Nefarious, Dave, and I watched Karate Kid — the original, not the new version, which I’ve already promised my little Jackie Chan fan that we can see in the theatre — and like with The Spy Next Door, Nefarious spent an hour after the movie frantically running around the studio giving everything in her way — often that was me — vigorous kicks and cardboard-weapon beatings. I don’t know yet what the summer plans are going to be, but she’s been asking to go to karate camp (with both words and actions).
Yesterday I was driving to go bowling and traffic was quite heavy. My lane became temporarily blocked, so after letting the lane to the right of me zip past for a while, I signaled when I had a red-light gap and moved forward a little and nosed in to reserve my spot. Then a glossy black tinted-window SUV gunned it to try and stop me from taking what they thought was their spot. However, being in my own big be-bumpered truck, I’m not afraid of someone hitting me, so I continued to move forward into my spot. After the driver first pretended he would hit me with his truck, he switched to extended angry honking. Whatever. I couldn’t care less, and really, you’re playing chicken with the wrong truck, because I’m armored and you have an shiny paint job!
A minute later he pulled up beside me and matched my speed and hugged my lane and started honking again, and I’m thinking what a psycho this guy is, and as I heard Caitlin saying, “he’s trying to show you his light” but not quite processing it quickly enough, I briefly jostled my truck toward him — even though I stayed in my lane it could have been interpreted as a “I’m going to run you off the road if you don’t leave me alone” gesture — and he started honking wildly and turned on the rest of his police lights in addition to the hand held siren-light that he was alternately trying to place and picking up to wave at me. Uh oh… Oops, did I just threaten to kill a cop or something? Stay calm! Time to pull over…
The cop walked up to my window in plain clothes but holding out his badge, and judging my how much he was shaking, I assumed he was pretty upset. This would turn out to be an understatement, and the first thing he said to me was, “I’m off duty right now,” and the second thing he said to me was, “but that won’t stop me from taking you to jail,” and he was practically screaming already, “and you’re under arrest RIGHT NOW!”
“Ok, if I’m under arrest can I go park my truck so it’s not on the street?”
I did that and got out of the car, and he screamed at me to put my cane, and then my knife as well, back into the truck and yelled at me to walk over to him. He was shaking badly and everything he said was full of rage and high volume and completely unprofessional (which is an issue since he’s asking to be treated as a cop). He started with the typical “please incriminate yourself” attempt, shouting “What were you thinking out there? Well?”
Sorry, I’m been through this too many times — “What was I thinking? Me? What were YOU thinking? You’re the one that tried to block me from changing lanes with your truck, and then followed me, honking and being threatening, and now you’re here screaming at me!”
“You tried to ram me with your truck!”
“I did nothing of the sort, if anything I was spooked because you were acting like a psycho,” I told the police officer calmly as he stood there trembling and sweating and screaming. And it’s true — his behavior up until this point had been aggressive and hostile enough that once they were being followed, some people would be very spooked.
“You and your zombie truck, you think the whole world revolves around you! Zombie? What’s that about anyway? Have you ever had to scrape some kid off the road? Well, I have! I’ve seen death in these streets! Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Sure, I understand what you’re saying,” I tell him, as he continues his rant. Even though he still peppered his comments with the threat of dragging me off to jail, it was pretty sure that I wasn’t even getting a ticket (he never asked for my paperwork once), let alone getting arrested. He did however make sure to tell me what he really wanted to do, giving me the sort of insight into the police mental state that problem cops always seem to want to give you.
In a completely failed attempt to threaten me — and as I towered over him I’m sure that our comparative was a factor in his behavior — he screamed, “Oooh, people like you make me so mad… Buddy, you don’t know how close you are to being on the pavement with me beating the hell out of you! Oh, how badly I want to teach you a lesson!”
As he did this, and I looked down at this trembling little guy threatening me, any last worry I had that there might be repurcussions went away. So I figured let him yell for a minute more and then head on to the bowling alley. The funny thing was when he started screaming about how “people like you think you’re the most important person on the road, and you always have to be first and don’t care about anybody else!”
I pointed out that this all started with him almost hitting me because he was aggressively trying to use the right lane to try to force his way in front of me. The irony was that he was guilty of what he was screaming at me about. It was obvious that his screaming and ranting and threatening were not making a very strong case to me — keep on meowing — and actually, if anything it was making me feel more and more justified that the behavioral problem was on his end. With all his screaming and me being calmer the more he did it, it was clear that I was not worried about being arrested, and even less worried about him beating on me — he eventually wandered, still shaking in rage, back to his car (“oh, buddy, it’s your lucky day because I’m going to let you go, but oooooh, you were so close to being beaten to a pulp and then tossed in jail”) and we both drove off. My only regret is that I know he’s going to take this out on his family. Guys like this, in addition to being precisely the sort of road risk he was accusing me of being, give a bad reputation to the police and the stereotype of the sort of person desperate for the authority to abuse the public. Cops with anger management issues are ticking time bombs.
