It could have been worse...

[garote]

This is quite an upsetting story and you may not want to read it.

I've owned a house in Oakland for about a dozen years. These days I spend most of my time in Sacramento, but Mira the cat stays in Oakland, because the house there has a lovely back garden that she's grown quite used to sitting around in. She's very old and set in her ways, and has a bit of a foggy brain sometimes, and she's quite defenseless since she only has three legs. But the garden is fenced, and she's still strong enough to push her way inside the cat door in the evening to eat dinner. As long as she's inside at night, with the cat door blocked until morning, she can pass her days in safety as the indoor-outdoor kitty she's always been, in a place she knows well. Moving her to Sacramento would be terrifying for her, and as much as I miss her I also love her, so while I'm in Sacramento now she remains in Oakland.

Usually I have the place rented out to someone who doesn't mind looking after a frail cat in exchange for a discount on the rent, but recently some tenants moved out in a hurry, and I decided it was time to get some overdue maintenance done. Work is a bit overwhelming, and I've been traveling a bit to see relatives. It's not the best time for household repairs, but I don't have a lot of choice.

So on Saturday morning I hopped in the little car that belongs to my sweetie and drove for Oakland. I was approaching the Caldecott tunnel on Highway 24 when a car I was slowly passing suddenly swerved into my lane, moving as if I wasn't there. The opposite lane was open so I swerved to the side as quickly as I could and braked, avoiding an ugly accident, but the other car's side mirror smashed against mine and was left hanging by a wire. I couldn't tell if our cars contacted beyond that. Had there been a scrape of some kind? There was some noise, but was it from tires or from contact?

I looked over and saw two young black men, each around 20 years old. The one on the passenger side was yelling at the driver, probably saying something like, "Dammit, I told you there was a car there! Now what are we gonna do?"

I had a moment to think. The near-accident was their fault. You swerve into a lane without warning right into the side of another car, you are at fault. They probably knew that. They probably also knew that they were liable for the repair to their own car and for any damage to this one. Would they want to pull over? Or would they want to just keep going and pretend it didn't happen? Was the driver even insured?

I kept driving straight, puzzling over it, waiting for them to make the next move. They pulled up next to me and the passenger rolled down his window, so I rolled down mine. The driver leaned over and yelled something, but I couldn't decipher it over the road noise. It seemed clear he wanted to pull over though, so I signaled and pulled to the side, then up to a clear spot so we could both get off the road.

I got out and stood by my car. The driver got out. The passenger stayed in the car, but held up his phone. Whatever happened next, he was going to make sure the whole thing was on video.

The driver walked over to me, within a foot of my face, and said, "So are you gonna pay for what you did to my car?"

Oh boy, this was going to go well.

"Pay for the damage to your car? You swerved into me. I'm not at fault here."

He said he didn't know what I was talking about. I told him it was obvious. I pointed at the scrape on the side of the car, which I could now clearly see, and walked around to the opposite side of his car, where there was an abrasion on the side just next to the rear bumper. I pointed at that and said "Any highway patrol cop who looks at those two scrapes is going to know that I was pulling away from your car and braking while you were moving towards me. They see this stuff all the time."

He said "No way. The scrapes on your car are white. My paint isn't white. Those scrapes were already there."

"That's not white paint," I said. "That's not how it works. You don't leave a streak of your paint on a car when you hit it. You just scrape paint off both cars."

"All I know is, you broke my mirror, man, and somebody's got to pay for it, and it's not gonna be me."

"Fine," I said. "Then we'll trade insurance and report the accident." I took out my phone and took a picture of the side of my car, then began walking over to his car to take a picture of the damage there.

He got really upset and began screaming something like, "Don't you go taking pictures of my car! Don't you go documenting shit! You don't get to take my picture!"

"This is what you have to do if you want to report it," I said, trying to remain calm. "We are legally required to take pictures of the cars."

He screamed some more about how I was not allowed to take photos, of him or his car. He leaned up towards my face, within inches of me.

I put my phone back in my pocket. "Well what do you want, then? Do you want to report this and get it fixed or not?"

"What I want is some money for what you did to my car!"

"Do you have insurance?" I said.

He paused, the yelled back "Do YOU have insurance?"

"Yes. I do. And this accident was clearly, absolutely, your fault. Do you have insurance?"

He changed the subject and said that because he was a kid, and I was an adult, I was trying to "finesse" him and say it was his fault to get out of paying anything. He said he already called his father, who was on the way here right now with his friends.

"Great!" I said. "Fine, I'll talk to him! And I'll say the same thing! I'll say this accident was your fault and we'll trade insurance with your Dad and then we can report it like he was the one driving the car. I don't care either way. Let's do that."

