I was riding my scooter and when I got to 6th and Market, another guy popped a wheelie and hit me. I don’t want to make this about his appearance, but he looked super homeless. Including having one inexplicably nice thing — the bike.
As we collided, I feel myself pitch forward as the bolt of the scooter snaps, and I tuck into a partial roll. It’s not fully successful and I sprained my thumb some. But I can get up.
I look at my scooter. Yeah, bolts snapped off. And I start wondering how I’m going to repair it, where the scooter shop is.
This is the point where I finally look up at him, because I realize he’s screaming.
Five or six security guards — who I now realize were probably just employed by all the shops around — rush and form a wall between me and this guy. He’s walking around in these big exaggerated circles, screaming. And I just stare at him.
Anger really is like a fist you’re holding closed on yourself.
He was so mad. Dude, he was SO MAD.
He accused me. “What’d you do that for, you fucking asshole?”
He pulls out his phone. I’m not sure if he actually called anyone, but he puts it to his ear and says, “yo bro, there’s cheap niggers around” (he wasn’t black).
At this point I’m just sitting on the curb, wondering if I should call an Uber or the cops or what. The security guys seem very concerned about me, which is sweet, but also kind of annoying of them, because I couldn’t get a proper view of him and I was consuming him.
He starts saying he needs an ambulance and that his phone’s dead. So I offer him mine.
He snaps. I thought he had already snapped, but there was some deeper tendon that snapped in him, and he just starts screaming
WHY ARE YOU SO CALM?!
I’ve been asked this before. Years ago, a different homeless guy in the city yelled the exact same thing at me on the sidewalk. I called Jorge over video as it was happening. He remembers it like this:
I just saw you on the sidewalk, you were cool as a cucumber, people were asking you if you were ok. You said yes in a cold voice.
Once, the reason I was calm was because internally I felt like a choppy sea — so stormy that throwing one more thing in wouldn’t make a difference. But I feel different now. More like a soft deep lake, a deep ocean — something drops and sinks, watched sort of ambiently all the way down.
He said, “Do you want to fight?” And the security guards bunched up again, and I felt a little headache at their interference. Like, it’s not good to go around getting into fights, but this guy is a huge bitch.
Maybe I was less calm than I pretended. Actually, no, that’s not correct. I was feeling quite calm. There’s a layer on which I felt eager for a fight — but for the experience, not to punish him. Just that I don’t think I’ve been in a proper face-to-face street fight before. Only not-face-to-face ones.
So I relaxed, flopped myself back down on the curb, asked the security guard if they knew the guy. Apparently they did. And I started looking at the cycles of some of the homeless with new eyes.
This guy had gone back to just pacing in circles and yelling and pulling out his phone, calling god knows who.
Turns out the scooter shop was closed. So, Uber home it was.
I still think of him yelling that phrase sometimes. I hope he’s alive and well.
Watching lots of movies did prepare me pretty well for falling.