I'd like to preface this by saying that this post is mainly for Jessica, but anyone who wants to suffer through it can feel free to do so. Keep in mind that the name of the Poet's girl of affection is purely incidental.
Jessica, I worked through this about five times, and I can't get it where I want it. I'm sick of spending time on the story, but I'd still like it to end up alright. So what I'm saying is: give me advise!
Anyway, it is what it is, full of faults and embarrassments, but such is life.
“The Poet, the Meathead, and the Good Samaritan”
A construction worker with a dramatic, enslaved-Hungarian beard sits in the window of a coffee shop, writing poetry to, or at least about, the woman who walked out of his life and into money four weeks prior. He drinks decaf in an oversized glass, pouring it quickly down his throat of wax. The poem he writes – or more tellingly, the type of poem he writes – revolves around the themes of disloyalty, of dishonesty, of disaster and defeat. He gives them names like Jessica One…Jessica One Point Two…Jessica One Point Two One…and so on. He’s thinking that maybe he’ll put them into a book entitled, The Jessica… It’s something he’s thought about, anyway, and he’s thinking about it while he’s penning Jessica One Point Two Nine Five. It begins, and ends, like this:
Jessica, you who destroy that
Hope that lies
In the hearts of men
Or in the hearts of
Anyone who has felt…
He’s stuck there in part because he’s getting ahead of himself with the entire The Jessica nonsense, but also because he’s staring, through the window, at a hysterical, albeit quite attractive, young woman pointing her purple umbrella at something a ways down on Clark Street. He decided, finally, to go outside and see what the hell she was pointing at.
The woman, drenched in down from neck to ankles, yells to the short, muscular man who walked briskly behind her, “Can you believe that?!”
“Believe what, Heather? I saw nothing!” he sounded impatient. “What did you see?”
“That car! That - ” she waved her hands and worked her head, searching for the words. “That…hit and run!”
“I missed it, I guess.”
“You missed it?! We both have eyes on our faces, Reginald, and I thought they were looking in the same direction.”
“What were?”
“Our eyes, you idiot!” Reginald shrugged again. She kept staring at the traffic ahead, and noticed that it had come to a standstill. She doesn’t think about anything before she finds her feet moving and her umbrella swinging and her mouth saying, “Come on, Reginald,” and Reginald shuffles quickly behind her, and the poet and his backpack, heavy from The Jessica, goes right along with them.
The poet, we’ll call him Lenin, though I haven’t the faintest idea of his actual name, wondered how the hell Heather could have seen such a heinous crime and Reginald not take in a thing. Reginald was wondering the exact same thing. He’d heard that city people were more self-involved, less community-oriented, but he couldn’t believe that Heather was the only person on the block who had the good heart to protect the Innocent and expose the Guilty. While the men were wondering, Heather was writing down the plate number, and traffic didn’t show any signs of moving.
“Go knock on the window,” Heather pulled Reginald’s arm.
“I didn’t see anything Heather. What do you want me to say?”
“Reginald Leopold Harrison!” she yelled, drawing laughs from some punk rock kids loitering on the sidewalk, amused by both the ridiculous name and the excessively critical use of it, as if the nine syllables were an indictment. “How can you be so…so…” She searched for the perfect insult. Reginald didn’t let her find it.
“Well, you’re coming with me.”
“Fine.” She smiled and nodded her head once, saying “and there you have it” without actually saying it.
“Which car is it?” Reginald asked, honestly.
“My God, Reginald.” She pointed at the white sedan flashing its left turn signal. She led, hurriedly, while Reginald’s short, thick legs moved in slow, full-reaching strokes, like a gymnast warming up to do the splits. He hoped beyond hope that the car would turn and speed away. But Clark was a veritable parking lot. Reginald had never seen traffic like this in his life, and it was two in the afternoon, on a Saturday! Before he knew it, Heather was knocking on the window, and he was right beside her.
Lenin, meanwhile, took out his cell phone, which had been disconnected for over three months due to lack of payment. He had been carrying it around in hopes that it might inexplicably ring, that the cellular gods would have pity on him and let a call get through. Today, the gods slept, but the antiquated flip-phone finally served a purpose, as Lenin leaned against a telephone pole and pretended to have a serious conversation with a lover, with Jessica, while he watched, riveted, as a young, tuxedoed black man rolled down the window. His radio was blasting Mahler’s Seventh, which he immediately muted.
