Duel

By Vince Basehart

August 22 -- It is late on a midsummer evening.

The Lensmobile moves with a few other cars westbound along Wilshire in Santa Monica.

A few blocks ahead, resting curbside, waits the red, hulking mass of MTA Bus number 7069. Waiting for prey.

I pass alongside the idling bus. Without warning, without using its blinkers, the bus suddenly lurches onto the street and into the path of my little hatchback. This is the automotive equivalent of shoving a total stranger off the sidewalk.

To avoid annihilation, I must hurl the Lensmobile, Bullit-like, into the inside lane.

Sure, I lay on the horn. Not out of anger, but instinctively, in the same way a terrified baby elephant trumpets in the midst of a stampede of tuskers.

Being a long time public transport user, the Lens knows the life of a bus operator is tough. Other drivers are aggressive, discourteous, clueless. During rush hour, if a bus doesn't just push its way into traffic it isn't going to move.

That is not the case tonight. At this hour there are spaces between cars long enough to land 747s. This was just a momentary bout of airheadedness for an otherwise responsible public servant, I think to myself. Perhaps I was in his blind spot.

I travel along in my new lane, steadying my nerves.

With remarkable agility, the bus swerves into the inside lane directly behind the Lensmobile. The driver flashes his high beams at me.

So he thinks I cut him off. Sorry mister.

A few more flashes of the high beams. Next, I hear the engine of the bus being gunned, shifting hard into low gear. The blood-colored behemoth lunges forward as if to ram me from behind, but instead rides my tail like a stock car drafting at Daytona. His high beams are now on steady, filling the inside of my car with blinding light.

The Lens has a situation on his hands.

I realize I am locked into a game of chicken with a 12,000-lb city bus driven by a maniacal City of Los Angeles employee. This is just like the 1971 thriller, "Duel," wherein Dennis Weaver is tormented by a murderous trucker in the Mojave. Only, in my case, Wilshire storefronts are whipping past my windows rather than cacti.

We stop at a red light. The bus edges even closer to the rear of the Lensmobile, nearly making contact. In my rear view mirror is nothing but the blunt nose of MTA Bus 7069 and its blasting high beams.

I move up a smidgeon. With an evil hiss of its air brakes, Bus 7069 moves up too. I move up another couple of inches. Hiss. Up inches the bus.

Over the rumble of the bus' engine I can hear the driver yelling. What words I can make out cannot be printed here.

"My God! What have I done to this guy?!" I think.

The light turns green and I move ahead. The bus swerves again, now to the outside line, and pulls up beside me. More yelling.

I can not see the driver's face, but I can imagine the expression of twisted glee it must wear as he attempts to deliver a coup d grace. The bus lurches back into my lane, into the very patch of asphalt the Lensmobile now occupies.

This is not a bad dream: the bus driver is actually attempting to shunt me into oncoming traffic!

In a split second I must make the decision: do I brake and have the front of the Lensmobile crushed by the rear quarter of the rampaging bus, or do I try to out-accelerate the sinister mass transit?

I punch the gas and swerve into the median strip, in front of and around the bus, over into the outside lane. We come to another red light. My heart is pounding in my chest.

The bus sidles up to me and comes to a stop with a hiss. Through the yellowed plastic passenger door window I can see the driver. He is skinny and looks like a gunslinger with a big black moustache drooping over a sneer. He sits silently and stares me down.

We have words. Very loud words. Or at least I do. I am detailing the ways in which he just made a hash out of his career as a civil servant, waving the page pulled out from my 6 x 9 inch Steno pad upon which I have scrawled in large letters, MTA Bus 7069.

From the corner of my eye I can see the bus' frightened passengers looking out the window at a nearly killed, screaming, unhinged Lens. One woman holds a crying baby.

At the end of "Duel" Dennis Weaver manages to lure the evil big rig off the edge of a cliff upon which it combusts like an atom bomb. Given the logistics of it all, and the general mayhem it would involve, I do not try to get the bus to plunge off the cliffs above PCH.

In fact, it all ends rather undramatically, with the filling out of a Metro Customer Comment Form which is issued complaint number #2298.