Among other things, I wouldn’t play high-school soccer, SnoopyFan. It’s a long story and I don’t much like to talk about it, but the basic issue was one of independence. I desperately wanted it, and my folks didn’t trust me enough to give it. Keeping me from having a car was one way of ensuring that I didn’t get it. Restricting my mobility also kept me close to home, so when I did get in trouble, which wasn’t any more often than most kids, my folks found out about it. Which kept me in trouble, and kept me from having a car.
I should add that I wasn’t asking for jack shit on a silver platter. What I wanted was the use of their cars so I could find a decent summer job. For example, when I was 16 I had a standing offer to build custom computers at a place in the next town at $10 an hour–a king’s ransom for a high-schooler at the time. But I needed a loan to buy my own wheels, and I needed my folks to put the car in their name so that I could ride on their insurance plan and not pay the absurd insurance rates that are charged to a 16 year-old kid when he tries to insure himself.
I got none of that, and yes, I probably deserved exactly what I got. So I walked to my $3.35 an hour job and worked 39 1/2 hours a week (so that I wouldn’t get benefits), and used a fair amount of that princely $110 a week after taxes to bribe rides and put gas in my friends’ cars.
(I should add that I did finangle a set of wheels every now and then. My Volkswagen Beetle was killed by an Oldsmobile, and my parents profited from the insurance money and didn’t give me another loan to replace the car. I got a free Rabbit from my mother and managed to wreck that myself. Once I bought a pristine 1972 Ford station wagon for one dollar. I still couldn’t afford to insure it, and I had to give it back to the people who scored it for me from an old man whose dying wish was that some kid might get some enjoyment out of the car he had maintained since it was new–that thing was awesome, and it broke my heart when I had to give it back, undriven.)
And, as Jon is about to find out, I also wrote my parents out of my life. I went to college ten miles away from where my father and my stepmother lived; I visited them exactly never until I hit upon the idea that must strike fear in the heart of every parent. I suddenly realized that while I couldn’t afford a car, I sure as hell could afford a motorcycle and an only-wrecked-once helmet.
When I told my old man my plan, the scales dropped from his eyes. He (I assume) told my stepmother to shut the fuck up, feigned back problems, and gave me his pride and joy Toyota Supra, and together we figured out how to insure it. A couple of years ago he told me, “I remembered the days when I had to hitchhike to college, couldn’t take a girl on a date, couldn’t leave that little college town, and I said to myself, ‘my boy doesn’t need to take that bullshit.’”
And while I now view that act as a priceless gift of love–and possibly an act of atonement–I still couldn’t keep far enough away from those folks until I built my own life, with my own money, with absolutely nothing that those folks could take away from me. It took a long time.
And yes, I very much was an entitled little asshole, and I was probably very wrong to feel the way I did. My point, JonScribe, is that the lesson you’re about to teach your kid is most definitely not the lesson you think you’re teaching him. And you’re going to learn that lesson the hard way unless you understand the problem from the kid’s perspective.
Such is the price of freedom. But freedom only costs about two thousand dollars these days. Don’t you think you and your boy can work something out, JonScribe? And if you can’t, can’t you at least cast the problem in those terms, instead of, “you fucked up, and now you’re going to suffer for it”?
