Essay 2 Draft 1

I feel like I’m always running out of time. I never have time to do things like fill my gas tank and buy groceries. Somehow those very needed things just kind of don’t make the list, then they’re very-very needed, and I have to squeeze them in at odd hours. For this reason, it seems like every time I’m at the grocery store its late enough that they’re started what appears to be the herculean effort of restocking the shelves for the next day’s business. I haven’t been logging these visits, but I would be surprised to find out if I were always there all that late. Certainly there have been a few 1, 2, 3 AM trips, but I don’t think 11 is that late, and I’ve definitely made it in before that and found the same thing: monolithic stacks of pallets, and the supermarket layout transformed into a labyrinth of carts and oversized boxes, morphing the familiar environs into an altogether foreign, almost industrial atmosphere. The night crew are people who need to get things done. They don’t have time to trouble themselves over appearances. Whoever they might be during the day, with their backs against a deadline, these people become a hive of insects, zealously pursuing their collective goal, and completely overwhelming anything that might offer opposition.

            Disappointed as I was to have again chosen to do my shopping during the magic hour, I held my short list in my head, and made my way around the perimeter of the store, determined to collect only the basics. I was doing well, milk eggs and bread, when I hit a particularly packed stretch of tile back by the butcher’s counter. Just beyond a tall stack of pallets, I could see someone coming toward me, pushing a large hand cart, which itself carried a stack of items the went well over the driver’s head. With nowhere else to go, I stepped sideways into an intersecting aisle and let the man and his cargo rumble past. He saw me about halfway through the maneuver, and quickly recognized what had happened. He smiled in a friendly way, and apologized, though as far as I knew he had done nothing wrong. I said he had nothing to worry about, or something, and he said thanks. And as I took a step back into the aisle I had been trying to travel down, the first thought I had was, “Well, it couldn’t have been that guy.”

            We had been doing about 22 mph for a couple miles when I flashed my high beams at the guy. Just one flash. I had meant it to be two quick blinks but my finger got stuck for a second, so I think it ended up being one slightly longer burn.  A second or two passed, and the hazard lights when on on the car in front of me. ‘Great, this situation,” I had time to think, before they went off again. They had blink 6, maybe ten times. I didn’t know what that meant, but my friend in the passenger seat let me know that the driver in front of me had more or less just invited me to go fuck myself. The driver continued to keep the pace, falling short of the 25 mile per hour speed limit on the long, winding road with one lane going either way- the only direct route back to Mike’s house. With a little bit of an exasperated sigh and a chuckle, I relaxed in my seat and carried on talking to Mike. We talked a little bit about his wife and daughter, waiting at home for us to return with the takeout cheeseburgers and root beers we had gone out to get. We talked about the arcade consoles we were planning to build that summer, and how we would try and build mine on a budget, because I was making minimum wage and couldn’t justify spending rent on videogames, even if this one in particular was a childhood dream come true. Anyway we talked, all the while crawling down the long, dark road that each of us had driven down a thousand times. It ran near the edge of the town I grew up in. I had come back that day to visit, because my buddy, who was actually my cousin, and his wife was taking their baby daughter to the fair in the center of town. Her first time eating chocolate. It was adorable. We spent the afternoon catching up, and I volunteered to drive to get dinner, because Mike insisted on paying. I never minded driving, especially at home. The pressures of driving elsewhere never seemed to get to me there. I could just kind of go where I was going, park where I wanted, and not worry any more about it than that.

