Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck (22 page)

Once you stop, if it’s night, turn on your car’s interior light and sit there with both hands on the wheel so the officer will be reassured you aren’t going for a weapon. Stay in the car unless told to get out. Roll down the driver’s-side window and the passenger’s-side window, too, if two officers are approaching you. Wait for the officer to ask you to get out your paperwork, and whatever you do, do not be talking on your cell phone when they get up to your car. They might not be able to put you on death row for that, but they’ll probably want to.

Finally, if you do get a ticket, sign it when the cop asks you to. As ex-officer Carson writes in
Arrest-Proof Yourself
, the ticket is “merely a receipt” acknowledging that you’ve received the traffic citation, not an admission of guilt. You can still go to court to contest it. But, in some states, refusing to sign it is a criminal offense—one that can get you arrested and sent to jail.

THE DESCENT OF MAN—INTO RUDENESS ON SIDEWALKS, MOVING SIDEWALKS, ELEVATORS, AND ESCALATORS

If there’s a guiding principle of polite conveyance on foot, it’s this: “The barrier method” is a type of contraception, not a form of pedestrianism.

Walkblocking

The considerate thing to do on the sidewalk seems obvious: Whenever you are walking side by side with one or more people and someone’s approaching or you hear hurrying footsteps behind you, go single file to let the person or people pass. But when I mentioned this during a talk, a girl, about twenty, couldn’t help but interrupt: “But, wait! If my boyfriend and I are holding hands, do we really have to let go?”

Tragically, yes. Spend some time apart. Like, three seconds.

It’s actually a sneaky form of bullying when a bunch of people strolling together form a human wall across the sidewalk, showing no sign that they’ll separate to let pedestrians through. Don’t enable their rudeness by pasting yourself to a storefront until they pass. Instead, use a trick I learned in the 90s in Rome, where traffic laws are seen more as traffic suggestions and the locals all drive like they’re on a lifelong coke bender.

I was a little tentative in crossing the street there because cars didn’t seem to stop for pedestrians—sometimes not even at a red light. “Don’t worry if traffic’s coming,” my Rome-dwelling friend advised. “Just walk across, but be sure you don’t make eye contact with the drivers. If they can’t be sure you see them coming, they’ll stop.”

I was terrified to put this into practice, but to my amazement, he was right,
³⁵
and I’ve found that the same psychology applies on the sidewalk: Avoid making eye contact, by looking either at the pavement or into a store window, and a wall of rudewalkers bearing down on you will part like the Red Sea for the Jews.

If you aren’t moving, move over.

• Texting while walking isn’t
always
rude.

If you live in a rural area and you’re in the mood to text while on a stroll, have at it. In any place more citified than Tenney, Minnesota (population: 5, last I checked), step aside. Remember, it’s called a “side
walk
,” not a “side
stop
suddenly and make everyone walking behind you leap around you.”

• The Empire Hate Building: Sightseeing without making people who live there want to kill you.

If you’re part of a group of tourists, sure, stop and look up, but first back up—against the buildings or to the curb—so you don’t take over the entire sidewalk like a bunch of grazing cows.

• Moving sidewalks and escalators: A poor place to do one’s impression of paralyzed livestock.

This is especially true in the airport, yet people the size of industrial refrigerators constantly plant themselves and their bags squarely in the middle of the walkway, making anyone hurrying along behind them feel like a colonoscopy camera meeting an intestinal impasse with ugly luggage. There are plenty of areas in which Europe has cornered the market on stupid, but somehow many Europeans seem to get it about moving walkways and their older cousin, the escalator: Walk left, stand right.

As for your exit strategy, upon coming off a moving sidewalk (or emerging from an elevator, subway stairs, or building) remember that your job is not done.
³⁶
Don’t just stop in your tracks and pick your teeth or check your phone, much as you might like to help the people behind you improve their reflexes by giving them a human obstacle to leap around.

For some, the sidewalk is a side-roll.

