It’s true. It’s a genetic impossibility and it has nothing at all to do with Sammy Hagar. It all became clear after an exhaustive scientific study.

My truck failed the smog check – the legally-sanctioned, ecological farce of a boondoggle known as the fuckin’ communist California smog check. It was turning into an ordeal so I decided to get some advice from the experts, that is, I went to the bar.

Now the last thing I want to do is talk to other men about cars. The size of your engine, the old classic that you had to sell because of the divorce, the time you did 107 MPH on the New Jersey Turnpike … couldn’t care fuckin’ less. I do of course like to stereotype people based on what they drive and talk about drivers behind their backs but that’s where I draw the line. Now I was engaged in reasonably serious auto-shop banter with Larry Lugnut and Corey Carburetor and Freddie Fuel Injection and it quickly became very clear why most men drink in bars without female companionship.

It seems every drunk in every bar suddenly gets axle grease under his nails when the subject turns to the smog check.

“Hey, man, what you need to do is get those computer monitors to reset, here’s what you do … drive at exactly sixty-one miles per hour from here to Needles.”

“No man, it’s sixty-two miles an hour and as you’re driving through Riverside, roll down the passenger window two-and-a-half inches …”

“Ya, ya, and when you get to Needles pull into the Sonic and order the chili fries and a grape ice cream slush and then climb back into the truck through the back seat and switch the satellite radio to Hair Nation and the computer monitors should reset and you’ll pass the smog test…”

Oh boy!

Seventeen different dudes had curious admissions on the topic of emissions including one who insisted that the only foolproof way get the smog gods to smile again was to drive along Route 66 until you see the Pocahontas Motor Lodge … then park in front of cabin #9 and let the truck idle until it runs out of gas … and then have it towed to the Conoco station and fill the tank with exactly seven dollars and eighteen cents of 92 octane.

There was a lot of automotive witchcraft, a tone of alcohol-fueled urban legend, but almost every one of these guys said – from the man who goes out to smoke after every three sips of beer down to the obese biker drinking Jack Daniels and Diet Coke – that driving a decent stretch at a speed somewhere between 55 and 65 MHP may do the trick.

You surely know that just reaching this magical smog speed on a local freeway is a challenge most days and maintaining it for anything beyond a hot second would take a highway miracle. Still, you could wake up at the crack of early and find a stretch of road that would allow for the steady, fast-but-not-too-fast hocus pocus that could solve the smog-check blues – if only you had an ounce of self-control and maturity.

♦

It was 6:15 AM. 17.2 miles to work. A congestion-free portion of an Orange County commuter artery. I deftly merge into traffic … 55, 59, 60, 62 MPH. I’m in the slow lane and I’m gonna break the code to the smog-check riddle by skillfully maintaining my speed for the next fifteen minutes.

But people are passing me at an astonishing rate. Not some of the cars, ALL of the cars. They’re blowing by me, passing me and then cutting me off, looking over their shoulder at me as they speed by like I was some granny in a Ford Falcon on my way to a Quilting Club meeting.

After a couple of miles, I can no longer take it. I can’t look the other way, I can’t be that guy hovering below the legal speed limit, who gets passed, gets shown the Bird by teenager girls in Camrys.

I can’t let the smog check be the boss of me. I can’t let some fake-ass test ruin my morning and keep me from my 80-miles-per-hour destiny; I refuse to let the prospect of successful vehicle registration turn me into the guy that gets cut off when I know I was born to be the cut-er-off-er.

The only way that driving is even remotely tolerable is to make it a race; to abandon all use of the blinker, to never allow competing drivers into your lane, to judge the 65-MPH-and-under crowd as inferior human beings.

And so, it appears, I shall never pass another smog check. I’ll be a vehicle registration fugitive, a lawless car owner on the DMV’s most-wanted list.

Some of us were born to live on the fringe of society. I can accept it.

Photo credit: davidciani on Best Running / CC BY-NC-SA