Whenever we were bored, which was all the time, we got in the car.
In the car, my friends and I cussed, drank, smoked, and outraced those who tried to tail us. We ate fried onion rings from the KoKoMo Drive-in, drove by to honk at each other’s houses and headed out on Highway 1 on Sunday afternoons. The two-lane road connected Shreveport in the northwest corner of Louisiana – more akin to East Texas in culture and practice -- to the roughneck and romantic oil and gas fields of the Gulf Coast, 360 miles south.
Briefly unencumbered by rules or manners, the car served as a haven, every one of us able to drive a stick.
Driving a stick is a lost art (just 2 percent of new U.S. cars had manual transmissions in 2020), and “art” doesn’t overstate how we practiced it. It’s like we were on an elite team in an obscure sport only we understood.
Sherry liked speed, teasing second gear until it screamed while dodging parked cars on narrow residential streets, her peripheral vision and motor response bionic.
“I love that blue-green shade of eyeshadow you’re wearing. Where’d you get it?” she asked one day, peering over at me from the driver’s seat while her long blonde hair swirled around her shoulders from the open windows. One hand rested on the bottom of the wheel like a monkey bar and the other dangled casually outside while speeding side mirrors threatened to behead me on the right.
Caroline was the safe, reliable one and Mary served as the team captain, fostering a sense of unity and camaraderie when she, for example, engineered an undercover pot drop at a neighborhood mailbox and arranged for us to sunbathe at a hotel pool despite being forbidden non-paying “guests.” Her steady hand at the stick made me feel safe enough to flout rules and break laws.
But nobody could baby a clutch like Danielle.
Sometimes she picked me up in her father’s lumbering Chevy Biscayne. It had “three on the tree,” meaning you shifted from the steering column and looked like a one-armed orchestra conductor while getting from first to third and back. We made fun of its fuddy duddy bench seats that sent you sliding, especially if you didn’t feel like downshifting to make a corner, which Danielle never did. (The first seat belt law went into effect in the U.S. in 1968 but was largely ignored.)
The Biscayne may have been a brute, but Danielle’s long, slender limbs moving effortlessly at the controls meant it glided through the neighborhood, down the new Interstate 20 and through life more elegantly than it deserved to, a rumpled middle-class salesman transformed into Don Draper at cocktail hour.
It was her brother’s 1960 vintage VW, though, that really allowed Danielle to shine. The bohemian Beetle, with its pared down dignity, fit her like the perfect Indian-print halter dress.
Sitting in the passenger seat, I watched admiringly one day while she drew on a Marlboro, drank a Coke through a straw, effortlessly shifted into second and flung her leg over to my side to release the reserve fuel tank with her foot. (The Beetle didn’t get a gas gauge until 1962.)
“You’re a badass,” I told her.
“Why?” she asked, not realizing her feat – the car sputtered for a second from lack of fuel but never lost a rotation -- which made her even more of a badass.
That was the difference with a stick shift; it wasn’t about the car so much as about the talent, grace and humble self-possession of the driver – virtually non-existent variables in an automatic where what counts are the make and model, cost and miles to the gallon or kilowatt hour.
Automatics were the muscle cars my high school boyfriends spit-shined and vacuumed before we went out on Friday and Saturday nights. The insides were clean and close, our domain for the night’s drinking, socializing and making out – clothes on, mostly.
Firebirds, Chargers, Mustangs, Chevelles, Camaros and Javelins – “gear selector” on the floor, between the bucket seats -- me, the passenger, my body forever ferried through space and time in a sleek metal box.
But as a driver, the car provided a room of my own in which to live my own narrative. Even in the sexist South, there were no restrictions against women getting driver’s licenses like there were for obtaining credit or an abortion, or winning an argument with my father.
I, myself, took pride in my ability to make a ride as smooth as an automatic despite the need to let off the gas to push in the clutch and shift into gear. Give me a hill with a stop light at the top, and if you were a passenger, you never found yourself rolling into the car behind you.
