I came into work with NovySan today. A little before noon, I walked down to Tere’s to get us some lunch. It’s a trip I make almost every time I come to NovySan’s office, and it’s not uncommon for men to yell strange things at me between here and there. “Nice tits,” for example. Or, “I want that ass!” Today, though, was a little different.
I was on my way back, walking west down Melrose, when a black sports car made a fast right onto Wilcox, without signaling. There was a bicyclist coming toward me, as well, riding on the sidewalk, and although he hadn’t been in any real danger, it was dicey enough to annoy me.
“Of course you don’t need a turn signal,” I muttered. “And never mind that you almost hit someone,” I added.
The bicyclist also made the right onto Wilcox, and I crossed the street and hit the Walk button on the other side. A moment later, I heard a voice. A loud, angry voice. I looked around, and saw the same bicyclist, stopped in the crosswalk on the other side of the street, and staring right at me.
“You better watch your fuckin’ mouth!” he said, “you motherfuckin’ asshole fucker!”
It didn’t register at first. I couldn’t make sense of the stream of profanity. Then he said, “That’s right, fucker,” and it clicked. He’s really angry with someone. “I said you better fuckin’ watch it!”
I looked around. The only other person in sight, who wasn’t in a car, was a gardener with a leaf blower about half a block away, in the direction the bicyclist had come from. It occurred to me that maybe he’d blown leaf litter into his chain, but when I looked back, he was still staring at me, through his black-rimmed shades. “You wanna fuckin’ talk to me,” he said, “you go ahead.”
“I didn’t say anything to you.” This was true. I hadn’t. But he wasn’t buying it.
“You fuckin’ got a problem with me, you come talk to me, you fuck.”
Now, it’s not the first time I’ve been threatened by a crazy person. But it is the first time I’ve been threatened by a crazy person who was so well put together. Twenty-something, muscular, wearing crisp khaki shorts, a nice windbreaker, a clean nylon backpack and a bicycle helmet. Somehow, it was the bicycle helmet that threw me – it’s just such a thoroughly normal accessory.
And so, because he was so normally accessorized, I tried one more time to engage with him in a normal manner. “I didn’t say anything to you,” I repeated.
“You don’t know who you’re fucking with!” he replied. “You wanna come over here and talk to me? Yeah? That’s what I thought!”
And with that, he was gone, pedaling east on Melrose and leaving me to stand on the corner gaping after him, so stunned I missed my Walk signal and had to wait through another long light change. During the mental replay, I realized he must have thought my (really fairly muted) expression of disgust for the driver of the black sports car was meant for him. Leaving aside the questions that raises about him (“How self-absorbed are you? Seriously, you did nothing wrong, and he almost ran you over, and you think I was being rude to you?”), it did prompt me to make a mental note. “Do try to squelch your urge to comment on the things you see around you.”
Of course, I won’t really be able to do that. I can just try to keep myself from doing it out loud.
