Wet Pavement - Los Angeles
Potholes and puddles six lanes wide. Thin lanes with braille dividers to wake sleeping motorists. Rare Los Angeles rain mixes with motor oil, cigarette butts, tobacco spit, loose screws, bubble gum, condom wrappers. Half the cars have functional windshield wipers. On the other half, drivers use their sleeves, desperately defogging the glass, squinting into oblivion, guided only by the raised rash of debris between lanes.
Traffic is diabolical on a normal day. At two o’clock any given morning the break lights burn like a slow moving lava stream. The horns can’t out-heckle the sound of hate, the sound of steering wheel bending tension, the sound of migraines, heart palpitations, pulsating ulcers growing like muscles on a pier pillar. The whole thing is rotten. By design. Sheer numbers, polluted with humans. Cars of every caliber, trapped in their hurry.
It gets worse in every window. The empty minivan piloted by an exhausted mother. Her children in juvenile detention boarding school. A chain-smoking, half-drunk priest, returning from a brothel, driving a Prius. He’s taking two lanes at a time, guided by God and Jose Cuervo. A formula-one racer, downgraded to a Honda Civic. The whole thing is smoking. It’s coming out the exhaust, coming out from under the hood, puffing out of an electronic cigarette machine the size of a plumbers wrench. He’s in the far left lane. Now he’s on the shoulder. Rev and backfire, back to the center lane.
Fender benders and tires blown to shreds. With the rain, it’s magnified by ten. The sameawful drivers. The same population problem. Poor visibility and not an ounce of consideration. The highway patrol vehicles escaped a half hour before rush hour. Their engines idle behind convenient stores. Their radios chatter with unintelligible chaos.
Los Angeles rain. A thing of beauty. A natural disaster. State of emergency. Quarter inch of liquid.
The morning rush hour is maddening. This driver is in her twenties. She’s fifteen minutes late for work. The sun visors are pulled down. Dixie Chicks echoing around the cab. Rear view mirror hooked sideways. Nearly rear-ending everyone. She’s driving with her knees. She’s been driving with her knees for the last three and a quarter miles. She’s holding a cat-hair makeup brush. Powdering her cheeks in furious circles. Dipping it in plaster, going at her cheekbones again. The contours, it’s all about the contours.
Her face contorts as if it’s experiencing fighter pilot g-forces. Wide mouth — powder cheeks — narrow mouth — powder cheeks — kiss face — powder cheeks. The process repeats itself. The dents and cracks are slowly filled with caulking and putty and pounds of powder.
The outside of her car looks to be in a state of similar repair. Paint borrowed, stripped and scuffed on every panel. A side mirror held on with bobby pins and Elmer’s glue. A punished headlight, looking dejected, staring straight down at the road. A destructive force, moving at the rate of traffic, swerving gently to the right, back to the left, guided by knees.
I can’t help but encourage it. She’s got a pencil to her eyeball now. Drawing rings. Darkening them, shading them, repeating. I wait for impact. Part of me wants the pencil to drive those fake eyelashes into her prefrontal cortex. She takes a break from her facial reconstruction art to change the radio station. A car merges into her lane. It’s a close call, but L’Oreal, the god of face painting, is looking over her. Tires skid on the wet pavement. Unfortunate. No collision.
I’m distracted from the imminent train wreck by a vibrating cellphone. I look at the screen. A name scrolls across. I answer it.
“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
Six word conversation. I end the call. Toss the phone back to the passenger seat. Before I can relocate the two-thousand pound makeup kit on wheels, red and blue lights flash in my rear view mirror. The highway patrol are back on duty. I’m getting a ticket. Breaking the law. Using a handheld device while driving. Justice is served.
I pull to the shoulder. Tear shaped rain slowly drowns the Los Angeles highway.