Friday Fricassee

One morning a year or so ago, another gal and I decided to go out for breakfast.  I parked right by the entrance of the restaurant, and when I opened my door, it swung* too far, lodging itself into the seat of the fancy-schmancy motor cycle parked beside me.

Panic ate at me for a few seconds.  Then I (sort of) calmly and (very) gently lifted the bike slightly from its tilted position, and was able to close my car door without having done any damage to the bike.

Disaster averted, right?

We walked into the restaurant and asked for a table for two.  Before I had a chance to follow the hostess to our seats, a short, well-groomed man approached me.

"Would you come with me to take a look at my bike, and make sure there isn't any damage?"

I stared.  "What?"

"My bike.  I saw what happened."

You know that creeping skin feeling that starts to happen when a weird confrontation begins?  I went there in exactly two heartbeats.  "I didn't damage your bike."

His tone pushed the outer limits of condescension.  "I saw it move."

"That's because I lifted it so I wouldn't damage it when I closed my door!"

He was quietly insistent, though, so I followed him out to the parking lot, where he examined his bike as though it were a living being.  Then he straightened.

"Okay, it's fine."

And he walked away.

This is the point at which, if this were fiction, the main character would say something amazing.

Since this day, I have replayed what I should have said after he saw that, true to my word, I hadn't made a mark on his precious bike.  He was supercilious ("I'm right and you're probably lying."), disrespectful (assuming I was the kind of person who would damage someone else's vehicle and not say anything), and self-absorbed (no apology for intercepting me as I was about to be seated at a restaurant).  I mean, seriously.  If he was afraid I'd damaged his bike, he could have checked it himself.  You know, discreetly.  I was right there in the restaurant; it's not like he would have had to do a trace on my license plate to find me.

I was angry about this for months.  Created scathing responses and allowed my imaginary self to deliver the lines with well-oiled proficiency.

Alas.  I'd been confronted by Superjerk, and I failed at the applause-inducing retort.

And this is one of the reasons that writing fiction is so satisfying.  We can create a tense scene, and in the midst of unspeakable jerkness or danger or idiocy or mayhem, we can WRITE THE PERFECT RESPONSE for our main character.  And readers will cheer and swoon.

Of course, we rarely get this right the first time.  We may not even think of that perfect response while we are drafting.  But, unlike real life, we get to go back and edit it.  And that's how the magic happens--behind the scenes, with much deleting and rewriting and tweaking and polishing.

Oh, that real life worked this way.

But this is one of the reasons that fiction elevates us, yes?  It draws us into situations in which our hero or heroine really does rise to the top--really does say or do exactly what you wish you would do if you were in the same circumstance.

Perfect one-liners.  Hot zingers.  Profound wisdom in five or six pithy words.  That's the dream.  That's the beauty of fictional characters.  They're real--so, so real, or else no one will believe in them--but they're also larger than life.

If they weren't, we wouldn't root for them.  We wouldn't carry them in our hearts for the entire three or four or five hundred pages of a novel.

One day, I'll write Mr. Motorcycle Jerkface into one of my novels, and I'll give him the tongue-lashing he deserves.  It'll be brilliant.  And I'll finally lay this ridiculous life scene to rest.

Because writing is cathartic.  But that's an entirely new post.

Happy weekend!



*At first, I typed "swang", and Blogger didn't like it.  So I looked up the simple past tense of "to swing", and, lo and behold, "swung" is considered acceptable now.  It sounds utterly wrong in my ear, but there you have it.

**Edited to add: I should have made it clear that this dude was not a "biker" in the biker sense.  He was a well-dressed, obviously affluent man wearing casual-dressy clothes, and the bike was clearly his "baby".  I have a dear friend who is an honest-to-goodness, hard core, scary-looking biker dude, and I can assure you that he would never speak to someone the way this dude spoke to me.