“Readers looking for insights and laughs will not be disappointed by Driving Like Crazy . . . [it] is a ride worth taking, even for readers who don’t know an oil pan from a frying pan.” —Washington Times

“Driving Like Crazy isn’t just a bound collection of greatest hits. P.J. has written new lead-ins to each story that offer fresh meat even for those who think they’ve read it all before . . . This book is a must-read.” —Automobile Magazine

“Reading O’Rourke can be like being dragged over a rocky field by a runaway ox on crystal meth—a wild and bumpy ride. His is a cartoonish vision of life, unapologetically if not joyously puerile, with enough hyperbolic volatility pumped into every paragraph to explode the Hindenburg all over again . . . For the automotive Walter Mittys of the world, who dream of an outlaw life on the road and identify more with the peace-disturbers than the peacemakers, it’s definitely something worth keeping under the pillow.” —Bruce McCall, Globe and Mail

“An insightful look not just at the American love affair with cars, but also at one man’s changing outlook on life, all of it fast-paced and over the top . . . Even readers who know nothing about cars and motorcycles will appreciate the joy and hilarity of this book.” —Booklist

“Never in neutral, O’Rourke offers laughter on wheels.” —Publishers Weekly

“Fasten your seatbelt, O’Rourke is about to provide us with some rocket-reading essays about life in the fast lane, the slow lane, and most of the time, no lane at all . . . This is not your parent’s armchair travel book, but be sure to make it yours.” —Ohioana Quarterly

“This book is a monument to slash-and-burn living, glorifying old cars whose miles-per-gallon ratings read like shoes sizes and indulgent off-road races conducted in fragile terrain. The thing is, you’ll hardly hear the cries of the rare lizards and cactuses being ground to extinction under O’Rourke’s tires because you’ll be laughing too hard.” —New York Times Book Review

I mean, aside from the teenage lovely pulling off her tube top in the next seat over. Ignoring that for a moment, let’s look at the psychological factors conducive to placing positive emotional values on the sensory end product of experientially produced excitation of the central nervous system and smacking into a lamppost. Is that any way to have fun? How would your mother feel if she knew you were doing this? She’d cry. She really would. And that’s how you know it’s fun. Anything that makes your mother cry is fun. Sigmund Freud wrote all about this. It’s a well-known fact.

Of course, it’s a shame to waste young lives behaving this way—speeding around all tanked up with your feet hooked in the steering wheel while your date crawls around on the floor mat opening zippers with her teeth and pounding on the accelerator with an empty liquor bottle. But it wouldn’t be taking a chance if you weren’t risking something. And even if it is a shame to waste young lives behaving this way, it is definitely cooler than risking old lives behaving this way. I mean, so what if some fifty-eight-year-old butt head gets a load on and starts playing Death Race 2000 in the rush-hour traffic jam? What kind of chance is he taking? He’s just waiting around to see what kind of cancer he gets anyway. But if young, talented you, with all of life’s possibilities at your fingertips, you and the future Cheryl Tiegs there, so fresh, so beautiful—if the two of you stake your handsome heads on a single roll of the dice in life’s game of stop-the-semi—now that’s taking chances! Which is why old people rarely risk their lives. It’s not because they’re chicken, they just have too much dignity to play for small stakes.

Now a lot of people say to me, “Hey, P.J., you like to drive fast. Why not join a responsible organization, such as the Sports Car Club of America, and enjoy participation in sports car racing? That way you could drive as fast as you wish while still engaging in a well-regulated spectator sport that is becoming more popular each year.” No thanks. In the first place, if you ask me, those guys are a bunch of tweedy old barf mats who like to talk about things like what necktie they wore to Alberto Ascari’s funeral. And in the second place, they won’t let me drive drunk. They expect me to go out there and smash into things and roll over on the roof and catch fire and burn to death when I’m sober. They must think I’m crazy. That stuff scares me. I have to get completely shit-faced to even think about driving fast. How can you have a lot of exciting thrills when you’re so terrified that you wet yourself all the time? That’s not fun. It’s just not fun to have exciting thrills when you’re scared. Take the heroes of the Iliad, for instance. They really had some exciting thrills, and were they scared? No. They were drunk. Every chance they could get. And so am I, and I’m not going out there and having a horrible car wreck until somebody brings me a cocktail.

