Texas Turns
Fiction
Diana didn’t tell me she was engaged to a bad-ass jarhead fighting over in Afghanistan. I didn't know until he came home on a two-week leave and came looking for me for stealing his girl.
I met her at the local honky tonk hole in the wall that went under the pretentious name: Champs Elysée. The neighborhood dudes call it “the Chomps.” I thought she was hot: a beautiful, tall, blond, flashing gorgeous legs in a little black mini skirt that, I’m sure, has met her father’s disapproval. My kind of woman. We danced to an accordion-playing country-and-western band and ended the evening stoned and drunk in my bed.
Diana and I became an “item” in the following weeks. At one time, not long before Mike — her beau — came home with a chest full of medals and an arm full of stripes, I had considered proposing marriage to her. Before I could work up the nerve, though, she told me about Mike.
“He’s pissed off,” she said as I drove her from her job downtown to the Chomps, “and he wants to fight you.”
“Where is he?”
“He said he will be at the Hungry Bear.”
The Bear is another sleazy tavern a half-mile west of the Chomps.
I made a turn to take us to the Bear.
“Oh shit,” Dana said. “He’s behind us.”
I glanced at the rear-view mirror. Yep, there he was, tailgating me and waving a long-barreled revolver at his windshield. The guy didn’t want to fight me. He wanted to shoot me.
I hauled ass down the avenue with Mike trying to drive up my exhaust pipe. I was in the right lane. Traffic in the left lane opened just enough that I could squeeze in and make a sharp left turn at the next street, while Mike fought to get into the turning lane. Now, anyone who has ever driven the streets of Dallas knows about the Texas Turning Lane. It is common behavior among Dallas drivers to turn left from the right lane or turn right from the left lane. That local variant on driving customs drives visitors to the city nuts, but the locals accept it as standard operating procedure.
No body knows where the custom came from, or why it exists at all. I have a theory: Texans are known for their “rugged individualist” fantasy. That penchant for breaking turning lane-protocols and engaging in lane crossing without turn signals is the driver’s way of expressing his rugged individualism. It is an excellent way for the meek to assert a masculinity that they might or might not possess.
Mike must have made the same maneuver a block or two north of us for he came tearing down a side street to my right ahead of me. I was in the left lane. I pulled off the Texas Turn maneuver again and entered the street he was on, going in the opposite direction. He yelled something at me as we passed but I was in no mood to stop and chat.
Drivers waving guns at other drivers is another one of those quirky Texas customs. Everyone, at some time or another, is going to have a gun pointed at him or her by one of the abundant numbers of road-raged gun fetishists. No one escapes that rite of passage. It’s a Texas tradition.
I made a few more turns, mostly Texas Turns, to get me on the path to take Diana home. From there I planned to take back streets to the Chomps where I might be sheltered by the crowd. Surely, my nemesis would not shoot me in front of witnesses.
I screeched to a stop at Diana’s home — she lives with her parents. Her father thinks Mike is an upstanding model of American citizenry and he thinks I’m just another street thug. Weird. It must be that Marines rank higher in her father’s esteem than a common foot soldier. I am a vet. Army. I don’t get that twenty-first century worship of military veterans. There is the same ratio of thugs, psychopaths, criminals, and crazies in barracks as exist in the civilian population.
“I’ll call you,” I said as I practically pushed her out of the car and sped away.
I stayed at the shabby apartment of my buddy Hal for a few days while I counted off the time for Mike to return to Afghanistan. On the fourth day I got the word that Diana and Mike had made up. I needn’t worry about Mike, I was told. He walked on air with the reconciliation with Diana. He was smitten. For the time it would take to get him out of the country again, he was a lover, not a fighter.
Over the next couple of weeks I sunk into episodes of depression punctuated with jealousy, loneliness, and feelings of insignificance. Mike returned to his station in the Mideast and Diana returned to her job as a receptionist for an electric company. I tried to call her, to rekindle our interrupted romance, but she wouldn’t answer her phone.
Finally, coming out of my funk, I drove to the Chomps to drown my sorrows in a bottle of Kentucky’s finest. The band was a bunch of white guys doing their best to play doo-wop and doing a moderately okay job. The bar was packed so I took the only available table in the joint.
“Do you mind if I sit here?” a feminine voice asked.
There stood a brunette with lustrous chopped hair in a punk style. She wore form-fitting jeans that emphasized an hourglass figure and a mock-lingerie top that revealed more skin than fabric.
My kind of woman.
