gutterball

the following is the text of an e-mail to my friend rob:

heybabe--so i'm driving home tonight, tired and annoyed, coming up canon to sunset; as always, this being beverly hills, light's red--you don't stop at every light in this little city they're not doing their goddam job.

and as always there's like six cars ahead of me but, as always, knowing that once canon crosses sunset the two lanes narrow to one, they obligingly guide their jags and bimmers and benzes leftward into single-file formation, nice and orderly and civilized like the pampered sheep they are--leaving the right lane wide open for an ill-mannered, deftly-executed white-trash gutterball maneuver (a specialty of mine, as you well know).

it's a subtle art, the gutterball, harder than it looks. timing is everything--it's all about rolling abreast of the lead car at the precise moment the light turns green. scrub off too much speed, you're behind when the light turns and the advantage is lost. too fast, even worse--if you have to brake before the light turns you're dead in the water, hardly better off than the pigeon you're trying to beat.

i'm on my home turf though, and i've done this a thousand times--i swing into the vacant right lane, double-clutch and downshift to second with practiced ease, time my approach, totally focused on the light--sunset side of course--because i know from long experience the exact moment at which it will turn yellow and then, four-and-a-half seconds later, gimme the green.

and at the precise instant this sequence of events plays out, i gun it, streak past the startled herd into the intersection and take the pole position--cold day in hell when mkf gets stuck behind a procession of snail's-pace grandmas all the way up the goddam canyon, especially after the day he's had. just one more perfectly-executed gutterball--like shooting fish in a barrel, as always.

except this time, it wasn't as always--because this time, there's this bus i never even see until it's right on top of me.

yeah, a bus--on this particular night, the driver of an eastbound-on-sunset los angeles city bus rolls the dice and decides, for whatever reason, that he can safely blow through the light at benedict canyon. maybe he's running late, maybe he too is tired of stopping at every light, or maybe he's counting on the customary genteel beverly hills pause before opposing traffic proceeds, i dunno--but the one thing i can tell you for sure is, the last goddam thing he expects is my ass barreling through the intersection crossways at him the instant the light turns green. i know this without a shadow of a doubt because i see the look on his face when he realizes what's about to happen and hits his brakes--probably the same thing he sees in my face, now that i think about it.

and now, the tragedy: much as it kills me to tell you this, my up-until-now-dormant instinct for healthy self-preservation suddenly and inexplicably selects this inopportune moment to rear its ugly head, causing me to reflexively slam on my own brakes (good ones, as it turns out--goddam japs have the ABS thing down cold) and the bus and i come to a screeching, smoking, fishtailing halt with scant inches between us--a skin-of-your-teeth near miss if there ever was one, lemme tell you.

even now as i'm writing this, i get cold chills when i think about what almost happened, rob: getting creamed by a city bus running a light, knocked around some--hell, maybe even injured--in front of six cars full of impeccably-credentialed witnesses, and me stone-cold sober with no open alcohol in the car--talk about a rare alignment of the goddam planets.

we coulda been so rich--and i blew it.

[note to readers: aside from being a beloved long-time friend, rob is also a personal-injury attorney.]