The road to Ramsey turns suddenly to the left, disappearing behind the bleak skyline of lower Bradford Street. If it seems accidental that I am here at this moment, when two cars collide, then you are right, for there is a reason why I stand here, and collect my thoughts, take the last puff on my cigarette, wipe off the lipstick tracers, a previously agreed upon reason de etre, that makes my stay valid, necessary, even required.
When the guy backs up from off of Ramsey, he’s talking on his cell phone, way too into the conversation for his own good. He’s trying to save a relationship that has died, you can see it in his stature, the way he slumps forward in his Subaru Forrester. He’s holding on to it, trying to reargue a point that has already been rendered moot. He is exasperated, he doesn’t notice, that just a few feet away, a black Escalade, twinkling in the sun, faded pixie dust, the gleam in the diamonds reflecting off the windshield. The driver of the Escalade is clueless as well, a rich kid, took off in his father’s Cadillac, he’s speeding and angry, and looks past the endless lines on Ramsey, he’s looking far down, looking through the shallow end of the swimming pool when he was four. He’s thinking how much the in-between time of adolescence sucks. He’s thinking about how he’d like to go back and do it over again.
And he might just get his chance, for the Escalade, with the boy driving, his mind way beyond the here and now rams into the side of the Subaru in its fourteenth attempt to parallel park into this window of a parking space on Ramsey, so from above it looks like a connected circuit, Escalade connected to the left hand side rear of the Subaru, traffic lights carrying on like nothing happened, a couple at a restaurant oblivious to the threat of food poisoning.
And the two men, these two disconnected men that now find themselves quite literally connected, at the hip, both of their minds still far off. The guy arguing with his girlfriend. He looks at the cell phone that reads ‘call ended.’ The young kid, still looks outside himself, beyond Ramsey, this is further proof that the adult world is out to fuck you over. And who is this asshole anyway?
And me, this humble narrator comes out smoking a cigarette, pretending like I just walked up, like I haven’t been watching the whole time.
What the fuck do you want? They are suspicious, and they have every right to be. I hold out the cell phone that radiates warmth.
--We got ‘em already. Their eyes point downward, they are embarrassed at the offer of help.
--Oh no, your cell phones wont work here,
--Go ahead and try, they won’t work here.
--So why does yours work?
So kids were never skilled at Grammar.
--Just use it ok.
And without even dialing anything, the first guy calls his girlfriend. The phone knows who to call, without any input, it senses it. After five minutes of mumbling, the guy stands over by the tree, the pissed off kid looks at me perplexed, or maybe looks through me is the better term. Thousand yard stare.
First guy comes back up. His face is calm, maybe for the first time this year. He looks comforted. He speaks slowly, and with purpose. He has all the time in the world.
--Hey thanks.
No problem. The great weightlifting.
The kid is pissed off. Like, hey what about my vehicle, whose going to call the cops? And I say no one is going to call the cops, because we don’t need to.
The kid starts swearing, flashing wanna-be gang signs, like kids do, he spits on the ground, his skinny red face like a chiseled cobra.
His speech becomes garbled, just one obscenity after another. It blends together, and in the heat, and the calm demeanor of the older gentlemen, the air slows down, sending a leaf, a brilliant colored leaf down on to the boy’s foot. He stops for a moment, His hands open up to pick up the leaf. He walks over and gives it to me.
--Go ahead, use the phone.
He stops for a moment, like he’s about to unload again, fuck the world.
--Just use the phone.
And he goes over to the bush, he slides his foot over the storm grate, and says ‘yeah’ a lot, and there are periods of silence where he looks like he’s going to cry, but he doesn’t and after a few minutes he puts down the phone and walks over to me.
The phone is open, the red stop sign of ‘Call Ended’ again, but on the screen where it usually says the number, it has a name that has been programmed into the phone. The name contains two genders, like if you were to concatenate male and female and turn it into a nonsense word.
Sheiladaan
They both calmly thank me and walk away. They don’t get into their cars, the cops never come by, and the rest of the day only the empty sounds of birds is heard on Ramsey.
In the morning the cars are absent, and so are the shards of glass that was proof of the crash. The tire marks are gone, and left in its place is the butt from my cigarette, and an old rotary telephone, where you put your fingers in one hole and slide it to the left, hear the recoil as it dials, pulses over the receiver over the din of traffic on Ramsey the next day. I walk up to the receiver, and hearing nothing, I put the phone down and walk away. And all that I can hear as I walk away is the distant ringing, that sound of a little hammer hitting the bell in the phone out on Ramsey, when two men, ready to give up on everything, walked home, leaving their cars behind on a hot day in June in Los Angeles.
