We are looking at rental cars in Switzerland, and almost all are manual rather than automatic. I used to drive a manual, but was never all that great at it. Not sure I would be much better now.

I learned the hard way, from 2 transsexual hookers on Sunset Blvd. I had just moved to LA from NY, to be with the love of my life. (She turned out to be a hooker, too, but that’s another story.) The love of my live, let’s just call her LOML for short, had an MG convertible. I had never driven a shift until I moves West and she left me with that car. It was a great little car, but I sucked using the stick shift. Especially when stopped on a hill.

There are 3 pedals you have to deal with on a stick. The brake, the clutch and the accelerator. This, of course, is all obvious to most people, but most people forget how this complicates things. On automatic transmissions you have 2 pedals. One is for GO, and one is for STOP. Anyone can handle that. Even me.

GO is one pedal. STOP is the other. Got it. I’m ready for the road.

But a manual immediately makes it 50% harder by adding a third pedal. This pedal does fuck all. By that, I mean it connects the engine to the drive shaft (or whatever it is that runs between the engine and the wheels). There’s really no reason for this except to make things more complicated. It’s like those added security buttons that unlock a door for a few seconds before you can push it open from inside the building. Except those, I suppose, are there for security reasons. The clutch is not.

The clutch is something that makes you do what all other cars do automatically. They may as well add a hand pump to cars, so you can pump the gasoline to the engine while you drive. It makes as much sense. But apparently, clutches excite some people. Like Europeans.

It doesn’t end there, because in addition to the third useless pedal, there is a stick mechanism that has to be used with the correct timing in relation to the 3 pedals. If you fuck it up, the car stalls, or suddenly lurches forward, makes a horrible grinding noise, or – worst of all – rolls back into the car behind you when you are stopped at a red light on a hill.

So I hated this little hill coming up on to Sunset from Larrabee. I always caught the red light, and I usually ground the gears trying to get going without rolling back down the hill. I think my troubles caught the attention of the locals at that corner. The only locals being some flashy looking transexual hookers. Maybe they were from Detroit, too. They had the black Southern patter tempered by Midwest industrial slang. They had short sequinned skirts. And they seemed to remember me.

I’m at the light, sweating as I wait for it to turn green, and two of these girls come and prop themselves on the hood of the car. It was a small car, and they leaned in doing all they could to distract me. And my gears, they did grind.

I do believe they helped make me a better driver, though. And one I ran into somewhat later, in that other story I was going to tell.