Repeat of "Scary Guy Pills"

It's one of my older stories, but still a goody.

I lived in central phoenix after college. Not quite the suburbs if you know what I mean.

One day at lunch, I ran out to the bank to put in a deposit. I had to turn left into the bank and there was a lot of traffic. I pulled in the middle lane to wait for my turn. When I pulled into the lane, I was face to face with another car who was waiting for his turn to go. I assumed (wrongly) that he was waiting to turn left also.

I don't know how it is in all states, but in Arizona, it's illegal to use the turning lane as a merging lane. You use the lane to turn left. Period. Not to to merge into it first, wait for a space, and then continue to go forward. See, I used to get a lot of tickets in my teenage years and I've been to traffic school ~a lot~.

When oncoming traffic cleared, I went to turn left. At the same time, the guy who was facing me in the turning lane, went to merge into traffic, so he almost hit me. Yeah, he was in the lane first, but since he was making an illegal maneuver, I had the right of way, so I flipped him off (as anyone in Phoenix would do) and continued on my turn into the bank.

There I was, waiting my turn in the drive through. I was up at the little tube thingy, putting in my deposit, and I notice the same car drive through a closed bank lane and park perpendicular to the exit of my lane, blocking me in. This huge black guy comes out (doesn't make any difference to the story that the guy was black. But I was a little tiny white girl, so he was that much more intimidating to me) and starts screaming at me.

The whole bank is watching.

I want to look at "cool" as possible, so I start smart mouthing the guy, even though I should of just apologized so he would cool down. While he's barraging me with curse words, I'm smiling as big as possible, nodding my head saying "uh-huh. You don't say? Really? Wow." This is infuriating him even more. But I persist.

As he basically runs out of curse words and is silent for more than a second, I look to him and say "Are you done? Cause if you are, maybe you should go home and take some more Scary Guy Pills."

No fucking clue where that came from. But I was quite happy with how it sounded. Rarely do you get a good "come back" in the moment.

At that, he stopped, cocked his head in confusion, put his left hand on the opening of my open car window and with his right hand, punched me directly in the face.

Things go black.I woke up to 1) blinding pain in my face 2) about every male customer on top of this guy, keeping him away from me and 3) the entire bank in the drive through window watching the melee. Awesome.

The guy stood up and the men stayed between me and him. He did some more cursing and got into his car and left. Police were called who gave me a lecture for getting into a confrontation with the man to begin with - scolding me over the idea "what if he had a gun?". Well, he didn't have a gun and he punched me. Can we focus on that? I'm the victim here!

The car ended up being stolen and they never found the guy. I had a wicked black eye and bruised cheekbone. And my mom was right - some day my mouth WAS going to get me into trouble.

Moral of this story? Confusing a very mean man can get you punched in the face. But it's a good story, no?


p.s. It's a big birthday day over at my other blog. (children mentioned)