For several days now, I have cajoled you, dear readers, to rush write your brains onto the page, to tell the stories hiding behind your masks, to get it all out. It is now time for me to confess my own humiliation, until now unpublished.
In 2006 Louise and I moved to New York City, swearing that we would never return to our home in Zion. This was to be our new life, our life of sophistication, of art, of theater, of Tosca, La Traviata, of Turandot. No longer would we subject ourselves to life with the Lumpenproletariat. We would rise to new heights of sophistication. While I've always been arrogant, I could feel a new surge of arrogant snot welling up in me.
Louise and I flew to New York, chose a two-bedroom apartment in Inwood, a Dominican neighborhood, just one building off Broadway and down the hill from The Cloisters, the medieval museum attached to the Metropolitan Museum. Now we were just a walk down the hill from a museum. We flew home and packed a 26-foot Ryder truck with everything we owned except for the stuff we crammed into a large storage unit. I arranged for movers in New York to be at the apartment at 9 AM sharp. Louise flew on ahead while our son, Charles, grandson Harrison, and dog Alice drove across this great country of ours. The timing was perfect.We arrived at our new home five minutes before the scheduled crew of movers, and in an hour's time we were in our very own apartment. Charles and Harrison took a cab to the airport, and Louise and I climbed into the Ryder truck to return it to its distributorship in south Manhattan.
I had never driven a 26-foot moving van from north to south Manhattan down Broadway. The traffic was far heavier than I had expected. Somewhere in mid-Manhattan I clipped a side-view mirror off a truck. Louise, who was as crazy hyper as I was, started yelling, "Keep going. Just keep going. The rules are different here." It occurred to me that she had morphed into a new dimension. We continued our mad romp down Broadway, and turned a tight corner just one block from the drop-off place. I think you hit something, Louise said. "Don't stop. Just keep going." At the very next corner, two policemen, two of New York's finest, stepped in front of the truck, hands out. I could see the Ryder place just kitty-corner from where the police stopped our mania. Ryder trucks, vans, pickups. But not our truck.
"Follow our car," one policeman said. He led us around the block, where he stopped. And we sat and sat in the truck. No one said anything. We just sat there. Cops were talking on the street, pointing to something I couldn't see. My skin began to crawl. I envisioned my future in the cold, damp halls of Rikers, from which, on a good day, I could see daylight through the bars of my cell. After a half hour, a policeman stepped up to the truck.
"Do you know what you hit?" His voice was filled with rage, the kind that could slam me on the pavement face down, handcuffed if I even winced.
"No sir," I said.
"You hit a police car," he said. I don't remember his exact words after that, but they began with "s" and "f" and "stupid s" and "dumb f."
Then in a few minutes a policeman stepped up with a much kinder demeanor. I saw that I was about to play the "good cop, bad cop" game. "These things happen," he said. "It's a busy city." He was setting me up. I could feel it.
Eventually a policeman decorated with gold braid on his hat and sleeves, a hot shot cop, stepped up. "You just put $5,000 of damage on my car." More fs ss, ds, df.
I just kept repeating my apologies, my great sorrow at the trouble I'd caused. I knew enough not to fight back. I knew fighting back would get me arrested, cuffed, beaten up, kicked around. "I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't know." The words of a wise dean at the University of Minnesota came to mind, "Never get in a pissing fight with a skunk."
During the two hours we sat in the truck, no one said, "Step out and see what you've done." I could feel the doom of New York City settling on my recently giddy brain. Eventually, a policeman issued me a ticket and said we'd get a letter for a court appearance. We returned the truck to Ryder, where it showed not a scratch, not a bit of souvenir paint from the cop car.
We took the A-train back to Inwood, but now I no longer liked New York. My snottery was gone. Three hours after I had arrived, I was on the verge of arrest and life imprisonment. A hit and run felony. So it seemed.
Two or three months later, a letter came, scheduling my court appearance. I dressed in my Sunday best and arrived in court about two hours early. Standing around in the waiting room were groups of attorneys. Suddenly it hit me that I could get help. I asked one if she could help me with a traffic violation. I told her my story. She said she could probably help. I wrote her a check for $250. "Have a seat," she said. I sat and waited. In 20 minutes she came back. "Not guilty," she said.
It still gives me the creeps.
