Avenue of Champions

The new issue of RVA Magazine is out, and once again they have put something I wrote in it. Go out and buy a copy.

Avenue of Champions

One night a couple of years ago I played pool with some friends at a place on West Broad Street. I left late and alone, and approaching car with key in hand saw in my peripherals a figure approaching from the left. Instinct took hold. I jammed the key in the door, jumped inside, and cranked the engine-- and then shame caught up to instinct. I took my hand off the gearshift and took a good look at my potential attacker. She was a heavy-set black woman in her thirties, dressed in jeans and a sweater, not particularly dirty or homeless looking. Just an ordinary person in the city at night and most likely in distress. Had I taken this innocent woman for a threat because she was black? Despicable.
I rolled my window down and asked what was the matter.
“I need a ride,” said the woman.
I had expected her to ask to use my phone. I offered her that.
“Nobody to call, I need a ride.”
White guilt makes you do strange things. Here was a stranger without manners refusing to be helped on my terms, and instead of telling her sorry and driving away I felt that I needed to prove to her that I was not afraid. That I was aware that I had the sociological upperhand, that I was keenly aware my great-great grandfather had most likely whipped hers for rattling his chains too much, and moreover, that I owed her for it.
So I cleaned my CDs off the passenger seat and asked her where I was driving.
“Oh, just drive and I’ll tell you where,” she said, “my name’s Denise. What’s your name?”
“Andrew.”
“Andrew, where do you live?”
“Southside,” I said, glad for once to live thirty minutes away.
“Oh. Well cross Broad and go straight for a minute.”
As we started over the bridge towards the Diamond she asked me if I had a girlfriend, and I started thinking about the episode of Six Feet Under where a hitchhiker douses Michael C. Hall in gasoline and puts a gun in his mouth.
“Yes I do,” I lied.
“Well do you ever, y’know, mess around on her?”
“No,” I said. My voice cracked.
“Why not?” she asked, “Not like she would know.”
“I love my girlfriend,” my beautiful imaginary girlfriend, I started thinking of a name for her in case I was pressed and settled on Michelle, “I’d never do that to her.”
Near the Diamond Denise asked me to make a right down a pitch-black street that seemed to go nowhere. At the time it was too dark to read the street name, but now I know it’s called “the Avenue of Champions.”
This is where a better story would take off. I’d park to let her out, and her pimp would come from the shadows to stab me and take my wallet. Or she’d ask me to do some meth with her, and a cop would pull up just as she did and when my family came to bail me out I’d get to explain why I was in a parked car with a stranger and some crystal methamphetamine at 2 am. Maybe if I were James Frey that’s how this would end. But it isn’t what happened, and I’m too boring to pretend otherwise.
Stopped there at the Avenue of Champions I heard, in my mind’s ear, the voices of two shitty DJ’s joking about this ridiculous white guy who allowed himself to be robbed and murdered by a black hitchhiker because he felt it would be racist to do otherwise. It would blow up into a national news story, a little throw away in the last five minutes of the network broadcast that Brian Williams thought somehow provided trenchant insight into race relations in America. I didn’t stop to wonder how the media figured out the motives of a corpse; I kicked Denise out of the car.
“Man, I’m not going to fuck you up,” she said to me.
“No,” I said, “I’m scared and you need to get out of the car. Sorry.”
And, amazingly, she did. Grumbling, she shuffled down the road towards I know not what, and I drove away half expecting to be chased by an El Camino back to Chesterfield County. Later, safe in the bosom of 23113, the guilt would return, and Denise would become once more an unfortunate woman in poor circumstances who was further victimized by the fear and latent racism of a would-be good Samaritan. But for a few minutes, driving fifty miles an hour through the museum district, fear outpaced guilt, and for a brief shining moment outside the Diamond I had ceased to be a total fucking moron.