“Directions?” he said, not so much as a question but as a sort of banal reality of his existence. He said it in a tone that made Lenin believe it would be followed with “story of my life…”
“What?” Heather said.
“Where do you need to go?”
“What?”
“Do – you – need – dir-ections?” the man enunciated each syllable, loudly, figuring Heather’s misunderstanding to be based in her inability to comprehend Black Speak.
“No!” Heather replied shrilly. “I’d like you to pull over and answer some questions for me and my boyfriend.”
“What are you talking about?” The man, incredulous.
“I saw what you did back there.”
The man looked over his shoulder. “What I did?”
“Your little boom-boom?”
“My little – ” he looked back again, his nose flaring out, his eyes squinting from the sun and from annoyance. Finally, he said…nothing. He turned his music back up. Loud. He rolled up the window. He probably adjusted the heater, as it was quite cold outside. He shook his head and smiled the smile of a man falsely accused of who knows what, an indignant smirk of disbelief. Lenin imagined him mouthing the words “Stupid bumpkins.”
“Can you believe that? He just – ”
“Are you positive that what you saw was actually – ”
“Yes! My God, Reginald! Yes! Go get him.” She waved her umbrella like a purple baton.
“Traffic’s moving. He’ll be moving soon.” He pointed at the car. “Look, he’s gone. He’s going.”
“He’s turning left. We can catch him.”
“We won’t catch him, Heather.”
But Heather ignored him and ran across the street without obeying the first rule every child learns in life – or maybe the third, right behind the Golden Rule and the one requesting you not sprint with scissors. She didn’t look both ways before crossing. Despite her inability to adhere to it, she made it safely across, and started quickly up an alley to cut the Crown Victoria off. Reginald ran to catch up.
Lenin felt guilty, and he decided not to continue following (stalking?). What was the point? In what realm did his curiosity lie? Was it attraction? He assumed that in some elementary way it must be attraction, but to whom? The girl? Not his type. Too prissy, too insistent, too overbearing. The Meathead? Lenin wasn’t interested in men, one way or the other. Ever since middle school, he never had a single male friend. He simply connected better with women, content to spend nights talking about love and relationships with girlfriends and Girlfriends Proper; he couldn’t care less about sports or cars or any of the other stuff typical men discuss over beer and cigars. It was an act of absolute self-defiance for him to get a job in construction, in which every one of his co-workers was a man, and every single one of them loved every single thing Lenin was so ambivalent toward.
So what was it about this couple, this meathead and this pushy, nagging woman, that inspired him to follow? He couldn’t come up with anything, but even as he was wondering, he found himself walking, and then sprinting down the alleyway, blindly following two tourists who had no navigational skills in a city he’d lived in all his life.
“He’ll be surprised to see us,” Heather said, breathlessly.
“What actually happened, Heather?” Reginald asked. “I didn’t see any damage on his car at all.”
“He was parked on the street,” she paused and took a heavy breath, “and he was leaving the spot.”
“Okay.”
“And then he hit the car in front of him, backed up,” pause, for breath or for effect, “and hit the car behind him! Can you believe that, Reginald?”
“Oh my God,” Reginald managed, under his breath.
“I know! He didn’t get out to check the damage, he didn’t leave a note, no insurance information. I mean, I don’t know how people do things in the city, but it’s just common courtesy.”
“Heather, that’s what bumpers are for.”
But Heather wasn’t at all interested in hearing about the mechanical or safety features of the automobile. A car hit two other cars, and that car, a white Crown Victoria, was maybe one hundred feet away, and coming closer. “Here he comes, Reginald!”
“Heather, traffic is really moving. He’s not just going to pull over to the side of the road when he sees you.”
“Oh, he’ll stop,” she said it with a poorly delivered line in a big budget action movie. Reginald blushed. He had no idea what she had in mind. Was she assuming that he would be impressed with her persistence and would slam on his breaks, put on the flashers and get out and apologize profusely? Was she going to jump in front of the car in hopes that he has astounding reaction time and anti-lock brakes? The car was getting closer and closer, and Reginald prepared himself for anything. Finally, as the white car was with say fifteen, twenty feet, Heather lunged forward. But she didn’t jump in front of traffic. Instead, she cocked her shoulder and threw the umbrella at the speeding Crown Victoria. But she didn’t compensate for the fact that she was aiming at a moving target, and the umbrella landed with a thud on the concrete, five feet behind the white Ford. A half second later, it was run over by an SUV. Defeated, Heather watched the car drive away, honking his horn and triumphantly waving his left arm out of the window.
