Slighcarp and Grimshaw

In a move that will teach us to not hang out with each other, Sarah went out with two young ladies that she works with at school, and I went to the mexican restaurant in Bronxville where they have $4 margartas and free nachos during happy hour. Sarah ate decent burritos and drank decent margaritas and hung out with the ladies. I read the first 23 pages of Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything (again, but only because that book is Awesome), decided to walk home along the road I used to live on, and got mugged.

Yeah. Mugged. With a GUN.

Now, I have never held a gun, being pretty much entirely against having a gun on my person, in my home or anywhere near me. To be honest, I don’t even know enough to tell whether the gun was real or not. However, with the self-preservation instinct finely honed by my ancestors and passed down to me through genetic traiting, I decided to err on the side of keeping my face its beardy, no-extra-holes-self. So I was scared, but even more than that (thanks tequila!) angry and bewildered. Even as they were demanding my money (which I couldn’t give them because I haven’t really figured out how to work the back pockets of my new pants), and yanking my bag over my head, along with my headphones (which were somehow twisted and tangled up with the shoulder strap), I was trying to insist that they slow down and let me get myself extricated and I would oblige them with the two dollars in my wallet (and using the word “fuck” a lot, which I don’t know was due to my fear or my indignance).

But this was a crime of opportunity: I saw them walking across the street as I was walking, singing along to Jawbox’s My Scrapbook of Fatal Accidents and generally looking forward to getting home and listening to Oingo Boingo’s Farewell Concert album with a glass of scotch. I didn’t give them a second look, until I realized I was surrounded by three young kids insisting on my cooperation, via the yanking and the gun in my face. They ran across at me when there weren’t any cars coming down the street (this is a fairly busy street) and were obviously in a hurry to avoid a car coming around the curve and shining its headlights on what they were doing. They grabbed what they could and took off into the dark of one of the sidestreets. The whole thing probably took 10 or 15 seconds. But the memory has that dreamy, slowed-down feel you see in flashbacks, with the blurry streetlight tracers and the not-quite-real quality of speech and movement.

Yes, yes; of course you have your impressions…and since this is your blog you have every right to recount them, you say.

But What Did They Take? you ask, leaning forward in your chair, anxious to learn what the scoundrels awayed with. Here you go (this a slightly abbreviated list, since you don’t need to know how many pens I carry with me at all times…):

One pair of Grado SR60 headphones.
One Timbuk2 messenger bag containing (I’m not kidding):
one copy of A Brief History of Nearly Everything
one copy of Tomas Transtromer’s Collected Poems
a notebook containing what I write down when I remember to write stuff down
a paycheck stub
a fold-out map of NYC
my checkbook

Not my wallet, cell phone nor my iPod.

This list perhaps will give you an idea of my bewilderment at being mugged at all. I thought, over and over in the brief moments this thing happened, “Really? You’re mugging me? Really?” I wanted to say, “Fucking come on guys, do you realize you are wasting everyone’s time? You are going to be profoundly disappointed when you look inside this bag and realize you robbed a tremendously lame dude.” But these are thoughts for one retaining the structure of his face by avoiding getting shot there. So I walked home, feeling strangely invincable, as I suspect one does after having something bad ends in the best-case scenario. I called my dad on the walk, railed and swore, then called Sarah, left two voice messages and texted her, typing, “I got mugged. Please come home.” Subtlety, my eye.

I got in my car and drove back through the neighborhood they ran away into. No luck, either seeing them or my stuff that I assumed they dumped almost immediately. Had I found them/recognized them, I have no idea what would have happened. What is most likely is that I would have rolled down my window a good distance away and shaken my fist at them and yelled, “You guys are jerks!” in the most impotently righteous manner I could muster. Because really, what else is there to be done?

All in all, it ruined my night, as you might suspect. I made Sarah leave dinner early, did nothing for my enjoyment of music, totally killed the little buzz I had going, and managed to instill in me a sense of fear and unease I had not previously felt in my neighborhood.

You jerks, I want to say, I was on your side! We were cool! I didn’t give a damn about 3 black teenage kids walking down the street! Now I do! I can’t help it! You tainted every future dealing I will have with strangers at night, everywhere! You ruined it for everyone! Especially me!

Bah. There was a lot of bah that night.

And of course, they didn’t hit me or anything, so I don’t even have any physical record of my encounter, so there’s nothing at all to leverage for real sympathy except the general predilection of people I know to like me…dammit. But it’s a good story.

PostScript: This all happened Friday night. Today is Monday. I got home from work today, and found my bag on the front steps of my house. Everything except the headphones was inside. They didn’t take a thing but the headphones. Someone must have found the bag, looked inside, seen the paycheck stub and possessed the wherewithal to drop it off in front of my house. That, or one of their moms found the bag, realized what had happened, and had absolutely none of it. That’s what I’d like to imagine, because, once again, let me reiterate, I was robbed by KIDS. Punk-ass jerky kids, but kids nonetheless. Weird. Weird beyond my ability to express.

So I am mostly whole again, but then again, kind of not at all. Dammit.