Laura's Piece from Inner Monologues: Haters

The Real Threat
by Laura Motta

No one ever threatened to kill me until I moved to New York. I don't want to be braggy here, but I'm just not the sort of girl whom one threatens to kill. I am relatively mild-mannered. I have nice friends. I am, to quote a saying on one of Donnie Wahlberg's old t-shirts, a drug-free body. I pay my credit cards on time. But on 9th avenue in gridlock on a rainy Tuesday night, none of that mattered.

See, I was in a van. And before you ask, I wasn't tied up in the back. I was riding in it.

This van takes me to and from work every day and is paid for by my company. The former point makes it the grimmest and most embarrassing form of transportation known to mankind—worse than any panel-sided station wagon you could imagine. The latter makes it the greatest.

I had an appointment after work to see my shrink—honestly, the timing here, as you'll see, was impeccable. The van was caught in traffic and running late, so I decided to jump out and grab the subway. We were stopped at a red light and I communicated my desire to de-van to the driver, who grunted without moving any part of his face, signaling that I could open the door and dive into oncoming traffic for all he cared. So I gathered up my stuff and opened the door. That's when I hit the guy.

He was riding a bike between the lanes of stopped traffic and the van door hit him square in the side in a spectacularly precise sort of way, like hitting the bullseye on a dunk tank. Like, somewhere in my mind, a congratulatory bell sounded.

He groaned and toppled over, and my first thought wasn't, "Wow, I just killed someone." Or, "How unfortunate." Or even, "Fuck." My first thought was, "I'm going to jail. I will need to surrender my mascara and wear nothing but jumpsuits."

Let me also say that I hate people who ride bikes. I blame either some youthful association with Puck on The Real World or the fact that my ex boyfriend liked his bike better than me. But if you ride a bike, let me tell you that you're doing a beautiful thing for the planet and an ugly thing to my disposition. Also, pull down your fucking pant leg and walk like the rest of us. You're not in Brooklyn anymore, Benji. And I bet that's really your name, too. The one you gave yourself. When you joined the band.

But I knocked the guy over and he sort of wailed and harrumphed, and as he lurched to the right, I saw it happen. The palm of his right hand touched the fender of the car on the other side. That palm is probably what stopped him from getting seriously hurt, because he stood up immediately, steadied himself, and aimed the best WTF expression in the general direction of the van. And then the guy in the other car—the one the biker had used to catch himself—started threatening to kill everyone.

But before he did that, he rolled down his window. Because that's always what you do before you start threatening to kill people. The window was tinted and from behind its shiny sheet of dark emerged the smooth, gleaming expanse of bald head and I knew immediately that this was going to be awesome.

He leaned on the horn for a minute. And then it began.

"Did you touch my car? Did you touch my fucking car? Did you touch my fucking car? Did you touch my fucking car?"

Because, you know, all of those questions could have different answers, depending. He's shouting in the direction of the guy on the bike, who, at this point, was standing there all lopsided and mouth-breathing. When the bald guy doesn't get an answer, he switches tactics. He gets out of the car.

The first thing I notice is his sweater because it's cashmere and his ears because they're enormous and his height because he has none.

"I want your ID," he screamed at the guy on the bike. "I want your fucking ID."

The guy on the bike continued to mouth breathe and stare and not hand over his ID, which I’m sure he forgot that he had on him. In fact, I’m sure he forgot he had a name, a place of birth, that today was a real date (anchored in real time), and that George Bush is no longer President. I’m sure, at that moment, the only thing he “had on him” was four broken bones, paralyzing fear, and soiled undergarments. Watching him, I forgot for a moment that he was riding a bike and remembered that this man also rides the grand roiling tidal wave of this thing, as Prince once said, we call life. And that I ride it too and am totally willing to hold other people’s heads under for a while if it means I’ll make it to shore safely.

But the bald guy loved the biker’s nonreaction so much that he turned away and started looking for someone else to yell at.

Now, while this was happening, I surely qualified for some sort of good citizenship award by doing the only thing that came to mind. I closed the van door. Thinking that it would, you know, make the van less conspicuous.

But then the bald guy, in what must have been his most intuitive moment of the week or maybe even the last two weeks, figured out where all this mess had started.

He marched over and pulled open the van door and, as the kids say, got all up in my face. He hesitated for a moment when he saw me with this look, like, “Oh. You’re clearly useless.” Which I am. And I know already, thanks.

"You motherfucking fuck. You scratched my motherfucking car." (This is clearly the version he uses for women.) "You scratched my motherfucking car. I'm going to motherfucking kill you."

How does a girl respond, really?

I could have really stooped. I could have said, "I almost killed the guy on the bike. I didn't touch your car. Keep the chain of blame straight, at least." I also could have said, “Wow, small penis, right?” but then he would have gotten the Baretta out of the glove box. I also, possibly, could have commented on the surreality of the whole thing, but he doesn’t know what that means. So I did nothing.

Actually, I think I made like a tweeting noise in the back of my throat.

That's when he slammed the door closed in my face, and that time, I made sure to lock it. Crafty, I know.

And then the light turned green. And the only reason why I knew this is because I was thrown to the floor because the van driver accelerated so quickly. We rode in silence until we approached my stop—the one I'd originally planned to use—and the van driver spoke for the first time.

"Did I touch that guy's car?" he said. He didn't look back, but he sounded scared.

"No," I said. "The guy on the bike touched that guy's car."

Because it was his fault. It was. Even though I shook and sobbed for the next four hours, it was. Even though I flinch every single time I see a guy on a bike now. Even though I still look for that guy, racing up between the lanes on 9th Avenue, simultaneously hoping that I do and don’t see him.

It was his fault. You know. Just so we all have the story straight.