CONTRIBUTED BY JUSTIN McBRIDE (San Francisco, CA)
“A Guide to Surviving Old Dirty Sal”
The following is intended as a guide to surviving old dirty sal. It is not exhaustive, but the advice that it provides is likely applicable to a broad range of scenarios. The bullet points signify a break in the story where we here at My Year As A Freelance Bicyclist® take the time to provide some wisdom—fueled by hindsight, no doubt—and possible courses of action.
Ignore this guide at your own peril.
You only need to see it happen once, and you’ll never forget it.
There you are, minding your own business, riding along a quiet road in the middle of a beautiful morning. You’re only hoping to complete your job, which on this day happens to consist of bringing a new calendar—actually nine new calendars—to a female client some fifteen miles outside of town. You are friendly, so on the phone you had lightheartedly tried to ascertain her need for nine new calendars, but she only said, quite cryptically, “time is running out for you and me.”
That was, you reckoned, more than enough for you to hear, and you told her you’d have the calendars on her porch by 10 a.m. the next morning. You have just realized that there’s only day-old water in your Camelbak, which you did not then—but will forever in the future—perceive to be a bad omen.
A low hum signals a car approaching from behind. In your mirror is a black sedan, so you slide further over toward the edge of the road, a skinny two-lane highway.
- There’s nothing strange about a black sedan on a quiet highway; but as always, use your intuition and know where you are, and remember that a freelance bicyclist is always a target—the common assumption is that you have either goods or money at all times (I know, it’s like, “Hey robbers, ever heard of PayPal!”), so it’s yet another reminder of the value of dressing inconspicuously and leaving the thick gold chains, etc., for the weekend and the clubs.
You notice the car slowing to a crawl, right up alongside you. The passenger’s window eases down. The first vision into the car reveals a mustached man with a mesh-backed Skil Power Tools hat. His hat proclaims “I Got Drills!”
- At this point, these people might still want directions to a hardware store or a county fair, so I won’t say it’s time to ride away. But be cautious. Your danger antennae ought to be on alert.
“Good morning,” you say. He doesn’t answer, he just chuckles. You then notice that beneath the man’s mustache, down hidden under that lower lip inside his mouth, there’s a little bump that runs the length of the lip.
- That, of course, is chewing tobacco, and now it’s time for you to go, because this guy doesn’t want directions. Of course, I didn’t know that at the time, so I stuck around. I thought maybe they were looking for someone to do a bike job for them, and as a freelance bicyclist, I have to be on the lookout for potential clients pretty much all the time.
(Alright, alright, now listen, I don’t like this black-market scene any more than you do, and I try not to get jobs from people I don’t know on the fly like this, but it was a slow week and I was feeling whimsical. It’s not like I’m in a fucking union anyway, so calm down.)
“So what’s going on with you guys?” you ask them. A perfectly nice thing to say, and it offers them another chance to respond in some way.
- Again, though, see my note above. I can’t emphasize enough: if you’re still there at this point, after seeing the Skil hat and the chewing tobacco, then you obviously haven’t followed my hard-earned advice, and I don’t have much left for you. What’s coming is not going to be pleasant, but you’ll really have no excuse at all after reading this guide.
The man then contorts his tobacco-filled mouth, seems to breathe in with effort like he’s got asthma, and he spits no less than three fluid ounces of tobacco saliva at you. It lands on your leg and your shirt and your face, a little bit even on your lip.
“Get a truck, faggot!” he screams.
“Damnit, you fucking bastard!” you holler. “Ahhh, dirty sal!” you scream, not quite sure that they’ll translate that to understand that by “dirty sal” you mean dirty, tobacco-infused saliva.
- At this point, even if you want to explain, don’t. Any dialogue between you and them is going to be a really hard conversation to have; you’re unlikely to make any headway in any direction, be it successful clarifications or inducing regret in the spitter. Besides, remember, you’re just still riding alongside them, each of you going about nine miles an hour, and so it’s just really awkward more than anything else. And by now you’ve thought more about it, and you’re pretty certain they actually didn’t get the “dirty sal” thing, but you just can’t stomach explaining it.
When you think back, of course, you run through the situation again and again in your mind, and you think of all the things you should have said to him.
The first and most obvious of which being, “You’re not even in a truck! You’re in a Hyundai! What the fuck, redneck?!” But you didn’t say that.
You also didn’t say, “Ha! This thing gets a million miles a gallon!” or “At least I got my dog neutered, while I’m sure yours runs around screwing anything that moves and becoming a real burden on taxpayers,” or “Enjoy mouth cancer, asshole.” Or even something weak like, “My other… bike… is a truck.”
Instead all you get out is a whimpered “My dad’s… a… lawyer.”
To which they finally respond to something that you said, by laughing and laughing and laughing as their Hyundai speeds off, probably, let’s be honest, toward a county fair somewhere.
You also, incidentally, don’t even bring up the whole homosexuality part of his comment, which is the real wild card of the situation, seeing as how you were, at the time, wearing a shirt that said “Women: Show Me Some Breasts, Please?”
In retrospect, you really, truly wish you had said “I’m a homosexual? Shoot, pal, you couldn’t even suck my bike’s dick,” even though it would have done nothing at all to counter his comment, but because it makes you laugh every time you think of it.
If nothing else, this guide should have communicated at least this much to all freelance bicyclists pedaling away, day after day: you really need to be careful when you’re out there in the wilds of unincorporated counties. Be careful.
And this guide is, admittedly and as I said above, quite limited—it might only be able to help you with a small set of circumstances. You’re going to have to use your instincts for the rest.
{ 1 trackback }