The Driver Read Free Page B

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.
    â€œMy 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.
    â€œYou want to know what kind of car I’ll get you?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œAren’t you worried about my heart condition?”
    â€œYou’ve been saying that since I was ten.”
    â€œI had a heart attack last week.”
    â€œWhy didn’t you call me?”
    â€œI didn’t want to worry you.” This was very suspicious. “Come home,” he said, “and we can discuss your car.”
    â€œAre you going to be okay?”
    â€œI 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