“I’m calling the police,” Heather said, reaching in her purse for her cell phone.
“Should we see if the umbrellas alright?”
“The umbrella is not our concern right now, Reginald.”
“Okay,” Reginald acquiesced. “Umm, shouldn’t we go back to the spot of the, umm, the accident?”
“Good idea,” she said, suddenly perky. “We can assess the damage.” She dialed 911 and started back up with the quick pace.
“911 emergency, how can I help you?”
“I’d like to report a hit and run.”
“Okay, was anyone hurt in the accident?”
“No, the two cars that were hit were parked and no one was inside them.”
“Where did the accident occur?”
“Umm…it was on…I’m from Kansas, ma’am, I don’t know the street names.”
“How am I supposed to – ”
“I know, just a second,” she said, covering the phone. “Reginald, where are we?”
“Right now we’re – ”
“No, the accident, where was that?”
“Clark Street.”
“Clark Street, ma’am.”
“Clark Street goes through the entire city. What is the address?”
“It’s by the Starbucks.”
“There are half a million Starbucks in Chicago. I need an address.”
“It’s by the Starbucks on Clark St.”
“I need an address.”
“Okay, one second!”
“Let me remind you that this is 911 emergency.”
“I’m sorry! We’re walking back there now.”
“How badly is your car damaged?”
“It’s not my car. I’m just trying to be a good samar – ”
“Did you get the license plate number?”
“Yes!”
“Give me that number, would you please?”
“It’s, hold on…it’s in my purse.” Heavy breathing on the other side of the line. The operator was tired of this emergency, ready to move on to another, more efficient one. “It’s 568-0251.”
“Illinois plates?”
“I…think….but – ”
“You didn’t record the state of the plates.”
“I didn’t even think about it.”
“What was the make and model of the car?”
“It was white, and…Reginald, what was the make and model of the car?”
“2002 Ford Crown Victoria.”
“2002 Ford Crown Victoria.”
“Limited edition,” Reginald added, and Heather repeated him for the benefit of the Operator (and Justice).
“Thank you. Have you arrived at the scene of the accident?”
They had. It was the 1200 block of Clark, and Heather told the operator as much.
“Is there anything else?”
“Yes, the driver was black,” Heather said, “and he was wearing a tuxedo. He must have been a waiter or an usher or something.”
“Anything else?”
“He was listening to rap music.
“Anything else?”
“No.”
“Thank you for your help. A car will be out shortly to investigate the accident.” Click.
When they finally arrived back at the place where the accident had occurred, the two victim cars were still parked there. Another car, a large black SUV, had taken the Crown Victoria’s place. It set so closely to the two victim cars that it nearly touched both of them, and the front driver’s side end of the SUV need to be angled out into the road in order to fit at all. Heather surveyed the damage: on the fender of the car in back – a black Pontiac Grand Am, there was a small, thin streak of white paint; the license plate of the front car was slightly dented. It was only now that Lenin discovered his car to be one of the damaged vehicles.
“See!” Heather said. “There’s damage!”
Reginald said nothing, just nodded. Or maybe it was more of a shiver. “It’s freezing.”
“It’s not that cold.”
“You have a scarf. You have a heavy jacket. You have the hat and the gloves. I’m wearing a fucking – .” Heather glared at him accusingly. “A, umm, a freaking…sorry. I’m wearing a windbreaker!”
“It’s not my fault that you came to the Windy City unprepared.”
“It’s the end of April!”
“I told you time and time again, ‘Pack for anything, Reginald. With all the water and everything, Chicago can be all kinds of different temperatures.’ Didn’t I, now, Reginald?”
“Can we please sit inside?”
“We’re waiting out here,” she said decisively.
“Heather.” Reginald whined.
“Do whatever you want, Reginald. I’m going to sit out here and wait.” She held her chin high, her lips tight and proud.
“I’m going to pi-, I mean, use the bathroom and get some coffee. Do you want some coffee?”
“Get me a cup of decaf,” she said coldly, her eyes darting from person to person to person. Surely one of them, she thinks, one of them is the owner of one of these cars. Sure enough, as Reginald walks into the coffee shop and wanders to the counter to obtain the key to the bathroom, a 30-something man with a long, nappy beard approaches her.
