President Me (12 page)

I also strictly forbid the use of all steering-wheel covers. The entire point of a steering wheel is grip. Covering it in fake sheepskin or shag carpeting, as my mom did in the eighties, isn't going to help you grab the wheel in case of a skid. Plus, they look stupid.

And finally, as far as car names, I'm going to require a little more truth in advertising. No one who lives in Malibu has ever driven a Chevy Malibu, nor has anyone who's been to the French Riviera driven a Buick Riviera. There has never been a celebrity behind the wheel of a Chevy Celebrity. And if you drive a Ford Esteem you cannot possibly have any for yourself. But it turns out 89 percent of male escorts do drive an Escort.

DUMB-ASS DRIVERS

The major problem with our highways and byways (and by the way, on the “byways,” do we need both? I think just highways will do) is not the cars or the road signs or even the cops. It's the drivers. Everyone is tuned out, distracted, and apparently not very interested in getting to where they're going in a timely fashion.

I know profiling is a dirty word nowadays, but it can save your life. It's the greatest gift we have as humans. There are sea snakes that take on the color of the poisonous ones so the other creatures of the deep will fear them. They've taken on the
profile
of another creature. We need to be able to assess quickly, by appearance, what is a threat and what is not. But there's too much of a racial element to it these days, and people are scared to admit they do it all the fucking time. Well, when it comes to driving you have to profile too. There are certain tells that make it clear when someone is a shitty, tuned-out driver that you need to get around. I saw a guy in front of me recently who had his gas cap open, with a stuffed animal sticking out of it. I pulled into the next lane and got past him with gusto. Another telltale sign that the person in front of you is going to maintain a full ten miles below the speed limit is when you can't see their head above the headrest. That means they're either old, Asian, or are the cholo who drives with his seat fully reclined. Either way, stay away.

You also have to factor in make, model, and year of their vehicle. There is a stretch of the 110 Freeway on my way home from LAX that is a rolling museum of some of the shittiest, least road-worthy cars imaginable. We play a game every time I'm driving this run on the way home from a gig on the road. My driving companions and I try to identify cars that cost less than five hundred dollars. Sadly it's not a very difficult game. These are not just eyesores, they are a hazard on the road. I was recently stuck in gridlock. When I got to the source I saw that it was a stalled-out, twenty-five-year-old Aerostar minivan with a baker's dozen of Mexicans inside. It included a primered fender held up with a tampon string. It had stalled out in the left lane and the cops were running a zigzag traffic interference around it so it could be cleared. If you're driving a piece of shit like that, you have to drive in the right lane so you can easily pull it over in the inevitable event it throws a rod. When you have a car that's driven the equivalent of a trip to the moon and back and your radiator hose was formerly attached to a lawn sprinkler, you should be fined if you break down. We need to start shaming these traffic jams waiting to happen. That's a new law in my administration. All drivers of cars that cost less than eight hundred dollars according to the
Kelly Blue Book
shall be painted with a scarlet
S
.

Here's a handy list of warning signs of the worst people on the road. Some are tuned-out menaces, others are just assholes.
Be alert
, and if you see this on a vehicle close to you,
get away now
.

STICK FIGURE FAMILY:
I hereby decree that you are allowed to accelerate to ramming speed every time you see a minivan with a silhouette of the family and their names on the rear window. We get it, you didn't pull out. Is that information you really think I'm interested in? I know you're a parent. You're driving a Plymouth Voyager with two hundred thousand miles on it; do you imagine I'm behind you thinking, “Who is that gay entrepreneur?” Even worse is the theme family. Oh, you're into snowboarding? Oh, you've got cats? Oh, they've all got Mickey ears, they must
really
love Disney. You know what I love? Driving more than fifty-three miles an hour. How about a stick figure depiction of your family moving the fuck over and letting me get to work on time?

COP AUCTION MOTORCYCLE:
One time I was driving home from
Loveline
. Because I did this drive all the time I knew the traffic patterns. Drew and I were talking to each other on our cell phones as we would often do on our commute home and I said to him, “What's with all this traffic? It's never like this.” There was a wall of cars, like a rolling start at a NASCAR race. I looked down the road a little and saw a motorcycle cop. All the L.A. drivers who've been traumatized like a battered wife and were scared shitless to pass were slowing down to fifty-two since the cop was going fifty-three. But because of my hypervigilance, I could tell something was off. So I started to thread my way through the crowd. When I got up close on the guy, I saw, as always, that I was right. The first thing I noticed was that he wasn't wearing cop pants. This was just some douchebag who bought the bike at the cop auction.

This should be illegal. This is impersonating a police officer. He had the black-and-white Moto Guzzi, the two-tone helmet, and a leather jacket. When they auction off these cop bikes they should have to be painted orange like a squirt gun so people don't get confused and start driving like Grandma when he shows up.

More importantly I want this guy drawn and quartered on the floor of the Staples Center. And I want his soul to go to hell. And if hell has a sauna in the basement that's where I want this bag of shit to go. These guys know what they're doing and they need to be destroyed.

A little side note on motorcycle helmets. As president, I'm not going to enforce helmet laws. If you want to spread your brains on the pavement, that's your prerogative. But for those who are going to wear a helmet, I'm banning the flat black color. I've never understood why this is even an option. It's not just the heat absorption boiling your cranium, but why are you trying to make yourself invisible to girls who are texting while driving?