"He'll be here soon with his friends and then he'll make you pay for this. You're lucky you didn't hit me in my home town, runnin' five deep, we would have got out of the car and surrounded you, and you would pay up. I'm from Oakland, man," he screamed at me. "From Oakland, you get me?"

Then he unspooled a long and really ugly rant about how I was a white man who had everything going for him, and he was a black man and things were desperate, and I owed him money no matter what. There were some gross epithets mixed in that I don't really want to recount.

While he was doing that, I was finding it very hard to maintain my calm. My stomach was turning somersaults and I had to start clenching my left fist very hard to stay still. The kid's friend in the passenger seat, eyes wide, got out of the car and walked over, and put a hand on his shoulder and said, "Hey, calm down, man. Take it easy."

He shoved his friend's arm away. He seemed to believe that giving me this rant, and telling me he was from Oakland, would scare me. Mostly what I was thinking was contempt, at his utter lack of a sense of responsibility for his own actions. Blind rage I could sort of understand. But it was my Dad's many years as a high school teacher welling up in me, looking down at this kid, the way my own Dad would look down at me when I was saying something outlandish and making excuses for my own mistakes. The sense of exasperated annoyance at a young person being an idiot. I was inhabiting a role from the opposite side now, and if I'd had any breathing space to think about it, I would have found a new, deep understanding of how hard it must have been for my Dad to hold his temper and his tongue all those years ago when I was unloading blame and excuses and hate at everyone around me when I should have stayed calm and kept an open mind.

At the same time, I noted that he was being careful not to actually touch me. He knew how to stay on one side of the line between a fight with fists and a fight with words. I could respect that. I sighed and leaned back on my car, and crossed my arms. He was expecting a shouting match but I wasn't going to deliver it. "I've been living in Oakland for ten years," I said.

Without missing a beat, he said, "Well good then, so you know how it is! I'm gonna get my people here and we'll see whose fault this accident is!"

I was certain he was bluffing. There was nothing stopping me from just getting in my car and leaving, and if he tried to stop me or follow me I could think of ten ways it would go worse, and zero where it would go better for either of us. "Okay, if that's how it's gonna go," I said, "I'll happily talk to your Dad or whoever. But I also have to tell my insurance company. And that means I have to get the highway patrol to stop here so they can take a report."

"NO COPS!" he said.

"Well then if you don't have insurance and you don't want the cops involved, then what do you want?"

"Come on, man! I don't have the money to pay for this. I need money." He seemed to be calming down. "I can go to the Pick 'N' Pull and get another mirror but I gotta buy it. Give me a hundred dollars."

I mentally gave him a few points for respecting me enough to assume I knew what the Pick 'N' Pull was. So he knew how to do his own cheap repairs. Good.

"I don't have any cash on me," I said. "I have zero cash. Not even in the car."

He then launched into a somewhat calmer rant, about how I should understand what his situation is, and how every dollar counts. "This isn't even my car," he said. "It's my Mom's car. I can't bring this car to her with the mirror broken off. She can't afford to replace it. How about 40 dollars? Do you have that?"

"I told you. I have no money on me."

He backed off a little and started pacing, muttering to himself about how unfair everything was. It gave me a little room to think. I realized that now that he mentioned his Mom, I was a lot more inclined to help him. It was quite possible that the biggest thing on his mind was the humiliation of confronting his Mom with a damaged car when he wasn't man enough to provide the means to repair it for her. I wondered if he even had permission to borrow it. I wondered if he even had a license. That might be one of the reasons he didn't want a photo taken: Perhaps he wasn't even supposed to be out on the road. Not wanting the cops involved I could understand anyway, just on general principle. I noticed that his own body language was changing, as it dawned on him that I wasn't just some random paranoid white guy instantly reaching for the phone to call the police when a black man came at him. Even after the threats.

"Do you have Venmo?" I said.

"My Mom has Venmo!" he said. He about-faced and went to his car, and pulled out his phone. He then went over to my car and leaned on it next to me, as though we were suddenly friends. He raised the phone to his ear, and in a moment he said, in a much more subdued voice, "Hey, momma. What's your Venmo account?"

He called up the app on his phone and found her. He held the screen up next to mine and I typed in her number, which automatically brought up a full name and a picture.

"I'll tell you what," I said. "I know what it takes to replace a side mirror. I'll make it a hundred bucks, not forty."

"Hey, thanks, man. You alright."

As soon as I pressed the button to send, I put away my phone, and he held out his hand for a friendly fist-bump. I kind of loathed the idea of rewarding him for yelling at me like he'd done, and after nearly causing a major accident that was obviously his fault, but I realized I was not going to get through to him. I returned the fist-bump.

"You know how hard it is, man. Everything helps. I'll see you around," he said, and walked to his car. In ten more seconds he'd pulled out onto the highway and was gone.

