A Partisan Diary

Wednesday, January 03, 2007

More sacred night

As I said I would do a confession of the event at dusk last week. Everyone had a different story.

Driving along in my automobile thinking that yes indeedy, I might be the messiah.

The way that would work is that everyone or nearly everyone picks up a few messiah trojans through the womb at birth, perhaps more in the crib with visitations from aregons or something. Most of these I thought, as I went by the edge of the park where the Japanese cherries were blossoming on Christmas Eve, how weird is that I thought as well, most of these trojans would lead to voices of conscience or minor visions out the corner of your eye. Some might lead to prophecy.

But a few might attract a whole software, a whole firewalled program perhaps a home version, a kind of John the apostle one, or the professional program, not the beta, that was here already, but the new launch of the messiah. The final version.

The park had dotted itself with lightly jacketed people attracted to its lime green December splendour consisting, most dramatically, in clusters of perfectly blooming orange and burgundy roses erupting up on bare white stakes from its pruned back rose gardens amidst wandering lines of frolicking semi-migrated finnish ducks, other feathered creatures amidst victorian creations of garden tangled perplexity, inter spaced with statuesque lethargically posing black squirrels scrunching their noses slowly while picking and choosing in unseasonable gluttony from exotic offerings of pieces of candy cane or from multi-hued tiny peels of dwarf oranges.

Could it be, I wondered, that in me the messiah program was imperfectly loaded in me, perhaps it was only an upgrade, not the whole thing, and that would account for the distortions in my various miracles and the randomness of my proverbs not to mention the repetitive mortality's.

Then bang. My car was hit just behind the driver's wheel and just at the front of my driver's door by a beige ford. The sound of a sudden collision reverberates in its own horrific way through all ages and fields of consciousness. Beyond a gong, beyond the bell of doom, it reverberates through all the other collisions you have been in or have seen. All the ones, if any, you will be in.

It sounds like the devil's cash register. It sounds like the gavel of judge merciless superstate hitting the bronze gavel pad in the court of ultimate judgement.

It was the same sound as the time I rolled the car in Medicine Hat. As the time I hit the police station, the time I collided with myself, the time I was, chauvinistically, objectifying the body of my friend's girlfriend Jennifer as she paraded down Front Street in her new 1930's style bell shorts, objectifying badly while not braking in time for the traffic light or for the caddy stopped at it.

That time the gong led to a decadent earthy sound of falling fibreglass paneling that I had just finished painting, put on to sculpt the car front. It is the sound of the complete dent in the universe of perfect metal. Of fate.

The ford was fifteen years old. My car by contrast glowed and smelled intensely of the fact that it had never seen a dark day. The scene of the accident is an absolute 'Y'. One road from the park, one road from the dreary suburb. They meet at a point guarded by two black and white traffic calming steel poles narrowly guarding a white traffic bump intending to slow you before you get to the straight part across the Heath, the straight piece which reminds you of the care free days of youth and racing but which leads to the roundabout of continuous road rage connecting those still shaking, exiting crawling from the motorway to those intending to enter it angrily and precipitously from the convolutions of the shopping villages.

A man leapt from the ford. Something in my mind thought 'he looks like a leaping chocolate ape.' 'How interesting' thought my mind next. 'You have lapsed into a surrealistic racism. This is unbelievably bad of you to now become an asshole under stressful conditions at this late stage of your life. What have you become? Something nasty?'

No I haven't. I thought dancing chocolate ape for two reasons. One is the Jack Spicer poem about that and the other was my favourite teacher in High School, the one all the guys called 'Jungle Bunny'. So 'bunny' is associated with Easter and that in turn with chocolate.

The guy is black, dickhead. And he is jumping. That is the reason you thought this. And in school they called him 'Jungle Bunny' because he was a black person from South Africa. We had never seen a black person before in our town but some had travelled to Florida for winter holidays. They picked it up there. They used 'coon' and 'nigger' too. It made them feel sophisticated. They wanted to sound knowing and social, modern. White in fact.