“Hello,” Lenin said quietly, touching Heather’s shoulder with his fingertip, to get her attention.
Heather jumped back, moved her hands in front of her body. “Didn’t you see me?” Heather continued to back away, looking into the coffee shop for Reginald.
“I was out here.”
“O – kay,” Heather said, slowly moving toward the coffee shop,
“I saw you follow that car!” he spurted out to ensure Heather didn’t run off.
Heather stopped backpedaling, and said excitedly, “You mean you saw the accident too?!”
“No, I didn’t see anything.”
“I guess no one saw it but me.”
“This is my car,” Lenin said ashamedly, under his breath.
“What?”
“It’s my car, this one,” he pointed to the front car.
Her face lit up like the Northern skies, a burst of joy and color that represented the fulfillment of her good deed. “Look what he did to it! Look at the dent!”
“Yeah, it’s, umm,” Lenin stammered over his words for two reasons. First, it had been quite some time since he had last spoken to a beautiful woman, and he was seeing something new in this previously calloused and insistent Heather: something soft and pure, something happy. Seeing her smile made him blush and forget, for a second or two, that he was supposed to be unhappy. Second, that dent had been there for three and a half years, and he could see absolutely no new damage to the bumper of his car.
“It’s terrible is what it is!” Heather said emphatically. “It’s horrible to think of what people have the capacity to do.”
“I agree,” Lenin said.
“They’re going to catch this guy.”
“I’m not so sure that the police are going to go after him.”
“No, I gave them the license plate number. They’ve got it on record. It’s only a matter of time before they…” Her voice trailed off as she saw the owner of the Grand Am unlock the passenger door to put shopping bags inside. “It’s the other party!”
“Excuse me, sir,” Heather said giddily. The man was tall, clean-shaven, thin, handsome.
“Yes.”
“Someone hit your car!” she smiled.
“What?! Where?” the man asked, looking around for signs of damage.
“In the front there. You see that streak of paint?” The man looked at it, shook his head, laughed out loud. Heather reached out to him and lightly grabbed his forearm, massaging it gently. “But don’t worry! The police are on the way.”
“The police?”
“Yes, I called them ten minutes ago,” she smiled again. “And I got the guy’s license plate number. He was a black guy in a tuxedo.”
“Look,” the man continued shaking his head. “What’s your name?”
“Heather Amber Smith.”
“Well, Heather Amber Smith,” he smiled, she smiled, and he continued, “my friends call me JMC, and I certainly appreciate the act of good will.”
“Well I believe it’s our responsibility,” she said, reaching for his forearm again, “to do something when we see something unjust.”
“And that’s commendable. But this paint has been on this car for eight months. There’s no new damage.”
“But, his car was white.”
“Well, that may be, but I don’t think we can…”
“Well, there was damage done to his car,” she said, pointing at Lenin, who slouched, eyes on the ground, behind them. “Right?”
Lenin shook his head. “My plate’s always been like that, Heather.”
Heather’s face became red. “You mean there’s…”
JMC lightly grabbed both of her wrists with both hands and shook them lightly. “Heather Amber Smith, you have done a good deed. But this is a good thing. There’s no damage. Nothing bad game of this. Would you be happier if these cars had thousands of dollars worth of repairs ahead of them?”
Heather thought about it and shook her head, staring like Lenin at the ground. “I just wanted to be a good person.”
“Look up at me, Heather,” he said. “Look in my eyes. You’re a very good person. You’re an excellent person. And to repay you for your kind, kind act.”
“I couldn’t possibly take…”
Lenin threw his bag, overflowing with The Jessica, into his car and backed up so quickly he had to brake hard, causing the car to lunge forward and himself to slam into the steering wheel. Heather and JMC jumped back and JMC started yelling at Lenin and Heather kept crying. Lenin squealed out of the spot and sped down the road. In his rear window, he saw and Heather and the man, staring at his car, and behind them, he saw police lights flashing, and he knew they were not for him.
He wondered where Reginald was during all this, and thought about the fate of the driver of the Crown Victoria. Perhaps somewhere in the city of Chicago, a black man is being pulled over for a hit and run. There’s no damage to his vehicle, but the police decide to take him in for questioning. They cuff him in front of an opera house, where he was waiting for the valet to park the car. He’s going to miss the Verdi. Meanwhile, old white women in fur coats, smoking Virginia Slim 100s under terrace, shake their heads and mutter under their breaths, “You can never trust the help.”