Stick. Shift.

A long post (or a short story) about transmissions and transitions

“Hergot, Petulo!!” my father boomed, the pissed-dad vein at his temple pulsing as he called to his Czech god, who would surely understand what an idiot his daughter was.

This stall-jump nearly put his head through the tiny windshield. He was too macho for seatbelts. It sloshed the Hamm’s beer he brought to numb this torture. He bailed out of the car.

It was day three of trying to teach me how to drive the 1980, Mexican Volkswagen bug I found in the newspaper classified ads. It was white and cute and had ladybugs on the floor mats, which were much more important to me than another detail the owner listed when I called to ask about it.

“It’s a stick shift,” he said.

I had no idea what that meant. The driver’s ed car with the chicken brake for the self-preservation of the coach forced to teach the class wasn’t a stick. My parents didn’t own one.

In the 1980s, about 35 percent of cars produced for sale in America had manual transmissions, according to the EPA. It’s about 1 percent today.

And only about 18 percent of Americans know how to drive one, according to U.S. News and World Report.

It’s today’s perfect anti-theft tactic.

I bought the Bug, which I later named Vermin, with $1,500 sweaty dollars in babysitting and waitressing money.

And I couldn’t drive it home.

But eventually, I got it. After my dad walked more than a mile home, refusing to get back into my car. I slowly figured it out on my own in that vast parking lot, without his belief that the louder he explained the way a clutch mechanism worked, chopping the air with each word, the closer I’d be to mastery.

I had a lot of accidents in the Bug before I could afford to buy studded snow tires – a necessity if you didn’t have a four-wheel drive in my Sierra Nevada hometown. It snows nine months of the year.

The time I rear-ended the massive tire of a city snowplow on my way to school in a 5 a.m. snowstorm – I drove in early to write the script for our daily television news show hours before most of my friends got up and started crimping and Aqua-Netting their bangs – I dented Vermin’s hood with an inverse tire shape which earned me “Worst Driver” in the yearbook.

Once I finally bought the snow tires, I had to become my own pit crew. Snow storm? Get out of bed an hour early, shovel the snow, swap the tires.

And when the snow melted – sometimes that same afternoon if it was a bluebird day – you had to get those tires off fast, or you’d be fined for jagging up the road with the vehicular version of track spikes.

Vermin took me all over California, I felt like a stunt driver tearing up and down those crazy-ass hills of San Francisco. I could parallel park it anywhere. My calves were awesome after hopping on-and-off, on-and-off that clutch relentlessly in Los Angeles traffic sludge during my college years.

I locked myself out of it covering a drug bust in Compton for a reporting class. It was an easy car to break back into though, with the help of friendly Crip.

The next two cars I bought during the years I was muscling my way into a newspaper world I had neither the pedigree nor cunning for were also manual transmissions. A Jetta and a Miata.

I got the Jetta on a student deal — $99/month, $0 down lease for new college graduates — when I moved across the country to work at a New Jersey tabloid. The Philadelphia car salesman with a pornstache asked me if I’m gonna root for “da Iggles” now that I’m on the east coast. What the fuck are iggles?

That car turned out to be a financially disastrous move because I logged a shitton more miles on it than the lease allowed.

The tabloid didn’t pay generous mileage, even when they sent me on two round trip drives all the way to Seaside Park on a murder story one day because I forgot to check the city dump for her body on the first trip.

Downshifting through fast passes and weaves on the turnpike, cruising on the stretches through the Pine Barrens, trying to spot Woody Allen near Soon Yi Previn’s dorm room at Drew University, joining the search party for Megan Kanka, the car and the clutch endured.

When I moved to New Orleans to work at the Times-Picayune, it went on to deliver me to hundreds of crime scenes, where I negotiated around potholes with the handheld police scanner screaming “34-S! A 34-S” from the cupholder. That was police code for a shooting. Nimble and fast, it my goal to get there before the ambulance. Sometimes I did.

Then I drove the car back north — this time a married woman with two dogs hairing up the backseat — to take a job as a police reporter for The Washington Post.

My husband totaled that car soon after I arrived, slamming it into a median outside the Department of Labor.

Probably out of more spite than vanity, I used my new, big-job money to buy my impractical dream car – a Miata.

He didn’t fit, his bald head smacked by bugs when I had the top down. He said it felt like driving in a cat food can.

“Then don’t drive it,” I told him. Mission accomplished. He stuck to his massive, equally impractical Eddie Bauer Expedition. It wasn’t a stick shift.

When I finally gave up the convertible, I was eight months pregnant with my firstborn and every exit looked like grandma struggling to get out of a low-slung beach chair in the sand.

“Does it come in a stick shift?” I asked the car dealership guy, when we finally went the minivan route.

“We’d have to order it special, m’am,” the guy said, eyerolling. He’d seen hundreds of me before, fattened with baby, convinced driving a minivan was the thing that would make us uncool. We were never that cool.

All our cars were automatic transmissions after that. It’s all we could handle.

I had little control over my drive or my life in those years. It was big boys, a big man, a big job and a big car that navigated me through each long day.

I was driven by school schedules, lacrosse and hockey practices, away games, carpools, roadtrips, performances, class camping trips. I didn’t get to decide when I would downshift or cruise.

