Proverbs 18, Verse 3
"Sin brings disgrace."
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CHIPPED WISDOM:
"See that guy, over there? See that bulge in his left gym sock? That's drugs," said the one in the driver's seat, with dead certainty as they waited at the red light.
"Drugs?" the rookie passenger replied incredulously, "how do you know? I mean, you sound so sure."
"See his shorts? They have pockets. What the fuck would he need to carry in his sock if he's got pockets?"
"Wow," said the rookie, "you're really something. Now take a right when the light turns green-- and don't forget to signal."
With the exception of that last sentence, this could easily have been an exchange between two cops in a squad car. However, this conversation took place between me (driver) and my driving school instructor (passenger) in 1996, when I was preparing to get my driver's license, and it wasn't inside a patrol car, it was inside a gray Chevy Lumina with an auxiliary brake pedal.
"You've got cop eyes," my instructor said to me, almost with a little bit of envy. Maybe he wanted to try them on to see what I saw-- a world where every felon somehow lights up in neon green to me, but nobody else.
My driving instructor, we'll call him "Marty" because that's probably the name of most driving instructors, if you think about it, was a spindly man, bald on top with a neatly trimmed mustache. He wore plaid short-sleeve dress shirts and khakis. They must have paired him with me because they thought, "Well, this is what this kid is going to look like, and probably be doing for a living, in thirty years-- might as well give him a front-row seat to his future."
My lessons were an hour long and we would pull over three times during each of the four sessions so Marty could get out of the Lumina and light up. Marty wasn't just addicted to nicotine, I think he was in love. He chewed the end of his cigarettes while he smoked, I presume to increase the speed at which the nicotine surged into his salivary glands and his gums. I guess, if Marty is still alive today, he has no jaw, which makes me sad, because the words that came out of his jaw were funny-- they had a sardonic, nervous energy to them.
"So," he said to me one day while we were hopelessly stuck in traffic on a road that was adjacent to a local college, "if you got into trouble here-- like, if shit went down-- what would you do?"
I glanced at him and furrowed my brow, "If 'shit went down'? Are you serious?"
"Yes, I'm goddamned serious, like if someone tried to ram you or if someone ran up to your car with a gun, what would you do?"
(These kinds of things are always happening to sixteen-year-olds in suburban southeastern Pennsylvania, just so you know.)
"I'd cut it hard and floor it up onto the college quad."
"Yes!" Marty yelled, giving the Lumina's plastic dash, and then my shoulder, an enthusiastic thump, "That's right! Do you know how many idiots I teach who'd be like, 'Uhhh... I dunno?' Retards!" he exclaimed, shaking his head. "Now find a parking lot-- smoke time."
On the way to my test, I reminded Marty that he had neglected to show me how to parallel park.
"Shit!" he exclaimed, "uh-- okay, pull in here."
He popped the trunk, lit a cigarette, started chewing and pulled out some orange cones and set them up. He gave me a couple pointers and then told me to try it. I immediately backed over one of the cones, wedging it between the rear passenger tire and the muffler.
"You'll be fine."
Turns out, even though I hit an orange barrel during the actual test, Marty was right. I was fine. I passed. Maybe Marty paid the test administrator off. Maybe he just didn't give a shit. Maybe he didn't have cop eyes.
I hadn't thought about Marty for years and years, but I thought about him today. When I got into my car this morning to go buy a new hedge trimmer, I noticed that my glovebox was open.
"Hmpf, that's weird" I thought. But my wife opened it and rummaged around in it just yesterday looking for Advil for me because I had a headache. She must have forgotten to close it. Then I opened the center console and noticed appreciably less coinage in there than there had been the day before. Ah-- sometimes, when I go into a store, my wife takes a lot of the change and puts it in her wallet so she has some, because she likes to have exact change when she pays for things."
The cop eyes looked, but they didn't see. And they certainly didn't see the GPS missing. It wasn't until hours later, when a patrol car slowly rolled down our street and parked at a neighbor's house did my next door neighbor tell me that his car had been ransacked last night. Then it hit me. Hard. I went out to the car and, lo and behold, no GPS. Cop eyes, it seemed, were failing.
So they got a GPS unit. Some spare change. Fortunately, they left my I.D. badge and the keys to the psych hospital where I work (that would have been a LOT of paperwork...) but they also stole a bag of theatrical make-up used to make me look like the bitter, crippled, wizened old monarch King Gama in the production of "Princess Ida" I was just in. Maybe those druggie bastards are running around North Philly with age lines and gray hair and tooth-blackener. Or maybe they're just snorting the setting powder. Either way, I hope they drop dead. It's hard to feel victimized when I'm the idiot who left his car unlocked, an unheard of rarity for Mr. Paranoia, but, nevertheless, I don't like that things are going bump in the night right outside my house and I don't hear it happening, or notice when it does. Somehow it's not the drug-addled miscreants who are to blame, it's me who is deficient.
What would jawless Marty say?
