The One Armed Man
My family has never had any problems finding adventure. In fact, I think it’s safe to say adventure finds us; we’re merely the innocent bystanders. This one particular adventure was so fantastical; it managed to catch even us off guard.
It was a Wednesday night when it happened, which perhaps made it even harder to believe. After all, Wednesdays seem as if they should be rather uneventful. It’s right in the middle of the week, we’re fully recovered from the past weekend, and not yet preparing ourselves for the weekend looming ahead. Wednesdays should be easy… but not this Wednesday. It was late, maybe about nine o’clock or so. My family and I were driving home, and we’d just pulled onto what we called the “gate road.” We were living in a condominium complex in Homestead, Florida at the time, and in order to get back to the residential area, we had to go past the guard shack. It’s something we had done countless times; pull up to the gate, push the little button on the gate opener, wave to the guard, and proceed through the gate when it opened. Not this time. My mom slowed the van considerably as we approached the gate, and I glanced up; this was a distinct change in our regular routine.
There was a man, standing in the middle of the road and blocking our path to the gate. He was waving one arm about above his head, looking slightly crazed. Upon closer examination, it was clear the man only had one arm, his right shirtsleeve hanging empty from his shoulder. I suppose the absurdity of the situation caused us all to react a little strangely. My mother started to roll the window down, to find out what was the matter, as it did seem as if there must have been some emergency he needed to inform us of. The one armed man approached the car at a quick pace, but did not walk up to the window to pursue a civil conversation with my mother. Instead, he leapt—quite impressively I might add, for a man who looked to be in his late forties—onto the bumper of our car. Once perched on the bumper, he proceeded to perform what can only be described as a jig; though I’m not sure that word really gives it justice.
He had the time to stomp out perhaps three steps, before my mother’s instinct kicked in, and we were backing down the road as fast as the car would take us. The man fell off the bumper, but somehow managed to stay upright, and it was only a few seconds before he was running after us. The road was miraculously vacant of any other traffic, so we were able to reverse down it in a (mostly) straight line. It was at this point we all realized two things: one, the guard was missing in action, which only added to our concern, and two, the one armed man was actually keeping pace with the van! Needless to say the stress level went up a couple of notches after that. It was also at this time the initial shock wore off, and all of us started talking at once, breaking the strange silence that had settled over us for a time.
“Call the police! We need to call 911!”
“And tell them what? There’s a one armed man chasing our car!? And he’s keeping up!”
“I don’t know, maybe!”
“I can’t call, I’m driving! You call!”
“Wait! What happened to the guard!?”
“Maybe we should just drive to Wal-Mart, we can sit in the parking lot for a while… wait till he goes away…” My brother Joey added his input from the backseat, seemingly calm, but obviously not wanting to face up to the one-armed man, “You know, this is a good example of why Americans have the right to bear arms!”
We finally reached the end of the road, and turning the car, started driving to North Gate, on the other side of the property, hoping we’d be able to speak to a security guard. None of us could stop craning our necks around to search the view out the rear windshield, even though we seemed to have lost the man when we made the turn off the gate road.
We pulled up to the gate house, and the security guard came out. My mother hesitated for a moment, before just diving right in, “This is going to sound crazy, but there was a one armed man chasing our car. He chased us all the way down the road at South Gate.”
The security guard did look a little dubious, but after a quick explanation, she headed back into the guard shack and grabbed the phone, calling South Gate to find out exactly what was going on over there. We sat in the van and waited, still taking the occasional glance out the back windshield, just to make sure there was nobody coming for us. Joey was still encouraging us to go to Wal-Mart, not wanting anything else to do with the one-armed man, and I was sitting quietly, still trying to wrap my brain around what exactly had just happened.
The guard finally returned to our car, and explained what had happened on the phone. The other guard—who was apparently still alive, a fact that none of us had been too sure about moments before—had been completely unaware of what was going on outside his window, but he did see the one-armed man walking back by the gate, and he called him over. He asked the man what he was doing, and if he’d just been chasing a van down the road. The man’s answer was simple; he had just wanted some cigarettes. He was chasing our van at top speed down the road for a cigarette. I suppose it’s impressive, not only was this man who had kept up with our car over forty years old, he was also a smoker. Perhaps the smoking had affected his brain in some way, and he was a little insane, or maybe he was so addicted to the cigarettes; he would do anything to get his hands on some.
We never did find out for sure what that man had really wanted from us, but we all had a hard time believing it was a cigarette. We returned home that night—much to the chagrin of Joey it was sans Wal-Mart trip—but none of us could sleep. It wasn’t out of fear of the one armed man; who now holds that title in our family as if he’s some kind of superhero. We couldn’t sleep because we were laughing. We laughed so hard, tears were coming out of our eyes. My mother says it’s because we’d had such an adrenaline rush, and no way to release it, but I think it’s because it was funny. Maybe not when it was actually happening, and we were all terrified of this one armed man who was chasing our car for some unknown reason… Looking back, though, the ludicrousness of the situation is hard to ignore. It may not have been a life altering event, but it did ensure one thing about our family. None of us smoke.
Kitchen Sink Not Included 