            It dawned on me that here, in my hometown supermarket, I was surrounded by people whom I didn’t find in any way threatening, but whom I also did not recognize. I did not know a single one of these people. And because I didn’t get a good enough look at the driver of that car, I realized, hypothetically, any one of these strangers, milling about the cereal aisle at 11:30 at night, could be this person I encountered on the road. A little old man pushed a shopping cart full of meat past me. He kept to his side, I to mine. He wasn’t friendly- he didn’t smile at me or anything- but he wasn’t aggressive, and he didn’t try to use his cart to bully me, out of aisle space, which he might have done, since I was only carrying a basket. It might have been him, or some one like him, but just maybe. Like a 5% chance. I didn’t like him for the role; something about his energy just didn’t match the level of insidious inanity I felt I was up against on the road earlier. I made my way into produce deciding whether or not I would be able to eat a whole bunch of bananas before they went bad, and quietly observing the other late night shoppers as they inspected avocados and hefted packages of celery. They were a motley crew. There’s nothing sexy about picking your way around cardboard towers to sniff at bruised pears under fluorescent lights at an hour when most other people whom you assess as your peers are in their homes reading or watching TV on the internet or holding their lovers or drunk. But despite their low level or wretchedness, nothing stood out about these people to make me suspect they were a dangerous kind of insane. They were clear.

            I wasn’t riding the guy’s bumper or anything. I didn’t honk my horn, not even once. I just kept behind him, close behind him but not too close, and waited for him to move. Coming through a bend, I could see the road ahead was straight for a good stretch. And what’s more, the only car in the other lane was a good long distance away. With no one else around, I decided it would be safe to pass this driver, who had insisted on driving so slowly, and get us home before the baby was asleep and the burgers were cold. I moved left into the other lane and hit the accelerator. I had recently sold my old jeep for a much newer, though still a bit old, Honda. Although it was by no means a racing car, to me it was fast, and I think even objectively, it accelerated quite well. So I hit the gas, not flooring it or anything so dramatic, but enough to move past this person who was holding me up and get back into the correct lane quickly and without incident.

 Much to my surprise, as I had begun to pull past the driver ahead of me, his car too began to accelerate, with the aggressive growling of a powerful engine. He went from even with me, to ahead of me, and stayed there. Much taken aback by this vindictive behavior, it took me a second to really understand the situation. When I did, not fully, but enough to act, I realized I was in a very vulnerable position, at much too great a risk for the potential gain, and quickly hit the brakes in order to move back in place behind the driver, whom felt I now knew to be dangerous and insane. The car in the oncoming lane was now heading toward me, and I had no interest in prolonging our relationship. If I was surprised before, I don’t know if there is a word for what I was next, when,  as I decelerated to move back into the right lane, so too did my evil pace car, which at first prevented me from rejoining the right lane at all, and when I was able to do so, almost resulted in a high speed collision between our two vehicles. Back in the right lane, having heavily leaned on my horn in outrage, I was a little shaken, and more than a little embarrassed that my cousin had experienced that failure with me. I felt like somebody I wanted to like me had just seen a bully give me a wedgie.

[Another supermarket section]

We were almost home when the one lane widened to three, about 100 yards before a traffic light. The guy drifted into the left-turn only lane. The middle was straight ahead, and the far right was straight or right. Now within a mile of home, it occurred to me how pissed Mike’s wife would be about this when she heard the story. I didn’t want to engage this guy or get into a thing with him. I was fighting mad, sure, but I was other things too: sad, and a little shaken. As we approached the red light, I pulled into the right lane. I figured the extra lane between us might be a buffer, should he be crazier than I thought. There was no one else on the road, so it was just the empty lane between us. I was a little scared, but I think I was more scared because Mike was with me. Like I didn’t want to be embarrassed by getting myself into trouble around him. Had he not been there, I might have taken the middle lane. Even so, from the safety of the right side, I couldn’t help myself, and as we drew even approaching the light, I stole a look to my left. The car was turning down a side street about twenty yards short of the intersection, so even though the light was still red, it was only for a second that I saw what looked like a middle-aged white man in a baseball cap, whose car’s interior was clean and sleek, looking straight ahead, but extending his arm at a 90˚ angle directly toward me offering me his middle finger. He never looked at me. It was like he was just doing it in case I happened to look over. He might not even know if  I saw. He might have mouthed the word “asshole,” but it was hard to see. He made a smooth left turn down the side street and was gone. Did I know a kid that lived on that street growing up? Hasn’t I gone to a party in that neighborhood in high school? It might have been that one kid’s house who played hockey and the drums. Or maybe this was somebody else. Maybe I didn’t know anyone who lived over there at all. We continued on our way. The rest of the drive home was uneventful.