Driveways Driving Me Crazy (Cigar Smoke 12-3-09)

I know I am a blessed person. I have a great family. I have both my health and my nine medications. I have a hovel up in Oregon I can escape to. And I have enough money to still be able to subscribe to newspapers. And I’m lanky. I’m living on house money, baby.

But I have to complain about one thing. For the past 38 years, yes 38 damn years, I have had really bad driveways. I bought my first house up in Altadena in 1972. It was such a great house and such a great deal that I just decided to hell with having a bad driveway. But indeed, it was a bad driveway.

The house was on funky little street called Northhaven Lane on a cul-de-sac. (That’s French for “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.”) And you came down this very steep hill to get to the front of our house. And then the driveway was on another even steeper hill to get to the garage. Yes, the god of driveways had doubled down on me and had given me an essentially useless, probably criminal, driveway. You could not go down the driveway and have much hope of coming back up the driveway.

Occasionally somebody could do it if they had a Hemi-kind of V8 engine and floored it in reverse and screech-assed up the thing and scared the hell out of me and my insurance agent. But generally, you could go into the driveway, but you could not get out of the driveway. It was like the Roach Motel for Buicks.

I can’t tell you how many plumbers and pizza delivery guys would not even slow their macho butts down when they got to the driveway and ended up on the bottom and had to be towed back out. I should have bought a tow truck but, like now, I wasn’t that bright.

Anyway, it was an ugly driveway and I endured that car-swallowing sucker for 17 years. And then Marge and I moved into another house in Altadena over on Crest Drive. It was another great house, built back into the semi-woods, maybe 100 yards off the street. Well, Virginia, that 100 yards of blacktop was my new driveway nightmare.

No, it wasn’t steep, but it had a few other fun navigational challenges. First of all, the driveway was very narrow and it went over a flood control channel on a stone bridge built by Chinese slave labor in 1896. Then about 50 yards in, there was a huge tree stuck right in the middle of the driveway. And this tree further divided the driveway into our driveway and the driveway of our neighbor who hated our Airedale. He would call us up and say, “Would you please keep that beast of yours quiet?!” And I would tell him, “Marge isn’t that noisy, dammit!”

Speaking of Marge, she would always have her car parked in the garage and she would want to get out at night, and she would say Jimsie Whimsie could you pleasie-wheezie get my car out of the bad old driveway that scares me because I’m a woman and you’re a man and you like backing out backwards and driving in the darkness of death when you can’t see over Chinese slave-labor bridges into seven-foot tree trunks? Please? I’ll make you chocolate-chip cookies and hide them in my bra. (OK, she never said that part about the cookies, but everything else is damn close to being true.)

So I put up with 12 years of the second horrible driveway. And then we moved to our current driveway-challenged house on Braeburn. When we were thinking about buying it, I mentioned to Marge that the driveway wasn’t really that good, and she said that she knew that, but it was better than the last driveway. And I said yes, it was better — in kind of the same way Mussolini might have been better than Hitler.

Well, she looked at me, closed her eyes, opened them up again, and I was still there, and then she turned to the Realtor and said, “We’ll take it.” So we’ve been in this driveway hellhole for the last nine years. And, OK, I admit that it isn’t quite as bad as the other two nightmare driveways of my past, but it still is not good. You see, it is another long driveway that goes right from the street straight back into the backyard. But now we have a gate to the backyard, which I have to open and close all the time and it’s a hard-to-muffle-my-screams kind of gate.

And then once you get inside the gate you have to kind of split off a little to get both cars in there. And, of course, Marge has her car in the garage and I have to keep mine out in the coldness and dampness where squirrels can take their little dumps on it.

So now when Marge needs to go out and my squirrel-turded-up car is there, Marge will coyly say, “My car needs to get out.” She flicks her eyelashes a couple of times, and adds, “You’re so manly when you’re backing my car up.” And I say, “I’m in my robe! It’s midnight!” And she says, “The neighbors probably won’t call the sheriff again.”

God, what I would give for a circular driveway. Or a couple of chocolate-chip cookies with bra marks.