THE DECISION Part II
Understand: When I first moved to California, I was told that there was only one thing holy and that was the crosswalk under California law. You have to stop when there are people in the crosswalk. Even if there’s no light, if there are two parallel white lines on the pavement and they aren’t cocaine, you gotta stop. I’ve seen old ladies dragging shopping carts across Ventura Boulevard at 8:45 in the morning and cars, even cars carrying very important movie executives, stop to let her hobble across.
Admittedly, this rule had become a little less firm in the popular consciousness than it was when I was first there. Pedestrians once beset me when I tried to make a legal-in-New York right on red and the people in the cross walk attacked like villagers in a Frankenstein movie. Now cars creep into the cross walk, they wait until the pedestrian is out of their lane and gun it.
But a SCHOOL?
Crosswalks in a school SHOULD be sacrosanct. They’re not, but if you’re going to run your oversized vehicle into a crosswalk near a school you should at least do it in drive and not in reverse.
And don’t be heading for my daughter and me.
I started to yell.
It did nothing.
Well, she did stop, but that was only to look out the window at us and then put it into gear and drive forward. Toward us.
She came close. Very close. Close enough that I screamed, “STOP” and shot my arms out and HIT HER CAR. I’m not terribly tall and don’t have the reach of a boxer. We measured later and she came within two feet of me, my daughter right behind me.
I was shaking with anger and fear. At a school, a place where you can reasonably expect safety in a crosswalk, and where I had looked both ways to see that the NASCAR auditioners had stopped to let us cross, someone had come close to hitting us not once, but twice as we had the temerity to try to pick Connor up.
Lauren was pale behind me, partially because she knew I was likely to be really angry in situations like that and partially because she had just come close to getting nailed by a forty-five hundred pound vehicle describe by its manufacturer as having “aggressive styling”.
No kidding.
We sat down outside the school and tried to calm down while we waited for my son’s bus.
Lauren was dead quiet. She wasn’t even reaching for her cell phone, which means it was really serious.
I continued to watch the folderol and frivolity that surrounded a day’s release. Some administration people came out of the school office and tried to manage the traffic flow that now no longer resembled a motor sport, but instead metallic salmon rushing upstream to spawn.
One woman told a man he was parked in the school bus zone. The offending fellow, a small, tightly wound Middle Easterner fairly leapt toward her while maintaining a not-too-threatening distance and yelled:
“Where am I supposed to park to pick up my kid, then? Huh? Huh?”
“You’re in a school bus zone.”
“Where am I supposed to park?” He yelled again, leaning forward toward her like he was fighting a wind when he was, in fact, causing it. “I got a kid to get.”
I was going to add: “You could park a block away and walk to the school like I did,” but I think I’d topped off my confrontation cup for the day.[1] I was also thinking of mentioning that it’s “I have a kid to pick up,” but really, it seemed he had bigger problems.
The administrator shrugged and walked away.
The bell rang. Kids began to come out of the school, running into the street and dodging between cars to reach those double and triple-parked. Parents would wave them over the the driver’s side of the car to get them in, which made me flinch even if they were parked three deep and the driver’s side was actually the sidewalk on the other side of the street. The administrators, amid a chorus of vindictive vocalizations had given up trying to control the situation and seemed to be concerning themselves with making sure the kids didn’t get killed.
The most amazing thing, looking back, is that everyone just seemed to ACCEPT it. The administration attempts at order were half-hearted, but really, what are they supposed to do short of calling the cops[2]? Any voice raised in protest was a lone one and likely to be met with derision from the fellow parents. In the big picture, they should channel some of that driving aggression into, say, career or home repair. Perhaps a hobby. Like mass-murder. Something more socially acceptable than playing Simpson’s Road Rage in three-d. Leave that stuff for the Playstation.
Connor’s bus came and the driver had to let the kids off between parked cars. Mrs. W, his bus driver, was one of the best, most conscientious people I met out there. She got off the bus with a big STOP sign and stood between the cars so the kids could get off with at least the illusion of safety. Luckily there was no one in the cars right around her. She was a pro. She must have done this before.
I gathered the boy with a hug and headed toward our car, hoping we could get across the street without incident.
And that’s when I saw the Odyssey and a fat woman standing outside of it taking my picture with a cell phone camera.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“You damaged my vehicle[3],” she said in a heavy maybe-Russian accent.
“You damn near hit me in the crosswalk.”
“No I didn’t.”
“Yeah. You did. You almost hit me and my daughter in the crosswalk.”
“No I didn’t and I have a witness. And she’s an adult!”
I started to take the kids and walk away again, trying to keep from blowing my top.
“What is your name, please?” She called after me.
“Why do you want to know?”
I knew why she wanted to know, but I wasn’t going to make anything easy for her.
Also, I was fairly sure she was full of shit.
“You damaged my vehicle.” She said.
“You were in a crosswalk. At a school. That’s illegal and I was trying to get you to NOT HIT ME!”
She looked at me with total derision. Then she turned to my son.
“Whose class are you in?”
That about drove me over the top. She already tried to hit my daughter, now she’s going to pump my son for info?[4]
“He doesn’t go to school here,” I said and I started to take the kids again.
“Who’s going to pay for my vehicle?” and then she started to ask people as they went by. “Do you know him? Do you know who he is?”
That was it. I stopped and with a terrible calm[5]said:
“You want the police? Fine.”
And I called the police.
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