I was taught one summer on a classic Triumph owned by my aunt’s boyfriend. Just a little older than me, she balked and played helpless, but I was determined and wanted to learn.
In the complex symphony of gears and cogs, the clutch, located to the left of the brake, disengages the engine from the transmission, creating a pause in which the operator finds the “H” path of the gear shift and taps into the surge. Finding that sweet spot put me at the helm of a machine I could tame into submission, engaging in conversation with the car and showing it what I needed. Like getting up on water skis at Cross Lake in summer, once you do it, you know you’ve got it.
The stick wasn’t about showing off but about potency and control. It was something long haulers, James Bond in his Aston Martin, and I had in common. I didn’t brag about it. I held my ability until it was needed like the torque from second to third gear. I wasn’t a symbol on a mud flap but a disruptor of male domination, and sometimes men took notice.
Once in college, I ferried a guy to his friend’s house in a complicated switching of vehicles and rides to a party or football game. I drove out of necessity because his friend’s car needed to relocate somewhere, and it was a standard transmission. As he sat in the passenger seat, I could feel his eyes watching my body move with the car, gripping the gear shift with confidence but a gentle ease, my legs pumping expertly between the clutch, brake and gas.
Mid-trip, I heard him clear his throat.
“Sorry I’m not saying much,” he said, his voice husky. “I’m watching you drive. You’re good at it.”
If being in the driver’s seat, literally, lent us a certain level of female power at a time before the pill, Roe v Wade (may it be restored, someday) and Title IX, my friends and I didn’t talk much about it. It was a place where we could excel, perhaps be admired. We might not have had muscle cars of our own, but we had skill. We could direct our cars to behave badly or well. Our stick-shift sisterhood lent us a level of agency and general bad-ass-ery before we knew much consciously about systemic discrimination, sexual harassment or any of the other challenges ahead.
It helped us feel for a moment that the way we saw the world had merit and by sticking together we might have a chance against its dings, dents and downright defeats.
That became clear when I attended the funeral of the mother of our friend, Lynn. Norma Jean had the best Mary Tyler Moore bouffant, but bright blonde that she often wore up in a French twist.
Gazing into her coffin, I knew Norma Jean wouldn’t be happy with her outfit that day. Morticians had made the only one of our friends’ mothers who talked to us about not being stupid with boys and the importance of our friendships into a frumpy matron with pin curled hair and garish red lips.
As Mary drove to the cemetery afterward, the stick shift seemed to rock us in a soothing cradle, as we talked about our love for Norma Jean, her style and her womanly honesty and advice. We parked and sat in the car in silence, wondering how Lynn would survive and how any of us would, at least in the same way we had before.
“Look, isn’t that the woman from the funeral?” Sherry asked, pointing to that woman, the one who shrieked upon meeting family members, yelled hellos and how-are-you’s across the room and generally made the event about herself, as we all mourned.
She was walking alone in heels across the damp grass at the gravesite, arm waving high in its black sleeve, voice raised to get a far-off person’s attention.
I watched her from about 50 feet out. I hated her. I wanted her to die instead of Norma Jean.
And then she fell. Flat on her face, in the mud.
I didn’t know if anyone else saw it. But suddenly the laughter inside the car seemed to strain the molecular structure of the glass in the windows. The woman looked up for a second, but we glanced away, pretending to be straight-faced while bathed in redemption.
I continued to drive a manual transmission even after most everyone I knew gave it up. Even though it was a small prize I had earned, I didn’t want to let it go.
However, I admit now that it’s been a while since I’ve driven a stick. I gave up my last one, a Honda Accord, in the early 2000s when city traffic far from Shreveport made it no longer romantic, fun or requiring of much finesse. I forced my kids in the passenger seat to do the shifting for me and I sometimes wonder if I’ve still got the muscle memory.
I need to practice because to this day I have a recurring dream in which the emergency is upon us, and the only way out is in a car with a manual transmission.
“Can anyone drive a standard?” someone yells. “I can!” I respond, jumping in and grabbing the stick.