D is for Driving
Introduction to “D is for Driving”
True story. What else to say?
For years now, I have gone out driving late at night, about once a week. The excuse I use is to clear my head and be alone with my own thoughts, but as much as anything, it’s to escape the numbing sameness of the suburban life I live. I tend to drive through areas which have street life after dark, which means areas wiser people avoid at night; South Central LA, Hollywood, Silverlake, Westlake, Little Armenia, Willowbrook, Koreatown, Skid Row.
It is also to remind myself that these are neighborhoods that people live in; not zombies, not aliens, not monsters...people, like me. That, though these are places my friends would never go after dark, these are places where human beings spend their lives 24/7. If we do not feel safe there, what does that say about what we have consigned these people to?
But the driving also reminds me that I am, essentially, a voyeur. I pass through these areas and gather impressions, and leave and go back to my safe suburban neighborhood. And then I write stories. Or I wring my hands over what I should do. But I never do anything, except drive and write.
I have been through there so often that my fears have all fled, but my tears have all dried, too. My heart is numbed. My hope is cold. I’m just a guy in a car.
But there is one night I cannot forget.
I was on Figueroa, heading north, about 91st Street. Off to the right, the Harbor Freeway cuts through with contempt, allowing travelers to pass through--twenty, thirty, fifty feet in the air--without having to touch the dangerous ground of South Central. And when they put through that freeway, they cut off all the streets. So to my right, all of the streets are dead-ends.
Just dead-ends.
It was about 1 a.m. Traffic on Figueroa usually moved quickly this time of night; not much cross traffic coming out of those dead-end streets. There was a less-than-small voice in my head that said that was good; it was good to keep moving around here. But tonight there was road construction, which was rare enough for South Central; usually the streets here were allowed to decay nearly to the point of craters before they were repaved.
But there was indeed road construction, and so as the crews and the bulldozers and skiploaders moved in and out of lanes, I found myself stopped at this intersection for long minutes. There was no other traffic around; just me, sitting in South Central at 1 a.m.
I looked off to my right, down one of those dead-end streets. On the barely-lit blacktop, I saw two figures, probably men, pushing and gesturing. Argument, anger; I could see that even from fifty yards away in bad light.
Then one of the men stepped back. His hands went down to his pants and came back up. Even over the sound of the bulldozer, over the sound of my car stereo, I could hear a pop.
Just one pop. The other man went down.
The first man moved forward, bent briefly over the other man, then skittered out of the halo of the street light and out of sight.
The other man lay in the street, the way a body lays when there are no hands to break its fall. No movement.
There was a whistle from in front of me. The skiploader had moved out of the way; a man in a yellow helmet and yellow vest was waving me on.
As I moved forward, I looked one more time to my right. Someone ran out of one of the houses and knelt down over the body in the street.
I was five or six blocks further down on Figueroa when three LAPD cars blazed by me, going the other direction. A block or two further, and a paramedic and ambulance shot by.
I wondered if I had watched a man die.
I’ve been on that same route a hundred nights since, and whenever I pass that intersection, I look down that street.
And I wonder why I’m there.
