Thursday, May 06, 2004
The Hump Seat Rider
Every afternoon the crowd heading to the Richmond BART station meets at Beale and Howard, and cars troll up docilely to take them on, two or three or four at a time. Each day the crowd gathers, all of them looking for their own ride home. In the morning, these same people park out in the ‘burbs and then carpool in with other strangers, getting a ride from a new fellow citizen each day, helping with tolls and keeping quiet while a cypher drives them to a dropoff point downtown, or back to whereever they started, or to the Richmond BART station, anyway. Stranger things happen every day. It’s supposed to be one of those social success stories.
The line was substantial but very well-behaved, so it moved pretty quickly. He pulled up when I was third in line and announced “room for four” out the passenger window. He wasn’t kidding, either - his gleaming old Lincoln could have been a limo. I loaded into the back seat with an older woman in a plain business suit and a young exciteable-looking guy - like the summer clerk you never hear from again. He enthusiastically volunteered to sit in the middle - “I’ll take the hump seat,” was how he put it, which seemed to embarass the older woman next to him, which in turn seemed to egg him on a little. I could feel tension building as the driver’s eyes ran up and down over him. The driver was built like his car with a big frame and big muscles, well upholstered but still looking sharp and stylish in a tailored suit - potentially, a very tough customer if you got him irritated enough. Riding shotgun next to him was a heavyset tired-smelling woman with alopecia and Persistent Sighing Disorder. It felt like it might be a long ride.
We got out past the island before things got weird, long enough for me to have lulled myself into a premature sense of safety. It started benignly. The woman in the suit got a call on her cellphone - she quickly turned off the ringer. But the clerky guy saw her phone and got rather agitated: “Wow, that’s the smallest phone I’ve ever seen!”
"Well. Yes.”
“No, really, that thing’s totally cool! Here, check mine out...” He pulled out a slightly larger phone. “Here, lemme see yours again.”
With a bit of a pout, she pulled out her tiny phone. It really was remarkable - I’d probably launder it, if not swallow it. “That is impressive,” I admitted. Feeling already as if I was helplessly participating in my own ultimate downfall, I pulled out my own cellphone for comparative purposes. It seemed like a museum piece next to those two slick little machines, a relic from a less sophisticated time.
The wheezing woman in front snorted derisively. “That thing’s ancient! I can’t believe it still works!” She was wrestling a cell phone from the depths of her cavernous purse. She presented it with a flourish: ivory in color, about six inches in length, smooth, almost cylindrical, and embarassingly ambiguous in overall design. So, four cell phones were lined up on the capacious central console; the smallest by far belonged to the woman in the suit and yeah, mine was the biggest. Hey, where I come from, that’s still a good thing.
The excitable clerk started in on the driver. “Hey, man, you got a cell phone?”
“Yeah.”
“Well how small is it?”
“Small e-fuckin-nuff.”
“Well let’s see it man, let’s see how it stacks up, we’ve got four out of five already now, c’mon man, play along....”
There was a moment when the driver was just looking at him in the rear view mirror, when I felt everything hanging in the balance. I didn’t know what it was, I just felt that I was on the verge of it and this was the last chance any of us would have to avert something catastrophic, but it was equally clear that nothing would alter the course of events… I felt it all falling inexorably into place while I just sat there and watched. The driver locked eyes with the clerk for a moment - and then he dipped a beefy hand into his lapel pocket and pulled out an elegant cellphone. “Will this do?,” he asked imperiously.
“Dude, this does great. Wow, look at this, five cell phones, all lined up, he rambled. “Everybody’s phone, all in a row, big to small. Pretty cool. And actually, they make an interesting arrangement all laid out like that.” He paused for a moment, appreciating the diversity of the various instruments. Then he calmly swept his arm over them with a smooth, natural gesture, swept them up and into his ratty canvas bag. We were too startled to say a word.
So, he went first, asking the now-wide-eyed driver, “Hey, man, does this car have that satellite tracking thing?”
In an ill-conceived moment of candor, the driver answered in the negative. “Cool,” said the young clerk. “Hey, lemme show you something,” he continued, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world, reaching into his bag where he’d put all the phones and pulling out a sleek, good-sized handgun. “This is a real gun. Here, I’m going to show you. Don’t be scared, this will be loud just for an instant, but then it’ll be quiet again. Okay?”
And with that he looked into the rear view mirror again, his eyes calmly on the reflection of those of the driver, the gun resting in his lap, pointed at the back of the driver’s seat.... The driver saw this, saw all of it, clenched his jaw and his hands on the wheel, and said nothing. The clerk with the gun pointed it up at an angle next to my ear and squeezed off a shot. The crashing clap might not have been audible to the drivers of other cars speeding along the causeway, but our eardrums were all severely traumatized. Every molecule in our bodies contracted independently and the breath was sucked from my lungs. A tidy hole with irregular edges over my head showed us where the bullet had passed through the thickly padded roof. He pressed the muzzle of the gun to the throat of the woman next to him - she shrieked as best she could with no breath in her body. He pulled the gun from her, turned to me, pressed the flat steel muzzle next to my adam’s apple. It was hotter than I expected, very hot indeed, and I could smell the exploded powder, thought I could smell the singed flesh of my jaw. I want to say I held my tongue but I honestly don’t know. Maybe I screamed. All I know for sure is that afterwards the car seemed very quiet. The only thing I could hear was a ringing in my ears, the echoing of that pistol shot.
The clerky guy spoke again, just to break the ice. “You know what I think?” The car was silent, so he continued: “I think you ought to take 580 to the 80, and just take the 80 east. Get into the central valley. I think that’s what you ought to do. Anybody got a different idea?” And we sat silently as he waved his gun back and forth among us, opening the conversation for responses. We said nothing. “Maybe Reno,” he muttered as he propped each foot up on each seat back and lowered his pistol again down to his lap, aimed at the driver’s spine. “Reno’s nice this time of year.”
