I have an Italian friend who drives like he’s in a death race with every other car on the road, which is to say he drives like most of his countrymen. For the past few days, he was at the wheel as three of us made our way from Sorrento to the hill town of Fiuggi, and he bore down on every car in front of us at a speed that suggested he either did not see it or planned to drive straight through it. At the last possible moment, he’d swerve around, weaving in and out of traffic while everyone else on the road was weaving in and out of traffic, a kind of high-speed square dance in which nobody signals and everybody somehow knows the steps. It’s sort of impressive, in a terrifying way. Unless you’re a nervous passenger.
My other friend, an American, who sat in the passenger seat, is a nervous passenger in the best of circumstances, but these were, unfortunately for him, Italian circumstances. His right foot kept stamping on an imaginary brake. His hand found the grab handle above the door and never let go while his other hand pressed hard against the dash. Somewhere just north of Naples, I thought he was going to dissolve into a puddle of sweat and cortisol.
I was in the back seat. And, honestly, I was fine with it all.
Which is not to say I’m a brave or reckless person. I’m not: I’m a fully insured adult who avoids any kind of physical danger (mostly by avoiding any kind of physical effort), and when I’m at the wheel, I keep the car at the speed of traffic. About the most reckless thing I do is smoke a few cigars a week.
So why wasn’t I clutching the armrest and holding my breath, such as my friend in the passenger seat? My hypothesis is this: Fear in a car is a job, and it only needs one person. Once my friend in the front seat took that position, it was filled. My services weren’t required, so I could sit back and look at the scenery, or at least at the parts of the scenery that weren’t rushing toward us at alarming speed. And if you’re not the one panicking, then you’re the one watching the other guy panic. In other words, you’re watching a show about a guy panicking, which turns the whole experience into a comedy.
I suspect a lot of life works this way. Every family has one person who worries about money, so everyone else can spend it without thinking. Every office has one person who panics about the deadline, which frees up the rest of the staff to go to lunch and complain merrily. We don’t call these arrangements cowardice or courage. We call them division of labor. Someone has to be afraid, and if you’re lucky, it’s not you, and if you’re really lucky, it’s someone who is funny to watch freak out.
LET’S LEARN FROM THE YOUNGER GENERATION ON DITCHING SMARTPHONES
At the halfway point, we stopped at an Autogrill for coffee, and I offered to switch seats with my friend, which is a sign that I’m not a completely thoughtless person. But he shook his head. “I want to see it coming,” he said, grimly. “I don’t want to just suddenly realize I’m flying through the windshield.”
Which makes sense, I guess. Fear wants a view. In the backseat, he’d have had all the terror but none of the details. I, on the other hand, have no interest in seeing anything coming. If I’m going through the windshield, I’d rather find out the way I find out about most things — late and secondhand. My friend has a tragic view of life — he knows something bad is going to happen, and he wants to know its exact ETA. I, on the other hand, have a comic view of life — I want it all to come as a surprise, like an open manhole I don’t notice because I’m too busy looking at my phone. So we finished our drive in our assigned places: tragedy in the passenger seat, comedy in the back.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.