A couple of years ago, I decided to go for more “achievable” new year resolutions: challenging and life-enhancing but also small to the point of near-stupidity. For example, near the end of last year, I decided I would stop using my car’s horn in non-life-threatening situations.
If you’re wondering what kind of asshole uses the horn in non-life-threatening situations, I know it’s noise pollution, and childish, and rude.
On any given day, I range from “grouchy dad in a movie set in the 1950s” to “PMDD Jerry Seinfeld”. You know: “When did they start putting these dumb adhesive bands on bananas? They come naturally bunched!”, et cetera. And for whatever reason, I’m at my worst in the car. When I’m overwrought, I don’t scream at my kids or pick fights with my husband – that all gets saved for the car, when I’m by myself, with no one else to hear me but God and my upholstery. I get disproportionately angry with strangers who are texting when they should be realizing that the light is green. So I take my very dumb revenge via honk.
When I shared this with a therapist I was seeing at the time, she offered a number of “helpful suggestions”. (I’d recently made the switch from a tough-love therapist to the kind who just sides with you on everything for an extra $150.) Her suggestions were based on actual anger management guidance for people even more irritable than I am, people who have been brought up on charges for real-deal rage incidents. One strategy is – seriously – saying the words “beep beep” instead of using your horn. Another is trying to express your feelings without involving or engaging the other person (for example, yelling “I am upset that you didn’t use your turn signal, because I am late for work!” to yourself, instead of at someone who might get out of their car and slap you).
I appreciate these non-violent solutions, yet I also must urge you to picture the angriest person you know – like, I don’t know, my cousin who got reprimanded at his UPS delivery job for listening to Korn too loudly. Imagine them gently shouting “beep beep” to themselves after almost being T-boned by a twentysomething who zoned out while trying to open a third Celsius in a Dodge Challenger. You can see how, in addition to being a little silly, it might not give the user the same sense of satisfaction upon deployment.
Not long after I received that therapist’s advice and totally failed to apply it, something exciting happened.
I was en route to school with my kids, late as usual and stuck on a narrow stretch of Franklin Avenue in Hollywood (one that half of LA seems to need to pass through at the busiest time of the morning), when a private waste management truck parked at a 45-degree angle in the center of the road. Two gentlemen in coveralls leisurely exited the truck and began dragging an enormous dumpster from the parking lot of a nearby shopping center, so that they might empty it into their trash truck.
When I say “leisurely”, I mean so jolly and unhurried they seemed as if they were in some kind of ambulatory book club, just dying to talk about All Fours over a couple of canned rosés, rather than two idiots blithely blocking both lanes of rush-hour traffic.
I could actually see the people in the cars around me going from the usual city-dweller “Can you believe this?” to throwing up their hands in despair and shaking them, like actors in a local production of Les Misérables.
Two full cycles of the stoplight passed without traffic moving in either direction, as our unbothered heroes wheeled the dumpster in a zig-zag pattern around the shopping center parking lot, still chatting amiably about, I don’t know, the latest season of the The Morning Show.
Here’s where things got good: the door to a dingy little white hatchback a few cars ahead of me opened up, and out popped a muscly short guy. And he was mad.
You may not have seen this particular guy before, but you’ve seen a “this guy” before. You know: the type who looks like he’s sculpted out of ground turkey, or has a bad photorealistic tattoo of a toddler on his forearm. The type who gets into it with the hostess at Outback Steakhouse because he saw an elderly couple who came in after him get seated first. The type of guy who wears tank tops in winter, because he’s built like a shaved Lorax on human growth hormone.
This guy yelled something at the two waste disposal gentlemen. When they didn’t respond, he spun around with great purpose, heading for his trunk.
My kids leaned forward in their car seats (they’re five, six and seven – ages pediatricians frequently cite as a child’s most bloodlustful). I could see other stuck drivers doing the same, although with a little more concern about whether actual violence might be about to unfold. I could tell we were all picturing being on that evening’s edition of KTLA news, wearing a bewildered expression as we told a Juvédermed anchor named Kirk what happened.
There was a collective clench as the guy’s beefy little torso disappeared into his tiny car, where he rooted around angrily for something. We looked from him back to the two oblivious dumpster wranglers, who seemed to be moving with even less urgency than before, pushing the big container on to the truck’s hydraulic lift as if it were a toddler in a baby swing. All despite the fact that they were maybe about to be publicly super-murdered.
A tense moment later, the muscly guy emerged holding an absolutely enormous bullhorn.
Well, now we could all relax. Then the real fun started.
“ATTENTION JERKOFFS! MOVE YOUR FUCKIN’ TRUCK! I’M TALKING TO YOU, PIN DICKS! MOVE YOUR DUMB ASS BEFORE I PUT MY FOOT UP YOUR ASSHOLES!”
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I don’t know whether he was an off-duty fireman, a parade organizer, a hostage negotiator or what. Maybe he had a bullhorn just so he could yell at people in traffic. It didn’t matter. He said “assholes” like it was two separate words, and he said it loud. This went on for some time; in a true feat of poetry, or improvisation, he never repeated the same florid insult twice.
Everybody started applauding and hooting. And honking, but in that fun, jovial way that happens when your team wins the World Series. The garbage twins seemed to notice us all for the first time, and more importantly, they began to hustle. That small angry hotdog of a man had performed an everyday, big city miracle: the men moved their garbage truck, the cars advanced, and my children made it to school armed with several brand new words.
As for me, I hadn’t been cheering as loud as everybody else – definitely not as loud as my five-year-old, who was still holding out hope that somebody might get a good whack with the bullhorn. I was busy worrying, fretting, being afraid of anger. From the bullhorn guy, from everybody in the other cars, but also from me.
I want to be the kind of citizen and mother who keeps a cool head, who can stay grounded and helpful through the inconvenient and the scary and the infuriating. I wish I was a person with great reserves of fortitude and patience, who stabilizes and comforts other people in times when we’re all frightened, inconvenienced and furious. We need those people, the peaceful ones who wait for things to pass and know that they will. I wish I was, but I’m afraid I’m not.
Shortly after the dumpster excitement, I went back to my “tough love” therapist, who told me that my nice therapist had given me dumb advice. This therapist-on-therapist beef alone was worth the price of eating two copays. But my tough-love therapist said that as long as I wasn’t hurting anybody, it was fine to be angry. Normal, even. “Better to punch a pillow than kick the dog,” she said.
Trying to not be angry was impossible – it’s what you do with the feeling that matters. This applies equally to sitting in traffic, getting cut in line for an oil change, or watching the world you wanted for your kids fall irrevocably apart, day after day after day.
That rage, she said, is not unique to me or to the particular time and place in which we’re living. We have jobs to do, people to raise – and the worst thing you could do is let the worst feeling become the guiding principle of your short time here. You could certainly honk, or make the choice to start carrying a bullhorn in your car. Or you could realize that new challenges require new coping strategies that don’t involve the daily venting of our rage in front of our children. While admittedly fun, it’s just not a sustainable way to live if you don’t want to end up in a trembling fetal position under your duvet every night, or, perhaps, in a glassy-eyed mugshot on the evening news. Then she said something unintentionally devastating about my new haircut.
Beep, beep.
