Car Talk with Bob

Bob keeps telling me how to wish others well, but it's getting difficult to maintain Buddhist detachment as we drive all over the damn country in a series of rental cars. As throw a hershey's kiss wrapper on the floor and wipe shards of cauliflower from my unwashed shirt into the cupholder in the front seat, I tell Bob we're like Felix and Oscar and Bob stops what he's doing, probably contemplating robots and kittens, and says, "maybe we are, but I have no idea who 'Felix' and 'Oscar' are."

"You don't know Felix Ungar and Oscar Madison?"

"Should I? Are they noteworthy humanitarians?"

"How can you not know the Odd Couple? It's a famous play and movie? By Neil Simon? with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau?"

"Jack Lemmon and William Matthau" he says out loud, and scrunches up his nose, his nose that is not nearly as large as mine.

"They're famous actors from the seventies?" I say. I look at his face, he squints, and searches his memory bank.

"I told you already: if I don't know someone they're not famous."

Earlier in the car, somewhere in Kentucky, or maybe Illinois or Tennessee, Bob asked me to name my favorite Queen song. I told him, "Crazy Little Thing Called Love." Encouraged, I later referred back to this conversation by informing Bob that Freddie Mercury "was a Berber; as in Morroccan. His real name was Faisal. [pause] Pretty cool, huh?"

"Maybe it would be pretty cool if I knew who Freddy Mercury is."

[disgust]

We tried playing G-H-O-S-T but Bob's spelling is atrocious and he had trouble distinguishing between proper nouns and regular nouns.

Any attempt to initiate Kill Marry Screw was abandoned after I used Paris, Lindsay, and Britney, and Bob refused to place them in a category. He then suggested we play Mao, a game with no rules. I asked Bob if he knew who Chairman Mao was. "He was bald. He made chairs."

Later we got into a standard nature vs. nurture argument. I told Bob some of the sixth graders I taught just couldn't grasp the concept of fractions, much less how to add and substract said fractions. Bob said anybody can become good if they train. I told Bob he would never play in the NFL no matter how hard he trained, and for some kids, doing fractions is like Bob making it as a linebacker in the NFL. Bob then claimed he COULD make it to the NFL if trained every single day for the next year. I labeled him "arrogant" and started punching the steering wheel and foaming at the mouth. Then Bob told me I ruined children's confidence and teaching was all about "Finessing confidence" and I started screaming Bob was a "punk" and trying to "make me look like a racist jerk," and he said, "the only thing you're missing as a teacher...is hope." My knuckles turned purple as I tried to squeeze blood from the plastic wrap on the steering wheel.

We tried making mix-cds using my itunes on my laptop. Bob tried to make his own cd using my collection of songs, but he knew approximately four of the artists, despite my love of Motown and 50s and 60s pop music. He labeled the mix, "Slim Pickins", and we argued over whether the correct spelling of pickens was "Pickins" or "Pickens", and whether or not by labeling his mix "Slim Pickins" he was referring to his paucity of musical knowledge or my dearth of good taste. "Do not go there, Robert. You will not win."

Then Bob went there. had the gall to tell me my favorite band, Wilco, was "annoying."
"I like the Neil Young stuff we've been listening to, but mostly your music is sappy. It's all about love and 'ooh, look at me, I'm sooo sad.' It's just sappy to sell more records."

I could feel the lizard-anger surging behind my eyeballs.

"Better watch what you say, pal. I'm serious." I was, too. I was serious. "You know what your problem is Bobby?"

"No, what's my problem?"

"Your problem is you know nothing about anything, because you're like 9 years old and grew up in Idaho and love kittens and X-box. Wilco is for people who have lived, man. You're too young to like Wilco."

Eventually we settled on a few rounds of mental math and historical dates. I would throw out a date like 1941 and Bob would say, "A man cut wood. That's right, bitch, prove he didn' t cut wood. YOU CAN'T."

"Fine Bob, we'll stick with battles. Every date is the date of a battle. Try 1914. "

"World War I."

"Good. Try 1861."

"World War I. "

"Bob you don't know when the Civil War started?"

"Civil Wars are for Civil Servants!"

Then we argued about the proper way to manage highway driving. I maintain the idea is to stay in the right lane as the default lane until you are too close to the car ahead of you, at which point it is necessary, prudent, and polite to change lanes and pass on the left, until returning to the default lane on the right. The beauty of this methodology is the way it combines tidiness with competitive fire. It feels good to pass, and thus symbolically dehumanize a series of four-door compacts and hulking semi-trucks, one after another, like a trained assassin. I feel as though most drivers recognize this system, and act accordingly. I find it aesthetically unpleasing to witness someone passing from the right lane. It's gauche.

Bob says my style of driving is "infuriating." Through clenched teeth and mesh bunny cap he seethes to me, "pick a speed, hit cruise control, and stay in one lane." I didn't have time to explain to Bob the elegant structure of the standardized method, so I gently rested the cigarette lighter on his thigh.

Until then.