Doctor Driver

There’s a myth that Hollywood is made up of the most talented, most deserving people in their crafts. And while Hollywood is full of talent, that’s not exactly true.

In almost every desirable industry there’s some kind of canonized gatekeeper. If you want to be a lawyer, you have to pass the bar. If you want to be a doctor, or a cosmetologist, or a plumber, or almost anything in a desirable industry you need a license or a certificate of some kind. There’s some formal filter that limits the number of people who can walk around and claim they’re an accountant or whatever it is. But no such filter exists for Hollywood. Anyone can just decide they’re a director, or an actor, or a costume designer, and show up and tell everybody that’s what they are and what they’re here to do.

Hollywood used to have a studio system, where everyone worked for a big movie studio. The studios had internships and apprenticeships and a ladder to climb in each craft and essentially they functioned as those gatekeepers. But long before I got here the studio system fell apart and Hollywood became a town full of freelancers moving from job to job. Without a formal gatekeeping system to act as a filter an organic and terrible filter arose to replace it. It’s enforced by a lot of things, from the culture that exists here to the way the unions and productions are structured, but basically Hollywood’s “licensing agency” is to torture people. Especially talented people. No matter who you are, it’s going to take years before you can make a living, and in those years you’re going to be struggling financially. You’re going to have opportunity after opportunity right at your fingertips, ripped away from you. You’re going to feel like a failure. You’re going to feel like a loser. People who care about you are gonna be telling you you’ve made a mistake. And if you’re smart and normal, you’re going to get to the point where it just doesn’t seem worth it anymore.

There’s no precise number, but industry estimates are that ninety-some-odd percent of the people who move to Hollywood to “make it” end up going home.

So Hollywood is not made up of the most qualified. It’s made up of the most tenacious. You’ll meet all types of people across the hundreds of thousands who make up this industry, but the one thing every one of them shares is a burning ambition that won’t let them quit. And as a result, we live in a culture where no amount of success is ever enough.

I know I am a slave to that ambition.

I went to college at SUNY Binghamton in upstate New York. There were a lot of jobs on campus that students could get, but the most coveted one was driving the blue buses. Being a student gave us access to the city buses, which were pretty good, but students lived off campus in very concentrated areas and traveled to very specific parts of town to and from campus in patterns that didn’t really match what the city buses had to offer. So there was a second student run bus service with school buses painted blue, driven by Binghamton students, on routes built to be helpful to the students. Being a blue bus driver was the highest paying student job on campus, and you got to learn how to drive a big blue school bus, so it was a pretty prestigious job if you could get it.

The only year I lived off campus, I happened to live right on a city bus route that took me to campus, so I never really took the blue bus.

Binghamton gets exceptionally snowy in the winter. One day during what looked like it could turn into a really bad blizzard I checked the news to see if I should stay home. Even though the public schools had closed, the university was still open and the city buses were still running. So I went outside, got on the bus, and headed to school. I probably should have realized it was a red flag when I was the only person on a normally crowded bus. But I just sat there oblivious looking at the snow until the city bus driver turned around and told me they’d just radioed all the buses back to the downtown station. They were shutting down bus service, and they were closing the university too. We were almost there and my house was the other way from downtown. “I usually pick you up on Kneeland Ave, right?”

I guess he did pick me up a lot. I never really thought about it. “Yup. I live by that stop.”

“What’s your address? I’m taking you home before I go back.”

I basically got chauffeured home in a city bus, in the middle of a very precarious snowstorm, by a very brave bus driver who insisted he was going to get me home no matter what.

What normally would have been a 20 minute drive took about 2 hours.

We sat in silence like one does on a bus for a few minutes then he asked me what my major was.

“Ah..A music man” was his response when I told him. He asked probing questions about the classes I was taking, the professors I had, the paper I was working on. He told me he had also gone to Binghamton. He majored in American history, and that’s where he learned to drive the bus. He had been a blue bus driver. He enjoyed being a blue bus driver and studying American history so much that he stayed for two more years after he graduated and got his master’s degree. Then he did what most academics do and moved to Boston, got his PhD in American history, and began teaching at a well known university.

He had achieved everything he’d set out to achieve in his academic career. A faculty position at a good school. He was pretty much set for life.

Except he hated everything about it. Grading papers made him miserable. Lecturing in front of full lecture halls gave him anxiety. He loved learning history. He hated teaching it.

As he skillfully darted in and out of snowbanks I wouldn’t have driven a golf cart through, he told me he used to lie awake at night and tell his wife that the only time he was ever happy was when he was driving a bus in Binghamton and reading books about American history.

He said his wife tried to convince him for almost four years to go back. She was an elementary school teacher and could get a job anywhere. She argued that being a city bus driver certainly paid less and was less prestigious than being a professor. But it also cost a lot less to live in Binghamton than it did to live in Boston, and their lifestyle wouldn’t have to change that much. His wife kept making that argument until finally, one day, he just quit. He moved back to Binghamton, got a job driving the bus, and spent his spare time back in the university library reading books about history.

And he was happy.

He took me to school a couple of times a week for the rest of that year. He called me Music Man and I called him Doctor Driver. I’m not sure I ever knew his real name.

Back then I thought of him as some kind of hero. But now, honestly, I live in a world where the story of going from university professor to bus driver is a tragedy. A downgrade. A demotion. But for Doctor Driver it was liberation. Freedom from all of the tortures that his industry inflicted on him and demanded he endure to climb the ladder. How can a move that makes your life happier be considered a demotion?

I’ve come to realize that there’s another hero in Doctor Driver’s story, his wife. She did the hard work that was necessary to convince him to do what he already knew he had to do to be happy.

What’s crazy is that the reason he had to be convinced by his wife to make that move is because it’s so hard in our society to move to a position that feels like it’s “down.” He knew what would make him happy, and he was right about it, because he’d already been driving that bus for fifteen years by the time we got caught in that blizzard.

But before he could get the thing he knew he needed, he had to untell himself the story we’ve all been trained to tell ourselves. That story that we measure our success in life by our success at work.

Just knowing what he needed to be happy wasn’t enough. His internal narrative had to change too. He had to learn to tell himself a different story than the one that’s been pre-installed in all of us: that our value in life and our value in the marketplace are the same thing.

What makes you happy is not really in your control. We like what we like and we don’t know why one person prefers chocolate and the other prefers vanilla. A lot of suffering comes from internalizing a narrative that we’re not supposed to like something we actually do.

Doctor Driver is a hero because he overcame that. His story feels romantic because it is. He learned to love himself and stop judging himself, and only then was he able to go home and get his “happily ever after.”

The part of the story that I still need to learn to tell myself is that I can’t get one if I keep believing that life is an infinitely tall ladder that must be climbed.