Uxbridge Road, scene of mediocre football violence, chip-shop violence, and now pedestrian rage. A mild mannered Saturday outing to eat Portuguese chicken led to an ugly situation where cars were overturned and seven people were hospitalised.
The prosecution claim that it all started when the pedestrian turned ‘anti-profanity vigilante’ bought Grand Theft Auto 3 – Vice City. Glued to his screen, the would-be hooligan learnt to pick up whores in stolen cars and then slash them to bloody ribbons with a meat cleaver. He learnt to barge into nightclubs and hose the YMCA act on stage with an assault rifle, and force people to dance with him before sticking a chainsaw in their chests. And crucial to the case for the prosecution, this is where he would learn to drag people out of their cars by their hair, knee them in the head, and then kick their twitching bodies until pools of blood announced their final demise. The vigilante was described by flat mates as a ‘sick weirdo’ as he played out sadistic fantasies in the game.
Mailbu: “Perhaps I could speak in my defence your honour? It was about 12:30 on Saturday afternoon. I had, it’s true been playing a violent video game with a ‘mature theme’, while listening to the hauntingly familiar 80s sound track. A friend called on his way to a test drive, and we departed for lunch. On making our way into the middle of the road, we paused for the stream of traffic on the far side.”
M’Lud: “Would you describe that as Jay Walking, Mr. Malibu?”
Malibu: “No, your honour, that’s a rediculous law dreamt up in the US to allow donut munching cops to keep their arrest rate up, and because of all the inbred rednecks who would otherwise walk into traffic and get crook lawyers to sue car manufacturers, road builders and city planners.”
M’Lud: “OK – what happened next then Mr. Malibu?”
Malibu: “Well we were stood between the two streams of traffic in the centre of the road. We were waiting for either a gap in the traffic, or for the traffic lights to turn red. Then the gentleman over there…”
Court Secretary: “Please note, Mr. Malibu is pointing to the gentleman in the body-cast in the gallery.”
Malibu: “…then the gentleman over there, driving his frankly outdated Vauxhall, shouts through his lowered window: ‘The light is f*cking green, you c*nts’, as he drove past. Well, the rest of what happens is a blur – it’s as though life became a great big video game – and his cursing at me was like a trigger. Like something which made me snap back into the video game. The next thing I knew was that my friend was pulling me off his bleeding body, and the car door was open, and my first instinct was to just get in this guy’s car and hightail it out of there…”
Some odd things did happen on Saturday; a man did hurl abuse at my road crossing technique at me. I later found a ziploc bag with approximately ten grams of white powder on the street outside a theatre. The couple in front of us had stopped to look at the bag, but were hesitant to pick it up. Figuring it might be worth a fair few notes if it was indeed the finest Columbian, I bent down and picked it up and smiled at them. They seemed satisfied with that and the fact that I was waving around the bag and telling my fellow theatre-goers that I had found shit loads of white powder, and moved off.
My test-driving friend and I tasted the powder, deciding that it wasn’t too tasty, and didn’t make us feel invincible, utterly interesting, and the most attractive people on the planet, but I still held out a glimmer of hope that I held 500 GBP of something in my pocket. It burnt a hole in it all of all the walk home. Past the queue of lecherous paedophiles in training as they waited to get into School Disco – past the Antipodeans and smell of late night beery piss they had liberally doused around the street outside their tribal gathering place – the Walkabout. I reached home and casually tossed the baggie onto a table.
“Washing powder,” claimed my flat mate in obvious disappointment. Bugger.