(1) The car pulled up and its driver glared at us with such sullen intensity, such hatred, that I was truly afraid for our lives. He looked like the sort of young man who might kill a president.

(2) (He was glaring because we had passed him and for that offensive action he pursued us to the next stoplight so as to express his indignation and affirm his masculinity.) I was with two women and was afraid for all three of us. It was nearly midnight and we were in a small, sleeping town with no other cars on the road.

(3) (When the light turned green I raced ahead. He didn’t merely follow, he chased and with his headlights turned off). No matter what sudden turn I took, he followed. My passengers were silent. I knew they were alarmed, and I prayed that I wouldn’t be called upon to protect them. In that cheerful frame of mind, I turned off my own lights so I couldn’t be followed. It was madness. I was responding to a crazy as a crazy.

(4) “I’ll just drive to the police station,” I finally said, and as if those were the magic words, he disappeared.

(5) It seems to me that there has recently been an epidemic of auto macho—a competition perceived and expressed in driving. People fight it out over parking spaces. A toll booth becomes a signal for elbowing fenders. And beetle-eyed drivers hunch over their steering wheels, squeezing the rims, glowering, preparing the excuse of not having seen you as they muscle you off the road. Approaching a highway on an entrance ramp recently, I was strong-armed by a trailer truck so immense that its driver all but blew me away by blasting his horn. The (behemoth) was just inches from my hopelessly mismatched vehicle when I fled for the safety of the shoulder.

(6)The odd thing is that long before I was even able to drive, it seemed to me that people were at their finest and most civilized when in their cars. (They seemed so orderly and considerate, so reasonable, staying in the right-hand lane unless passing, signaling all intentions). In those days you really eased into highway traffic, and the long, neat rows of cars seemed mobile testimony to the sanity of most people. Perhaps memory fails, perhaps there were always testy drivers, perhaps—but everyone didn’t (give you the finger).

(7) A most amazing example of driver rage occurred recently in Manhattan. We were four cars abreast, stopped at a traffic light. And there was no moving even when the light had changed. A bus had stopped in the cross traffic, blocking our paths: it was normal-for-New-York-City gridlock. Perhaps impatient, perhaps late for important appointments, three of us nonetheless accepted what, after all, we could not alter. One, however, would not. He would not be helpless. He would go where he was going even if he couldn’t get there. He got out of his car and strode toward the bus, rapping smartly on its doors. When they opened, he exchanged words with the driver. The doors folded shut. He then stepped in front of the bus, took hold of one of its large windshield wipers and broke it.

(8) (The bus doors reopened and the driver appeared, apparently giving the fellow a good piece of his mind.) If so, the lecture was wasted, for the man started his car and drove directly into the bus. He rammed it. Even though the point at which he struck the bus, the folding doors, was its most vulnerable point, ramming the side of a bus with your car has to rank very high on a futility index. My first thought was that it had to be a rental car.

(9) To tell the truth, I could not believe my eyes. The bus driver opened his doors as much as they could be opened and he stepped directly onto the hood of the attacking car, jumping up and down with both his feet. He then retreated into the bus, closing the doors behind him. Obviously a man of action, the car driver backed up and rammed the bus again.

(10) It is tempting to blame such aggressive, uncivil and even neurotic behavior, but in our cars we all become a little crazy. How many of us speed up when a driver signals his intention of pulling