Violent robbery sucks.
I can say this definitely because I just experienced it. 45 minutes ago to be exact.
“How much money you got on you?”
“None.”
“Give us your fucking money.”
“I’m not ly—“
I haven’t been hit in a long time. Not deliberately. Not violently intended.
It hurts.
Okay, now I remember.
Surprised from behind, someone taking your arms and pinning them, and then pressing you forward, holding you out on display for the attacker; that’s pretty helpless.
And beyond that, I haven’t been knocked to the ground, and left to scrounge myself up, figure out where I am and how much danger I’m in, in a long, long time.
One, two, three four five… laughing. They were laughing because after I rose to my feet, and they were all already across the street, watching, I stood there; in amazement.
“Dudes!” I shouted to them, “Can I just have my bag back?”
Because there was nothing of value in it for them. I mean, take a look: nothing. What’s that? The cheap-ass phone that I got to replace the good one I lost two months ago? The $65 special? Please. The bag itself? It was a knock off I got in south-east Asia.
See? Nothing. They ignored me. I ignored myself. I didn’t want to know what I felt in that moment. I hailed a passing cab and asked him if he could help me. He refused.
“It’s too much trouble for me,” he said.
I could feel the blood running down my chin as I looked at him.
“I’d like to think,” I said to him, calmly, “that if I encountered you, bleeding at five o’clock in the morning, that I would help you in any way that I could.”
“You don’t understand,” he responded.
“I think I do,” I said. “I was assaulted a few minutes ago and you won’t call the police.”
It was the public bus driver that dropped me off close to the Police Station, looking worried (and they say civil servants are dead inside…); the police were nice, and suitably concerned, but tired, as we are all tired of the same thing, day in, day out.
“Do you remember anything about them?”
They were young. They were white. They were cocky… and given the opportunity, I would devise disempowering horrors to subject them to, one and all. Horrible horrors.
I’ve been beaten up a relative lot in my lifetime. School was not an oasis of calm for me; it was more a tempestuous ruin of mental and physical abuse… I like to think that I’m over it; but being swarmed and beaten on the walk home at five in the morning hit a little harder than a fist in the face. Right now I’m feeling just as powerless and small as I did then, at the mercy of the crewel classmates.
What this awakened in me is a dry thirst for vengeance. I’ve been pretty copasetic as far as humankind goes for some time now, but I have enough unresolved issues rooted in power dynamics for this to get my blood to a boil. Little shit-heads.
Update: I am more or less unscathed. I have a split lip, a lacerated inner cheek, some gravel imbedded in my palm, but all systems are still go, and my face is mercifully un-swollen. It could have been worse. This was just a little rattle of the cage.
Incidentally, I’ve determined that the moral of the story is always take cabs.
