Just saw an awesome license plate…but that’s not the good part. The plate was SCALPEL. Heh, I wonder what he (or she, though I imagine it to be a he) does for a living. It was a new silver Lexus, looking somewhat valuable. The funny thing is there was this bumper guard thing hanging out of the trunk. Maybe I’m out of it, but this is something I’ve never seen before. It was about 30 inches long, 4 inches high, and maybe 2 or three inches deep. Looked like a hunk of two by four wrapped in dirty white vinyl, though I assume it was made of  some sort of cushiony, foam rubber material, not pine.

The bumper bar hung from two adjustable straps, kind of askew. It looked like SCALPEL just popped the truck when he parked, pulled it out, and (probably self-conscious) didn’t take the time to straighten it out. I’m not knocking the idea. My cars, especially newer ones, have suffered at the hands of other drivers. Scraped bumpers, dinged doors. It sucks. This was in an on-street space, with cars in front and behind… double clear and present danger. The funny thing about it was that there were several grommets in the vinyl where the straps attached to the two by four. White painted metal grommets. Just the kind of thing that would ding, scratch, or otherwise mar the surface of a nice, new silver Lexus.

But what REALLY made me laugh is when I imagined the driver. I thought of Eriq La Salle, the driven, and somewhat unsympathetic surgeon from ER, back when it was sort of palatable…maybe even engaging once in a while. I didn’t see him as Dr. Peter Benton, however. I imagined him as Darryl Jenks, in Coming to America with Eddie Murphy and pre-whoop whoop Arsenio Hall. He had that crazy, curly, Soul-Glo hair. I imagined him, dripping with ersatz Jheri-curl activator, scooting to his trunk and flipping out the bumper guard before rushing into the barber shop for a greasy touch-up.