Also, it’s important to be drunk because being drunk keeps your body all loose, and that way, if you have an accident or anything, you’ll sort of roll with the punches and not get banged up so bad. For example, there was this guy I heard about who was really drunk and was driving through the Adirondacks. He got sideswiped by a bus and went head-on into another car, which knocked him off a bridge, and he plummeted 150 feet into a ravine. I mean, it killed him and everything, but if he hadn’t been so drunk and loose, his body probably would have been banged up a lot worse—and you can imagine how much more upset his wife would have been when she went down to the morgue to identify him.

Even more important than being drunk, however, is having the right car. You have to get a car that handles really well. This is extremely important, and there’s a lot of debate on this subject—about what kind of car handles best. Some say a front-engined car; some say a rear-engined car. I say a rented car. Nothing handles better than a rented car. You can go faster, turn corners sharper, and put the transmission into reverse while going forward at a higher rate of speed in a rented car than in any other kind. You can also park without looking, and you can use the trunk as an ice chest. Another thing about a rented car is that it’s an all-terrain vehicle. Mud, snow, water, woods—you can take a rented car anywhere. True, you can’t always get it back, but that’s not your problem, is it?

Yet there’s more to a good-handling car than just making sure it doesn’t belong to you. It has to be big. It’s really hard for a girl to get her clothes off inside a small car, and this is one of the most important features of car handling. Also, what kind of drugs does it have in it? Most people like to drive on speed or cocaine with plenty of whiskey mixed in. This gives you the confidence you want and need for plowing through red lights and passing trucks on the right. But don’t neglect downs and ’ludes and codeine cough syrup either. It’s hard to beat the heavy depressants for high-speed spinouts, backing into trees, and a general feeling of not giving two fucks about man and his universe.

Overall, though, it’s the bigness of the car that counts the most. Because when something bad happens in a big car—accidentally speeding through the middle of a gang of unruly young people who have been taunting you in a drive-in restaurant, for instance—it happens very far away, way out at the end of your fenders. It’s like a civil war in Africa; you know, it doesn’t really concern you too much. On the other hand, when something happens in a little bitty car it happens right in your face. You get all involved in it and have to give everything a lot of thought. Driving around in a little bitty car is like being one of those sensitive girls who writes poetry. Life is just too much to bear. You end up staying at home in your bedroom and thinking up sonnets that don’t get published till you die, which will be real soon if you keep driving around in little bitty cars like that.

Let’s inspect some of the basic maneuvers of drunken driving while you’ve got crazy girls who are on drugs with you. Look for these signs when picking up crazy girls: pierced ears with five or six earrings in them, unusual shoes, white lipstick, extreme thinness, hair that’s less than an inch long, or clothing made of chrome and leather. Stay away from girls who cry a lot or who look like they get pregnant easily or have careers. They may want to do weird stuff in cars, but only in the backseat, and it’s really hard to steer from back there. Besides, they’ll want to get engaged right away afterward. But the other kinds of girls—there’s no telling what they’ll do. I used to know this girl who weighed about ninety pounds and dressed in skirts that didn’t even cover her underwear, when she wore any. I had this beat-up old Mercedes and we were off someplace about fifty miles from nowhere on Christmas Eve in a horrible sleet storm. The road was a mess, all curves and big ditches, and I was blotto, and the car kept slipping off the pavement and sliding sideways. And just when I’d hit a big patch of glare ice and was frantically spinning the wheel trying to stay out of the oncoming traffic, she said, “I shaved my crotch today, wanna feel?”

That’s really true. And then about half an hour later the head gasket blew up and we had to spend I don’t know how long in this dirt-ball motel, although the girl walked all the way to the liquor store through about a mile of slush and got all kinds of wine and did weird stuff with the bottlenecks later. So it was sort of okay, except that the garage where I left the Mercedes burned down and I used the insurance money to buy a motorcycle.

