Go Blue

The freight train made me wait, as its wise to do around anything moving with a weight and inertia that border on inevitable. The sun had gone down, so the signal arm was alternating flashing red, left and right, in the short-long-short Morse rhythm of the train over tracks and ties at grade. I was slightly behind schedule to get to an exercise class at the gym, but my ex-wife, who pays for all my kids' college needs, makes her living in railroads-at-grade, so I was OK with this type of commerce in action. Besides, if I'd decided it was going to be 2015 Mini Cooper Countryman (base model) vs. freight train, I'd have ended up stuck on that side of the track forever. Better to defer any frustration to some future fight I might actually have a shot in, like convincing people on the internet they are wrong.

Because it's Southern California, roads can either be flat or straight, but never really both. The one ahead was straight and angled up toward one of one zillion unremarkable terrain features we keep around just to make the maps interesting in the absence of rivers. Ahead there were more lights flashing, along this otherwise always quiet, darkening route through back streets and housing developments the local-knowers like me used to avoid the navigation nightmare of the main road leading to my gym's shopping center, snarled and confounded by, ironically, a years-long project to build the road over the at-grade rail crossing.

Along the rising road, I could see more flashing, well out of the ordinary on this very ordinary trip. Not trying to brag, but some weeks I go to the gym twice, no big deal. From what I could make out (my gym-going contact lenses are "progressive," which is optometry talk for "not particularly great for in close or far way"), there was a car in the middle of the road with hazard flashers on and beyond that, cops guiding a large flatbed tow truck through some maneuvers. Through the now-passed train and approaching, nothing changed about the scene, so I assessed it thusly:

-Big tow truck was there for some kind of RV or food truck parked off to my left.

-Car in the middle of the street was somehow involved as it had been sitting there with hazards lights flashing for the whole time I waited for the train. Whether it got hit or broken down, not sure, but it seemed stationary.

-Cops were focused on the bigger thing rather than the smaller thing.

As the cops cleared the center of the road and the car with the flashers on continued not to move, I crept around it, to the right. I kept an eye on the cop who was doing a sweeping "go ahead" motion along the ground with a flashlight. So I do.

Now the flashlight is right at me. I am in a cop's gaze. So I stop dead. The window rolls down (not to brag, but it's a power window, one of the only comfort features of the Mini Cooper Countryman base model. Do not ask me about the durability of the vinyl "leatherette" upholstery). Immediately, he's at me.

"This is what you call a clue, a car stopped with its hazards on. And then because you're impatient, you pass on the right."

Flashlight still in my face, finally lowers.

"OK," I say. "I thought you were waving me through."

"You pass on the right, that's a ticket," he lets me know.

"OK," I say again. He's the agitated one with at least five weapons on his belt,* so I'm not inclined to argue.

There's a three-beat. He grunts at me, gives a single wave over his shoulder and walks away from my car. I drive on. The window rolls itself up (yes, it goes both ways, no cranking).

In retrospect, having your hazard lights on is a way to signal that your car is stopped, sure, not necessarily that it's in distress or dead. So misreading everything, that's on me, clear. Every interaction with any cop I've ever had has been exactly the same, the exact same stance of aggression, the exact same tone of dominance, the exact same probing and pressing for deference, like an ape trying to get another ape to smile.

As a white dude, of course, I never really felt myself in danger, but I stayed het up and squirrelly. The anxiety and stress of it sat way at the back of my consciousness even as I processed the low-stakes encounter spurred by a dumb misunderstanding. I did think more about how in other civilized, industrialized countries a police force is built around the concept of public good, not as a bastion of order (the parameters of which they keep to themselves and jealously protect) surrounded by a swelling and roiling horde that can only be kept at bay by subjugation and the promise of violence; a small army of firearms-entrusted people making $80k a year with a notable pension plan but somehow simultaneously invested in the idea of a collapsing civil order in between being dissatisfied with the way the landscaping service cuts their lawn and tracking their fantasy football teams on Sundays.

This country is so weird, man. I got a blog post out of it at least, I guess.

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*gun, taser, pepper spray, baton, handcuffs... more if you count the belt itself I guess. Do they carry knives? Seems like they would.