Mr Harris

Once when I was sixteen I went down to North Avenue Beach to hook up with two West Side Hispanic girls I’d met at a rave. It was summer, I had a car, money from cutting lawns in my neighbourhood and three bottles of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill. The plan was to get the girls drunk, hook up with one or both of them. But after we’d finished the bottles and smoked some weed, the skinny girl lay back in the sand and said she was going to be sick. Then the darker, prettier girl started worrying that they should get home, and that was the end of it. The lake wind had been blasting us all evening anyway; the whole thing had been an enormous waste of time.

The girls had come in on the El and they asked me for a ride home. I was a North Side prep; the West Side was a place I didn’t go. Except for a few safe enclaves, the West Side was black. Then the pretty girl batted her mascaraed eyes at me with her hair pulled back tight and sexy and that was it. I told them to hop in the car.

The car was brand new, a six-cylinder Corsica that my parents had bought for me. The pretty girl ran her hand on the dash and liked it. We were listening to Led Zeppelin, which they didn’t usually listen to, but it was my car and so they did. The skinny girl who had ruined everything was in the back, getting sicker by the minute. Then we were up on the Ike and the midnight traffic was wall to wall, cherries lighting up ahead of me, everything stop and go. The girl in back kept saying, ‘I’m going be sick, I’m going to be sick in your car.’ And I kept turning around to tell her to hang on. I did this half a dozen times, and half a dozen times I almost hit the car in front of me. Then I finally did.
The girls were instantly sober; so was I. The car that I hit was lit up in my headlights; in it I could see a whole family of people reaching for their necks. That the car was a junker with patches of missing paint all over the trunk meant something bad. That the bumper was hanging off was worse.

The driver and I got out at the same time. He was black, older, not a big man; I noticed right away how small he was. He was holding his neck and wincing in pain. We stood together in the middle lane of traffic with the cars lined up behind us blaring their horns. ‘Damn you hit me,’ the man said, holding his neck. I looked at my car. There was no damage. But he was looking at his car. He said, ‘Damn you knocked off my bumper.’ I could see that the bumper had been held in place with electrical wire, was still held in place by wire on the one side. I said to him, ‘You just have to rewire it.’ He looked at it and said, ‘Man you knocked my bumper off my car.’

This is why you don’t go to the West Side, I told myself. This is why everyone you’ve ever known has told you again and again you don’t go to the South Side, the West Side ever ever ever. Poor poor poor. Black black black. You’ll get robbed and murdered. You’ll never get home again.

The man said to me, ‘Man we got to call the cops and have the cops come and look at this.’ I shook my head. I said, ‘My dad can’t find out.’ He said, ‘Well, we got to figure something out then.’

He took longer than he needed to find a pen and paper in his car. The whole time he did the black faces in the windows turned to look at me as they rubbed their necks. He wrote down my address from my driver’s licence and then my phone number, which I told him. Then he said, ‘Man you’ll hear from me soon,’ and got back in his car. Back in my car I was shaking. Anything else that happened in that ride I don’t remember other than the girl who had ruined everything hadn’t gotten sick.