The Ride Report

I lost my cool and dished out a little street justice this weekend. My wife just shook her head when I told her about it, my riding buddy probably wishes I hadn’t been there, there’s a gardener out there somewhere who’s probably still looking over his shoulder, and I feel like an idiot.

My friend and I were gassing up as we prepared to ride up to Thousand Oaks to return the “floorboards” I bought from the idiot I talked about in my last entry. We pulled out of the gas station together side-by-side and we were turning left onto a major street at an intersection, joining traffic that was stopping for a red light. A pickup truck was approaching as we pulled out, and my friend and I were both timing our approach to pull in behind this truck as it passed and stopped at the light. Suddenly the guy driving the truck slammed on his brakes, and our carefully-timed turn to drop in right behind him turned into a “holy shit” handful of brakes because we suddenly had a pickup truck in front of us instead of an open lane. I managed to stop in time. My buddy didn’t.

To my right I heard a thud-crunch sound and looked over to see my buddy doing his best to drive his bike under the truck and hold it up at the same time. He was heeled over on his left side with his front wheel socked neatly into a front-wheel-sized divot in the bottom rail of the truck’s left rear quarter-panel. Here’s an illustration I’ve created of what the critical moment looked like:

His front wheel was tucked under the truck and he couldn’t stand the bike up or move it back with the truck where it was. I had managed to stop in time, so I put my kickstand down and went to the drivers’ door. “Pull up a little,” I said.

I’ll admit I may not have been as calm and pleasant as I sound now. The driver looked at me through his rolled-up window, eyes wide as saucers, frozen.

“Pull up!” I repeated, in what might have been a not-friendly voice. “NOW! Then pull over!”

The driver inched up … and up … and up… And then the light turned green and he floored it and took off. I ran to my bike and yelled over my shoulder to my buddy, “I’m chasing him down!” And the chase was on.

I caught up to him and pulled up next to his door when he got caught at the light at the next intersection. I went to his window again and told him to pull over. He refused to look at me and stared straight ahead. His window was rolled up and his door was locked. I told him to pull over or, well, unpleasant things would happen. The light turned green and he took off again.

I chased him down again, rode next to him and yelled to pull over or else. He had to stop for another red light and I got off my bike again, told him to pull over again. This time he sort of nodded and inched forward. I walked around to the passenger side and stopped traffic to let him get over … and he took off again.

I was already angry, but this put me over the top and sent me into a blind rage. I did the only thing I could think of: as his truck went by, I wound up and punched the fender as hard as I could. It didn’t stop him, didn’t even slow him down, but now he had dents in both quarter-panels to worry about.

Long story short, I kept chasing him even after he got on the freeway and eventually he figured out that I wasn’t giving up. He finally got off the freeway and stopped on a surface street. By this time I had calmed down a little, so I didn’t take his head off when he got out.

The guy told me in broken English that he didn’t stop because the accident wasn’t his fault and because he was afraid of me. I told him that in this country, we stop even for accidents that aren’t our fault, and that I only started yelling at him when he looked like he was going to take off. He refused to show me his license because “You’re not the police” and I suggested that he should go ahead and call them. After that he just kept repeating that it wasn’t his fault, and I started agreeing that maybe it wasn’t, maybe my buddy’s insurance would have paid for his damage, but he took off so now he was fucked because hit-and-run is a felony.

I called my buddy up on the cell, told him what was going on, and got the report from his end: his bike had a few minor scratches on the fork cover, but aside from that it was fine. He actually kinda wanted to let the whole thing go because he thought the accident was his fault and he didn’t want it on his insurance.

Well, hell. Here I had chased this poor schmuck halfway across the valley, punched in the non-accident side of his truck, threatened him with murder and all-around bodily harm, and generally scared the hell out of him — and now my buddy wanted me to let him go because he hadn’t done anything wrong? Where’s the fun in that? And more importantly: what’s the exit strategy that gets me and my buddy off whatever hooks I’d hung us on?

I bluffed him. I told the guy “My buddy wants me to let you go. I think I should kick your ass and call the cops. What do you want to do?” The guy was in his truck and gone in a flurry of dust inside of 30 seconds.

And that, kids, is why street justice shouldn’t be anything more than a TV series starring Rocky’s Apollo Creed and the guy from Will and Grace — because you just never know where it might lead.

I went back and met up with my buddy and sure enough, his bike was almost spotless. As I said to him later, after he swore me to secrecy (and you see how well that’s working out), “It’s almost as if it never happened if I hadn’t been there.” He has all kinds of excuses about why it wasn’t his fault and that the guy shouldn’t have stopped like that and how good he is at “predictive riding” when people drive “like they’re supposed to” and blah blah blah. I just keep reminding him that, at the end of the day, he hit a big white truck that everyone else managed to avoid, even the guy who was riding right next to him and making the exact same turn.

He’s still working on a comeback for that.