Not That Fly For A White Guy

I dropped the income tax returns into the drive-up mailbox at 2:30 a.m., and started pulling out of the Post Office onto the street. Looking across Broadway at the AM/PM, I saw an anxiety-producing scene: 15, or even 20, young African-American males loitering in the convenience store parking lot. When Beth worked there, she said similar groups would sometimes dance on top of their cars in the parking lot in the AM hours - spirited, maybe, but utterly obnoxious, from her jaundiced, I-have-to-work-here point of view. Tonight, there was no dancing. Instead, they seemed to be jumping into their cars and quickly leaving the lot.

Something odd was going in the middle of Broadway: a motorcycle and a car were parked in the middle of the street, and the drivers were standing together and talking to one another. Debris in the street suggested some kind of minor collision had just occurred. I pulled onto the street just as the other cars were pulling onto the street. Everyone swerved to avoid the folks in the middle of the street, but instead of driving normally after that, the impressionable drivers took the initial swerve as a suggestion for yet more exaggerated swerving. Quickly, I was the only one left driving straight down Broadway. Everyone else was weaving and swerving, like writhing interlocked snakes, across all the lanes on the street, including the westbound lanes. Spirits were high, and there was lots of happy shouting from open car windows. I gripped the steering wheel, and hoped that they could at least avoid hitting me by accident.

My turnoff soon came and I turned right, escaping without incident. The swervers continued heading east on Broadway, in high spirits.