Notes from a Psychotic Expat in South America
Fear and Loathing in Lima
A Peruvian fun ride
Even as I’m adjusting the driver’s seat of the Yaris, what I’m going to attempt barely seems real. Painfully stupid, yes. Tantalizingly fun, definitely. But not really real. It feels akin to a potentially fatal passage rite of manhood, like spearing a lion or sticking my hand into a dirty mitt filled with stinging bullet ants. Something to bring back that eye of the tiger. (Wait a minute, forget about the bullet ants.)
While I familiarize myself with the dashboard controls, Auntie M sits in the suicide seat, fielding text messages.
My nostrils fill with the fresh scent of spearmint from the ‘Little Tree’ air freshener as I nod to myself in the rear view mirror. No matter what happens, act cool. “Nice car.”
“Gracias.” She pauses, then puts down her phone and shoots me a concerned look. “Has you ever driven outside of the United Eh-States before?”
A big breath. “Not really.”
Auntie M tightens up her seat belt and straightens up in her seat. “Just take it real eh-slow.”
“No problem.”
And. . . we’re off. With the Slow and steady wins the race mantra screaming through my head, we launch out of the garage like a turtle on Thorazine. Time for that dreaded first point of contact. As I’m executing my first right turn, my mantra’s been replaced by Oh, fuck!
Auntie M yells out, “¡ Oh mierda!” as I stomp on the gas and veer into the fray. Lashing my hopes onto false confidence, I start whistling show tunes, but my right foot just keeps pounding the gas pedal. I’ve driven only two blocks and I’ve been honked at once and flipped off twice. Well, thrice if you count the pedestrian, which most Limeños don’t. Seems like a moral victory.
“Eh-Stop!” Auntie M screams.
The tires squeal like a pig being spit-roasted as I lock up the brakes at a stop sign-looking thing next to a Wong superstore. She stares at me like I’ve already committed multiple felonies. “What es you doing?”
The ol’ bod is contortioned upright forward with a ten-and-two death grip on the steering wheel. In my mind I was doing quite well, but maybe not? I blurt out with false bravado, “I’m bending the traffic to my will!” not looking her in the eye.
“Is you okay?”
“Fine!”
More honking from the pandemonium behind us. We both peer out at the traffic ripping through the two-way street.
With eyes as big as saucers, I glare at Auntie M. “We fucked up!”
She tilts her head. “We?”
“Never mind.”
“Tranqui — .”
“Hold On!”
Aaaaaahhhhht. Aaaaahhhht. Aaaaaaaahhhhhhht.
Her head whips back as I hunch over, steering the Yaris through what I hope is a moving safe space through the jankiest of left turns.
At some point I re-open my eyes, just in time to see Auntie M point at a big Carretera Panamericana Sur sign staring me in the face.
“¡Doble derecha!”
“Eh?”
“Turns right! Now!”
Shit. My one and only hope out of this godforsaken traffic.
I’m not really sure what happened next. My best guess is that the Yaris, sensing it was being driven by a complete idiot, goes into full-blown automotive survival mode, willing itself to jump back and to the right, like a surprised alley cat.
Before I can even soil my underwear, we’ve already crossed three lanes and darted between two speeding cargo trucks.
Just the type that shark-faced Marco likes to play suicidal games of chicken with while winding down from a stressful day.
I’ve been in Lima long enough to ignore the honking. Truth be told, I’m too busy waiting for the doomsday shudder of final impact.
Fortunately, I’ve prepared ahead, steeling my nerves by engaging in several practice wrecks in my youth. Surely, the piddly little dent on my ’82 Honda Civic’s right quarter panel from careening into a stop sign at college counts as something. Sort of.
One other time, I was calmly stopped at a red light when I was swiped by a semi-truck’s ass end, which picked up my work van’s frontside like one of those porcelain tea cups little psychotic girls like to play house with before they kill and bury their whole family using rat poison and a hatchet. Car wrecks are like that.
But it’s the first good, solid wreck in high school that was the bees’ knees for me. Jamming out to AC/DC’s ‘Highway to Hell’, I floored my parents’ banana-colored 79 Impala down a short side street, slick from Portland’s interminable rains. Probably hit the vicinity of seventy when we passed my friend’s house.
My friend yelled, “Stop!”
Oh, I stopped. As soon as my right foot pawed the brake, the yellow submarine lurched right, barreling into a ditch, blasting through a fence, catching air off a small boulder and skewering the top of a mailbox, running over a small forest of ferns, then carving a deep gouge in an ancient tree before bouncing back out onto the road and coming to a dead stop like a deer strafed crossing a freeway.
Pure adrenaline. Glasses knocked askew, I was dumped onto the passenger seat in my friend’s lap, still clutching the steering wheel with a death grip.
After changing my underwear, I managed to get out and circle round the dead beast. The prognosis was grim: the front end was completely smashed. Radiator fluid and some greenish sludge bled out of the large gashes on its lacerated underbelly. Pieces of the car were later found in faraway neighbor’s back yards like they had been shot out of a trebuchet. A beached narwhal’s twisted mass of mangled metal.
Totaled.
Almost.
The radio worked, and ‘Highway to Hell’ was still jamming on strong.