But we all loved him. He had a discourse we had never heard before. He had lived in Paris. He taught geography from memory of the actual features. Table Mountain. The Wild Coast. He spoke of politics.

The leaping man put fists to his eyebrows. He kicked his own tire. He shouted several curses involving the proliferation of showers of assholes. He waved a fist at me. A head appeared at the side window of the ford. It was a woman, not black but something. Her hair, framed above the beige door panel had the same burgundy colour as the car I had driven into the police station years ago. It seemed orange at the roots.

I was now considering whether, despite the fact that the two were a little overweight, and not dressed according to the code, if I had been hit by dangerous 'hoodies' or even more dangerous 'yardies' interrupted perhaps in a dangerous mugging cruising game, dope dealing as they went in a, bass projecting thumping meander around the shopping villages, interrupted by me. And I had shown no respect.

My mind chastised me severely for this. It asked how I, of all people, could do such main stream stereotyping. What a shit I was. How could I leap to judgement before even realising the detail? They had, for example, you ridiculous pissy scared child, no hoods. The leaping man was wearing a knitted sweater in a style popular at Christmas four years ago. He was probably on his way to a family gathering containing the niece who gave it to him. The woman's hair is so coloured gloriously through the Ford's glass by the sun setting there beyond the Heath.

The leaping man, now howling about damnation, leapt into his car and reversed from contact with mine. I reversed too. He then drove from the juncture of the Y through the striped poles to the straight part beyond. He parked on the verge, got out and began leaping again. He pointed to a place on the road's shoulder behind his car. I drove where he indicated and parked. Checking for traffic carefully I got out.

"Give me your identification" He shouted. "Don't you have any concentration? Don't you look where you are going? Don't you know what you are doing? How did you ever get a license? Your type shouldn't be allowed on the road." He said.

All good questions but I thought to help him with boundaries of our discourse by saying "I will not discuss who is to blame". I hate to talk about right and wrong. It always turns to comparative moralities and personalities.

The woman had now gotten out of the car. Her hair was exactly as I had seen it, setting sun or not. She had orange roots as well and a pseudo leopard skin jacket, the kind which I, because of my feelings about animals , regard as hypocrisy with evil intent, intent only restrained by opportunity, and worse, as insincere irony in dress.

"What are you smiling at" she said with a gutteral whine. This is a question one should never answer. But I did check my conscience and realised it was not because she seemed a stereotypical bumped up chav from some dreadful place, probably Dagenham. No, how could she be that if she was with a black guy. She might even be cool.

In Dagenham, the way things are going, she would be in constant threat. She doesn't look like the type to cope with that. A bit highly strung. A lot of the working class of Dagenham have been driven to madness with catastrophic visions served to them about immigrants from Africa and Asia raping their daughters and wives and taking their jobs and worse, using all the public services, taking the beds in hospitals and the education budget for their pagan schools, using all the services once for workers but now being increasingly disintegrated by liberal privatisation, taking from them while helping foul, criminal immigrants to slurp up benefits and privileges awarded by vile and corrupt mainstream politicians who sleep with them , being given cheap palatial homes, as the working class lives in rat traps ground under to drunken suicide or leaving altogether to either go to Canada to get their own boat or to Iraq to fight.

"You twit" she said. I found myself smiling again. And then, to my shame I did a class zinger at her.

"Does your mobile phone take pictures?" I said. I knew from the date of the ford, his sweater and her leopard skin that it was highly unlikely it would. If they had been real hoodies and not a lower middle class outfit as it now seemed they were, they would have a phone that probably would be able to do things my phone, still in my hand and unused, could never dream of. They would also have knives and possibly a rapid fire Russian pistol.

In silence we three now walked in rotation around the cars. For me things got better. My car, from a limited edition factory modified model especially strengthened for rallying, and painted frightening racing red with an anarchist interior design, all Ferrari blood and dracula black, had a tiny demure bump, reflecting a pinhead glow of light but no scratch. Not the hint of a scratch. A designer bump. It was enhanced actually.

