Daniel Price - Slick

Silly New Yorker. Crips don’t drive sport utility wagons. I was more concerned about an irrational drunk. The last thing I needed was to deal with somebody’s beer-fueled rage.

I got out. A small woman emerged from the driver’s side. In the harsh white glow of the headlights, I could only see her silhouette.

“Are you okay, ma’am?”

Without a word, she reached into her car and shut off the brights. She’d done a fair amount of damage to my trunk, and virtually none to her front bumper and grille. An other reason to hate SUVs.

I was idly intrigued by her license plate: MRVL GRL. It was easy enough to add the proper vowels and get Marvel Girl, but you had to be a longtime comic book reader in order to put the name to a face. Marvel Girl was the very first alias of Jean Grey, the female member of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s original X-Men. She dropped the moniker in Uncanny X-Men #101, when she merged with a cosmic entity to become the all-powerful Phoenix. Since then, she’s gone on to become Dark Phoenix, dead Phoenix, resurrected Phoenix, and Famke Janssen.

The driver looked like none of them. Whereas Jean Grey was a statuesque beauty with a large mane of flame-red hair, this Marvel Girl was a pixie of a woman, a cropped-cut brunette. If it wasn’t for her denim skirt, I might have guessed she was a teenage boy. Then I would have studied her face. Her small features, combined with contrastingly large eyes, gave her a naïve, golden-age charm. She would have been considered beautiful back in the silent-movie era. Today she was merely cute and pleasant in a Katie Couric sort of way.

She jerked a tense shrug, then examined the damage.

“Well, it’s ugly,” I told her, “but it could have been worse. You do have insurance, right?”

She didn’t answer me. She kept looking at my dented trunk.

“Excuse me? Do you have insurance?”

Shrugging at me again, she took a handheld PDA out of her blouse pocket, then had second thoughts. That’s right, honey. It’s too dark to be taking notes. Who the hell are you?

I held my arms out. “Uh, hello?”

She abruptly motioned to the dark figure in the passenger seat. Get out here, will you?

The door opened, and an icy young blonde stepped out into the night. Very young. Her exaggerated crossed-arm stance pegged her at around fifteen. She was rail-thin and, unlike Marvel Girl, a little more hip with the times.

She studied me, then my car, and muttered an obscenity. Marvel Girl knocked on the hood to get her attention. “What do you want me to do about it?!”

Frustrated, the driver moved her hands in blunt but methodical patterns that clearly said volumes to the girl. They told me a few things as well.

“Wait a second. You’re deaf?” I looked to the girl. “She’s deaf?”

“Yes, she’s deaf. My mother wants me to tell you that she’s sorry for hitting you. It was totally her fault. As if that wasn’t obvious.”

“I didn’t…” I looked to the mother, then back at the daughter. “I didn’t even know deaf people could drive.”

“Yeah. It’s blind people who have the problems.”

“No. I know, but…” This was too strange. “Can you tell her I need her insurance information?”

Annoyed, the girl signed to her mother while talking. “He wants your insurance information.”

Marvel Girl nodded impatiently. Yeah, yeah. Obviously. But consider this.

Unlike all the interpreters I’d seen on TV, the girl waited until her mother was done before translating.

“She says she has insurance, but she thinks it’s a total rip-off. They’re only going to raise her premiums until she pays back twice whatever they end up shelling out for this.”

That seemed like an awful lot of information for such a quick bit of sign language. But she was right on about the insurance companies.

“I agree. But if she’s proposing some kind of split—”

“You’re actually supposed to talk to her.”

“What?”

“My mother. She’s the one you’re dealing with.”

I looked to the woman. She threw me a wave and an edgy smirk. Hi.

“Uh, are you proposing some kind of…split…? Because that’s…”

As I spoke, the mother watched the daughter, who interpreted my words. It was very disconcerting. The mother signed back.

“No no,” said the daughter, “she says she’ll pay for all the damage. She’d rather pay under the table, that’s all. Just get an estimate and she’ll send you a check. She’s good for it.”

Nothing invites cynicism more than the assertion that someone is “good for it.” Reading my face, Marvel Girl held up a finger and went back to her car. Awkwardly, I turned to the daughter.

“I’ve never talked to a deaf person before.”

“You hide it well.”

“What are you doing out so late on a school night?”

“Long story.”

“Oh. Don’t tell me you go to Melrose High School.”

“I don’t. I’m in eighth grade.”

“Really? You look older.”

“Thanks. You know, you’re awfully polite for someone who just got rammed.”

I grinned. “I’m on Prozac.”

“Good. Maybe you can lend some to my mother.”

Marvel Girl reemerged from the car with her insurance slip and a business card. After handing both to me, she signed to her daughter.

“She says if you want insurance, there it is. But please trust her. If you give her an estimate, she’ll give you a check. Or better yet, she can pay in services. She’s a professional web designer. Or so she likes to think.”

I looked at the card. Jean Spelling, Original X Web Design. Cute. She was definitely a comics fan.

She signed some more. The girl translated. “Again, she says she’s really sorry. I told her not to talk and drive. She was in the middle of chewing me out, as usual.”

Sensing that her daughter was going off-script, Jean tapped the hood again. The girl rolled her eyes. “Anyway, please don’t report this until she has a chance to pay you. Deal?”

I glanced at Jean. “Look, I don’t care how I get paid. If you can go out of pocket, that’s fine.”

On reading the translation, Jean pressed her hands, shining her relief at me. Thank you. Thank you.

“Just drive carefully,” I said.

She smiled and quickly signed to her daughter. “What’s your name?”

“Scott. Scott Singer. Yours?”

“Madison. I was the one asking. My mom wants your business card in case she needs to reach you.”

I took a card from my wallet and gave it to Jean. She looked younger up close. Early thirties at the most. I noticed her plain silver wedding band. I wondered if Madison’s father was deaf, too. Could deaf parents even have a hearing child?

Jean touched my wrist and, with a hint of strain in her face, mouthed “Sorry.”

I shrugged. “Take it easy.”

They waved and got back in the car. Sighing, I returned to my damaged Saturn and shut the door.

Miranda cocked her head at me. “So what happened?”

“Did you ever see The Piano ?”

“No.”

“It sucked.”

“So what happened? Was this woman drunk?”

“No. Just deaf.”

“She rear-ended you because she couldn’t hear you.”

“Apparently she was talking while driving.”

“That’s messed up.”

“You know what’s messed up? That I know the history of Wilshire Boulevard. I know the mating habits of the Hawaiian monk seal. And yet I didn’t know deaf people could drive.”

“That’s fascinating. So are we sleeping together, or am I just ugly?”

I took a deep breath and then a good look at Miranda. She wasn’t ugly.

________________

I moved to Los Angeles in 1991. Before that, I had never even been to the West Coast. I’d spent the previous four years in Georgetown, until Drea told me to flee. She had been my mentor, my lover, my sugar mommy, my idol. She represented everything I wanted to be. Then, at age thirty-nine, at the height of her career, she fell apart. Some publicists burn out. She went nova.