What Goes Around Den Watson

What Goes Around

   It’s 1962 and 2:30 AM on a dark deserted street in one of LA’s many suburbs. Except it’s not quite deserted. Parked on the side of the road is an older model car with a black woman and a young girl standing beside it. I’m on my way home from a late date in my even older stick shift coupe—just the one front seat.

   I pull over and a conversation begins.

   “Are you out of gas?” I ask. 

   

  “I don’t think so,” she answers. “I don’t want to be a bother. Maybe you could stop at the next gas station and tell someone?”

   “No,” I say, “I’m not leaving you and your daughter out here at 3 in the morning. Where do you live? I’ll drive you home.” 

The protests begin. She might have been the most polite woman I’d ever met. 

“I can’t trouble you.” 

“It’s no trouble.” 

“I live too far out of the way.” 

“Where do you live?” 

“Over near Atlantic.” 

“That’s only a mile or two. Hop in.” 

  We never exchanged names, but in a few minutes we were in a run-down neighborhood with dirt front yards and sagging chain link fences. Except for one house in the center of the block with a white picket fence enclosing a green lawn, a well-tended flower garden, and a trim pathway the woman and her daughter now walked up and into their home - which, I’m pretty sure, had a telephone.

   I was home 20 minutes later.

                        Comes Around

   It’s 10 years later. I’m on the way home from night classes an hour away, and it’s about 11 when my car breaks down in south Central LA—also called Watts—a pretty much all-black area. I’m on one of the larger—but now deserted— city streets standing next to my car with my thumb out. Nobody goes by and I start walking. I’m at least 10 miles from home. A couple of cars go by but don’t stop. Then one car does. I approach the passenger window and look in at a black man in his 50s who says

 

   “Get in.”

 

   I do and thank him. 

   “You don’t want to be out here this time of night. Where do you live?” 

    I tell him and he says he’ll take me to the city limits. 

   “I don’t want to be in your town this time of night either,” he says, and drives me 5 or 6 miles closer to home.

   “Thanks for the ride. I really appreciate it. I can walk from here.” He made a u-turn and drove back to his neighborhood.

   This time it took me an hour and half to walk home. 

   And on the long walk home I thought, once again, about what’s wrong with this world and what’s right with it.

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