Walkabout or How Real is it?

***
A rare hot San Francisco day. Dusk falling into night.

I took five young Aussies, three men and two women - all tanned, all attractive - across the Bay Bridge to the train depot in Oakland. I asked them where they were going.

"We're on a walkabout," a tall man replied.

"You mean, you're making it up as you go along?"

"You got, it mate."

"You know, you sound just like a young Mel Gibson," I told him.

They laughed.

"Too bad he don't look like it," one of the girls cracked.

"Too good lookin' for the likes of you."

They started putting each other down and laughing.

"Take it easy on him," I told the girl, "he could look like me."

"Na' that would be an improvement," she said leaning forward from the back seat, putting her arm around my neck, nestling her cheek on my shoulder and peering up at me

I stared into her blue eyes and at her sexy, teasing smile and lost my concentration.

Not a smart thing to do in West Oakland. I took a wrong turn and, then, another wrong turn, went under the freeway and found myself driving through what looked like a bombed-out lunar landscape.

Instead of street lamps, huge Halo projectors rose from the top of twenty-five foot poles casting light down on endless rolls of military-type bungalows. The place looked like a film version of a WWII prison camp.

An ancient Toyota hatchback came careening around a corner chased by three black & whites. A dude knocked out the hatch window and started firing with what-I-took-to-be a 9 mm automatic. Its magazine holds 18 bullets if I remember my TV correctly. Dude fired off about 17 of them without hitting a damn thing. Then, just as the car whipped around a corner, he nailed the leading cop's front tire with a single shot from a 100 yards away.

The cop car spun a half U before the driver took control and brought it to rest. The other patrol cars screeched around the corners with two cops firing pistols out the windows of both vehicles.

I put in reverse, whipped the steering wheel and floored it, spinning a U. I was almost hit broadside by three more cops cars who raced around me with the drivers screaming obscenities loud enough for me to hear.

"Fuckin' A," I said.

"Fuckin' A," the Aussies said in unison, laughing.

"Just like a Oliver Stone flick," one of them reported.

"If you say so," I replied as I sped down the street wondering where the hell I was going. The place looked the same in every direction. The Toyota had taken a left so I decided on a right.  Wrong choice. The Toyota raced toward me from a quarter block away with a five cops cars following close behind. I didn't have time to turn.

"You'd better duck," I said, "dudes sometime confuse us with cops -"

"Dudes," they imitated, laughing as they put their heads down.

Indeed one of the dudes pointed his gun at me and fired just as I ducked. I never found a bullet. It must have gone in one open window and out the other.

"I think it's the badges," I said finishing my thought as I looked up.

That was pretty much it. I kept driving straight until I finally got out of the neighborhood.

"God! I'm sorry," I told my customers who had been quiet since we'd been fired upon. "I don't know the neighborhood - I just took a wrong turn."

"Naw - this was great!" One of them said.

"It's the highlight of the trip," added another.

"At last," the blue-eyed girl said, "we get to see the real America."