truth is you can stop and stare
run myself out and no one cares
dug the trench out laid down there
with a shovel up out of reach somewhere
yeah, someone pour it in
make it a dirt dance floor again
The second time anyone tried to steal Carby, it was just two kids, and they were more inept than the junkie.
Wait. Back up.
One night some time before this, maybe before Eve and Dave were dating ("seeing each other," or "talking" if you're from Jersey), there had been a loud crash and fervent pounding at the door. It was three men, two girls, and they were all clearly not sober. This is not to imply that alcohol was their chemical of choice. Before doing anything Dave touched Eve's shoulder. A dance teacher had, long ago, imparted wisdom concerning the profound effect of a single, confident, touch. The touch had applications beyond dancing, although Dave rarely bothered.
Then admidst the shouting and death threats that filtered through the door, Dave walked to the door and said, "coming!" He voice sounded cheeful, but that word masked the sound generated when he unsheathed a kitchen knife from its holder on the countertop and held it such that the blade was aimed back along (and hidden by) his forearm. They people went away without him even opening the door and all that; what matters is the part about the knife.
Ok, back to the night of the second battle between theves and chain lock made of galvanized steel. Breaking these locks is no joke, but its not easy either. It is best done by careful application of 1 pair of bolt cutters with five foot long handles and a 350 pound man, over a period of five to ten minutes. That is, if you are going for the chain itself and not after the lock.
The would be juvenile bike thieves came armed with a pair bolt cutters with shorter handles and no hope of cutting steel, and two 140 pound teenagers. They had no hope of defeating the chain but that could have taken Eve in a physical confrontation. Eve was actually suiting up to ride when she heard the sounds of amateur bolt cuttering. Having experienced a previous theft, the one where she could no sooner walk to her door than see some loser ride off with her precious bike, Eve felt a particular sense of urgency, one that precluded her natural tendency to dial 911. Had she done so, the officer that had pulled her over to ask for her number would have shown up, wasted an hour of her time and disturbed all over her neighboors long after the kids had disappeared.
Instead, Eve spent a few precious seconds to run to her kitchen and grab a knife and then tumbled out the window at the base of the stairs, not wanting to waste the extra time it took to go out the front door. She landed on unsteady feet and her body slammed into the house on the other side of the alley, but she was still standing, and still holding that knife. The knife that she had pulled was the ugly one, the weird, long and thin one with the weird little umbrella shapes in the blade that you only use when the good big knife is dirty. It wasn't much good for stabbing and Eve didn't know how to use it anyway. She didn't need to.
The two baby thugs that were trying to steal the baby ninja saw a terrible harpy in pink leap out of the window and come running for them with a giant ass knife. They ran, although they were no so terrified that they forgot their tools. After running, they began telling, and given the natural male tendency to exaggerate the length of various objects, the 20 centimeter kitchen knife became a 60 centimeter katana blade.
Before this occured, Eve had a serious and immediate problem. Her bike clearly was not safe in that neighboorhood, not if children who hadn't even graduated high school were trying to steal it. The only solution Eve could think of was to take it inside, but that posed a problem. There were a large number of steps between the sidewalk and her front door. She needed a ramp. She looked around the alley and in a dumpster but did not find a conveniently placed board. The hardware stores were all closed at that hour, and she would have to ask someone for a ride, someone who would probably find too much merriment in what she was about to do. And she couldn't wait until the next day. Eve went inside and looked around for something, anything that would work. She spotted the solution immediately but did not even look at it directly until she had thoroughly searched the rest of the apartment, twice. Then she examined her book case.
It was a cheap but functional bookcase, the epitomy of Swedish modular furniture. Well, except for the part where it wasn't modular; it was just a bookcase. Eve tore it apart. It wasn't difficult, actually, just tedious, since she had to unload everything on the bookshelf. Once armed with one of the long side panels, Eve began to perform her first stunt: riding up the long panel and into her house. It went fine, mostly, except for the very end when the rear tile reached the end of the panel and its weight pushed down on the edge of the board, which caused the other end to fly up like a disproportionate seesaw. Surprised, Eve gunned the throttle and spun the tire. The panel went flying one way and the bike roared into her apartment. Eve came to a stop with the front of the bike and her elbow leaning into the wall. Her wooden ramp flew down onto the sidewalk and slide into a car, though fortunately since it was on the ground, one end only his the tire while the other slide underneath. Eve collected the ramp quickly and spent some time situating the bike The ramp and objects formerly on the bookcase surrounded it. Then Eve remembered she had wanted to go riding.
Thus began Eve's hiatus from riding. At first it was only that night, and then days went by, and then Dave found out.
Dave had a number of ideas about fixing her problem. Most involve garages, including the one where he kept his car, but Eve didn't have the money and they were far enough along for her to allow him to pay for something like that. Dave's worst idea was the one he came up with when he realized that the bay window in the lower part of the apartment could open. The secret, he insisted, was mulch, mulch that could raise the height of the flowerless flower bed in front high enough for a ramp to be feasible. The ramp itself could fold out from inside the apartment, after the window was open. Eve didn't bother asking why, and just went along with the whole plan. Her plan was to put a stop to Dave's plan the moment he was about to inflict permanent damage to her apartment.
Construction of this nature was light and could be accomplished by amateurs but required materials. This was the reason Dave and Eve were caught on a bridge in a car in stop and go traffic during the afternoon rush hour.
There are people out there in the world who due to some defect meet motorcycles with fear, hatred, or both. The portion of these people that can afford it drive cars instead. They aren't particularly good or knowledgable drivers; getting a car license typically requires no more than taking a government employee on a short cruise around the neighboorhood and then parallel parking between some barrels. The majority of these people never became motorcyclists or race car drivers, and therefore never really learn much, and even worse, never learned how little they knew. Despite all this, they sure can get jealous, and if one thing makes a moron jealous above all else, its when that moron sees a motorcyclist splitting lanes or riding on the shoulder during stop and go traffic.
