That cursed moped
“I don’t know why he’s picking on me,” Pauly says as his hands shake around the cup of Dunkin Donut coffee, he makes me buy him so he can calm down.
One of Pauly’s customers at the Fotomat booth warned him,
saying that the local Washington Township cop was looking to bust him.
“He’s up on top of the hill where the road from Mount
Arlington runs down into the highway before the circle I need to take to get to
work at the mall,” Pauly said, meaning the booth in the parking lot of the
mall, not the mall itself.
“It’s as if I have a target on my back the way me and
Charlie had when we got busted in Montclair,” Pauly says. “Only I’m not
carrying pot the way we did back then, and I’m certainly not driving around in
a cherry-red Volkswagen the way Charlie always did.”
“Don’t you think driving a moped in his part of the state
makes you stand out?” I ask.
“I don’t care if I stand out, as long as it gets me to work
and back,” he replies.
Pauly doesn’t care how stupid he looks riding the moped in a
part of the state where riding anything smaller than a two-ton pickup truck is
the equivalent of highway suicide. He doesn’t even care too much about the
environment (assuming already the world might come to an end in his lifetime
anyway,) he’s just worried about the price of gas, even though the Ford Pinto I
gave him in exchange for two guitars and a promise of a job at a Fotomat out in
the Boondocks of Washington Township is no gas-guzzler.
This was before he made me get him a job at the Dunkin Donuts
where I worked for a while before my 1969 Lemans dropped its transmission in
the middle of the New Jersey Turnpike, and before, Pauly eventually gave up
both jobs for a clerk position in the local library where he didn’t have to
drive so far in a car or as it turns out, his puttering out of date moped, he
named after one of The Beatles – though I don’t recall which one.
This was even before it became fashionable to have adults peddling
along on scooters, we would have been ashamed to be seen riding even as kids,
mopeds being some kind of middle ground before evolving to a motor scooter and
still lesser by far than the macho motorcycles people like the Hell’s Angles or
off duty cops might ride.
“I don’t know how long he’s been watching me,” Pauly says.
One of his customers at the Fotomat told Pauly, “He’s got a
hard-on for you,” made worse by the fact that the cop could not quite catch up
with Pauly even though the cop had a cop car and Pauly’s moped could barely huff
and puff to reach the minimum speed for traveling on a highway.
Day after day, the cops reached the hilltop at some point
after Pauly’s had passed, seeing only the fading fumes along the slow lane
where Pauly had been. Day after day, Pauly made his way to work and back, unmolested,
as if fate or god or some magic he possesses protects him from the wrath of the
pursuing officer, the way ultimately, his arrest in Montclair long ago protected
him in hindsight from going to Vietnam, the draft board willing to overlook
nearly any crime, but would not tolerate a pervert who had been busted for
possessing pot.
“I thought my luck ran out of me when I saw the cop car in
my moped mirror,” he says, “lights flashing like hell and creation to make me
pull over, his big overweight belly rolling out the driver’s side of the patrol
car for that long amble to where I sat on the side of the road, pulling out his
ticket book, wearing a grin of intense satisfaction at having finally snared me.”
Pauly looks at me as if I might understand why the cop would
view him as a dangerous criminal who dared to ride a childish moped in a world
meant for more adult vehicles, perhaps, even the Pinto might not have sufficed in
a world where real men with muscles drove muscle cars.
“I thought he was going to drag me off to the county jail,”
Pauly says. “I still can’t get over the gleam I saw in eyes. It was like he was
busting Dillinger. For a fucking moped!”
But then, that same fate that kept him off the battle fields
of South Vietnam intervened at that moment, the cop -- a few precious steps
from where Pauly waiting – got distracted by another sound from over the hill,
the roar of a hotrod, smoke from is tail pipes stretching out behind it like the
clouds of thunderstorm.
“He just stopped dead in his tracks,” Pauly says. “He looked
at me, then at the hotrod, and that gleam just faded out of his eyes. He just
sighed, closed the ticket book and glared at me, saying ‘This is your lucky
day, boy.’”
Then then cop hobbled back to the patrol car, forced himself
in, and with a sputter of gravel from under the car’s rear wheels, he sped off
in pursuit of the hotrod.
“You should be happy,” I tell Pauly.
“I am,” Pauly says, clutching the coffee cup as if a life
preserver. “I’m just worried about what I’m going to do tomorrow when he stops
me again.”
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