Knucklehead, page 28
Back when I was a skinhead homie, I always drove like someone was chasing me. Now I drove super slow. Make me speed up, ese, my Inner Cholo said.
I was still a quarter of a block away from the big intersection of 24th Street and Mission; the light ahead had been green for some time. And I decided it was better to hurry up and reach a green light going maybe 30 than to hit the intersection at lowrider speed (half that) while the light went from yellow to red. An orange light, Sarah used to call that. Or was that Amalia? Anyway, stopping at the yellow and waiting for the next green never occurred to me; my cholo style was still a work in progress. So I sped up to make the light, which had indeed turned yellow by then.
Nearby, a kindred soul was deciding that that exact moment was a good time to make a U-turn. The signs prohibiting it were large and everywhere. He too had been on Mission, headed toward me; now, as I joined him in the intersection, his passenger side faced me, blocking my entire lane.
Hummin’! Comin’ at ya!
Sure, I saw what was happening. I had maybe two seconds, after the car swung into the path of oncoming traffic, when I could have driven around it, or stopped. I’m quick, and 30 mph is still pretty slow. Two seconds was plenty of time to avoid a crash, but I didn’t have to avoid it. I was not obligated to. I wasn’t in the wrong; the other driver was. Undeniably so. It is not my responsibility to protect another driver from the consequences of his or her poor judgment. And no one would ever be able to prove that two seconds was enough time for me to stop. It wouldn’t have been enough time for the sheep. That’s why they are constantly running over innocent dogs and cats: I was driving my car at the speed of my choosing and I looked ahead and saw another living creature in the road and I had a few seconds but I’m too slow and also I didn’t completely care so I killed it with my car. They say that, and the other sheep nod like that is a decent or reasonable thing to say. They might use the standard shorthand—I couldn’t stop—but it means the same thing.
If the sheep are allowed to do so much damage thoughtlessly—and they are—why can’t I do a little damage deliberately? Harm is harm. No one being hit by a car is ever thinking, Well, as long as this is a genuine accident it’s not so bad. I’m careful, the natural consequence being that I do less unintended harm than someone who is careless. That should count against me? I say no. I do not relinquish the amount of damage that I, as a human being, am apparently entitled to do. And if I can’t do my share of damage by accident, then I am entitled to make up the difference on purpose. All I want is my fair share.
Claire came at the car with a calm fearlessness. It was a Mercedes. I peered inside. Dude at the wheel; chick riding shotgun. They weren’t even looking at me.
What does it all mean? a sample asked.
Time slowed. We were 20 feet away, then 10, then five. My windows were open, but all the background noise faded out. I leaned back and tried to relax.
The sound effect that they use in movies for a car crash is about as accurate as the one they use for gunfire. I’d expected screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-CRISH! There was, of course, no screeee; I hadn’t used my brakes. And there was no CRISH. It was more like a WHUMPF. It sounded like a door slamming.
A door did get slammed. Claire hit the Benz’s rear door and kept on going. By the time we stopped, her bumper was damn near in their backseat.
But there was no one sitting there, and the people in the front didn’t get that banged up. I’d expected heads shattering windows. But all I saw was a couple of people getting jostled. Somebody spilled a large drink on dude, though. What looked like a cherry Big Gulp (definitely not blood) was dripping off his chin onto his nice white shirt. So there was that.
The woman was pissed. Even with her back to me that was obvious. She never even turned around to see what could have killed her. She was too busy chewing out her man. She told him not to do it. She told him not to make that U.
Dude opened his door, but he didn’t get out of the car right away. I heard him try to calm her down first in Spanish, then in English. Neither worked. I think he called her Leticia. I love that name.
We were stuck together. I didn’t care for that. Dude looked over Leticia’s shoulder and saw me just as I was putting Claire in reverse. He started motioning. You know the gesture—you wave your outward-facing palms side to side while shaking your head no no no.
Say some punk try to getcha for your auto? Cypress Hill queried. Would you call the one-time, play the role model?
“No.” I gave Claire some gas.
