Monday, November 23, 2015

Lane/Kari: Body Damage

On my last post, someone commented asking if I knew that Darius was going to ask me out and if I was going to say yes. The answer to the first question is yes, the answer to the second is...less clear. I've been asked out by guys before in this body already...a lot. Not just at bars or clubs but random people at work and once even at McDonald's. I'm also still a guy on the inside and I know that you don't put on the moves like Darius did at the banquet without trying to get a date. He texted me a few days after asking to meet up for coffee, and I expressed Ashley's concerns about me dating the relatives of her friends, and that to avoid the awkwardness we should take it slow and start of as just friends.

His response? "Fine by me, but friends can still get coffee together." I took him up on his offer. I was impressed by the man's tenacity as well as the fact that he was willing to work around my schedule. But also, I like talking to him. We have more in common than just sports, he's very interested in local politics and is an economic consultant for the county. If I were in my correct body, he and I could be friends. My entire life is surrounded by Kari's friends, Kari's family, Kari's co-workers and while most of them are nice people I'd like to associate with people who I like to talk to.

It might seem like I'm leading him on, but I did tell him I'd take it slow. That's not a definite time frame. "Slow" could mean 7 or 8 months or however long it takes for me to be out of this body and the real Kari to decide if she wants to date him (She could do, and has done, a lot worse).

As I've said, Ashley is pretty good for keeping creepy guys away, but my plan is for her to be useful for more than that soon. I'd like for her to be able to run errands and do shopping for the house, and for that she's going to need her license. I had promised to do her driver training if she picked a school activity and stuck with it. One season of cross country later and this week we began a teenage rite of passage.

Ashley took the driver's ed course at school the first semester of her sophomore year, which was more than a year ago. I don't care how good of a classroom teacher you have, driving is 15% knowing the rules and 85% experience. Which was a bit of a problem, since she hadn't been behind the wheel in a long time, and I wasn't exactly the best teacher. I learned to drive in high school like all my friends, but I'd been living in New York City for 5 years and didn't do it at all until I got here to this body. And while I was able to draw up memory, I was very rusty. I haven't hit anything, but I've come close a few times. So now here I was having only regularly recently driven for 5 months, giving instruction to someone who had never done it solo and not for a long time.

It's one thing to subconsciously know what to do while driving, it's entirely another to verbalize those tips to someone else and I wasn't doing a very good job of it. We managed to get around the block a few times and out onto a busy street without hitting anyone, the trouble actually occurred in a wide open parking lot of a closed electronics store.

The parking lot was old but the lines from the parking spaces were still there, so it was a good place for Ashely to practice parking a car inbetween them. She kept getting close, but she has a habit of overcorrecting to the right and parking the car at angle or halfway out of the space. On maybe her 8th try I was getting very verbal, telling her when to turn the wheel, when to use the break. "Left now. Now more left. Too far left. Now too far right. Give it the break." Well all of my commands were scrambling her inexperienced brain and instead of hitting the break her foot didn't go over left enough and she hit the accelerator, lunging the car forward and smacking the right side fender into a lamppost.

We're fine. The car didn't get to a high enough speed and we were wearing seat belts, but the car was damaged. It still drives but the front right fender is crumpled and the headlight was smashed and no longer turns on. And since this was a used car that's no longer under warranty, I had to take it to a body shop to get an estimate. 400 dollars, parts and labor. I thought I was being gouged but multiple estimates were similar. Kari has insurance but the deductible is too high for this to be covered.

400 bucks isn't a LOT of money, but for a single mom on a receptionist's salary it isn't very doable, even with my smart money management. So since the car was still operable I drove it with one headlight. (Am I the only one who remembers The Wallflowers?). That is in fact, illegal to do and on Friday driving home I got pulled over.

I don't hate cops, but I don't think anyone really LIKES interacting with them. I don't have a criminal record nor have I ever done anything to warrant being arrested, but every time I see those flashing lights I freeze a little. That was before, when I was a white man with no criminal record. Now I was a Latina woman who may have a history that I never bothered to ask. As the cop was walking to my car I suddenly thought of all the current issues in this country between minorities and police and gripped the steering wheel a little tighter.

Seemingly this cop wasn't racist, or at least not visibly racist against Mexicans and asked for my license and proof of insurance in a very professional manner before telling me that my headlight was out and that was a ticket. As he walked back to his squad car to run Kari's information I looked down at my cleavage and got an idea.

I was on my way home from work, and as I mentioned I've been wearing revealing outfits at the request of my pervert boss. I got it in my mind to try and see if a little flirting would get me out of a ticket. I unbuttoned my blouse to show even more cleavage and almost the tops of my bra cups and hiked my skirt up so that the band of the stockings I was wearing started to show. When the cop came back I looked at him with my big brown eyes, batted my eyelashes, pushed my shoulder blades together, and said "I'm really sorry officer,I must have forgotten to get it fixed. Is there any way you can get me off...with a warning?"

The officer didn't skip a beat and wrote me a 100 dollar ticket. So much for feminine wiles.

If only I could have bent over...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm sure the cop noticed. It probably took a great deal of will power for him to not cave to your efforts. You have more power as a female than you realize.

Anonymous said...

Hi Kari.
Did you ever have that coffee 'date' with Darius? Do tell. :)