I stopped at a red light on Mass. Ave. in Boston, a couple blocks away from the bridge, and a woman in a beat-up old Buick backed into me. Like, cranked her wheel, rammed right into my side. I drove a Chevy pickup truck. It being Boston, I got out of the car yelling, swearing at this woman, a little woman, whose first language was not English. But she lived and drove in Boston, too, so she knew, we both knew, that the thing to do is get out of the car, slam the door as hard as you fucking can and yell things like What the fuck were you thinking? You fucking blind? What the fuck is going on? Jesus Christ! So we swore at each other with perfect posture, unnaturally angled chins. I threw my arms around, sudden jerking motions with my whole arms, the backs of my hands toward where she had hit my truck.
But she hadn’t hit my truck. She hit the tire; no damage done. Her car was fine, too. We saw this while we were yelling, and then we were stuck. The next line in our little drama should have been Look at this fucking dent! I’m not paying for this shit. I’m calling the cops, lady. Maybe we’d throw in a You’re in big trouble, sister, or I just hope for your sake there’s nothing wrong with my fucking suspension, that sort of thing. But there was no fucking dent. There was nothing else for us to do. So I stopped yelling, and she looked at the tire she’d backed into, her little eyebrows pursed and worried. She was clearly in the wrong, I was enormous, and I’d been acting as if I’d like to hit her. So I said Well, there’s nothing wrong with my car, nothing wrong with your car…are you OK? She nodded, and started to cry, so I put my arms around her and I held her, middle of the street, Mass. Ave., Boston, a couple blocks from the bridge. I hugged her, and I said We were scared, weren’t we? and she nodded and we laughed.