The minivan was my glass-enclosed nerve center, perfect for doing radio hits, interviews, filing columns or packing it in the back for a quick nap during their practices.

Had I been driving a stick, I couldn’t frantically text or edit or respond to editors while driving. (I know, I’m evil.) The automatic transmission was the only logical choice.

When we visited family in the Czech Republic, there was always an extra charge to rent a car with an automatic transmission. Of course I declined. I’m cheap – I recycle Ziploc bags. Plus, it was back to stick shift time.

It was only on vacation when I had all the control over our schedules, our meals, our destinations…the transmission.

On one getaway I had a bout of extreme hubris – the middle-aged mom version of late-in-life skydiving, I suppose – and finally faced one of my great, driving fears. I rented a car in a left-side country.

My younger son and I took a short trip to Dublin. We wanted to see the Irish coast and didn’t want a tour bus.

The car was tiny, tinny and of course a manual.

“Would you prefer an automatic?” the rental lass asked, a little judgily.

I hesitated for a beat.

I’m one of those righties with an utterly useless left hand. Would it handle a stick shift while the rest of my brain is fighting decades of muscle memory to drive on the left?

“Nah, I’m good,” I fronted.

I hit so many fucking things.

The constant thwack-thwack-thwack of the small car mowing over those plastic pylons along the country roads sent my son into gut-busting laughs over and over again. I stalled many times. I wasn’t ready for that much control. Yet.

The older son left for college in a dying car his grandparents gave him. My dad didn’t have to teach him to drive the automatic. Thanks be to Hergot for that. But he did write the oil type and air flow instructions in Sharpie on the fabric headliner.

The second son took over our little Bronco Sport because it fit his drum kit, then he left for college.

The Washington Post decided they didn’t want local columnists anymore, so I didn’t need to have a mobile office to file a dispatch from a riot or Chesapeake Tidewater lands or a mobile health clinic in Virginia coal country.

“I wouldn’t mind learning to drive a stick shift,” the older son said a while ago. He’s becoming a car guy, spending hours online looking at Honda Civics to mod.

He’s ready to have more control, to decide when to downshift without braking and when to sit back and cruise. I hear ya, kid.

Me too.

My husband and I were down to sharing his Ford F-150, which I hate driving in the city. I hit everything with its stupid wide-wing sideview mirrors and hold my breath when I hand it back over to him, fearing he’d see the latest ding or crack.

The attendants at the parking garage beneath The Washington Post laughed when they saw my eyes barely above the steering wheel, roaring in. They acted like the Dulles ground crew, arm-signalling me through the tight, underground maze. Eventually, they gave up and just sent me to their emergency corner spot, moving aside the orange cone that reserved it. I gave the guy a $20 every couple days for this favor.

My next car was going to be small. Teeny fucking tiny. And it was time for the next car.

I couldn’t afford to add a car note to our finances the same year we’re paying two college tuitions. Plus I really don’t have a dream car for this new chapter. I have no idea what my life is going to look like in the next few years, a period of weird instability.

For 20 years, my car had existed to serve my children and their busy lives. It felt unnatural to go back to Miata thinking. It had to be a stop gap.

But wait. If the kid wants to learn to drive a stick, wouldn’t I be doing something for him if I bought one?

It was one of the things I wanted for my children. They would know how to change a tire, work in the food service industry, cook a decent meal, work a chopsaw, do some basic plumbing, ski down a mountain, gut a fish and drive a stick shift.

If I bought a stick shift so that the boys can learn to drive it over their college break, I’m still selflessly mothering, right? Still working on that checklist. (The fish thing is going to happen this summer, guys.)

So the search began. Parameters:

• Under 80,000 miles

• Under $7,000

• Manual Transmission

• Sunroof (the “Miata” indulgence)

And I was in luck. Tons of cheap stick shifts are sitting on used car lots for hundreds of days.

“I think he bought this one by mistake,” the harried manager of a barbed-wire used car lot in North Philly told us.

I found a lot of toy-car Fiats in my online search.

“Fix It Again Tomorrow?” my husband snarked.

The market also had loads of Mini Coopers, the official empty nester car of women who wear statement eyeglasses and black clothes.

(Okay. Still not cool.)

The Clubman in Philly was relatively low mileage and so cheap I could pay for it in cash. It’s a 2014 with some dents and scrapes. It’s not a two-seater, there’s room in the back for a short ride with my giant kids. The seats fold down to accommodate a modest Home Depot run. It has a CD player and no back-up camera.

“It’s like a Hershey’s kiss,” that North Philly woman said.

Or rootbeer. A bold color after decades of black and grey cars.

“What color is it?” asked the whipsmart daughters of a cousin in Philly, when we told them why we were in town. “Chocolate kiss,” I said.

“Or…poop!,” the older one said.

Fine. Poop.

It’s zippy, agile, and it feels good to downshift into turns. I challenge myself on every drive to lay off the brake. I had spasms of nostalgia on the first drive home, reviving my mind’s wiring back to the stick shift days. The ambition, the fear, the exhilaration.

It’s a little terrifying. And I’m going to stall once in a while. And I can’t really zone out when I’m cruising. But there’s no Hamm’s in this car, no one is yelling at me and nothing is going to be automatic.