Do I attract weirdos? Or am I, in fact, a weirdo?
I left work last night around 5.30. It was dark, and cold, and raining. There were no people around. I was walking to my bus stop. This involves crossing King Edward Terrace, a fairly busy road, at a pedestrian crossing. (The crossing is clearly signposted and well lit, but it occasionally becomes invisible to motorists, and I cross my fingers each time I step out onto it.) There was no oncoming traffic on the near side of the crossing, so off I went. I got almost half way across when a car coming the other way drove through the crossing just in front of me. The driver slammed on the brakes at about the time I would have been under the back wheel of the car. The car then drove off again, with its horn blaring incessantly and the driver’s arm waving out of the window. I thought it must have been someone I knew, apologising for almost killing me, so I waved back as I continued walking to the bus stop, shaken somewhat.
The next thing I knew (by now I was at the bus stop, calling up some Bill Fay songs on the iPod), the sound of the car horn was getting louder again, and the car, having done a U-turn on King Edward Terrace (itself no mean feat at that time of the day, on, as I have already said, a dark and wet evening), was doing a right-hand turn into the street where the bus stop is. “Here we go”, I thought to myself, as the driver, in the one motion, leaned across to roll down his passenger-side window, and started to drive his car off the road and up onto the footpath. For a moment I thought the object may have been to finish the job and actually run over me, but the car then stopped. By now I was very conscious of the fact that there was not another living soul around. The driver, who seemed to be a pretty large bloke in a small car, stuck his head almost out the passenger window and started screaming at me, and gesticulating wildly. In the split second in which I had to weigh my options, I thought: if I start to run, he will get out of the car and come after me (or even perhaps keep driving after me - I mean, the car was already up on the footpath pointing in my direction), in which case I don’t stand a chance, and it’s not as if there was anywhere that I could run to. On the other hand, it would be faintly ridiculous for me just to ignore him: he was as in your face as someone could be when they are in a car and you are standing at a bus stop, and anyway there was nobody else around that I could pretend that he might be talking to. So the only life-extending option I had, I figured, was to engage this guy in rational conversation.
As it turned out, that was fairly easy to do, because he wouldn’t let me get a word in edgeways. And he threw me with his opening line. I was expecting “What is your problem?” (easy answer to that one: I’m standing in the rain at the bus stop, without an umbrella, watching rain pouring over the brim of my hat, and wondering if you are going to pick up an iron bar and kill me with it); or “What the hell do you think you were doing?” (easy answer to that one, too: I was crossing the road at a designated and well-lit pedestrian crossing, giving me the right of way, and you had more than enough time to see me given that I was already almost half way across the road; okay I was wearing dark clothing, but after all I am an aging post-punk and wearing black is like an article of faith, not merely a uniform, and in any event the dark clothing would be offset by what was visible of my pasty white skin).
No; the first thing he said was: “What fucking country are you from?” Huh? Before I had time to come up with some kind of smart response, though, he had the answer: “Are you Italian? Are you from fucking Italy? That’s it, isn’t it: you people. What’s your father? Is he fucking Italian? Is your father Italian? Of course he is. Why don’t you back to your own fucking country you fucking wog. You wog. I hate you. You fucking wog.” (I am perhaps not recording this verbatim, but I hope you are getting the idea.)
Before I could explain to him that my father had been dead for some years and that I am at least fourth-generation Australian on both sides of my family, he took a new tack: “Where do you work? Where do you fucking work? You work over there don’t you? [looking back in the general direction of the High Court of Australia] Yeah I know you fucking do because I seen you [sic, obviously] coming from there. You people. You fucking people. I’m going to report you to the police. You people think you can get away with anything but I’m going to report you to the police and they’re going to come down there and they will fucking report you. You fucking people. You think you can do anything. Are you fucking Italian? Where’s your father from? You idiot. Why don’t you go back to Italy you fucking wog. Fucking dago.” (I was kind of wondering if my hat, a 1940s-era fedora, of the kind favoured by Canadian comic-book artist Seth, was some kind of obscure signifier of an Italian origin, but I didn’t have the chance to ask, I was drowning in this guy’s verbal torrent.)
At that, he drove off, but not before winding his driver’s side window down so that he could continue screaming at me as he drove back whence he came, turning left onto King Edward Terrace and leaving me, standing in the rain, to ponder what exactly had just happened.
