So I’m sitting here in Orange County. It’s a place so close to L.A. that you can hardly see your hand through the opaque, suffocating smog if you held it out in front of your face (never mind your eyes squinting shut from the chronic smoker’s cough you’ve developed over the course of your stay). I’m in Orange County, the place where Midwestern lungs and hearts go to die. I am having a coffee and a cigarette on a sunny morning, looking at the trees. Five minutes earlier, I felt my breakfast of a fresh orange, a piece of toast, and two cigarettes come surging up my esophagus as I pedaled my bike, hunched forward over my handlebars, towards this café.

What had appeared to be a sixteen-year old girl driving a Range Rover had just made an illegal left turn and almost clipped my front tire. I don’t know whether it was my sudden fear of death at the hands of the privileged and undeserving or my subconscious hope that I could vomit this close to the passenger side of her car that made me feel sick. Were it the latter, maybe then I could have leaned to my left and thrown a hearty Chicagoan OOMPH behind the mixture of orange peel and tobacco-blackened stomach acid, so as to spray the substance all over the side of her car.

Though it’s not likely, I wonder, “Maybe she won’t notice it and it will rot for days on the side of her car. Maybe the stench will be unbearable and her perfect life with her perfect boyfriend under her perfect blue sky driving through her perfect unending strip mall lined with perfect (and not indigenous) palm trees will come to a screeching halt because she doesn’t smell like the perfect Abercrombie model and now her perfect boyfriend won’t let her spend suck his perfect dick.”

Or maybe she would have noticed. Possibly even said a polite, “Oh my god, I think some stupid biker just puked on my car” to whatever inattentive relation she had been talking to, then flipped the diamond encrusted cell phone shut. It’s quite possible that the sunglasses she was wearing, though they overtook a majority of her face, left a touch of visibility in her peripheral. Then she would have seen me lurch towards her car, stomach acid exploding from my mouth, painting the side of her freshly washed SUV. If this were the case, there’s even the possibility that she’d gently apply her brakes, watch as I speed in front of her, then follow me at a safe distance around the corner to where I was headed in the first place.

She’s not heartless, so she’d run her hand through her boisterous, bleached-blonde hair and dial up her pastor (who she normally can’t stand, about but keeps him on the speed dial so that her mother will believe she is religious and not just “spiritual”). After explaining that she almost killed me, and that now I’ve locked up my bike and am buying a cup of coffee and appear to be having it “for here,” her pastor might do the right thing and suggest she pay for my coffee and apologize.

The tanning appointment (because with year-round beach weather, she finds it necessary to contract more skin cancer) she’d been rushing to, wouldn’t start for another twenty minutes. Besides, Daddy owns the chain. She might push her credit card in front of my hand that has stretched two Washingtons towards the barista and say, “I’ll get that,” to the coffee slave and “Sorry,” straight into my eyes.

She’d sit down with me at an outside table and continue to apologize left and right in between interrogating me about what I’m writing in such a small notebook. I might tell her that I’m just describing how beautiful every morning’s sunrise is and how much I can’t stand the homogeneity of all the strip malls and fast food joints around here. I’d be lying, saying the most pompous thing possible, to cover up the fact that I’d be writing down every detail of her face, her words, her hands, the way that she grabbed my wrist as she said, “I’ll be more careful, I swear,” for the fourth time. I simply can’t help but notice how remarkably pleasant manicured nails look on some women, as if every tiny detail of this being’s life is ordered and perfected.

I’d ask about her home life and she’ll leave out the way her dad beats her mom before screwing her. She’ll skip that part where she admits her brother is gay and instead say that he’s really into surfing. I’d think her lying is fine. I’m just a stranger who puked on her car. And she’s just a pretty girl. Even her eventually leaving for her appointment would be fine, even her scraping the metal legs of the chair against the cement below wouldn’t hurt my ears. Maybe we both would have learned something.

But none of that happened. She drove off, even slammed the accelerator. I held down my breakfast. I still have a cigarette in my mouth and a cup of coffee in my hand and these palm trees, well, they still aren’t real.