It’s easy to forget that curb ramps at intersections and ramped pathways to businesses have an essential purpose for some of us. The handrails on both sides of the wheelchair ramp outside one Culver City, California, Starbucks look like the perfect place to lock your bike or tie your dog—unless you know Thom Fritz, who can only get into that Starbucks by rolling up that ramp in his motorized wheelchair. Thom has this rare muscle-attacking disease called Friedreich’s ataxia, moves parts of his body with great difficulty, and has a hard time speaking and seeing objects in his path until they’re right in front of him. So, when somebody blocks the ramp, even a little with their locked bike wheel, Thom gets trapped there and has to wait until somebody sitting in Starbucks notices him and helps him through.

Amazingly, Thom hasn’t let his disease stop him from getting out of the house. In fact, he went across Australia in his wheelchair and published a book about it in 2006,
Rollabout Australia.
But, back in Southern California, along with bikes in the handicap ramp, carelessly placed shopping carts are one of Thom’s fiercest daily impediments. This blog item he wrote makes me mindful to always go that extra few steps and push the shopping cart back to the store:

Often, I go zipping along minding my own business, lost in my thoughts, and I come across a shopping cart left lackadaisically in the middle of a walkway or sidewalk. I am bound to run into it, or be forced to make a last-minute maneuver to keep from running into it. These unexpected maneuvers lead to collisions of a catastrophic moment, leaving me with a broken and bloody foot or sending me careening off the sidewalk or walkway into the flower bed or even off the curb.

Thom wrote that he sees the shopping cart as having two purposes—convenience in transporting our groceries and reminding us of the relationship we have with others. In Thom’s words, the latter “must be looked at a little more.”

The world is neither your oyster nor your giant spittoon.

Certain sidewalks in midtown Manhattan can become a hockaloogie obstacle course. One look up at a bird or a building and you’re sure to find some stranger’s DNA wet-mounted in the treads of your shoe.

These spitters do this where everyone else walks because they’re disgusting and because nobody ever follows them, removes a shoe, and returns their slobber to them by wiping the sole on their coat. (I’m not recommending, just fantasizing.)

Yoo-hoo,
spitters … your saliva belongs one of three places: in your mouth, in the toilet bowl, or speeding down the drain. Also, you might want to get that checked out—whatever’s in your mouth that’s so odious that you feel the need to be all “bombs away!” with your saliva everywhere you go.

Do you mind if I fart?

Sorry, smokers, but the entire great outdoors isn’t one big “screw you if you don’t like my smoking” section. Guidelines for polite smoking in public are akin to those for passing gas. If you wouldn’t stand just upwind from a sidewalk café or a public bench lighting your farts, don’t stand there and light a cigarette.

My favorite café is unfortunately situated in respect to Southern California wind patterns, turning it into a walk-in ashtray whenever some passerby with a lit cigarette sits down in one of the four little metal folding chairs in front of the place. When their smoke (and occasionally ash) starts blowing in the door, one of the other regulars always looks (pleadingly) to me to go out and say something. I, of course, don’t tell the smoker what to do, being mindful that bossiness tends to make a person long to do just the opposite. Instead, I simply give them the air pollution report—along with the benefit of the doubt: “You probably didn’t know this, but your smoke is blowing right into the café.” There was only one guy in an entire year who
didn’t
say something like “Whoops, sorry. I didn’t know” and then move away from the doorway, and that guy looked like my voice wasn’t the only one he was hearing at the time.

THEY CALL IT THE “F” TRAIN, NOT THE “EFF YOU!” TRAIN

Considerate conveyance on public transportation

It doesn’t take much to be polite while riding the bus or subway—just remembering that public transportation is shared transportation and that there’s a good chance that you’re already torturing another passenger near you simply by existing.

It’s public transportation, not a public restroom.

While riding public transportation, do not pick your teeth, floss, apply nail polish, clip your fingernails—or, worse—your toenails. During my years living in New York, I not only witnessed several men clipping their toenails on the subway, only one of whom looked homeless and insane, but once saw a man remove one of his shoes and begin biting his. And as long as we’re puttering around in my mental archives, no, you don’t get to save time during the workday by masturbating under a magazine while en route to the office—and besides, remember all the people these days with smartphones.