MOTORCYCLE INTERCOM COUPLE:
I understand riding a motorcycle and carving up a canyon, but the guys who turn their motorcycles into Winnebagos are a breed of cat that I can't get my head around. They've got a loaded Gullwing and retractable training wheels and they've got their 250-pound old lady in the trailer attached to the back with the helmet intercom system going. There are guys in Hummers that get better gas mileage and have worse surround sound systems. I could not imagine having a bucket on my head with a direct voice line to said bucket on my wife's head for a six-hour trip to San Francisco. I'd steer into oncoming traffic or jump off and roll over the cliff of the Pacific Coast Highway into the sweet relief of silence on the rocky shore below.

CALVIN:
You see a lot of Calvin from
Calvin and Hobbes
on the back of cars and pickup trucks. On the back of one truck he's dragging a cross, on the next one he's pissing on the Chevy bow tie. The kid's got a lot of range. Either way, whether you love God or hate Chevy, how about you keep it to yourself and stop using poor Calvin to do your white-trash bidding.

And since we're beating up on the honkies right now, the guy who tries to turn his average workaday pickup into a monster truck is a special kind of asshole. I call out whitey on this one in particular because white guys go high with their vehicles while Mexicans go low, but white guys are going way too high in my opinion. In general pickup-truck guys tend to be the worst offenders in the “hey, look at me” category. People who drive pickups really want you to know what they're into, whether it is the Jet Ski in the bed or the gun racks on the back.

ANNOYED HEAD SHAKE:
You've all had this happen. You're slowly and cautiously backing out of a driveway but there's a van or a cube truck parked to one side and you can't see oncoming traffic. Then as you get farther out you see someone coming, so you hit the brake. They go past you without any incident, but as they pass you get the slow down with the head shake. You know that “what kind of animal would attempt to back out of his driveway during daylight hours?” look. As if to say, “What's wrong with you? No traffic cones? No motorcycle cop waving traffic through? No guy in an orange vest holding a flashlight? You're just flying out of your driveway willy-nilly at the breakneck speed of zero miles per hour?!!!”

I like it when the head shake continues well beyond the point you could view it. As this dick drives off into the sunset you can see him still shaking his head. He'll be doing that until he's safely parked in his spot at work fifteen miles away. Shit, he'll probably be doing the shamey-shamey-shake all through his day at the funeral home or Kinkos. This has got to be confusing for the people a little ways down the road who are walking their dogs or delivering mail and don't know why he's pissed off. “Why is this guy disapproving of my mail delivery? I'm just trying to put food on the table for my family.” Maybe this is why mailmen “go postal,” they're constantly feeling judged by guys who are still shaking their head at me, the monster who attempted to back out of his own driveway.

REST-IN-PEACE WINDOW DECAL:
This is something we see on the roads of Los Angeles that you readers in Wisconsin probably aren't hip to. What I like to call “the rolling memorial.”

Now, I don't want to tell the Latinos how to grieve but here's how us white folk do it. We bury our loved ones, shed a couple of tears, then we get together, have a couple of drinks, and talk shit about that person. Then we move on. I lost my grandmother a few years back, I didn't duct-tape her urn to the roof of my Audi.

Plus we do not do a lot of flattering math when we see these. When we pull up and read
In Loving Memory of Chuy 1992–2011
and think, “Jeez, he was only nineteen,” this is not followed by the thought “War hero. Must have died in Afghanistan.” Nope. It's usually “Gangbanger” or “Tunnel collapse, muling drugs in from Tijuana.”

The point is, I'm depressed enough as it is. It's Saturday and I'm sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic. I just passed a mural on the side of the freeway covered in graffiti and I'm listening to Lady Gaga on the station I used to do morning talk on. I'm sorry to hear about Chuy's untimely passing but what the fuck do you want me to do about it? Should I pull up, roll my window down, and say, “I didn't know Chuy personally but judging from the rear window of your Ford F-150 he seemed like a hell of a cat. Please accept this floral arrangement I bought from Chuy's cousin when I was getting on the freeway.”

MULTIPLE BUMPER STICKERS:
There is a simple equation with bumper stickers—the more you have the crazier you are. Half the messages on bumper stickers, like the memorial decal, are something I can do nothing about. For example, “Bring the POWs Home.” Who do you think is driving behind you, Chuck Norris? Do you expect me to call my wife and say, “Gas up the Huey and pull the sleeves off my shirt, I'm bringing our boys back home!” And it's not like I'm going to pull up alongside you and say, “You've probably not heard an alternative viewpoint on this but a lot of those guys signed up for it, they weren't drafted, and many were having sex with underage Vietnamese girls. Just saying.”

Worse than the “Nothing I Can Do About It” bumper sticker is the “Fuck Off and Die” bumper sticker. I've literally seen a bumper sticker reading “Fuck Off and Die.” I don't even want to get into the head of this guy. My question is for the woman living with him. Why is she not stopping him? Like when my stepdad showed up for a funeral in a red Members Only jacket. Why didn't my mom say, “John, we're going to a funeral, not a NASCAR event. You're one beret away from being a Guardian Angel. Go find something black and attempt to be a human.” More importantly if the government can hand out chickenshit tickets for no front license plates, shouldn't telling me and my family to fuck off and die be a traffic offense? That's hate speech.