The Benz screamed. Claire and I backed up about six feet, dragging the Benz with us for the first two. Fortunately, Claire had butted but she didn’t bite; we didn’t have any shreds of Benz attached to us. That might have interfered with her tires. Good girl.
Once we were clear, I turned Claire off and got out. And I began that little dance people do after an accident where they meander over to the part of their car that was hit and begin inspecting it casually.
Even after the dragging, it took dude another minute to get out of the Benz, and even then Leticia was still talking at him. Mostly curses. Dude was in trouble.
“Hi!” I smiled. “Looks like we had a little fender bender, huh?”
He made it around to the crushed side. His mind was blown. He stood still and stared at it awhile, hand plastered to his face, and then he walked past it and stared at it from the other side. It was still crushed. He looked up at me, and then he looked down at it again. Half the Benz’s ass was just gone.
He’d had a chance to grieve; it was time to move on. I made a little “tsk” sound at his devastated luxury sedan, and then I turned and regarded my car. My old domestic beater. My beautiful hooptie I’d bought for $5,000 cash.
Claire was fine. Almost completely unharmed. She had a good-sized scratch right in the middle of her big metal bumper, but that might have been there already.
“Hmm,” I said to the scratch.
I approached my bumper and examined it from different angles, the way dude had done. My movements felt very tai chi. I tsked and tsked. When I was sure that dude had observed my performance, I turned back to him.
“Well!” I said. “Guess we’re going to have to exchange information!”
“Wha?”
“Exchange information. For our insurance people!” I gestured at the insurance people out there somewhere. I hadn’t made a student loan payment in years, but a brother always kept his car paperwork straight. Anything else would have been rookie shit.
“I don’t have insurance . . .”
“I’m sorry?”
“. . . and this is not my car.”
“God dammit, Erik!” Leticia snapped through her open window. I guess she’d told him not to do that too. I still hadn’t seen her face. But she was Latina, she had long black curly hair and big gold hoop earrings, she cursed a lot, and she was mad. I wanted to marry Leticia. But first I had to fuck Erik.
“Not your car? Oh my.”
Spurred on by fear of his woman, Erik tried another tack. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. No insurance.” Bolder. “What you want to do?”
I chose not to see it as a rhetorical question. “Well . . . I guess you and I can work this out without involving any third parties. You know. Directly?”
A cop car drove past and slowed. The passenger cop glanced at the accident. He looked singularly uninterested. I waved and smiled and the car went on.
“I’m real sorry about your car,” I lied. “But you know you’re not supposed to be making any U-turns here, right?” I glanced up at one of the huge red-and-white signs hanging directly over our heads.
“Yeah.” Deflated again.
“I would be happy to just get reimbursed for my repair work . . .”
Erik looked at the old scratch on my bumper, looked up at me, then looked at “his” caved-in Benz. At my scratch again, at me, at the Benz. We looked at Leticia’s shiny hair. Then he looked back at me.
“I need my car for work,” I lied. “It has to look nice.” Claire still had the dent where Sarah had kicked in the passenger-side front door. “I could go get an estimate for my body work and let you know the number, and if you forwarded that amount straight to me, I wouldn’t have to contact my insurance people and give them your license plate number . . .” A little ham-handed, but I wanted this done with.
“No—I mean, OK.” Erik’s palm was plastered to his head again. “Yeah. Yeah.”
“Great!” I went back to my car and got a pen and a scrap of paper out of the glove box. I pointedly wrote down Erik’s license plate number, then handed the paper to him. “So if you could give me your address, I can forward the estimate to you . . .”
Leticia sucked her teeth loudly, without turning around. Erik flinched.
“Perhaps your phone number?”
Leticia was silent.
Erik wrote down a phone number, and then seemed to have a revelation. A wicked smile appeared. “Now you can give me your address,” he said. “To send you the money.”
I was well aware that, even though I was a lawyer dressed like some sort of rock-and-roll gangbanger, Erik was probably not an accountant dressed like a coke dealer. Not with his ruined $500 silk shirt and $1,000 gold rope chain and borrowed, uninsured Benz and superhot girlfriend who didn’t make eye contact. I saw Scarface. My tiny basement apartment could be overrun by a Colombian hit squad with little difficulty. My neighbors would hail them as liberators.
