Oh, What Weird Fantasies We Weave on Freeways

You’re driving down the freeway. You look over at the next lane. The driver is combing her hair, scanning the Thomas Bros. Guide or talking back to the radio. That’s normal. That you can understand.

You can even understand the guy in the BMW shouting into the car phone he’s holding with one hand, flipping off the Toyota driver with the other and steering with his knees.

But what about the man all by himself, face contorted, shouting insults at no one present and gesticulating wildly with his hands?

Or the intent young woman in the slow lane scouring the shoulder like a Pinto-owning bird of prey?

Or the young man holding the crystal around his neck and chanting fervently at the car ahead?

What on earth is going on here?

Welcome to “Freeway Fantasies--the Secret Life of Commuters,” L.A.’s longest-running roadshow appearing daily on a freeway near you.

Contrary to the common wisdom that freeway driving is nothing but unrelieved stress and heart-pounding tension, driving on a freely flowing, uncongested freeway requires at best only 5% of one’s attention, says California Highway Patrol Sgt. Gordon Graham. Consequently, for many people the daily commute is a time to let their demons run free and their fantasies bloom.

“Sometimes I pretend I’m not really going to work,” says Paula d’Autremont, 39, of Tujunga, a personnel worker for the Army Reserves. “I’m going to the Bel Age Hotel for cocktails with Warren”--as in Beatty.

“It’s an opportunity for unconscious messages to be heard,” says Richard Docter, a clinical psychologist at Cal State Northridge. All those ancient unresolved issues bubble to the surface again, giving people a second chance to “re-fight battles and to gain mastery.”

That’s why you see a guy arguing with himself and waving his arms. But he’s not talking back to his boss or standing up to his wife: He’s reliving a confrontation he lost 15 years ago. This time, though, alone in his car, he wins a uncontested knockout with his stinging comebacks and stunning replies.

Or else you glance over at the driver in the next lane and suddenly you know from his sly smile that he’s not driving a faded blue Honda--it’s a Sopwith Camel in the skies over World War I France.

“They have a fantasy there is a machine gun in the grillwork,” says Roderic Gorney, a UCLA psychiatrist. Or a bazooka in the wheel well. Sometimes they use the hood ornament as a gun sight.

“They line people up and launch a couple of blasts,” says the CHP’s Graham. You look over and see a middle-aged Walter Mitty gripping the steering wheel for dear life. But in his mind, he’s sighting down that speck on his windshield to fire a heat-seeking missile up the tailpipe of an arrogant Lincoln 80 yards ahead.

David Kohnhorst, 75, a retired radio comedy writer from Sunland, takes pleasure in spotting people in powerful, expensive cars and knowing that at the first opportunity the driver is going to “blow right by” his 1964 Ford Fairlane. “I know he will have to do it. I feel good in knowing that I know.”

Some people play games: You now have five seconds to pick the one car out of all the cars around you that you will have to drive the rest of your life.

Or: Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to stay ahead of that lane-changing maniac you see in your rearview mirror without increasing speed, relying instead on your superior wit and intellect.

For assistance, you might rely on this invaluable piece of freeway lore: Never switch lanes because the lane you switch to invariably slows down.

Or, this from UCLA folklorist Francis Cattermore-Tally: If you think hard enough, the car in front of you will go away.

There’s no telling what goes through people’s minds on the freeway, says Graham: “It might be a date with Heather Locklear.”

But it sure isn’t driving. That’s why the cops stand on the far side of the guardrail when writing speeding tickets. It’s not you they’re worried about--it’s all those people still on the freeway, eyes focused inward, ready at any second to plow into their parked patrol cars.

And when someone is pulled over, Graham says, most of the time the person doesn’t have a clue why.

Some people are so deep into another reality (or the next astral plane) that they drive right past their freeway ramps, whereupon they suddenly they succumb to the Boston MTA Syndrome: a pathological fear of not being able to get off the freeway.

Graham says he’ll pull over a driver for cutting across four lanes of heavy traffic, leaving other cars sliding and screeching in his wake, and when he asks why the offending driver pulled such a stunt, the answer is: “But that was my off-ramp.”

“Well, did you ever think about taking the next off-ramp?”

“No, that is my off-ramp.”

Even Kohnhorst in his 28-year-old Fairlane isn’t immune. He has such an immense dislike of being passed on the right, he says, that when he sees a car coming up fast on his right, he immediately eases over to block the lane. “I’m not going to let him get away with it,” Kohnhorst says. “It is an important neurotic phobia that I don’t like to be passed on the right.”

The truth is, most drivers are idiots, says Paula d’Autremont. They frantically change lanes to save two seconds and advance 14 feet.

“I wish that freeway shooting was like legalized hunting,” she fantasizes. “I’d take a few tires out.”