Now, girls who like motorcycles will do anything. I mean, really, anything you can think of. But it’s just not the same. For one thing, it’s hard to drink while you’re riding a motorcycle—there’s no place to set your glass. And cocaine’s out of the question. And personally, I find that pot makes me too sensitive. You smoke some pot and the first thing you know you’re pulling over to the side of the road and taking a break to dig the gentle beauty of the sky’s vast panorama, the slow, luxurious interplay of sun and clouds, the lulling trill of breezes midst leafy tree branches—and what kind of fun is that? Besides, it’s tough to “get it on” with a chick (I mean in the biblical sense) and still make all the fast curves unless you let her take the handlebars with her pants off and come on doggy style or something, which is harder than it sounds; also, pantless girls on motorcycles attract the highway patrol, so usually you don’t end up doing anything until you’re both off the bike, and by then you may be in the hospital. Like I was after this old lady pulled out in front of me in an Oldsmobile, and the girl I was with still wanted to do anything you can think of, but there was a doctor there and he was squirting antiseptic all over me and combing little bits of gravel out of my face with a wire brush, and I just couldn’t get into it. So take it from me and don’t get a motorcycle. Get a big car.

Usually, most fast-driving maneuvers that don’t require crazy girls call for use of the steering wheel, so be sure your car is equipped with power steering. Without power steering, turning the wheel is a lot like work, and if you wanted work you’d get a job. All steering should be done with the index finger. Then, when you’re done doing all the steering you want to do, just pull your finger out of there and the wheel will come right back to wherever it wants to. It’s that simple. Be sure to do an extra lot of steering when going into a driveway or turning sharp corners. And here’s another important tip: always roll the window down before throwing bottles out, and don’t try to throw them through the windshield unless the car is parked and you’re outside it.

Okay, now say you’ve been on a six-day drunk and you’ve just made a bet that you can back up all the way to Cleveland, plus you’ve got a buddy who’s getting a blow job on the trunk lid. Well, let’s face it, if that’s the way you’re going to act, sooner or later you’ll have an accident. This much is true. But that doesn’t mean you should sit back and just let accidents happen to you. No, you have to go out and cause them yourself. That way you’re in control of the situation.

You know, it’s a shame, but a lot of people have the wrong idea about accidents. For one thing, they don’t hurt nearly as much as you’d think. That’s because you’re in shock and can’t feel pain or, if you aren’t in shock, you’re dead, and that doesn’t hurt at all so far as we know. Another thing is that they make great stories. I’ve got this friend—a prominent man in the automotive industry—who flipped his MG TF back in the fifties and slid on his head for a couple hundred yards, then had to spend a year with no eyelids and a steel pin through his cheekbones while his face was being rebuilt. Sure, it wasn’t much fun at the time, but you should hear him tell about it now. What a fabulous tale, especially during dinner. Besides, it’s not all smashing glass and spurting blood, you understand. Why, a good sideswipe can be an almost religious experience. The sheet metal doesn’t break or crunch or anything—it flexes and gives way as the two vehicles come together with a rushing liquid pulse as if two giant sharks of steel were mating in the perpetual night of the sea primordial. I mean, if you’re on enough drugs. Also, sometimes you see a lot of really pretty lights in your head.

One sure way to cause an accident is with your basic “moonshiner’s” or “bootlegger’s” turn. Whiz down the road at about sixty or seventy, throw the gearshift into neutral, cut the wheel to the left, and hit the emergency brake with one good wallop while holding out the brake release with your left hand. This’ll send you spinning around in a perfect 180-degree turn right into a culvert or a fast-moving tractor-trailer rig. (The bootlegger’s turn can be done on dry pavement, but it works best on top of loose gravel or schoolchildren.) Or, when you’ve moved around backward, you can then spin the wheel to the right and keep on going until you’ve come around a full 360 degrees and are headed back the same way you were going; still, it probably would have been easier to have just kept going that way in the first place and not have done anything at all, unless you were with somebody you wanted to impress—your probation officer, for instance.

An old friend of mine named Joe Schenkman happens to have just written me a letter about another thing you can do to wreck a car. Joe’s on a little vacation up in Vermont (and will be until he finds out what the statute of limitations on attempted vehicular homicide is). He wrote to tell me about a fellow he met up there, saying:

. . . This guy has rolled (deliberately) over thirty cars (and not just by his own account—the townfolks back him up on this story), inheriting only a broken nose (three times) and a slightly black-and-blue shoulder for all this. What you do, see, is you go into a moonshiner’s turn, but you get on the brakes and stay on them. Depending on how fast you’re going, you roll proportionately. Four or five rolls is decent. Going into the spin, you have one hand on the seat and the other firmly on the roof so you’re sprung in tight. As you feel the roof give on the first roll, you slip your seat hand under the dash (of the passenger side, as you’re thrown hard over in that direction to begin with) and pull yourself under it. And here you simply sit it out, springing yourself tight with your whole body, waiting for the thunder to die. Naturally, it helps to be drunk, and if you have a split second’s doubt or hesitation through any of this you die.

