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Persevering amid life's many tests

By Ben Montgomery, Times Staff Writer
In print: Wednesday, August 13, 2008

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ADVERTISEMENT [MELISSA LYTTLE | Times] Stanley Mayausky, 79, lost his driver’s license last year but hopes to someday again drive his 1974 Impala. [Melissa Lyttle | Times] Stanley Mayausky walks 2 miles to take the license exam.

TAMPA — Stanley Mayausky steps to the counter at the Department of Motor Vehicles. The man behind the desk recognizes his face.

"Good luck today, sir," he says.

Stanley takes a seat against a wall and waits to be called. He wipes sweat from his forehead. He has walked 2 miles this morning, down Bruce B. Downs Boulevard, from his home to the DMV. It's a walk the 79-year-old has made before. The soles of his shoes are worn thin.

When it's Stanley's turn, he stands and walks to a computer terminal, under a sign that says, "No Talking, Cell Phone Use, Notes or Open Books During Test."

"Here goes nothing," he says.

• • •

Stanley has lived in the same house since he moved to Florida from Passaic, N.J., 30 years ago. It's a small concrete-block house with a carport. Under the carport sits his pride and joy, a 1974 Chevy Impala. He bought it new. Can't remember how much he paid for it, but he does remember the feeling of driving down to the Jersey Shore and taking his wife on dates.

Now there are spider webs on the tires and a layer of dust on the hood.

He can't legally back it out of the driveway, not since the accident.

So once a week, he primes the carburetor with a splash of gasoline, climbs inside and cranks the engine.

• • •

Ten minutes slide by. Then 20. Then 30.

Stanley seems to get stuck on certain questions. He reads and rereads the multiple choice answers, moving his lips.

The test has 20 questions. An applicant can miss no more than five.

Forty minutes. Fifty. An hour. Dozens of people have come and gone from the DMV.

Stanley doesn't move.

• • •

Stanley grew up in Passaic, he says, and after the war, he worked at a pigment plant in Perth Amboy for 11 years. When he got laid off, he found work at a funeral home, dressing bodies. In the late '70s, he and his wife moved to Tampa. He can't remember why now.

She went to work at a bank. He went to work at the Pepsi bottling plant near their home, first on the line, then on garbage detail.

"It was a good job," he says.

Soon after they arrived, his wife got sick and had to stay in the hospital for an extended period. When she died, he buried her in a vault he bought at a cemetery in Temple Terrace.

They had no children. He had no other family here.

Every week, he fired up the Impala and drove to the cemetery to leave flowers for his wife.

• • •

A few weeks ago, Mary Marton saw Stanley walking down the street, his back stooped and his clothes loose and a little soiled. She lives a few houses down from him, and the two talk occasionally. Marton, 58, stopped to give him a ride. He told her he was going to the DMV. When she came back an hour and a half later, he was still taking the test.

He asked her for help, but the DMV clerk gave her a look, and she politely declined.

While Stanley worked, Marton chatted with the clerk and quickly got the impression that the entire DMV staff knew him.

"They said, 'Oh, yeah. He comes here all the time,' " Marton said.

Marton wondered how often Stanley was making the 4-mile walk to and from the DMV. She feared for his safety on busy Bruce B. Downs Boulevard.

She asked him why he persisted, and he told her he had lost his license late last year, after he left the scene of a fender-bender in a parking lot.

"There wasn't no damage," he said later. "I still should've stayed."

On Aug. 1, Marton went back to the DMV to talk about Stanley. A supervisor told her there's no limit on how often someone is allowed to take the written test. And there's no charge. The supervisor called someone in Tallahassee. Then Marton heard her say into the phone: "He's taken the test 61 times."

That was a few weeks ago. According to Ann Nucatola, a spokeswoman for the DMV, he's up to 72 now.

• • •

On Tuesday morning, Stanley fails again. The DMV has lots of questions to choose from and it changes them all the time.

"I missed six," he says. "Six. I can't hit a five for nothing. All I need is a five."

He tells the clerks goodbye and leaves the crowded DMV to return to a house that's empty, to a freezer full of TV dinners, to a car he cannot drive.

"I've been driving for all these years and, see, they've made all these changes to the rules and they never told me," he says.

Ask Stanley how many times he has failed the test, and he can't remember. A few, he says.

"Maybe I'll try again tomorrow."

If Stanley passes, he must then take the driving portion of the test. He can fail that a maximum of five times before he's barred from testing.

A man down the street offered Stanley $3,000 for his Impala. Stanley told him to fuhgettaboutit.

He says he needs the car. He has somewhere he has to go, if only he can pass the test.

On the back seat is a bouquet of plastic flowers.

Ben Montgomery can be reached at bmontgomery@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8650. Times researcher Shirl Kennedy contributed to this report.