I was riding my bike home recently — Okay, I should disclose that I was riding home from the bar. In any case, I was moving along pretty fast. I like to ride my bike, and I like it better the faster I go, so I go fast usually. There are a lot of college kids in my neighborhood, and this time of year they’re all out and about doing their fun college things, so maybe I should have exercised more caution. But still, who expects to round a corner and find a throng of sorority chicks playing pattycake in the middle of the street?
If you’ve been in any kind of collision — car, bike, forklift, whatever — you’re familiar with the sense of absolute clarity that precedes it. Time expands, you notice details, at least in retrospect, that would otherwise slip by. What occurred to me, as I stared at the twenty or so young women who walked at me in identical pink T-shirts, was that I was a bowling ball. I was bowling. And I was going to score a three on this frame.
Through some pretty deft (for a drunk guy) maneuvering, I managed to avoid the first two, but I clipped the third one hard on the shoulder, knocking her flat on her ass. A pack of gape-jawed chicks converged over her, squawking concerns and helping her to her feet, while I lay stunned in the street. I got up as quickly as I could, ran up to the girl, and interrogated her frantically. She was tiny — maybe 110 pounds, tops — and I hit her solid, and I was sure I fucked her up in some serious way.
Meanwhile, all the chicks had their own questions for me. Oh my god are you drunk? Why were you going so fast? Oh my god! One of them emerged as the enforcer. She insisted I give her my contact info in case any problems developed in the future.
That’s when I noticed the guy behind me. A regular dude, in a polo shirt and cargo shorts. Quickly, he moved to establish himself as the enforcer, for no other reason I can discern to to score some tang.
“You gotta have him call you, else he’ll just make some shit up.”
Whatever. The lady enforcer told me her number and I called her phone, meanwhile turning my attention again to the girl I’d hit, quizzing her on her shoulder, her back, did she hit her head.
Which is when the dude piped up again. “Brah, you need to chill your shit.”
The University of Texas is an internationally ranked institution, by the way.
Do you know why this is bad language? I mean, yes, there is the lack of specificity of it, the ambiguity of both the verb and the direct object. And there is the unconscious self-caricaturization, the trite, surferesque frat-boy jargon.
But what really offends me about this sentence is the very unpleasant and comical image it evokes, which is not at all appropriate when you’re trying to establish authority in a tense situation.
