Life In Texas, 1982

Life In Texas, 1982

          I was driving south on San Antonio’s McAllister Freeway and took the Hildebrand Avenue exit. I waited for a car to go by and then turned left onto Hildebrand, shifted to the outside lane so I could turn right at the light at Broadway toward my home in Mahnke Park, and crossed over the freeway on the overpass. A pickup truck exiting the freeway’s northbound lanes didn’t wait for me to drive by and pulled onto the avenue right in front of me.

          I hit the brakes and the horn and swerved onto the inside lane, barely missing both the pickup and the car behind me. As the traffic flowed I pulled alongside him and naturally displayed the middle finger of my right hand to him, and since we both had our windows rolled down I shouted, “¡Idiota!” at him.

          This seemed to piss him off unduly. Maybe he considered an Anglo name-calling him in Spanish to be offensive – I don’t know, but he went fucking ballistic and started shouting at me incoherently. He either sped up, gunning his engine loudly, or slowed down, loudly downshifting, to keep me from pulling in either in front of him or behind him until we stopped for a red light at Broadway, at which time he produced a large-calibre handgun and aimed it at me through his driver’s side window.

          I say large-calibre, but I’m in no way an expert on firearms. All I knew was that the barrel I was staring down looked fucking HUGE.

          This was a situation that called for some rapid decision-making.

          If he decided to pull the trigger It’d be like me blacking out from too much whisky without the whisky, and also without the waking up in the morning wondering how I’d made my way to bed and what I’d broken on my way there. I wouldn’t even hear the shot.

          I couldn’t run the red to get away from him because two cars were stopped ahead of me between my car and the light. The realisation flashed through my mind that he couldn’t escape, either, with two cars stopped ahead of him, too, and the State of Texas loves capital punishment the way that speedfreaks love methamphetamine.

          I leaned part-way across my car’s passenger seat to put my face directly in the middle of the window, where he could have an unobstructed view of my head and shouted, “SHOOT, chickenshit! Go ahead and shoot, you chickenshit bastard! SHOOT!”

          The gun disappeared from my view and he flipped me the bird with a big snarl on his face. That’ll teach me, I guess.

          The light changed and he turned right on Broadway. I turned left toward Alamo Heights. Maybe a drink at the Broadway 5050 bar before going home would prove to be beneficial. It being a warm South Texas day and all, I was shivering a bit.