This Schenkman himself is no slouch of a driver, I may say. Unfortunately, his strong suit is driving in New York City, a place that has a great number of unusual special conditions, which we just don’t have the time or the space to get into right here (except to note that the good part is how it’s real easy to scare old ladies in new Cadillacs and the bad part is that Negroes actually do carry knives, not to mention Puerto Ricans, and everybody else you hit turns out to be a lawyer or married to somebody in the mob). However, Joe is originally from the South, and it was down there that he discovered huffing glue and sniffing industrial solvents and such. These give you a really spectacular hallucinatory type of a high where you think, for instance, that you’re driving through an overpass guardrail and landing on a freight-train flatcar and being hauled to Shreveport and loaded into a container ship headed for Liberia with a crew of homosexual Lebanese, only to come to find that it’s true. Joe is a commercial artist who enjoys jazz music and horse racing. His favorite color is blue.

There’s been a lot of discussion about what kind of music to listen to while staring doom square in the eye and not blinking unless you get some grit under your contacts. Watch out for the fellow who tunes his FM to the classical station. He thinks a little Rimsky-Korsakov makes things more dramatic—like in a foreign movie. That’s pussy style. This kind of guy’s idea of a fast drive is a seventy-five-mile-an-hour cruise up to the summer cottage after one brandy and soda. The true skid-mark artist prefers something cheery and upbeat—”Night on Disco Mountain” or “Boogie Oogie Oogie” or whatever it is that the teenage lovely wants to shake her buns to. Remember her? So what do you care what’s on the fucking tape deck? The high, hot whine of the engine, the throaty pitch of the exhaust, the wind in your beer can, the gentle slurping noises from her little bud-red lips—that’s all the music your ears need, although side two of the first Velvet Underground album is nice if you absolutely insist. And no short jaunts either. For the maniacal high-speed driver endurance is everything. Especially if you’ve used that ever popular pickup line, “Wanna go to Mexico?” Especially if you’ve used it somewhere like Boston. Besides, teenage girls can go a long, long time without sleep, and believe me so can the police and their parents. So just keep your foot on it. There’s no reason not to. There’s no reason not to keep going forever, really. I had this friend who drove a whole shitload of people up from Oaxaca to Cincinnati one time, nonstop. I mean, he stopped for gas but he wouldn’t even let anybody get out. He made them all piss out the windows, and he says that it was worth the entire drive just to see a girl try to piss out the window of a moving car.

Get a fat girlfriend so you’ll have plenty of amphetamines and you’ll never have to stop at all. The only problem you’ll run into is that after you’ve been driving for two or three days you start to see things in the road, great big scaly things twenty-feet high with nine legs. But there are very few great big scaly things with nine legs in America anymore, so you can just drive right through them because they probably aren’t really there, and if they are really there you’ll be doing the country a favor by running them over.

Yes, but where does it all end? Where does a crazy life like this lead? To death, you say. Look at all the people who’ve died in car wrecks: Albert Camus, Jayne Mansfield, Jackson Pollock, Tom Paine. Well, Tom Paine didn’t actually die in a car wreck, but he probably would have if he’d lived a little later. He was that kind of guy. Anyway, death is always the first thing that leaps into everybody’s mind—sudden violent death at an early age. If only it were that simple. God, we could all go out in a blaze of flaming aluminum alloys formulated specially for the Porsche factory race effort like James Dean did! No ulcers, no hemorrhoids, no bulging waistlines, soft dicks, or false teeth . . . Bash! Kaboom! Watch this space for paperback reprint rights auction and movie option sale! But that’s not the way it goes. No. What actually happens is you fall for that teenage lovely in the next seat, fall for her like a ton of Trojans, and before you know it you’re married and have teenage lovelies of your own—getting felt up in a Pontiac Trans Am this very minute, no doubt—plus a six-figure mortgage, a liver the size of the Bronx, and a Country Squire that’s never seen the sweet side of sixty.

It’s hard to face the truth but I suppose you yourself realize that if you’d had just a little more courage, just a little more strength of character, you could have been dead by now. No such luck.