Failure to signal

Lawton, Oklahoma is a cool little town to stay in. It lies at the foot of a small range of squat mountains right in the middle of the plains. The constant echo of artillery from Ft. Sill reverberates across the town like thunder.

When I was staying in Lawton, the first Gulf War was on.

Lawton is a sleepy little town of fewer than 100,000 people and it's a long way from any major city. I don't mean OKC or Tulsa, but real cities like Dallas or New Orleans. But it has a mall downtown by golly! They have a Sears and a Dillards, and all that big city stuff.

I'm cruising down some side street with 45 degree parking on my right somewhere West of the mall on my V65 Magna. It was a bright, beautiful weekend and I was just picking up a few things before heading up into the mountains to spend the night.

I'm stylin. Got my Oakleys on. Hair halfway down my back. No skid lid. Black t-shirt and a grin from ear to ear. The speed limit is 20, and as I pass Chester Cheese back there on the corner I'm doing the speed limit, and my sh1t-eating grin is screaming "fuck you, porky."

He reads it on my face as I cruise on by, leaning against the hood of his car, staring right at me as I glide past him, barely making a sound on the Honda.

A van is in front of me crawling down the street looking for a parking spot. I could pass on the left in the other lane legally, but I didn't want to exceed the 20 mph limit with Barney Fife back there polishing his bullet, looking hard for someone who looks like me to work over.

So I crawled along behind the van for a block. Not today Porkskin, I got a different agenda than fooling with your punk ass.

Glancing in my rearview I notice that Granny Goodbitch in the Lincoln has made a right turn and is now following me at a distance of about 50 feet. I'm starting to feel a little bit uncomfortable here. Almost claustrophobic.

What's worse is that upon examining my rear-view mirrors I can see that Granny Goodbitch is having a hand-waving, eye-popping, positively engrossing conversation with Auntie Prisspanties.

And not paying one damn bit of attention to what's going on you know, like, on the damned road.

I sat up in the saddle and gave serious thought to getting myself out of harm's way, and threw a glance over my left shoulder.

That's when the brake lights came on and the van took a nose-dive. Someone had decided to just start backing out of that 45 degree parking right in front of her, and she wanted that spot.

I squeezed the clutch, kicked it down from 3rd to 2nd, let it go and gave a little twist all in the blink of an eye. And in so doing shot myself around the van and was to the stop sign before I heard the Lincoln impact the rear end of the van, and the van shove the car trying to back out into the parked car beside it.

Presence of mind had just saved me from being an incorrigible sandwich.

At the stop sign I turned to look behind me and decided I'd better flip a bitch and go see if anyone was hurt. Barney Fife had stopped polishing his bullet and had rolled up to the scene of the accident with his purdy lights just a goin, and was talkin into his walkie-talkie as if he was the grand poobah of this here parade.

And he was lookin right at me.

Oh boy. Here we go. I have the hair and the beard and the motorcycle. I musta caused all this trouble.

I knew it before he even told me to wait until he saw to everyone.

5 minutes later, with the paramedics looking over the old folks, and his boss having arrived to oversee the traffic control and removal of vehicles from a 20 mph pileup, this cat was giving me hell for pulling that fool stunt, blasting off down the road like that, startling these old folks, and making them crash.

He was of a good mind to haul my butt off to jail right then and there.

He wrote me a ticket for speeding, and for failing to signal a lane change. He said he would let the DA decide whether or not to charge me with causing an accident.

WHAT?

I argued with him that all I had done was save my own life! That I saw the accident coming and knew what was going to happen and waited until damn near the last minute to do anything for fear of getting wrote up for that!

His response was that lots of people go to jail for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I think he was just a sonofabitch.

The judge agreed with me too. He threw out all of my citations, and told the cop to his face never to bring him that kind of BS again. I think maybe the judge rode a motorcycle. He told me to raise my left hand. I did. He looked at the cop and said there, he signaled. Case dismissed.

It was a good day to be incorrigible.