For a small percentage of motorcyclists, engaging in such questionable and often dangerous maneuvers is one of two options they face when stuck in stop and go traffic on a warm day on an air-cooled street bike. Those bikes cannot sit idling for that long with no wind to cool the engine, and their only other option is to pull over and let their engine cool down. Riders of watercooled sportbikes do not have this problem, but many of them, especially the ones with sportbikes, split lanes anyway, because they can.
There is a small percentage of the morons in cars who realize that pure envy and hatred and nasty comments alone cannot stop these motorcyclists from splitting lanes and getting ahead of them. This zero-sum line of thinking stems directly from the ignorance of the car driver, as motorcycles don't take up space in the same way that cars do. That doesn't matter. What matters is that these drivers resort to more drastic measures.
One such driver that day was Timothy Venn, a name that would in some circles soon become famous. Timothy Venn was, on that day, riding in a sedan with his wife and kid. It was the kid that would later seal the deal with the media. Timothy Venn did not like stop and go traffic. There was nothing good on the radio and he was in the middle of an unheated but still unpleasant argument with his wife when he saw the jackass on the sportbike.
An anonymous (never caught) man on a yellow CBR was splitting lanes at a rather unsafe speed, as sportbike riders often do. He was going ten, fifteen, possibly even close to 20 miles per house past stopped cars that were an average of maybe four feet apart. It is a dangerous game, and accidents happen. Timothy, though, he was no accident. Timothy saw this guy on a yellow sportbike, this guy who was allowed to get ahead of all the traffic just because he had a motorcycle, and though he would never phrase it this way, he thought it was quite unfair. Something inside him snapped, and he did to the sportbike rider what many morons to do bicyclists by accident: he doored him.
Getting doored is a painful experience, and fortunately for the rider, and most of all for Timothy's health, he opened his door early enough for the yellow rider to stop. The yellow rider yelled. Timothy's wife yelled. Timothy leaned out and gave the rider a piece of his mind, which was mostly full of bullshit. The rider was less full of shit but much more foolish, and pulled out a chain with something on the end. He knew how to use this chain, and he used it on the rear windshield. The rear windshield cracked but did not break, as good safety class should, but the cracks were numerous and spread out like an instant cloud, covering the windshield. The girl in the back seat screamed and bent over, covering her head. The wife screamed, and Timothy lost it. He exited his car.
Dave and Eve watched all this from a few cars back, in the same lane. Dave said: "Drive if you need to." Then he was gone, out the door and running up to join the altercation. Eve could not hear what they said. It looked to her like he was a good peacemaker.
When Dave arrived, the rider was using the word fuck a lot and Timothy kept waiving his phone and insisting that he was calling the police. Dave got between them and made peace.
"Hey buddy, you got two hundred people staring at you and they're all dialing 911." Dave pointed behind them. "You need to haul ass." The rider was no idiot and quickly came around to Dave's way of thinking. Timothy did not. Thats when Dave started yelling. "Get in your fucking car, or I will put you in it! No, I already called the police. I told them all about you." That put Timothy off his guard. Then, "how you could you endanger wife and kid like that? Look at your fucking wife. Get in in your car, and lock the door. The cops are on their way. No get in your car. Lock the fucking door. I won't tell you again." As Dave said this last part he pulled out a compact breath mint spray that looked to Timothy like a can of mace. Timothy got back in his car. Dave nodded to the rider and got out of the man's way.
Dave was wearing a hoodie under his leather jacket and pulled the over his face as he retreated from the incident backwards, intent on obscuring the vision of any cell phone cameras. He was also surveying the damage on the rear windshield. The moment he saw that chain hit the glass, he had wanted to get closer. He wanted to know what was on the end of that chain. Unfortunately, Timothy was tough to wrangle and Dave was still the kind of guy that talked before swinging (Biff would have tossed the guy over the hood of the car and slammed the door shut--the easy five second solution), so he hadn't gotten a good look at the weapon. From the look of the windshield, it wasn't that effective, which was actually fortunate for the little girl in the back. Dave needed something that would shatter the windshield in one blow, if that was even possible outside of the movies.
Dave got back in his car. "Well, they're mad." traffic was slowly ebbing around the guy with the smashed winshield, who thought it would be a great idea to just sit there and wait for the cops during rush hour on a bridge with no shoulders that was packed with stop and go traffic. It gave Timothy time to fabricate an innocent sounding reason for opening the door--one that did not amount to vehicular assault. Dave flipped up a cap on the stick shift and pressed a hidden single-axis hat switch. There was a quick whir and a clunk, and then a sequence of seven letters and numbers flashed briefly on the dash.
"What was that?" Eve asked.
Dave flipped the cap down. "Switched license plates. I don't wanna be involved when the cops show up."
"You have a button that switches your place? What to you need that for?"
"Look who's asking. You have one."
"I don't have one. I'm getting one. Maybe." That plan was only a maybe since the beginning of the argument.
"So you're getting one. Hurry up and get it and then ask me that question."
"No. Why do you need a thing to change your license plate?" Eve's voice had a more serious edge to it.
"Same reason you do."
"I need one because I don't want to be pulled over by horny cops. Why do you need it? Are you constantly harrassed by creepy girl cops?"
Dave looked at her for a bit, smiled, and elected to change the subject. He looked back out. "I can't believe the nerve of that guy."
Eve gave up. "Yeah, I know, splitting lanes like that. Unbelievable."
"What?" asked Dave. "No, no I meant the jackass with the car door. He should get his face bashed in...."
No comments:
Post a Comment