Act Two, Scene the First
Meet me halfway…let your imagination and my words take you up to the Bronx.
We’re on a two-way road that goes slightly uphill. Call this road “Bedford Park Boulevard,” ’cause it is.
We’re approaching another two-way motorway that runs perpendicularly to the one we’re on. Call that one “Webster Ave.”
The diner — our destination, you the listener and I the teller, and Nick and Kevin, still in my car — is on the far left corner of Bedford Park and Webster. On the far right corner, our bar, of no narrative import.
Green Day blaring in my ears, I crossed over Webster Avenue. I spied a parking spot on my left (your left) smack dab in front of the diner, that is, on the opposite side of the street from where we were.
I also saw at least one but as many as thirty or thirty-five (if memory serves me) stationary police cars about half a block on up the road. It was the Bronx. I found nothing unusual about seeing a police car in a slightly dodgy area. Its most significant characteristic, to me, was its position a few car lengths behind the parking space I would eventually be gunning for. No matter.
Nonetheless, I needed to get to that space in front of the diner. There were no available spots within sight and I didn’t want to be walking six blocks, full of food, in a tizzy because I wanted to get to Manhattan to watch Game Four (which was to start in about 45 minutes).
I drove up to the top of the hill where there was a stoplight, its green signal shining bright. The signal hung over an intersection with a one-way road, on which traffic would hypothetically move in a right-to-left motion in front of me. There was a double yellow line below me. There were no cars to my right and, after a glance in the rearview, no cars behind me (except that stationary police vehicle that I had just passed).
Now, I don’t like to overanalyze things —- so all I can do is admit there were several factors at play that compelled me to perform my next action. It was the sight of the police car + the suburbrebel Green Day music of my adolescence and new adulthood + the desire to thumb my nose at that police car + wanting to impress my friends + needing that parking spot for my own + the Red Sox game + craving just to do something and not to worry about it until afterwards for ONCE.
So as I neared the still-green stoplight, I veered my car to the right a little bit, almost to the point of turning the wrong way onto that one-way street. In my little spitfire of a foreign car my turning radius was pretty tight, so I knew just how much space I needed to give it.
So I went for it.
I pulled the wheel hard towards me counterclockwise.
I crossed over the double yellow line.
I made it through three-quarters of my turn.
I looked out my driver’s side window.
I saw the illuminating headlights of another car just inches from my own.
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