You are reading The Mandate / Hot takes on topics that men don’t like to talk about / Written by LA-Based Writer, Cultural Strategist, and Olympic Medalist Jason Rogers
In the grim morning light, the old man’s grubby hands looked like fleshy mittens smudged black with god knows what. But as Jeb regarded them more closely through the windshield of his Mercedes, he realized that he could make out individual fingers rimmed with long ragged nails. The man had come out of nowhere clutching two torn rags, which he plunked down and began moving in spastic, squeaky circles, dirtying the previously spotless glass with wet, bubbly streaks.
Jeb patted the breast pockets of his suit, then searched the armrest compartment for some bills or a few coins. Finding none, he sighed and bent down low over the steering wheel, trying to position his face below the dripping splotches so his face could be seen.
No cash, he mouthed silently through the glass.
The old man marshaled no sign of acknowledgment that Jeb could discern.
“No cash,” he said, audibly this time.
But old fatty fingers continued beavering away at his task like a jeweler polishing a precious gem.
“Hey man, no cash!” Jeb finally roared before furtively looking around to see if any onlookers at the stop light had taken notice of the scene. The street was deserted, but the two drivers on either side of him — a young, mousey woman with a blonde bob and an aging man in a brown tweed jacket — maintained the aggressive forward poise of people committed to not noticing. When the light turned green, the two flanking cars lurched forward, leaving Jeb stationary at the crosswalk line, considering his options.
The old man wasn’t technically in front of the car. But he was sprawled over it in such a way that, if Jeb accelerated, it might lever him upward. Even if it didn’t send him vertical, who knew where his feet were placed. Was he even wearing shoes? One could be wedged in front of the tire. He could suffer a broken toe, at least.
Nothing to do but wait it out.
Jeb glanced at his watch. The board wasn’t expecting him for another forty-five minutes, yet he felt a sense of urgency. He wasn’t nervous, per se, more unnerved at what the event signified — the period at the end of a sentence he often repeated to his wife about how the downtown area in the city of his youth had turned into such a god-awful mess. He’d driven this route for twenty years on the way to the office, and it was always a bit rough. But the last year had seen its descent into something out of a post-apocalyptic film: hobbled tents, trash cans on fire, shopping carts laid out on their sides like slain beasts.
The old man lifted his rags from the glass and plopped them down on the car's hood with a smacking thump. Then, he took hold of one of the windshield wipers.
“Oh no, you don’t,” Jeb said, fumbling with the silver handle on the door before thrusting his heft out into the frigid air.
He took up a position across from the man yanking on his wiper like a hapless fisherman. Diagonally splayed upward, the wiper began to make noises unwelcome to Jeb — no doubt a spring or gear or widget-thing bending in a direction it shouldn’t. He gripped the tip end and endeavored to counteract the man’s tugging by pushing it flat against the glass.
“Hey man, stop!” Jeb said, his voice notching up an octave.
The man looked up, finally meeting Jeb’s eye, but retained a tenacious grip on the wiper. Only then did Jeb realize that the man’s hands were the only part of his body with fat to spare. He was a twisted old thing, all knees, hips, and elbows. But his hunched frame had the expansive sense of perhaps once supporting girth. Hidden beneath a layer of gray fuzz, his lips fixed into a crooked snarl. His pupils were small pinpricks of black in a sea of green.
“Five dollars,” the man said, his voice warped and wobbly as if emerging from an old record.
“I told you man, I don’t have any cash,” Jeb said, “Please let go, you’re going to break it.”
The man repeated his request and kept his hands firmly fixed on the device like meaty talons.
“Really?” Jeb said, “C’mon, don’t be like that.”
The two men stood there for several long seconds clasping metal and rubber. Jeb looked down at his own hands — his own hot dog fingers — and began to feel woozy, knocked sideways by the kind of deja vu that makes reality feel like it’s being stretched to reveal its seams.
“Peter?”
Jeb wasn’t aware that he’d spoken his dead brother’s name. But he’d clearly said it because the old man winced at the sound. His snarl momentarily unfurled, and his face somehow brightened. Then, he released the wiper, and Jeb felt pain as the now one-sided tug of war sent his knuckles knocking against the glass. Jeb instinctively looked down to assess the damage, to his hands, to his car. By the time he returned his gaze upward, the old man was gone.