…bad day for a pump jockey; the start of a long fall… part 2; the fact of the matter…
By: Thomas Krawford
Tags: Autism, BlackLivesMatter, Short Story, Authors, Narrative

old farm equipment superimposed by a breaking news header

By Thomas E Krawford jr.

Tompkins was pushing him, and He, Our Young Friend, back in those blurry days of confusion and denial; family secrets piling on top of family regrets; buried underneath a mountain of family fears; did not like to be pushed…

The Custodian (Our Custodian) looked around the church-quiet dorm floor. The stillness felt strange to him; looking down those empty carpeted hallways, almost like the air had been let out of a bicycle tire; a flat kind of feeling; a death in the water kind of feeling. Yet, there were still a few Residents left on the floor. Those who couldn’t leave; because regardless of Co-Vid 19 state-wide protocols started by the authorities; in light of the rising death toll at the time; they had logistic or economic, or scholarship priorities that meant they had to remain in the dorm until classes officially ended on the eighteenth of December; no more than a few days away.

Our Custodian sang songs to himself in that stillness; sometimes songs he made up; other times, merely covers of previous singers and songwriters; sometimes sad and mournful tomes; sometimes odes to an imaginary lover; one whose picture he kept on the home screen of his cell phone; a picture of a red-headed cherubic-faced; the youngish blue-eyed woman who kept him company; an imaginary friend and confidant with an ever-present Mona Lisa Smile; a smile who kept him company and got him out of bed; every morning and into work; generally; on time. Sounds like a reasonable state of mind.

Right?

Well, there were, and are, still those times when Our Custodian’s state of mind, possibly was or is not so stable, like a few hours ago, while on the way home from work.

He was crossing at a clearly and newly marked pedestrian crossing at the corner of Tappan and South University; newly marked because the entire stretch of road; from State Street to East University had just been reopened due to extensive construction improvements; when a red Lincoln Mercury SUV turned onto the eastbound side of South University from State Street, and accelerated way beyond the twenty-five-mile posted speed limit; a general speed limit for most of if not all of central campus.

Our Custodian was certain of this because he had entered the crosswalk just as the SUV had turned onto South University from State Street, and he looked up and saw the SUV rapidly gaining speed as it approached the crosswalk. If we look at a map of the area, we can clearly see that from the corner of State Street and South University to Tappan and South University is about a minute (drive time-wise). If any individual, already in the crosswalk at Tappan and South U, when someone was turning onto South U. from State Street, it should be reasonable to assume the individual in that crosswalk should have plenty of time to cross the street safely.

For the driver of that SUV to reach the pedestrian crosswalk as quickly as it did, given our Custodian’s beliefs of the fact of the matter, that driver must have been traveling at speed well over the posted speed limit.

Yet, being right does not necessarily mean you ARE right.

To his credit, Our Custodian raised and waved his hand when the driver was twenty or so feet away.

The driver did not slow down; in fact, despite an obvious pumping of his brakes, the SUV driver actually sped up; and at the last minute, leaving mere inches between the rapidly oncoming vehicle and the pedestrian (our Custodian) was nearly hit as the driver swerved to avoid a probably fatal collision; but instead of being grateful for being spared death or possible serious injury, Our Custodian smashed his gloved hands against the rear passenger’s window; and then the driver stopped and got out of his car.

“What the hell is wrong with you,” the driver demanded to know. “pounding on my car?”

“You almost hit me,” Our Custodian hissed, taking a slouching snake stance; turning his left side to his opponent; softening his knees; thereby minimizing exposed any potential target area and giving his body position to move; to strike; a move he had learned from his father years ago; when he was an infant living in Chicago; when his father wanted to teach his newly born second son how to channel the excess energy, and near hysteria, the infant always seemed to prefer as a general reaction; particularly to changes in his immediate environment back; in those early days of 1961–1962.

“C’mon,” Our Custodian beckoned as the driver appeared from his vehicle, clearly incensed but more surprised than actually angry. “You almost hit me,” Our Custodian repeated.

