Titters, Tears and True Confessions

Students shopped for designer clothes or stole glances at Cameron Diaz at the cafe. Recreational drug use was openly described. A gay man came out of the closet.

It was comedy traffic school, a truly democratic forum where young actors and screenwriters come together with social workers, hairdressers and the chauffeurs of the rich in one of the last genuinely public spaces left in status-layered West Hollywood.

“Welcome, violators. Your punishment has started,” our comedian/instructor said with airy scorn at precisely 9 a.m. Sunday morning. He rattled off the requisite ban on drug and alcohol use during class. “Hope you had your fix,” he added brightly.

And in another nod to local cultural sensitivities, he reminded us that it was National Coming Out Day, “the day parents just let the phone ring and ring and ring.”

“I came out years ago,” yawned the best-looking male offender, a weary bronze sophisticate in a polyester dogtooth shirt who sprawled in his chair with the relaxed elegance of a Gentlemen’s Quarterly sportswear layout.

*

Traffic school comedians have a rap for being comedy never-has-beens on the way down. Our teacher made sure we knew he was on the way up. That he had entertained with singers Chris Isaak and Boz Scaggs recently in San Francisco. That he was hoping to kiss off the traffic school racket tout de suite. Until then, none of us were safe from his wit. (Except, as it turned out, students getting regular television roles. What goes around comes around.)

“Don’t worry, Cliff, you can laugh. It won’t make you gay!” he boomed at a pumped-up young man who shifted uneasily in his seat during some particularly raunchy jokes.

“So you’re getting a master’s in traffic school!” he cackled at a young repeat offender in a polka-dot jumpsuit, with matching red fingernails and toenails. (He let up when she turned out to be a digital sound mixer.)

Next came a neo-Stalinist self-criticism session. We introduced ourselves--”Hi. I’m a violator”--and described our infractions (“Once you admit it, you’re on the road to recovery!”). The teacher rated us.

“All you men ever did was illegal right turns,” he sniffed disdainfully. “Some testosterone in this room.”

Then came a group confession of unusual things people had done in their cars, yielding the standard (conceiving a child) to the pathetic (driving around the block backward to take mileage off the odometer).

At lunch, everyone grabbed their cell phones and half the class bolted to the designer atelier next door for the annual sale. The rest walked to the overpriced bistro, where Ms. Diaz was twirling her pasta with the lead singer of an alternative rock band and other personalities whose names my classmates rattled off with startling authority.

It was all a mere prelude to our descent into the darker emotions of the post-lunch Traffic Jeopardy game.

*

The competition over traffic law edification became a proxy for the issues that trigger the deeply neurotic emotions psychotherapists so love (working in a newsroom, I’m familiar with this phenomenon) and encounter groups thrive on.

“Which one of those people are you sleeping with?” a violator-contestant in an exquisite black silk pantsuit and a leopard-print scarf snarled at the teacher when he ruled in favor of a competing team.

“So that’s how you think people move up in the world,” he retorted disapprovingly.

The real emotional roller-coaster came with the traffic horror stories.

The stunning blonde who had politely endured being the butt of some mildly sexist ditz jokes told in a soft voice how a pickup made an illegal turn through a crosswalk and sent her crashing head-first through the windshield. As she slid into the street, the driver floored his truck and drove away, leaving her to undergo massive plastic surgery.

The teacher told of a student who had wept in class as she related how a drunk driver left her two teenagers paralyzed from the waist down. And there was the man who had been pushed into an oncoming truck by a rear-end collision--because, while stopped, he had dangerously set his wheels to the left in anticipation of a turn. His wife died and the truck driver sued him.

The teacher told, too, of how his brother stayed later than he at a party and drove into a tree on the way home, dying instantly. “My mother’s scream was deafening,” he said quietly. “My father had to hold her down.”

Not to mention the careers short-circuited, dream jobs lost, to revoked driving privileges.

Please don’t drive under the influence, he implored. Be safe, humane drivers. And we, emotionally wrung, were ready to swear under oath that we would never do anything wrong in our cars again. Some people had tears in their eyes.

Our teacher began to open up, delicately revealing that he is gay (“I don’t want the tabloids to out me someday when I’m famous”), that he had joined a gay bowling league to find a steady partner.

We scaled down from this emotional climax by renaming the traffic signs we had studied.

“White Trash Zone” was what we called the one with the trailer. A complicated one with an arrow became “The Sign Formerly Known as Merge.”

The teacher recalled the wittiest mock responses to his traffic test. To the multiple-choice question, “If you become angry or upset before you drive, what should you do?” a Berkeley class wrote: “Roll a big one.”

It would be trite to say that we all felt a little closer.

But it is true that by the time our high-styled Swedish classmate disappeared into the enormous black Suburban with smoked windows, we saw each other with new eyes.

We had laughed together, we had vented, we had confessed. For a long moment, we thought of exchanging phone numbers.

But instead we got in our cars and drove away, past the nightclubs, past the hedges expensively trimmed to resemble Noguchi rock sculptures.

Because this is, after all, L.A.