WHO DAT?!
“Really weird shit happens to you,” my pal Drooq told me after I detailed how a veteran challenged me to a fight in a parking lot on Memorial Day weekend following a misunderstanding at a record store. “I still die thinking about you getting in that wrong car with the black man.”
When my Camry was in the shop two years ago, I borrowed my mother’s Ford to get cash from the credit union. As I exited, not thinking about the particulars, I walked by my mother’s car and absentmindedly ripped open the driver’s side door of a different silver sedan.
“WHO DAT?!” yelled a startled black man.
The incident was bizarre enough, but the man was using a laptop propped on his steering wheel.
“OH, GOD!” I yelled back. “SORRY, WRONG CAR!”
Before he could respond, I slammed the door and speed walked to the right car, exited the lot as fast as possible, and laughed at myself all the way home, immediately telling anyone I knew who would get a kick out of the incident.
Two days later, I received a text from Sue.
“Guess who I just saw?” she said about a photo she attached to her text message. “WHO DAT?!”
There in the credit union parking lot was the same man back at work on his spreadsheets, stealing Wi-Fi to avoid eager bosses unwilling to extend his deadline, or so I could imagine. I later asked Barbara, the lady in charge at the credit union, if she knew who this man might be, but she was clueless.
I live a simple life. I eat a banana three hundred and sixty-five mornings per year. I anticipate grocery shopping each Monday because it guarantees I will converse with one human being in person that day. I spin records, read books, and write in my journal in solitude most nights. Why do I attract outlandish incidents in the wild?
When I laughed at the odd syntax of the veteran in the record store, he took it as a slight, calling me a clown and an egg head like a grade schooler would. Unwilling to let it go, I told him I didn’t give a flying fuck what he thought about me, declared his dog “shitty,” and told him to fuck off when he asked to fight me, insisting the cops gave less of a fuck about him than I did when he inquired if I would be calling them.
My pal, Bruce, responded to both stories shocked that I didn’t get shot. What are the odds something so predictable might happen to me? Should the day come that I die holding five thousand dollars cash or a pile of esoteric vinyl, everyone should know I died doing what I loved: interacting with a stranger in hopes something memorable might transpire.
As I take my final breaths, a nondescript man will set a laptop beside me. The camera will zoom in to reveal eight words on the screen: THE VETERAN FIRED RUBBER BULLETS. TO BE CONTINUED…
New life, who dis?