Unfortunately, it seems there were too few photo-and video-equipped phones back in 2009 to cramp the personal care efforts of the DC subway rider whom blogger Unsuck DC Metro deemed the “Metro Arm Barber.” Yes, just as it sounds, a guy seated on DC’s orange line was snipping off all of his arm hair with a pair of scissors and then brushing his trimmed fur onto the seat and floor as horrified riders stared on in shock.

Dealing with public transit pervos: Is that your erect penis in the small of my back…?

It’s sometimes hard to tell whether the train’s just crowded or your commute is being turned into a sex crime. Be mindful that you can ruin a person’s life on a mere suspicion. It’s better to maybe let a grope-grabber get away with it than to accuse somebody who’s only guilty of squeezing into a packed train car at rush hour and then needing to reach down into his pocket for his phone.

If you are creeped out by somebody pushing up against you but really can’t be sure whether you’re being victimized (or if it seems dangerous to say something), move away from the perp immediately by announcing that you’re about to be sick. Not only should this get others on a crowded train to quickly clear a path for you but the potential to be vomited on also seems likely to rapidly shift a perp’s priorities and state of mind.

Once you move away, clue in any sympathetic riders who come to your aid. You’ll feel less alone, and they may support you and help you assess the situation. Clandestinely videotape the perp, or at least take a photo of him if you can do that without endangering yourself, especially if he seems to be rubbing up on the woman who took your place. (This almost always happens to women, not men.) If you can, after you get off, approach that woman to see whether she feels she was victimized and whether she’ll join you in filing a report with the transit cops. The blog
Gothamist
and other sites report mass transit butt-and boob-grabbers being found and charged thanks to photos and video passed on to them by victims and witnesses.

Even when women are certain that they’ve been sexually touched—like when somebody grabs and twists their boob—their gropers often slip away to grope again because their prey are too shocked or embarrassed to do what one woman in the New York City subway did: bellow, “He groped me!” In July 2012, the
New York Post
reported that a thirty-year-old Bronx man allegedly grabbed an unnamed thirty-five-year-old woman around the waist and copped a feel of her butt as she got off a Queens-bound G train. The
Los Angeles Times
added that she chased the man onto the L train, pointing him out to other passengers, who pulled him off the train and held him until transit cops arrived and arrested him on charges of forcible touching. (That part of the incident was captured on video and posted on YouTube with the title “Subway Grabber.”)

New Yorkers have an undeserved reputation as people who won’t get involved. I’ve read research on the “bystander effect”—how being in a crowd causes people to do nothing for a stranger in trouble, sometimes because of “diffusion of responsibility.” People in the crowd tend to assume someone else will intervene or, if they haven’t, there’s good reason they haven’t. And, sure, there are stories of subway gropees’ cries being ignored by other passengers, but the portrayal of New Yorkers as a cold, look-the-other-way bunch is exactly the opposite of my experience during my years living in Manhattan. My sense then was that New Yorkers realize that life in the city is tough for everyone, and they’ll come to your rescue, especially if you call out and especially if you’re a lady in jeopardy. That said, you’ll increase your chances of overcoming the bystander effect and getting help if you do more than announce to the train car, “He groped me!” Be specific about the help you want and from whom.
³⁷
For example, say, “This guy in the red groped me! You two big strong dudes over there by the door, please help me: Grab him and hold him for the police!” By calling out to them as individuals, you’ll make them more likely to intervene and help you get the scumbag’s creeping hands around a set of bars, where they belong.

Ear invasions: When somebody’s iPod becomes an Everybody-in-the-Train-Car-Pod.

You get on the Lexington Avenue line at 14th Street. It’s crowded, so you can’t really move around. This is a problem because no sooner does the train groan to a start than the lady next to you starts spilling a tiny but continuing trickle of her Sprite down your leg and keeps spilling it … 23rd Street … 28th Street … the trickle continues.