Their front bumper had fallen down to the ground, the headlight had cracked, the front panel, rusted, I could see, was split. It was a mess. It looked disreputable.

"You haven't stopped smiling since the accident" the woman said to me. She looked close to crying. They had presents it looked like, ready to deliver scattered on the back seat of the car.

The man then said "Are you on drugs?"

"No, are you?"

"Of course I am" he said with a fair degree of ironic schoolmarmish, arrogant, sarcastic smugness I thought. It was a perfectly tuned and modulated middle class outraged voice, delivered with a nod to the woman as if to say, while showing off gravitas and heavy judgement, 'See what kind of an asshole we have met here and now as usual'.

"That is a useful admission" I said, with the voice of a cunning weasel. I raised an eyebrow.

He hated that. "Of course I am not on drugs" He said. "How dare you!" His wife looked alarmed and a worried look of a mixed bit of admiration and disapproval crossed her face. She may have been surprised by his radical knowing sally about drugs. Not good for appearances.

He had had a slight tone of doubt in his voice with his accusation as he looked over my clothing. I was wearing a classic leather jacket and motorcycle boots. I was doing so ironically, a calculated bit of projection and fun on my part, as the car was, ironic but authentic too and arising from my tradition and background. But hey, maybe he didn't get that.

"Let me see that identification" he said, to make up for his moment of doubt. I returned to my car and he to his. He came back to the damaged meeting point we had established at the front of his car with a black photo album sized notebook and a blue fountain pen. What was this guy? A retired operational manager of a cab company? A government inspector of drains? No, too Kafka. Was that pen a retirement gift? Government issue? Was the book for attendance at his primary school?

"Identification please" he said, looking over the notebook while writing, one could assume, a detailed waterproof attempt at a description of the damage, which damage was exactly as that I had received once in an MG when I hit a deer, an occasion I both sketched and wrote a poem about, and perhaps also writing a description of the location. I decided to be helpful.

"The whole issue is the point of impact" I said, with a smile.

"What do you mean you twit" He said. "The point of impact is back there at the poles". I smiled at the use of the word 'twit' which derived, although he may not know that, from an ancient usage for homosexual. Perhaps associated in his mind with the smiling and with the leather.

I decided not to point out, to spare his feelings and image in his woman's eyes, he was so obviously playing his manly righteousness and competence to her, that the damage to my car was on the side and that to his was on the front, so that meant I had reached the yield sign first. Nyah nyah.

Also the damage to my car meant, besides that it was a better car and that I probably was a better man for that, no, no, that isn't true I contradicted myself, but it did mean I was not moving the fastest. That is science. It might mean too I was actually stopped dead at the poles. Carefully. While he was racing along.

"Are you with the police?" I said to encourage his assumed command of the role of officiousness and which he was acting out so well. I did not smile when saying so. Let him jam. Rock on leaping man.

"As good as" He said. He smiled to the woman. I loved this. I love how the middle classes go on about their connections and influence. I believed the guy was now caught up in a wonderful dream of law and righteousness, of his intrinsic worth and decency prevailing over leather-jacketed hoodlums such as I, caught in a necessary delusion, believing firmly in a reliance on his good citizenship, on his insurance company, on his woman, on the subtlety of his social standing, to see him through this disaster of fate and unjust, unfair and criminal affront to the fragile structure of his life, in which one day, please God, he would be proven right about everything. He would be known by all as decent and hard done by. One day he would be powerful through righteousness. Perhaps it was today.

"I shall return to take pictures of the spot with my camera." He said, glancing at his wife. "You shall be hearing from my insurance company, never fear."

He looked as though he meant that this was instead of giving me the thrashing I deserved. He would rely on his public and private services to deal with me as he directed.

