Death & The Scooter Guy

     When we first read about the accident, we thought, “Surely it wasn’t that guy.” The newspaper said a man on a Vespa had been killed in a hit-and-run on highway 191, west of Midland, a little after 10 pm. It was the first week in February, and when The EGE read the article, sitting at Starbucks, we both looked over to the table where The Scooter Guy usually sat.

At some point, he might have told us his name; neither of us can remember, which is common for me but not common for The EGE. We’d been seeing him off and on for so long we can’t even remember. He’d be there every night for months, and then there would be months when we didn’t see him, and then he’d be back. All during the fall and winter of this year, he’s been there almost as regularly as we have, and that’s pretty regularly. He’d park his scooter on the patio and set up his laptop back at the big table and then get up every 15 minutes or so to go out and have a smoke. He was always polite and seemed cheerful enough, and it took us rather a long time to realize that his life, his big, exciting, filled-with-adventures life, was maybe mostly made up in his imagination. For a long time we believed he’d been a chef and a hair stylist, a model and part of the crew of a fishing boat. Or maybe a cruise ship. Maybe both. And maybe he was; we never could tell. His family sounded amazing. His adventures were astonishing. He seemed rational and believable, but every once in a while he’d posit an argument about something that was so far afield that I’d lose it and chew him up. It’s not my best trait, but it’s there: when someone tries to convince me of something I know beyond a shadow of a doubt is complete and total nonsense, I sometimes go into a long, loud, multisyllabic rant, hauling out my Big Words and leaving the other person no room to jump in and defend their point of view. 

I feel bad about that now. The last argument we had was just a couple weeks ago, the end of January, when I was talking to the barista who had asked us what we thought about creationism being taught in science classes in public school. I’d said that that was idiotic. It wasn’t just an issue about the separation of church and state, no. It was more than that: it’s not like the US ranks so high in science scores that we’re looking around going, “Gee, our kids have totally mastered photosynthesis and Mendelian genetics; what else can we teach them for 55 minutes a day?” A man sitting at the table with The Scooter Guy had jumped in and tried to convince me that evolution was a religion, and I’d gone a little ballistic on both him and, tangentially, on The Scooter Guy when he had joined in. I got a little carried away and somehow managed to introduce entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics, topics about which I know absolutely nothing, into the argument. I won, of course, if only through sheer vociferousness, and I heartily amused The EGE, who kind of enjoys unleashing me on pompous white guys, but I felt bad about it the next evening when the other guy came up and apologized for “upsetting” me and said how much he’d enjoyed our debate. And now I feel bad all over again because it was one of the last conversations I had with The Scooter Guy.

The newspaper didn’t have anything else about the accident--they were still looking for the vehicle that hit the scooter and were asking anyone with any information at all to call them. Every evening when we drove up to Starbucks, I expected to see the scooter sitting on the patio. I imagined in my head how we’d all laugh about how we’d worried that he was dead; when he left every evening, the last thing we said to him was always, “Ride carefully,” to which he always replied, “Oh, I have to.”

Last night there was another short article about the accident in the newspaper, this one offering a reward for information and giving the victim’s name and where he worked. And The EGE, who has an actual memory, said, “That’s him. That’s where he worked.” So I texted someone who knew him, someone who’d told us, long ago, that, yeah, most of those stories were just that: stories. I texted her and asked if this was the same guy, and she said that yes, that was his name. I came home and searched online and found very, very little. Just a MySpace page with a couple photos that confirmed the name and seemed very, very sad: the photos were old ones, the kind you’d take yourself in the mirror. He was alone in all of them except the faded ones from when he was a kid. In the sidebar, he said he was gay, something we wouldn’t ever have guessed. If you'd asked me how old he was, I wouldn't have had a clue. What was sad was that this old MySpace page was the only thing I could find about The Scooter Guy besides the short pieces about the accident and a very short obituary saying arrangements would be made at a later date. No blog, no Facebook, no photos. Just an old, seemingly abandoned MySpace page. Funny how it’s now sad when someone has no online presence; it’s as if they had no life when, in truth, they probably had much more of a real life for not having spent all their time online.

What’s even sadder is that someone ran into this man on his scooter on the highway at night and just kept on going. They didn’t stop and help, didn’t turn themselves in, didn’t do anything at all. The officers are trying to give them an out, a reason to turn themselves in, by saying in the newspaper that perhaps the taillight on the scooter wasn’t working, and maybe the driver didn’t see the scooter until it was too late. I’m guessing they’re trying anything they can think of that might convince someone out there to come forward and admit they were involved, trying to give the family--his mother, some siblings--some closure. I’m guessing that whoever it was was either doing something they weren’t supposed to be doing (driving under the influence) or being somewhere they weren’t supposed to be (coming home from a bar or a date or any of the places Odessa has that Midland doesn’t (if you want illicit excitement, you drive to Odessa)).

But what’s saddest of all is that it was almost two weeks before we, the people who saw him every evening, figured out that he was dead. Nobody at Starbucks knew his name. Nobody was completely sure when they’d last seen him. Nobody knew where he worked or where he lived or if he had a family.  One night he came in and ordered tea, and for some reason they didn’t make it for him--they were busy, it just slipped past them, whatever. He waited around and then said he was going to the other Starbucks across town and get his tea there. He didn’t make a fuss, didn’t pitch a fit, didn’t confront anyone. Just left and drove his scooter several miles across town in the dark and cold to get his tea.

He loved that scooter. He’d been talking about the trip he was going to take this summer, driving it over to the east coast and up to Nova Scotia, where he’d take a ferry to London. Or maybe it was France. He told me about the sidecar he was going to make for it so he could carry an extra engine. It--the sidecar, not the engine--would be made out of a heavy-duty plastic barrel, with a fabric cover he was sewing himself. Blue, to match the scooter.

I keep thinking, still, even after piecing together all the bits and realizing that, yeah, that’s almost certainly the same man, that we’ll drive up to Starbucks and see his scooter sitting on the patio, waiting for him to come out and ride home.