Intermission #2: Looks Can Be Deceiving

You can learn almost everything you need to know about human beings by watching how they behave when they're driving.

Here’s the thing. If you’re driving along and you look over at another car, it’s easy to go with your preconceived notion about that person from the look of what they’re driving, and from the look of them. Most of the time, this societal shorthand works just fine – but Driver Beware. There are a lot of us out there who no longer look like their backgrounds. I’m just saying…

Take for instance, this past weekend, a middle-aged woman driving down the back roads from the Northern Virginia/DC area to a coastal city in Virginia, to see about a family member that needs some help.

And say this woman drives a while until she hits the outskirts of Fredericksburg, Virginia, and the road has gone from four lanes to six for a while, to accommodate the turning lanes in that little city. And let’s say there’s a stop light, and the woman looks at state road signs and finds that she’s put herself in the wrong lane to make a turn down the next road she needed, so she puts her blinker on and waits for the light to change so she can change lanes.

And let’s say this yellow-orange colored truck is several feet behind her in the lane she needs to switch to, and when the light changes, the truck stays back there – leading the woman to believe it was done purposefully, this waiting when the light changed, so that she can switch lanes. She’s grateful, is the woman, and she moves quickly so as not to disrupt traffic flow and make the driver of the yellow-orange truck wish he/she hadn’t bothered to be nice.

And the traffic moves through the light just fine, until it’s stopped en masse again at the next red light. And then, the woman sees in her rearview mirror the driver of the yellow-orange truck open her door (yes, the other driver, it turns out, is a she as well) and march up to the woman in the black car. The woman in the car doesn’t turn around; she watches the light, because even though she’s mildly curious about the traveling legs in her rearview mirror, she’s a lot more concerned about the light changing to green, and her just sitting there.

BLAM

(pause for maybe a breath’s amount of time)

BLAM

A blam so hard it sounds like the driver’s window may well just go on ahead and crack. Then another.

Hmmm.

Now, here’s where it pays to remember that looks can be deceiving. The woman driving down these back roads to visit her relative looks, in her black German car and her black designer sunglasses and her dyed blonde hair - she looks to be a woman a fool slut in a yellow-orange truck can mess with and have herself a big time, and maybe feel good about herself and really feel powerful there for a few minutes, before reality sets back in.

But that is only because the woman in the black German car with the smooth beige leather interior doesn’t look like the typical picture of a woman whose father quit school at fifteen because he had to scrape together neighborhood jobs working in a corner grocers and hauling coal in hand-pulled wagons to help his mother to make enough money so that the government lady didn’t come around again to try to take his younger brothers and sisters away after his father died, leaving eight children and no paycheck during the Depression. A father who used to walk out of his camelback house with the holes in the outside walls down by the kitchen (and that’s where the rats got in, and they kept patching and patching but it was never enough so the rats kept on getting in), and he’d walk out of that hellhole of a house just about rubbing his hands together with glee, thinking about who he was gonna punch out that afternoon.

And she doesn’t look like a woman whose mother grew up in a coal mining camp in western Kentucky, where beating the shit out of the man who wronged you was not only not frowned upon, back in the day, but was absolutely expected, and if you didn’t do it, don’t bother coming back home.

So, not a good plan, this hitting the window of a stranger’s car.

Ever see the movie True Lies? Remember the part where Arnold Schwarzenegger is in a Corvette with a creepy used car salesman, and it looks like he takes the guy’s head and slams it into the car so that the guys passes out and there’s blood everywhere – but then you realize it’s only the character Arnold is playing, fantasizing about slamming that guy’s face? And the only reason you really thought, as the viewer, that Arnold really did slam the guy is because you already saw the kind of person old Arnold is, character-wise, and so you believe he coulda slammed the guy, no problem?

Yeah.

It took everything I owned in my psyche not to do what the temper of my bloodline was telling me to do.

I kept reminding myself I had a lot to lose, and the woman with her lips now almost right up against the outside of my window, screaming and flailing around, didn’t look like she’d mind figuring out a way to get her hands on it if I even twitched, because she’d have a lot to gain.

I wanted to roll down my window and wait for her to lean in and try to get at me, or I did and I didn't want to, for three conflicting reasons.

One, all I had to do was grab her by the top of her hair and slam her, hard, down (and let’s face it, I had the element of surprise in my favor, as I don’t remotely look like I come from a long line of fighters), and smack her face into that very painful place where the window comes out of the door. Leaving the window maybe an inch above the door line really makes that hurt a lot.

Two, once she reached in at me, and she would’ve reached if I’d given her the chance, I could have her arrested for assault, and that would have been nice, but I wasn’t exactly driving aimlessly down the road – I had to get to the place I was going.

Three, I remember being her. Well, not exactly - not tall and not driving a yellow-orange truck. I drove an old off-white VW bug – so decrepit inside that the floorboards in the backseat area had rusted through so you could see the road, and any passengers had to keep their feet on the seat, or risk loss of limb. Or foot, anyway. But I remember being broke and desperate about it, and thinking for years on end that there would be no end in sight to the way I was living. Feeling that, and being a part of the huge and quiet and ongoing underclass never leaves you. So I recognized her, and it didn’t make me do a happy dance that I am where I am now. Not at all. It made me want to cry with her in her frustration and lashing out at this lady in the nice car - who did she think she was?

Plus, life’s too short to be sidelined by raging buffoons.

So, I smiled at her instead – you know, that certain kind of smile people fucking hate? That’s the one. I felt bad about doing it – but not enough, it seems, to stop myself.

And then the light changed.

Ever have it happen to you? Been mistaken for a different kind of person than you look like you are, and have to grapple with yourself? Because no one is ever only one version of themselves, I don’t think. I think you carry all the earlier versions along with you, always.