…And he’s in the driver’s seat. A beautiful
night, a night where one can do nothing but just stand there yet release
buckets of sweat from their pores. Regardless, after having been dragged up to
my grandmother’s house, a humid little oven with a cooling system so strong
that penguins leave Antarctica for just one feel of it, I decided that I would
head elsewhere. My mother and sister joined me, and we went to the beach.
It was a great drive down to the beach.
Nobody tailgating me, no hassles on the road. We had the music blaring, and as
the filthy lyrics were spat seductively we watched our mother’s complexion turn
paler and paler, but we reassured her that the music was nice ‘cruising music’,
music that even the car would dance to. And she was okay with that. After all,
we will have to listen to her loud Lebanese music the next time she takes us
somewhere in her car, so it was a decent deal.
The first stop was the area after the pier
and before the beach, where my favorite gelato van hangs around, selling the
best tasting orange gelato to date at a cheap rate, too. Just as I parked
beside him, he turned off his lights and turned the van on, preparing himself
to leave after having spent the entire day melting like the ice-cream he sold
to little toddlers who knew no better than to eat it before the sun did. My
mother and sister panicked. I made them run to the van as I stayed behind to
roll my windows up, and surely enough he decided to serve us some gelato. It is
fine – I tipped him an extra thirteen dollars for our having been a nuisance to
him.
We enjoyed our gelato, each one of us a
varied cone of frozen goodness. My mother was the first one to feel it: a giant
grasshopper flew from around us, evading the seagulls, and chose her arm as the
best landing spot. She shrieked after realizing it wasn’t her hair stroking
her, and threw all of her belongings besides her gelato on the floor and
jumped. We decided to get back into the car and roll onto the next stop, the
beach. When we got there we walked past couples until we found more
grasshoppers and decided to sit beneath the light. Smart of us, yes? Not
really, because fifteen minutes into our sitting, my left hand, which was
cupped, palm facing the bright night sky, became a landing spot for an even
bigger grasshopper, and it caressed my
little fingers before I managed to jump, shriek and power-walk back to my car.
My mother and sister followed.
Air conditioner on, we began to drive
around the neighborhood on our way home. On a street where the limit was
50kmph, a speedy red Commodore was driving just over 20kmph, and slowed down
even more when he found out that I was behind him. My mother and sister assured
me that there was a baby on board, having read his little yellow placard on his
back window. I decided to wait until there was nothing between our lane and the
oncoming lane, and no cars, and I decided to overtake him since he was too
stubborn to move for me to pass – and what does he do? He decides to match my
speed with his car, and I could not speed more in case my mother’s hair was
completely overcome with the color grey, so I sped up as much as I could just
avoiding the car on the oncoming lane. I slammed my brakes having just passed
him, and looked through my rear-view mirror to see a laughing brat, showing his
friend how ‘cool’ it was to nearly send the person behind him to collide with
oncoming traffic. I was about to come to a complete stop and make use of the
hardest object in my car, when I decided that a taste of his own medicine was
better. I drove even slower in front of him, and he decided to give my middle
finger a spotlight as he flashed his high beams. I stuck it up, and it surely
danced long enough for me to dispel some of my anger. When the road allowed, he
took to the lane beside me and just as I turned off into another street,
decided to honk his horn at me and throw obscenities.
My mother told him to “shut up” , so I knew
at that moment that despite my having scared her during the happening, she was
on my side again. We drove off into the night, cruising around my street
waiting for my father to notify us that he arrived at home after he was left by
us at our grandmother’s house. He called, and we headed back.
It is occurrences such as this where I
begin to wonder whether some drivers have this placard on their rear windows to
notify us that they have limited driving skills, because if they really did
have a ‘baby on board’ then they would not attempt to cause a collision, and
they would consider that other drivers behind them who are sharing their wide
road need to drive somewhere much closer to the speed limit than them so that
they may allow room for these drivers, rather than turning what started out as
an innocent family cruise fueled by the interfering of grasshoppers into an
episode from Speed Racer fueled by the interfering of an immature driver who is
possibly avoiding the attention of the police by pretending to have a baby on
board when in reality they are the baby who needs to be tucked far, far away
from a supercharged vehicle and even further away from being able to reach any
form of license which permits them to operate a vehicle.
Now, the next time I see a car with a ‘baby
on board’ placard attached to it, I will automatically assume that they have no
such thing on board other than a potentially underdeveloped brain sitting in
the driver’s seat, and I will try with my very best efforts not to attempt to
entice them into believing that my very strong car wants to race their even
stronger car because I am one of those limited amounts of people left in the
civilization of drivers who believe that drivers should be critically aware of
the speeding limit so as to ensure the bad temper of the people driving behind
them are not to be tampered with. Yes, I drove on the wrong side of the road
for an excess of five or so seconds exposing me to risk, however had I not
calmed down enough I would have spent more than five seconds exposing the twat
behind me to several risks.
And what infuriates me more is that unlike
this certain twat, I abide by the speed limit and yet certain other twats
choose to want to observe my tail-lights up close, so close that scientists
have never seen the movement of bacteria even with the aid of a microscope in
such closeness. Tailgaters should make themselves useful and clean things on
the back of my car to save me from doing it.
What upsets me the most in this entire ordeal is that he did not sing 'Baby on Board' by The Be Sharps to console me. Twat.
