch and smiling at the girls at the next table. “You should order one.” The 360 driver smirks with jealousy, knowing he will when his lease runs out.

  Not one of these people will ever hunt, cave-dive or race, or attempt anything that would endanger their purebred dog, Italian navy diving watch, or custom-ordered car, let alone their own safety, unless well paid, forced, or shamed into it.

  This is the message of Rendezvous—it’s not what you have, it’s what you do with it.

  Rendezvous demonstrated what one can do, must do, if one owns a car like a Ferrari. There is no dignity in bragging about one’s car when it has never surpassed 50 percent of its maximum speed, or in comparing diving watches that have never seen the ocean, let alone a shower, or in driving to a restaurant where the girls see not a car but the promise of the rest of their lives pulling up in front of expensive restaurants in bright red sheet metal and tan leather. There is only the absurd cash outlay for the best engineering on four wheels, the question of what equally outrageous challenge it must be put to, and whether that test will be sufficient to please the god of decadence from whose domain the car has been borrowed. To do any less is far worse than wearing $200 sneakers for a pleasant stroll, or domesticating an animal meant to roam free—it’s eating McDonald’s in Paris, it’s watching porn instead of having sex with one’s girlfriend, it’s returning from war with one’s gun unfired. Such second-rate decadence is worse than bad taste. It is not a victimless crime. It’s an insult to everyone who can’t afford the option.