“But I didn’t,” the driver replied, almost as if not hitting Our Custodian was an achievement, a testament to the driver’s consummate skill in driving.

Well, things went back and forth for a few heated moments until the driver of the SUV declared that he had a gun and that he was going to get it; at which point he went to the driver’s side rear passenger door of his vehicle; presumably to obtain a firearm he had said he had.

At that point, Our Custodian restrained the driver; right arm-bar across the front of the neck; left arm behind the back of the skull; ready for the sleeper; “You are not going to get any gun,” Our Custodian informed the driver. “You are going to get back in your car and get the fuck out of here.”

He backed up for a minute until both he and Our Custodian realized there were too many witnesses to be adequately accounted for.

So, he pulled off, and Our Custodian went about his business of safely and sanely getting home after another long day of work; and when he got home and closed the door, he asked himself: “What the hell were you thinking? He could’ve had a gun and shot you! You stupid motherfucker!”

“Don’t ever do that again‼.”

“How in the hell did you get to be fifty-nine years old, you crazy son of a bitch?”

It’s then that Our Custodian had to admit, half to himself, and the other half to plain reason, that he might have been a little childish, never backing down from a good fight even when the odds were almost hopelessly stacked against him.

In fact, the very next day, he spent most of his time between cleaning, sanitizing, and disinfecting, brooding over the incident. He couldn’t say for sure whether or not he had remembered to at least be tried activating the crossing signal before entering. Ultimately, he had to grudgingly admit to himself that, indeed, he could’ve forgotten.

He could have played a significant part in his own nearly tragic, or if he were lucky and didn’t lose his life either from being hit; or shot to death by a road raging fellow African American; whose own gray hair should have demonstrated to the two men that they had something in common; that is if either of the two had stopped and thought in the heat of the moment; that a life-changing outcome for our hapless (at best) Custodian; who responded the way he did; could’ve been easily avoided; that; only if the two men had seen themselves as Black Men; and not as robots, previously programmed by some machine of social conformity through violence and submission; then no confrontation needed to have escalated any further than; let’s say: “Sorry man, my bad.”

Who knows why this preferred exchange did not happen?

We are not rocket scientists here.

This author holds that this brief account of a recent event in the current life of the protagonist of our experimental narrative started almost a year and a half (and some moons) ago, will effectively allow both the writer and the reader of this particular overall general text, to adequately transition back to that time in the narrative where we; the performer, the audience and the text; such as it was back in mid through late March; when the pandemic forced state authorities to shut everything down abruptly stepping away from the experiment; a point of departure where it stood all this time; because that’s just the way things were in the Spring and Summer and Fall of 2020; as essentially a hanging thread in a year of hanging threads.

So, please join me in the next installment, where we directly delve into part three of bad day for a pump jockey, where the author recalls; not a possible narrative, but a probable plot; one where the protagonist doesn’t tell a truth per se; instead he narrates a probable truth; one that showed him as Tompkins must have seen him at that time back in those blurry days of confusion and denial; where family secrets piled on top of family regrets; buried underneath a mountain of family fears found themselves glazed over by guilt, unnecessary artifice and ambiguous career ambition pushed upon Our Young Friend by the fiction of himself being, so called, normal; pushed him and his sense of self at the time of meeting with Mark Thompkins; on that fateful evening at that gas station at the corner of Maple and Telegraph roads all those many years ago, when Our Young Man’s car showed up at his place of work at the time; pushed the way he had always been pushed by his loyalty to his mother and father; pushed into thinking he was never savagely; horribly, sexually abused; pushed by everything he knew and had come to trust, back in 1979 Bloomfield Hills Michigan; pushed; when he did not, and at that point; could no longer, like or accept; being pushed…by anyone…

Ann Arbor’s Beer Depot from the perspective of the second floored fished eyed lens of the opposite parking garage

(to be continued as “the point where The Fall began”)

Thomas E Krawford of Ann Arbor, Michigan

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