Strange Encounters

I was driving around the Industrial section near downtown in the early afternoon making sure I knew the best route to a social event in the early evening. My three children were with me. Just as well or I might have become entangled with the driver of an enormous semi-trailer. His trucker's fog horn behind me at a light when I didn't jump off fast enough to suit him got my blood racing so fast I almost lost it. He was so big, and we were so small. Well, what the heck, I'll confess, I gave him the finger to go with my faint bleeping  back at him. He bore down on me from behind blinking his headlights at me in broad daylight, on an off, as if imaginary blows he'd promptly administer after he crushed my vehicle. Luckily I was able to change lanes, turn left, and escape him. He was fenced in by numerous other vehicles.

This was the second such traffic encounter I'd provoked in a week. Something is amiss. There's defensive driving, and then there's aggressive driving to avoid the possibility of collisions, and then, narrowly separated from those two, there's suicidal driving. I think I might be lunging into the latter.

In recent weeks there have been six highway shootings, several lethal. I'm jumpy, so kill me. Two murders took place on the same stretch of the 110 Harbor Freeway, in LA, when another car pulled along side the other at high speed and fired as many as nine shots into, and near the driver, killing the drivers of both cars. The other shootings were similar. Erratic, high speed, too close driving seems on the increase in spite of these sobering, and bewildering, and infuriating murders.

Some days ago driving down an offramp I was tailgated by a black SUV. I hate them and call them hearses. Some brands of black SUVs have a grill made of shiny, vertical metal fence posts that up close in the rear view mirror look like teeth bared by an enraged, giant shark, mindless, automatic, hungry and angry, about to announce the sentence of death through that grill.

That's when I first got in trouble in recent days through giving the finger. Turning on my lights, and pumping the brakes, sounding the horn, did no good. The shark was gonna swallow me. At the red light at the foot of the off-ramp I screamed at the top of my lungs at the driver, giving the finger again, and casting grave doubts about the sanity of all her forebears. Yes, it was a woman. Small, and dainty, and maybe, I later figured out, not yet twenty.

Full of chagrin, embarrassment, and regret, I slowly drove to my nearby destination, an outdoors employee parking lot of a hospital. Three blocks and one right turn later, as I entered the parking lot, suddenly there was the very same huge, black SUV closely following. That parking lot was not her destination, I was her destination. My God, I thought, has she changed drivers? Am I about to be rammed? To escape I tried circling the large parking lot containing narrow roadway separating many rows of hundreds of vehicles. Tenaciously she clung to my tail. Round and round we went. Did she have a male companion with a gun? I hoped that the mad scene of two rapidly moving vehicles zigging and zagging, circling, and dodging would attract a security guard, but no such luck. I felt a coward from not stopping and at least attempting to call for a truce.

Eventually she trapped me. We were going in opposite directions and she, who was all alone and even younger than I thought, slim, pretty, with long hair pulled back, drew up quietly and slowly beside me so we could talk driver to driver. She wanted an explanation. I didn't have an explanation, and I didn't have a note from home either. She was trembling. I said I hated too big truck-like SUVs. She said I oughta get a bigger vehicle. She stared at me unblinking. My God she was gorgeous, or at least her trembling was a monster turn on.

I think I was kinda raped, and didn't really mind all that much. I might go back to driving school. Maybe she teaches there.

Barry