Illegal U-Turn

Illegal:  Prohibited by law; against the law; unlawful; illicit; not authorized or sanctioned.


Last night SuperK and I went to a small birthday party for one of our friends in The Program.  We dithered and hemmed and hawed, trying to decide whether or not to go in the first place without hurting our friend's feelings.  This despite the fact that we almost always have a good time when we do social things, especially with friends in recovery.  But we almost never want to go and this feeling intensifies as we get closer to the time that we need to leave.  We call this time of the experience  the introvert-being-forced-to-deal-with-other-people-who-are-the-worst phase.


SuperK: "I don't want to go."
Stevie Seaweed: "Then why did you say that we'd go?"
SuperK: "Hey, it's your friend, you dumb ass."
Stevie S: "Ah, I don't want to go either.  Let's not go.  Can you come up with a good excuse?  Can you come up with a good lie?"
SuperK: "You're the good liar."
Etc. Etc. Etc.


(Editor's note: Please substitute Stevie Seaweed for SuperK whenever you want, and vice-versa. There are no saints in the Seaweed family in these exchanges).


This exchange of dialogue goes on for a while longer so I'm going to put on some soothing elevator music so that everyone can relax for a minute and think good thoughts.  Maybe a instrumental version of "The Girl From Ipanema."


Anyway, we leave right at rush hour and our route takes us by default right through downtown New City.  It's raining.  We make it a few blocks, heading for a bottleneck bridge, before the gridlock begins.  We sit for a while and watch red taillights flicker through the blurry windshield, wondering at the drivers who make it half-way through an intersection and then sit there, blocking everyone's progress while getting no further themselves, before I lose my temper and decide to forsake the highway route for surface streets.  By the way, I like the concept of a "surface street."  It implies that a viable option are streets below the surface of the earth or maybe floating up in the air, tantalizingly out of reach, unless you have a hovercraft.


The route I chose at random puts us on a 3-lane, 1-way street.  The right 2 lanes are clearly marked "Bus Only" and the cross street that I need to take to get us back on track has one of those venomous graphical signs: Right turn arrow, in black, inside a circle, also in black, with a large angled slash, in ominous red, overriding the whole thing.  The words "Except Bus" were at the bottom of the sign.  The buses, against whom I rarely hold a grudge, were clearly top dog on this particular street.  I'm going to assume that all of the "Bus Only" signs were meant to discourage cars like the one I was driving.  I didn't see any other cars on the street.


I look left.  I look right.  I check the rear view mirror, then make a big sweeping right hand turn from the far left lane, across the two bus lanes, nearly clipping the No Right Turn sign in the process.  There were people on the sidewalk holding up signs: 9.1, 9.0, a couple of perfect 10s!, a lousy 7.7 from the Russian judge.  A few of them threw roses in front of the Subaru.


"There's a cop one car in front of us," I casually remarked, immediately after The Move.  I figured that once the officer tallied up all of the fines associated with the spectacularly illegal move I had just made the total would have been in the $1700 range.  He began driving very, veeerrry slowly, so I pulled in to the next lane to get around him, and his lights went on.  Believe it or not, SuperK and I were laughing pretty hard at this point.  I believe this would have been an perfect example of Getting What I Deserved.


He must have been making a donut run.  He made a spectacularly illegal U-turn in heavy traffic, turned off his lights, and went elsewhere.


We continued on our gruesome mission, through the rain and homeward bound drivers.  Not being very accomplished in the Adult business we had purchased no card, no present, and no party hats so we offered to stop and pick up a few pizzas on the way.  We stopped at one promising place that didn't have pizza, then drove around the busy commercial area for a while before throwing in the towel.  Normally you can't walk down the block without running into a pizza place.  We could find no pizza, although I was able to indulge my love of illegal U-turns a few more times.  I figured that I was wearing a halo that night after being given a pass on the initial monster illegal move.


We had a good time with our friends.  There was plenty of food.  The hostess had suggested a money tree for anyone who wanted to help the birthday girl meet some unexpected expenses so no one had brought a present or party hats or pizza, for that matter, although one guy made some unbelievable bacon wrapped dates that were salty and sweet and I ate about 1700 of them so I was really cursing this guy at 3AM when I was trying to find the Rolaids.


As usual, nothing bad that happens is ever my fault.


I should have gotten that $1700 ticket.  It would have made a great story.  Maybe I'll just lie and pretend I got it anyhow.