Who Dents Our Car Mars Our Being

An Englishman I met at my high school reunion has sent me a letter complaining about the anger and hostility displayed by Angelenos when their cars are scratched.

On the eve of returning to England, says Dick Hills, he was involved in what he calls “a minuscule auto fracas” in a parking lot. He concedes that it was clearly his fault. He was driving his son’s car, which is a foot longer at both ends than his own, and he brushed the paint on two adjacent cars.

“The ensuing scene confirmed my suspicion somewhat that the Los Angeleno is fashioned after the style of the town’s geo-structure--a thin layer of friendly topsoil covering hard rock.”

The owners of the two cars he had outraged were a young man and a younger woman. Although he apologized, accepted responsibility and showed his papers, the other owners seemed to be acting out prewritten scenarios on “How not to yield an inch in an auto incident.”

He says the young man faced him with “a frozen wordless hostility,” and the woman “chose the ploy of attack by innuendo.”

“ ‘Oh, I know all about you drivers in England!’ (Derisive laugh.) Her eyes were hard, her face pinched.”

However, Hills tried to remain conciliatory. At that point a volunteer witness, a woman of about 40, with the face of “an avenging angel,” came to the side of the aggrieved woman driver. “‘I saw it all!’ she hissed, glaring at me as if I had just run over a founder member of the Women’s Liberation Movement. ‘Call on me any time!’

“For a few moments, as I stood there, the vulnerable soft centre of this group, I became disoriented, as if surrounded by humanoids, divested of all compassion and natural response. It was frightening, and haunted my attempts to sleep for several nights.

“Nothing seems to penetrate this topsoil of friendliness so easily as confrontations with (a) money and (b) the law. The car, particularly in California, is a moving time-bomb of both. But is the veneer of civilization as thin as a paint scrape?”

Hills adds that there are many good things about California that he will miss. He reminds me that when we met at the Bonaventure Hotel we briefly discussed my column on what he calls “the catachresis involved in the social usages of the word love .”

By using that word catachresis , which, by the way, I had to look up, Mr. Hills at least establishes his intellectual credentials.

I infer from Mr. Hills’ complaint that in London when strangers are involved in a minor automobile collision they exchange “cheerios, old chap” and invite each other into the nearest pub for a mug of beer.

He is correct, however, in suspecting that our surface friendliness here in Los Angeles can be severely strained by a scraped fender. Little old ladies can be turned into ogres by a minor bump. A few years ago I just barely tapped the rear bumper of a woman as we were both turning left onto Franklin from Yucca, in Hollywood.

She rolled down her window, stuck her head out, showed me a ferocious scowl, screamed an obscenity and motioned me furiously over to the curb. I obligingly pulled up behind her. She got out of her car blaspheming, strode to the rear end like a Nazi, studied her bumper, and finding no sign of a collision, got back in her car and drove off without a conciliatory word.

For one harrowing moment I had looked into the maw of raw hatred. It is probably true that in Los Angeles we regard our cars as extensions of ourselves, and an affront to a fender, no matter how slight, is like a slap in the face.

Strangely, the anger aroused by a collision seems to vary in indirect ratio with its seriousness. When a collision is really damaging, one is in shock, feeling lucky to have survived, and one might even feel some compassion for the other driver. It is mainly when the damage is minor that our emotions expand to express our outrage.

Perhaps we ought to adopt the British use of the word love when somebody scrapes our fender. “Don’t worry about it love,” we might say. “It’s really nothing.”

Seems like a happy use of catachresis.