No matter how badly I was lost, I should have known I was on Troost, just by the car in front of me.

‘94, ‘95 maybe, Ford Festiva, patchy paint, shocks sagging comically on the driver’s side. Well, no wonder, the woman behind the wheel must have been at least four hundred pounds, if her mammoth neck and sloping glacier shoulders were any indication.

The passenger was a man, average-sized, in do-rag and enough bling that it shone even at the back of his neck, from one car back. He was getting the ever-loving shit beaten out of him.

I was yelling obscenities at the driver, probably cursing her to die of syphilis in a back alley of Calcutta, because of her driving. Once I saw exactly *why* she was driving like a retarded tweeker on sedatives, though, I just couldn’t help but follow.

You’d think that such a violent argument would require her to make some movements of her head and body that didn’t involve her right fist, but you’d be wrong. But no. Of course, maybe this wasn’t an argument, maybe this is just how these two people pass the time on a Tuesday lunchtime drive through downtown.

Anyway, about twice, maybe three times per block, and nearly incessantly at red lights, that fist went. Pow. Pow. Pow. She looked like she knew what she was doing, like she did this a lot. Then again, so did he. Several times his head recoiled from her blows with such force that it rebounded off his window and hit her fist again of its own accord. At times she maintained a rhythm reminiscent of those balloon-on-a-rubber-band punching toys I loved so much as a child. No slapping, no grabbing, just punch, punch, punch to the side of his head, which, when it wasn’t being buffeted about like a pinball, was bowed over his lap.

I finished the drive to my husband’s work in a state of wonder. As in, I wonder if she supports him financially, or can suck the chrome off a trailer hitch, or even less likely, if he deserved it. And I wonder why, if I saw a woman being beaten like that, I’d have been on the phone to 911 before the second punch landed, but in this case, I just followed for half a dozen blocks like the scene before me was a particularly engaging television program.

Mostly, though, I just wonder what more ludicrous bits of street theatre this strange new city has in store for me.

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