And never fear! How often had he got to use that phrase? How splendid this now must be for him! I decided to help him further. "I shall need your identification as well" I said.

"Of course you shall have it. Why ever would you think not? I have my driver's license, my insurance, and a utility bill".

"I shall need the woman's identification as well" I said. I had hoped to give him more room for bombast. But I realised at once I shouldn't have said 'the woman'. His face contracted. It puffed up. His eyes widened and narrowed. He was trying to compute. I realised too late I had undermined him with this. Oh God!

"How dare you! How dare you ask such a thing? She wasn't driving. She is none of your business. You twit. You bastard. You fucking thug. I have a good mind to get the police out here."

At this point my devious mind came up with three completely disparate thoughts in procession. The first was to wonder, with a kind of new curious revelation what on earth was going on there. Was this an after office party Christmas Eve affair on its way to consummation? Was this a pair of civil rights workers retired on their way to a reunion? The second thought was that astonishingly, this guy thought I was a Dagenham racist filled with venomous and coiled absolute and soulless pathological contempt for this mixed race couple who had, most likely, been rammed by me.

How dare they think that. I had been jailed for oppositional activities against racism and fascism, I had founded organisations, I had been shot at by Kalashnikovs. I had been threatened by the South African secret services with death. I am not another orangutan cruising around on Christmas Eve in a muscle car. I am taking tree ornaments to my flat over the park.

Then I felt a great annoyance at being repeatedly called a twit and a bastard. A very dark part of me firewalled off, a part that knows no fear or morality, suggested that I go back to my car, get my tire iron and bash the rest of the shit out of his fucking wreck.

Instead I said "I forgive you."

"If you are saying it is my fault, you twit, I am phoning the police. Where is our mobile Dear? Please phone the police. This is unacceptable."

I sighed. He was obviously expecting me to argue the case as the scenario went. I think he may have wanted to threaten violence to be restrained by the woman. He may even believe that I thought myself guilty. The poor guy. If only I could help. It got worse for him when the mobile was dragged out of the purse. How awful for him, at least five years old.

I gave him the first ID I could find. It was a UN passport stamped throughout but still valid. I expected a problem with this which would lead to further officious complications with my license, my nationality, the car ownership and even insurance, none of which were available to him in a way that he could write down in his book. But he could in awesome faith write down the details in the passport.

And he didn't notice the passport was blue, had official pages in fifteen languages or that my accent did not come from London's cultural mix. He only noticed the address in it. It was a suburb I had lived in years ago. It is a mixed race suburb, fairly notorious for that. He said "Is this a place near Streatham?" His eyebrows rose. I had confused him. He looked at my clothes again. I didn't look black or even asian.

"Yes" I said.

'Dear' was still trying to phone the police. I returned to my car and sat. The Heath at sunset is beautiful. On the open ground a dozen people were flying kites. The cars going by had windows open to the apocalyptic mild breezes foretelling a new range of wild electric storms like those that had just passed.

I felt such rising warmth of charity for them. The mobile was evidently dead. Poor woman. But good thing too because the police would never be bothered with this little bullshit, blacks involved or not. I knew from the radio they were presently dealing with searching trains and subways because of a red terror alert and trying to contain drunken riots in the stock broking district. This evening will have four hundred reported stabbings before santa arrives. The insurance company will instantly on reading his byzantine monkish notes with irrelevant detail forget his pathetic little headlight.

It will not pursue a United Nations ghost for recovering a pittance for a completely undocumented accident at an obscure half marked yield sign on Christmas eve.

And if they came close to finding me through my dozen official filters, impossible without international co-operation, I would have to tell them about the drunkenness, the impersonation of a police officer, the woman who was actually driving and also point out the point of impact on a previously damaged surface. They would sure raise his rates.

As I sat they drove off after awhile having concluded with one another who knows what narrative of events.

Something in my mind spoke thus:

'Leaping man and leopard skin woman, you shall enter the gates of Heaven. Forgive me.'

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home