Don’t Look Now; There’s a Man at the Wheel of the Next Car

At work, a man and a woman get into a small argument. The evening before, the man says, he had found himself stopped at a light right next to her. He had waved and even honked, but the woman had not responded. You ignored me, he says, sort of angry, sort of hurt. I didn’t see it was you, the woman answers. How could you not have seen me? he asks. All you had to do was look. I never look at other drivers, says the woman. It’s one of the rules.

A few days later, the woman checks in with some of her friends, just to make sure she isn’t out of her mind. There are rules, right? she asks the women she had assembled. Yes, they all tell her. Yes there are. And the first one is, never intentionally make eye contact with a male driver unless you’re actually trying to pick him up.

When I moved to New York at the callow age of 20, my aunt gave me one piece of advice. On the subway and the street, she said, you will see a lot of people. “Look at them once, OK; look at them twice, they follow you home.” I thought she had a very poor attitude toward humanity but after being followed home more than a few times, I began to share it. Not every man with whom I made inadvertent eye contact confused it with an invitation for, shall we say, greater intimacy. But enough did that I soon learned to keep my eyes focused ever toward the horizon, my face set in that drop-dead stare that has endeared New Yorkers to the rest of the world for so many years.

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Here in Los Angeles, we don’t have to worry so much about being surrounded by strangers on the sidewalk as we do on the road. And while many people may have cute-meet stories about hooking up with their honey across lanes in rush hour on the 405, most women do not have lovin’ on their minds when they’ve just missed the light at Robertson and Third. Yet, there he is, that total stranger, nodding and smiling suggestively when you accidentally glance his way. And suddenly, you’re stuck. If you smile back, he might think it a genuine invitation. If you look away, stare fixedly ahead, he might take it as a snub, and then who knows what the next step is?

Not always, but often enough, these accidental eye-catchings are followed by vocalizations, usually of the sexual variety. “Smile, baby, why don’t you smile at me,” is probably the most benign, and the rest are not printable. One of my girlfriends says that unless a weapon is visible, she just calls the guy on it. Yes, she says, that is exactly what I want to do, with you, seven or eight times, right here, right now. That takes care of that, she says, every time. I am not sure I believe her, and very sure that I am too big a sissy to ever try such a thing.

Most women I know have been followed for a few blocks or miles by men who they happened to glance at while driving--one friend had a guy tail her all the way to her parents’ house and then ask if she wanted to date him. Like this was a normal courtship ritual. Three drunk men in a red pickup hooted and hollered in a “Deliverance” sort of way, tailing me from downtown through Echo Park one night, disappearing only when I pulled into the Brite Spot, a diner favored by the LAPD.

I remember being surrounded by cheering women when Thelma and Louise took down the lascivious trucker. “That sucking noise,” asks Thelma, or Louise, “what is that about, anyway?”

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Most of the time, these incidents are as infuriating as they are frightening. That a few people take advantage of the anonymity of a car and the implied threat of urban life to get their jollies watching a woman’s jaw tighten as she stares straight ahead and pretends not to hear. That a few people make it necessary to have rules, including do not look at other drivers, do not smile at other drivers, do not talk to other drivers or else they might follow you home.

Jerry Seinfeld once had a line about men who just don’t know how to meet a woman. Sometimes we just honk our horns, he said, miming the action. So when you see a guy just honking his horn at you, this is someone who has simply run out of ideas.

As someone who has been honked at more than a few times, I think I speak for women everywhere when I say: Think of something else.

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Mary McNamara can be reached at mary.mcnamara@latimes.com.