(no subject)
Emma and I are hanging out at the park across the street from the high school. Kids are flooding out as the Donnas finish their last song and are looking for something to do just as we are. "I could a drink,' I admit to Emma in a lame attempt to try and convince her that we should head over to the Lexington Club since that's where all the bands from Ladyfest are hanging out. God knows I need to be seen since I'm such a fucking hip and cool scenstress.
She's not having it. She calls the people that she's staying to see if they're home yet and if they can let her in. I call Angie to see if she wants to drink with me at a dyke bar but she's not having either since she's at home and already has a free cocktail in her hand. Obviously, it's time to make some goodbyes. A long, drawn out goodbye because you know that you really have no place to go and time is working against you like it always does. Except now it's pushing instead of pulling. So talk about girls because you can talk about girls for hours and never run out of things to say. It being our last night in San Francisco we didn't want to give it over to sleep just yet.
"So, you find anyone here cute yet?"
"Yeah, but I'm too shy to talk to them."
Just like that, shallow and lame because we don't know what else to say. So I suppose that Bang!/Crunch! was something we had been waiting for. It doesn't register at first. I just see a car skid and smash into some other parked vehicle and two bodies flying in the air. There's buckets of glass flying around them, falling stars glittering in the street light, and for a second it almost looks pretty; until you realize that those are human bodies in the sky and they have just smacked head first on the concrete.
Shit. Did that just really happen? People around me start running either toward the crash or away from it. I run towards it without thinking. There's three people around one body twitching on the ground, but I see the second girl a few feet over by the car. Her helmet is still on, (What were they driving? A scooter? A motorcycle? It's to distorted to see now.) but there's blood dripping down from both her temples. She's trying to move her legs but she can't do anything much but flip her body a little bit this way and calasp back that way like that dog I saw in the middle of 39th Street after he got hit by a car last week.
I don't know what to do but there's nobody around to ask so I touch her arm and ask if she's okay. Of course she's not fucking okay so I ask if she can tell me her name. If she can remember anything because this is what I see people do on television shows. She mumbling incoherently but I don't think it's in response to anything I say. She does this for a second till her mouth fills up with blood and then she stops. I try to tell her that she was in an accident but everything should be all right and that there's an ambulance on the way. I check to make that Emma's at the pay phone so at least I wouldn't be lying about that. She doesn't make an attempt to mumble anything and know she's stopped moving. I try to look in her eyes to show her some sort of sign that it's going to be fine but she's not looking at me. She's not seeing anything at all.
The police arrive and they look more confidant than I do about the situation so I back off. Someone shouts to turn the engine off in the car. I'm the closest so I reach into the front seat. The radio is on and it's tuned to a top 40 rap station, loudly. The windshield wipers are going and the interior lights won't go off since the car door is just dangling there. It's a cheap mid-eighties domestic car with some silly fancy name like Cavalier or Taurus, the kind that I've been a million times before, except now it just looks alien to me. Look around, baby seat in the back, trash on the floor, no keys. Check the side of the steering, here's where the keys should go but nothings sticking out. I try to turn off the wipers but I just make them go faster. Try to turn off the radio but I can't find the off button. Fuck, I can't think clearly. Where's the owner of the car? Shouldn't they be doing this instead of me? But the driver took off while we were all watching the human cannonball fly. Maybe there was never anybody in the car because no one can recall seeing anyone behind the wheel and nobody is owning up to the damage that the car had done.
The cops ask me if saw anything. I say no just like everybody else so they push behind the yellow police line. Emma and stand there fews a minutes trying to figure it out. Spectators around us are asking the questions questions as the cops did, with more sincerity in their voice. Nobody has an answer for them either. Emma complains about how long it took for 911 to answer. I'm not really listening to her so she tells the woman standing next to her about it. "Yeah, it's really scary how long they put you on hold for. They get some many calls because that's the first thing people think to do no matter the situation is so there's no enough operators to handle it."
I'm watching the paramedics give CPR to the bodies on the ground. Not working. They bring out some shit that look like tool boxes, pull something out and try again. There's three cop cars now and a fire truck. Where's the fucking ambulance? More CPR. The first girl is carried off somewhere that I can't see. The intersection gets blocked off with road flares. Someone brings up a blanket. More "did you see what happened?" are going on behind me. More CPR.
Then the blanket finally gets used to cover up the last girl with.
I tell Emma that it's not polite to stare and that there's nothing we can do so we should get out of the way.
"We're not in the way,' she protests, 'I want to see what's going on."