“Okey doke!” I took back the piece of paper and ripped it in two and wrote my full name and actual address legibly and in large print on his half. I handed it to him. “Here y’go. Now, I will get an estimate ASAP, and I’ll call and tell you what it is. And I’ll need cash in the mail within—oh, let’s say a week. Then I’ll keep my insurance out of it and nobody has to know, OK?”
Erik had a funny expression on his face. Good enough.
“One week!” I repeated. My smile was at maximum. “OK?”
“Yeah.”
I made Erik shake my hand, then left him to deal with Leticia. I envied him more than a little.
* * *
I spent much of the next morning canvassing the local auto body repair shops for estimates on my $100 dent job. (The fender scratch wasn’t even worth that.) As I’d hoped, my neighbors wanted to gouge me not only physically but financially as well. Some of those quotes were profound insults. When the owner of Como Nuevo Auto thrust the yellow estimate form at me with “$450.00” written at the bottom and underlined three times, I looked up and let him see sadness on my face. I wanted him to be happy.
I headed back to my car, assuming that Como Nuevo was the best I was going to do. Then I glanced across the street and saw the biggest “It’s STILL Army Street” sign ever.
Some months earlier the city changed the name of Army Street, one of San Francisco’s auto rows, to Cesar Chavez Street. In America, when you are badass, you get a street named after you. No big deal, one might have thought. One would be wrong. Motherfuckers lost their minds when they heard the change was in the works. Dirty white men took to the streets. They lost; City Hall did it anyway. As dirty white men are wont to do, they refused to acknowledge their defeat. The “It’s STILL Army Street” placard is the Confederate flag of San Francisco.
This particular flag took up most of the picture window at All-American Auto. The rest of the window was covered with old newspaper front pages. Most of the photos on the front pages were of Reagan.
All-American Auto was extremely promising. But I wasn’t ready. I went home and changed.
* * *
For the first time in my life, I wished I had a bow tie. But I didn’t, and I wouldn’t know how to tie one if I did. So I went with a black suit and no tie. It would look like I’d taken the bow tie off.
I pulled into the garage and got out. “As-salaamu alaikum!” He didn’t turn around. There was no way the owner of All-American Auto had any idea that was even a greeting, so I restated. “As-salaamu alaikum, my brother! Good day to you!”
Picture George Carlin, if George Carlin was neither smart nor funny and had been drinking since he was ten years old. Picture dirty hate. He was beautiful.
He regarded me, but he didn’t talk and he wasn’t going to. What he is doesn’t talk to what I am. I’d been there before. It was fine. This wasn’t a job interview.
“Yes, yes, good day to you, my brother. I am in need of your assistance. Driving home from the Million Man March some weeks ago, oh, the glorious—were you there? Did you attend the beautiful spectacle that was the revelation of Minister Farrakhan’s dream made flesh? No? I am truly sorry you couldn’t make it. No doubt you watched it on the television. In any event, on my return home from that blessed gathering of black male power, I had a slight collision with another Nubian vehicle . . .” I reached out and herded Dirty Hate over to the dent in my door, careful not to touch him for any number of reasons. He stared down at it. Dirty Hate hated my car too. Claire was a race traitor.
“No one was hurt. But, as you can see . . . how can I go forth and preach the gospel of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad in this condition? I ask you?”
His face twitched. Dirty Hate was almost ready.
“Help a brother out!”
Now he was ready.
Dirty Hate stared at the dent a bit more. He pulled a wrinkled pad out of his back pocket and jabbed at the top sheet with a pencil. He ripped the sheet off and extended his arm without looking at me. Then he spit on his own floor.
“$700.00” was all it said. No description of labor or time; no list of parts. Just a number. That would do.
“Splendid! More than reasonable. Let me just—I would like to minister to this area a bit, while I am here, perhaps enlighten your neighbors? I will drop off my vehicle before you close tonight. At what time do you close, my brother?”
But Dirty Hate was already walking away.
