I Know That Guy

I Know That Guy

I knew that guy. I mean I didn’t really know him I just knew what he was all about from a momentary glimpse of him –him looking at me through the side window of his car and me looking back at him through mine. I knew him all right. And he knew I knew. We were standing between two mirrors. Me looking at him looking at me at him at me.

I was in the passenger side seat of my wife’s car. The windows were rolled up. It was hot and the A/C was on. Sick and tried of traveling. Tired of sitting in the passengers side seat of this piss ant little Japanese piece of shit on the New Jersey turnpike. Mile after mile of dodge’m cars and nothing scenery and numb conversation but mostly silence and boredom. In my own car, driving it might not have been so bad but in a tinny Jap car with the grinding road noise coming up through the floor and the tinny stereo speakers making music (when we turned it on) sound like crap it was bad. Bad.

My youngest boy was in the back seat breathing on the moon—snoring—exhausted from two hours on his skateboard in one of the worlds great skating parks. Not that you would know that it was all so great from looking at it. Built under an overpass near the stadium in extreme South Philly. Beer bottles and trash all over the place and graffiti on every non-breathing surface. But I can understand why that is just part of the deal—what makes it so great. The trash is a statement. My wife told me “ give me a couple of hours. If I lived near here and brought him here a lot I would form a committee to clean this place up. Hell," she said, " I could clean it up myself!" And she could too! But she missed the whole point. Clean has nothing to do with it. Clean is what she wants not what they want. In fact if she cleaned it up they would prolly stop coming to the goddamned place. Definitely, if you cleaned up the spray paint off the walls, you might as well put a hostess at a chain link gate and hand out Mickey Mouse ears at the door. The kids wouldn’t come any more. I felt like an asshole even being there with him. Especially with the god damned video camera in my hand. Now what ever possessed me to take that thing out of the car? Oh yeah! I did it so the kid could have some pictures of himself to show his buddies of him at this place. Like a legend –this place is—or something.

So he was in the back seat snoozing away and she is at the wheel and I might as well have had my hand in my pants pulling my pud for all the fun I was having. Just getting from here to there is all I was doing when the beat up old piece of shit liver colored sedan pulls up on the right of us. The traffic was crawling now—we’d hit the traffic trying to get back form the Jersey shore—and this beat piece of crap pulls up next to us. In the front seat are two kids—prolly about twenty years old each. One—the passenger—has a black baseball cap on backwards and his head is bobbing up and down to some music I can’t hear or maybe isn’t even there. Who knows? The driver needs a shave and has a long black greasy ponytail and a filthy white tee shirt. He’s driving hunched over and got his bottom lip pushed out and eyes straight ahead focused on the road like he’s doing a hundred and twenty miles an hour. He’s not rocking at all so I wonder if there really is any music. I was going to roll down the window just to see if the music was real but something told me not to bother. It didn’t matter anyway. Nothing in that car mattered. Just then I caught a look at the occupant of the rear seat. Hadda be their old man.

He hunched forward so the bill of the passenger’s baseball cap was right under his nose. When he turned his head to look out of the driver’s side window at me he had a look that spoke a hundred pages to me. We coulda sat down next to each other in a bar and told each other’s story without any problem. Easy as pie.

I figure his car was broken down some where. Was prolly broken down for a while and he had wiggled like a worm on hot asphalt for a couple of weeks trying to get it fixed. NO luck. He walked to the bus stop to get to work. The kids were in the back bed room sleeping. Some times they were there when he got home. They would be fresh from a shower and ready to go out for the evening. One of them was in junior college and had been for three and a half years. All set to get his two-year degree in a couple of months if he got one more physical Ed class. The other one worked at the K-mart as a stock boy. Never gave two shits about school and was perfectly happy to go in to the air-conditioned K-mart for his shift as long as the two hundred and forty four dollars a week kept coming and his mom kept on doing his laundry. He knew the old man was going to get on his case every couple of weeks or so and he would for sure get kicked out one of these days but o.k. till then, right?

Last night the old man was sleeping on the couch when they came home. They had a few burgers out on the kitchen table thawing and they were debating on whether they should fry up a bunch of potatoes to have with the salad left over from their mom and dad’s dinner. He came into the kitchen rubbing the sleep from his eyes and was standing there watching them plunder a bag of chips when his wife came down the stairs. She got into the middle of everything started to season the burgers and took the gallon of milk out of the refrigerator to pour into two huge glasses.

I gotta get a ride to the auto parts store tomorrow, he said out loud after thinking about saying it for a full five minutes. He had trouble believing these two man-child things living with him couldn’t read his mind and offer to do things for the household. Been a problem for a long time. Just couldn’t figure out that with all the “up-bringing” he and his wife had given them that they couldn’t just somehow do things…like making their beds and taking out the trash. It bothered him so that sometimes he got really depressed. Really depressed. And when he got depressed it made him mad and when he got mad he would open up like a howitzer and scream and say things that were on his mind—not necessarily logical, but on his mind none the less –and in the end everyone would be starring at him not knowing how to deal with this madman ( the truest description of him at this point was “mad man”) and everyone would be embarrassed ( especially him…).

So, there is this beat up sedan with these three guys siting in there and the one in the back is looking at me and I’m looking at him and I‘m thinking—I know that guy! Sure as I am bored to death out here on the New Jersey Turnpike and headed for my home, I know that guy. Sure as I am headed for my home where my oldest son is prolly still asleep or cooking himself a meal of steak and baked potatoes I know that guy. And he is looking back and forth from me to the back of his son’s head with the baseball cap and he’s wondering what ever happened to the baby he held in his arms. And he’s wondering what ever happened—what’s gonna happen to the boy who he taught to drive and told about condoms while the boy blushed and squirmed…What’s gonna happen to him? And he looked so old in the back seat of that crappy car. This used to be my car, he thought. I bought it new and babied it with oil changes and washed it and waxed it and took the whole family out for picnics in it and parked it out at the end of the parking lot at the shopping center cause I didn’t want to have it get all dinged up. Now it’s rusting and falling apart. No one ever replaces anything on it now that I gave it to them to use. There is no handle on the passenger side door. You gotta open up the window and reach outside to open that door. Who’s checking the oil? I don’t know. And here I am begging a ride to the Pep Boys so I can get a couple of parts to repair my own car and I feel like a beggar getting a ride in the car that used to be mine…

I know that guy. I might not be just like him but I’m enough like him that I know why he looked at me the way he did. We are in the same club. I used to think I couldn’t ever be like that. That my boys were different—Ha! That’s just the way it is my friend. I mean it’s not like they poke your eyes out and steal your girl but it’s damned close! That’s just the way it is!

I had to look away from that beat-up car. At just the same time he looked away from me. Up in the sky there was a DC-3 at about five thousand feet. How do I know it was a DC-3? I don't know. I just did. Last night I watched a big sleek jet coming in for a landing at Philadelphia international airport. I have no idea what kind of a jet it was. Just big and long and sleek like a greyhound dog with wings. But I know that was a DC-3 up there over the New Jersey Turnpike. Just like I know that guy in that beat up old car. I just know.