I make her walk away anyhow. We say a much shorter goodbye this time and head off in separate directions. The next day I check the paper for any news blurb on what happened. As of yet, nothing has been reported.
She's not having it. She calls the people that she's staying to see if they're home yet and if they can let her in. I call Angie to see if she wants to drink with me at a dyke bar but she's not having either since she's at home and already has a free cocktail in her hand. Obviously, it's time to make some goodbyes. A long, drawn out goodbye because you know that you really have no place to go and time is working against you like it always does. Except now it's pushing instead of pulling. So talk about girls because you can talk about girls for hours and never run out of things to say. It being our last night in San Francisco we didn't want to give it over to sleep just yet.
"So, you find anyone here cute yet?"
"Yeah, but I'm too shy to talk to them."
Just like that, shallow and lame because we don't know what else to say. So I suppose that Bang!/Crunch! was something we had been waiting for. It doesn't register at first. I just see a car skid and smash into some other parked vehicle and two bodies flying in the air. There's buckets of glass flying around them, falling stars glittering in the street light, and for a second it almost looks pretty; until you realize that those are human bodies in the sky and they have just smacked head first on the concrete.
Shit. Did that just really happen? People around me start running either toward the crash or away from it. I run towards it without thinking. There's three people around one body twitching on the ground, but I see the second girl a few feet over by the car. Her helmet is still on, (What were they driving? A scooter? A motorcycle? It's to distorted to see now.) but there's blood dripping down from both her temples. She's trying to move her legs but she can't do anything much but flip her body a little bit this way and calasp back that way like that dog I saw in the middle of 39th Street after he got hit by a car last week.
I don't know what to do but there's nobody around to ask so I touch her arm and ask if she's okay. Of course she's not fucking okay so I ask if she can tell me her name. If she can remember anything because this is what I see people do on television shows. She mumbling incoherently but I don't think it's in response to anything I say. She does this for a second till her mouth fills up with blood and then she stops. I try to tell her that she was in an accident but everything should be all right and that there's an ambulance on the way. I check to make that Emma's at the pay phone so at least I wouldn't be lying about that. She doesn't make an attempt to mumble anything and know she's stopped moving. I try to look in her eyes to show her some sort of sign that it's going to be fine but she's not looking at me. She's not seeing anything at all.
The police arrive and they look more confidant than I do about the situation so I back off. Someone shouts to turn the engine off in the car. I'm the closest so I reach into the front seat. The radio is on and it's tuned to a top 40 rap station, loudly. The windshield wipers are going and the interior lights won't go off since the car door is just dangling there. It's a cheap mid-eighties domestic car with some silly fancy name like Cavalier or Taurus, the kind that I've been a million times before, except now it just looks alien to me. Look around, baby seat in the back, trash on the floor, no keys. Check the side of the steering, here's where the keys should go but nothings sticking out. I try to turn off the wipers but I just make them go faster. Try to turn off the radio but I can't find the off button. Fuck, I can't think clearly. Where's the owner of the car? Shouldn't they be doing this instead of me? But the driver took off while we were all watching the human cannonball fly. Maybe there was never anybody in the car because no one can recall seeing anyone behind the wheel and nobody is owning up to the damage that the car had done.
The cops ask me if saw anything. I say no just like everybody else so they push behind the yellow police line. Emma and stand there fews a minutes trying to figure it out. Spectators around us are asking the questions questions as the cops did, with more sincerity in their voice. Nobody has an answer for them either. Emma complains about how long it took for 911 to answer. I'm not really listening to her so she tells the woman standing next to her about it. "Yeah, it's really scary how long they put you on hold for. They get some many calls because that's the first thing people think to do no matter the situation is so there's no enough operators to handle it."
I'm watching the paramedics give CPR to the bodies on the ground. Not working. They bring out some shit that look like tool boxes, pull something out and try again. There's three cop cars now and a fire truck. Where's the fucking ambulance? More CPR. The first girl is carried off somewhere that I can't see. The intersection gets blocked off with road flares. Someone brings up a blanket. More "did you see what happened?" are going on behind me. More CPR.
Then the blanket finally gets used to cover up the last girl with.
I tell Emma that it's not polite to stare and that there's nothing we can do so we should get out of the way.
"We're not in the way,' she protests, 'I want to see what's going on."
I make her walk away anyhow. We say a much shorter goodbye this time and head off in separate directions. The next day I check the paper for any news blurb on what happened. As of yet, nothing has been reported.