Don't Talk To Strangers

Editor's note: This was originally posted on MySpace at 2101 EDT on 17 April, 2007.


I started the day by getting seriously weirded out. And here's how, of course... I wouldn't leave you in suspense like that, dearly beloved; you know that.

So, I wake up and I get dressed and shave my face and brush my hair and teeth and get all prettied up, because today is the first day of my new job that I'm going to have for a whole two weeks.

(Aside: I have a job at the Veterans' Administration hospital. Those of you to whom I whine and complain (yeah, that's everyone, I know) know that I hate the VA and I hate their hospital. And now I work there.

We have seen the enemy, and they is us.

This is the kind of delicious irony that motivates me to get up in the morning. But I digress, quite on purpose. On with the real story.)

And after I'm all ready to go work, I get in my car, and I start to drive to the VA hospital, because that's where I'm going to work, of course. But then tragedy strikes, because my car is dangerously low on gasoline.

This is because I've been running my car on fumes a lot lately. And I've been doing that out of a misguided desire not to spend money, and a misguided belief that the price of gas will go down soon. I am misguided in these ways largely because I am an impoverished college student, and that is of course the reason why I'm going to work at this point in the story.

So, as I leave my place of crashing on someone's couch, my rice-rocket begins to lurch alarmingly, signaling me that it is getting ready to just quit running and strand me on the side of the road in my hour of need.

I hasten to the nearest gas station. I make it there just fine.

Jesus smiles, as do I.

I put gasoline in my car. A whole half a tank. Big pimpin', spendin' cheese.

As I finish recapping my gas tank, I am approached by a friendly gentleman of color. He is well dressed and polite, and he asks me if I would be so kind as to transport him to his place of employment, which is the International House of Pancakes on south 13th Street. He tells me some bullshit about being stranded because a taxi didn't come to get him or something, but I'm not really listening to that part, because I don't really care about his personal problems.

Nonetheless, I decide that he doesn't look like a killer hobo rapist, and I invite him to hop in the rice-rocket and we'll get going.

Let it never be said that I don't got the soul to help a brother in need.

We proceed along our merry way, exchanging some meaningless pleasantries about the weather, and then, after a long silence with which I was entirely comfortable, things get strange.

Understand my mindset: I'm pretty damned sure that this guy isn't going to assault or rob me, or he wouldn't be in my car. I'm quite confident that he does need to get to the International House of Pancakes restaurant for work, or I would have told him politely to get tied and stop hanging around gas stations to hitch rides from vulnerable fully-stopped motorists. But, in good quasi-paranoid fashion, I'm waiting for the trick, the game, the hustle. I'm waiting for the extra bit he didn't mention, the ulterior motive, for something to happen that will remind me that this is not 1957 and that there's nothing so simple as a man who just needs a ride to work anymore.

That's what I'm thinking, more or less, when he shares this intensely personal anecdote with me.

He tells me that last night, this friend of his got a couple of girls and brought them over. Pretty girls. And not just any pretty girls, but the kind of pretty girls that are apparently okay with having sexual relations with people they've known for scant hours.

This becomes apparent when he tells me that even though one of them was supposed to be for him, he found himself unable to obtain and maintain a suitable erection.

ED can strike anyone, apparently, just like the commercials say.

"I've always been shy that way, I guess," he confides to me.

Many thoughts are going through my mind as I sit there.

One of them is something like "why are you telling me this, you crazy random man? You don't even know me... you just met me, and you're never going to see me again."

Another of them is more like: "right, and this is the part where you tell me that you're a homosexual or bisexual man."

I begin wondering whether he thinks I'm cute. I expect that in the next few seconds he will either propose that I pay him money to perform a sexual act upon me, or that he pays me money for the privilege of performing a sexual act upon me.

Maybe he'll just ask me for a date.

So, naturally, I say "Hm."

It's a good all-purpose response, and I feel clever for having thought to employ it.

Things get quiet again. I begin to think that everything will be okay. I'm getting closer to the International House of Pancakes with every twitch of my eyebrow.

He breaks the silence once more. Dialogue resumes.

"She was really offended."

"Was she, now." (I mentally kick myself for having responded in more than one syllable. Those extra two will cost me, I can feel it.)

"Yeah. She was really upset that I couldn't [have sexual intercourse with] her."

"Hm." (I try to recover, but I can feel that I'm in a deadly spin already.)

"My friend [had sexual intercourse with] both of them. I mean, he [had sexual intercourse with] mine right in front of me, man. She was [quite upset]."

(I maintain silence, in a last desperate bid to make it all stop. I accelerate.)

"Yeah, and the whole time he was [having sexual intercourse with] her, they were both looking at me."

(I'm sure he's not going to make an indecent proposition to me, now. I don't know why he's telling me this, but I'm more and more certain that it's not to seduce me.)

"It wasn't right, man. She got no right to be [angry] at me just 'cause I couldn't get no [erection] so I could [have sexual intercourse with] her. And them lookin' at me like that wasn't right either."

"I think you did the right thing." (I am so lame.) "A lot of these young girls, they don't have their heads in the right place anymore." (The speed limit is forty-five miles per hour at this point in the road, and I could not possibly care less about that.)

He nods. I turn into the parking lot. I am going to survive this.

I stop the car. "How much do I owe you?" he asks me.

I tell him not to worry about it. For some reason I don't want to touch anything he has touched. Especially not money. I think about prostitution. "Just have a good day at work," I say.

"God bless," he tells me.

I get the hell out of there, and I go to work.

Never talk to strangers, boys and girls. Never ever talk to strangers.

And don't let them talk to you.

You don't want to hear it.