* * *
Exactly one week later, there was an envelope in my mailbox with no return address and nothing in it but cash. Erik was a bad driver, but he took that loss like a professional. And I got to live indoors another month.
History Is Written.
Sunday, May 19, 1996
“We now return to ‘Ruby Ridge: A Star-Spangled Tragedy.’”
My eyes moved from the TV down to the newspaper at my feet. FREEMEN STANDOFF ENTERS THIRD MONTH.
Scott Glenn or somebody was on one knee in a fucked-up cabin making a speech about freedom to a little Aryan boy.
History is written by the victors.
I’d have turned off the TV, but Jimi was sleeping on it. It was warm.
What’s Your Excuse.
Friday, June 7, 1996
The bus smelled funny. Well—I wouldn’t call it funny.
It wasn’t armpit, which I would have expected; and it wasn’t ass, which I would have feared. It wasn’t any sort of artificial smell, like cologne. It was a natural smell, an earthy smell. A bad smell? Certainly not a good one. But could be worse. More unexpected than truly bad. It was faint, but that only made it harder to place.
Maybe it was just that I hadn’t been on a bus in a while. Maybe the smell was just bus. If this used to be familiar, I had blotted that out. I didn’t miss riding the bus. But I had things to do downtown and didn’t have the heart to deal with parking. Plus, driving was a little too much fun lately.
I sat all the way in the back of the bus and mulled it over. There was a window right next to me, but I closed it. The fresh air was hindering my investigation.
Was it feet? No. Rotten produce? Rancid coffee grounds? Negative. Oysters? Any sort of shellfish? Nope. Vomit? Thankfully, no. Weed? No. A dead mouse? No. The smell an alcoholic has coming off his skin all the time? Maybe. I made a triumphant fist. We were getting somewhere.
The Geary Boulevard bus stopped at Divisadero, and a single person got on and dumped a handful of change into the fare box. An old man. He eased himself into the nearest old-people seat, almost directly across the aisle from the driver. The driver waited until he sat down before taking off.
“Oh . . . my . . . goodness,” the old man said, loud, as the bus squeezed back into traffic. “A nigger. Driving a bus. What a shock.”
I was certain I’d heard him wrong. I rewound the tape in my head and replayed it. The tape was obviously defective. Everybody told me I was paranoid; this one was easy to write off. The man was, after all, all the way at the other end of the bus. I tried to focus back on the smell.
“Nigger, do you know how lucky you are to be driving this bus? This is a good job, boy! You’re lucky to have it.” The bus driver didn’t respond or react in any way at all, which only confirmed that I wasn’t hearing what I was hearing.
“Because this is my country. You’re in our country, boy. White men. This country was put here for the white race.” The old man dry heaved, twice, but it passed.
“White men made this country. You’re only here because we brought you here. Do you know how lucky you are to be in my country, boy? We did you a favor! You could be back in Africa with all those other crazy niggers, choppin’ each other up. We civilized you. So know your place!” The driver still did not respond, and the old man smiled widely. I spotted no teeth. “Yeah, you know your place. Good boy. You’re one of the good ones.”
I had to seriously consider the possibility that I was having an auditory hallucination. I calculated a 61% probability that if I walked up to the front of the bus and brought both my fists down on the top of that old man’s head as hard as I could, later, when I told the cops what I’d heard, that driver would point at me and say, That poor man said no such thing! He didn’t say anything. You just walked up and killed him.
“You people should be so grateful to us, saving you from yourselves. But instead all you do is make trouble. You come over here and wear your goddamn pants down around your knees and shoot the place up. Don’t you people know you ain’t in Africa no more? I got damn dogs act better’n the best of ya.”
There was a 24% chance that the two men were friends. Maybe they had that friendship that white people always fantasize about in movies, where, because the two men were in Vietnam or something, the white one can drop N-bombs like a Tourette’s patient and the brother just laughs because he somehow knows that white dude doesn’t really mean it. But even 24% was high, because the brother wasn’t laughing or responding or doing anything. It was more likely that I was psychotic, which was almost the more attractive option. But those odds had dropped from 61% to 35%. I could see the old man’s craggy lips moving.