"Hmmm," I thought to myself. "What basically happened here is, I just used money to make a problem go away, and he probably knew I would, if he made himself into my problem. Who 'finessed' whom in this situation?"

I got in my car and sat at the wheel, still shaking from the effort to contain a massive swell of physical rage at being threatened and screamed at for a quarter hour, for having the temerity to be the victim of a shitty driver's shitty driving.

"In the end, I have to admit, I've spent just as much money on really good dinners. And I'll walk away from this, into a future that contains more good dinners. Maybe this is how it should have worked out anyway."

I drove slowly the rest of the way to Oakland, and spent the afternoon and evening cleaning out abandoned laundry, grease, and dirt from various surfaces of the downstairs unit. The previous tenants had packed the garbage cans full, then left the remainder sitting around. They'd left still owing me a month and a half of rent. It was another instance of me cleaning up after someone less responsible. But again, I weighed it in my mind: I'm the one who owns the house. I'm still in the better place. Me being responsible doesn't make those around me responsible, but, barring serious misfortune, it does get me results, and I can be grateful for that. There are people in the world - many of them living quite near at hand - who have their responsibility rewarded more often with doubt, suspicion, and closed doors. It could always be worse.

I'm glad that kid loved his Momma.

A few days later I looked at the name in my Venmo account and got curious. It seemed like a fairly unique name. I put it into Google and clicked around. To my surprise the name appeared in the body of a lawsuit that had been posted to some open-access website full of legal documents. The age of the woman was given, and the age of her son, born a little over 20 years ago, living in Oakland.

I read through the lawsuit and was horrified. It was the summary of an appeal filed in 2010. A prisoner was trying to get his earlier conviction for rape overturned, on grounds that he was not "reasonably certain" that the woman he'd raped had objected to the act. There were various other details about a murder and an attempted cover-up and an auto theft, but the part concerning the woman was what stuck with me.

Two men had borrowed her car because they wanted to use it as a getaway after robbing a local drug dealer. The robbery had gone wrong from the start, and they'd shot the drug dealer dead in his own driveway. Later on they snuck into the woman's house at night, while she was asleep in the back bedroom with her young son. They woke her up and pulled her into the bathroom and told her they were afraid she was going to snitch on them for using her car. One of them got the idea that they would give her a massive dose of ecstasy in order to mess up her brain and make her forget the last few days, so he fetched a cup and dissolved a bunch of pills in it. The two of them forced her to drink the whole thing. She said she felt feverish and wanted to lay down, but not near her son because she didn't want him to see her that way. She laid down in the hall and seemed to lose consciousness.

One of the men left. The other man hung around for a while, then dragged her into the bed in the front room. She was fully conscious, but pretended to remain passed out because she didn't want to wake up her son with a screaming fight that she would probably lose, followed by something much worse. The court proceedings do not describe whether her son could hear what happened next, or whether he managed to sleep through it. A few hours later the second man returned to the house, and the act repeated itself.

The appeal in 2010 was based on the idea that, since she hadn't fought back, the man could have assumed that she was consenting to sex. He absolutely lost that appeal, and went back to prison to serve his life sentence.

That poor woman's unfortunate son was the person I met by the side of the road. I wonder how his life has gone, between now and then.

Sure, kid, take the hundred bucks.

If there was a chance in hell you would see me as something other than a target or an enemy, I'd give more. As it is, I return to my own life, a bit shaken, sadder for the state of the world, and a bit more determined to get involved in something that helps. Meanwhile, for the past few days after work I've been pulling weeds, throwing away withered food, wiping down cabinets, scraping old grout off bathroom walls, and digging strings of caulking out of tiles with a razorblade, while Mira the cat hops from one sunlit patch to another in the back yard. These days it's about the only exercise she's up for.

I love that cat. She's kept me company through some difficult times. I wish I could protect everyone the way I try to protect her. But I can't.

Comments

[juan_gandhi]

You are the kind of person these people are counting on. It's a traditional business, cut off and then demand money. Practiced in Germany, practiced in the US.

I would not stop, I would not give them anything, I would contact the police and the insurance; and of course I would have taken a photo of the other car. I would not condone their criminal practice.

[garote]

I can see how it might be a useful scam to someone else. But that kid’s car took more damage than 40 bucks would have covered. And if he’d ranted at someone else the way he had at me, he might have ended up with a bullet wound.

[juan_gandhi]

He's a beginner.

[ira_k]

it might be a business but in this case I seriously doubt it. he would not use his mom's car for that kind of thing...it was clearly an accident but he has too many issues to be able to deal with it...mentally, emotionally or otherwise.

[ira_k]

thank you for this story. you are a good man. sometimes we do the right thing without realizing it. the boy clearly has many issues particularly about being able to protect his mom.

[aquestrian]

Seconded!

[zka]

This is the kind of story that reminds me to count my blessings ... Fffffffff