Mugging Virgin
I should probably title this article “you’re doing it wrong” and if you read further, you’ll (eventually) find out why.
A few years ago I had the unfortunate experience of being mugged for the very first time in my life. I’m no pussy when it comes to angry confrontation; in my past, I spent several years running a grocery store located in a very bad part of town called “The Bottoms.” I had more than my share of shoplifters and scammers in that store and it soon became apparent that a large portion of my customers were also thieves, forgers, and general louts. When I left that position, I was promoted to dealing with those same people more exclusively…and this job was full time conflict.
Owing to my previous dealings and general knowledge of how things were scammed, I was promoted to the position of “Security Liaison” between the company I worked for and the municipal police department in my area. What that meant was that when I wasn’t busy writing schedules for my apprehenders and off duty police officers that worked for my division of the company, I was in the thick of things myself.
I would travel to flea markets to recover stolen property. I would sit in my car and do observation. I would spend late nights in parking lots, watching employees setting cartons of cigarettes out for their friends. Yes, I was a glorified mall cop, but I was also directly involved in catching misdemeanors and felonies of such strange and wonderful sorts that I feel that my experience in those areas made me a veteran when it came to violence and “getting down.”
Positions like that tend to give a person either a big head or a sense of invulnerability, or both. I was (am still) the victim of that sort of thinking. When you have been threatened, smacked around, thrown over a counter and dealt out the same sort of thing so many times, you usually act first and don’t think. Flash forward ten years and the instinct, though dulled, is still there. I didn’t freeze when the pistol was shoved in my face, but rather, I got angry and wanted to act.
A friend and I had been out at a group of bars here in town. It was Saint Patrick’s Day and we were pretty buzzed. The end of the night had come and we were getting ready to go home. The bars we were at were near “The Bottoms” but they were in a more upscale part of town that was adjacent to the ghetto. Lots of cars were evacuating the now closed strip and were moving off towards their final destinations for the night, but the main roads that would aid in that evacuation took the travelers directly through the deepest, darkest, crime infestedest part of “The Bottoms.”
Since it was a holiday of sorts and lots of alcohol was involved, I didn’t think it very strange to see people wandering around that late at night. Besides, people in this end of town never went to bed, there was always something going on. The car I was riding in pulled to a stop light at an intersection.
What we didn’t see was that a person had somehow snuck his way around to the back of the car while it was stopped and was now slinking towards the passenger side door of the car where I was sitting with the window open. Suddenly, I was yanked out of my drunken reverie and I was staring at the open mouth of the barrel of a small pistol. A million things ran through my mind in a split second. I can’t remember any single one of them, but I can remember thinking “it’s small, probably a .22, is it a revolver? Yeah, it’s a revolver. Can you take it away from this guy? Guy? That’s a kid, he can’t be more than fifteen years old. Get out of the car and beat his ass.”
“Give me everything in your pockets,” the jackass with the gun said.
Oh man I was pissed. My friend knew it too. She could see me tensing up in that way an animal unnaturally coils before it attacks. She tried her best to calm me down, but my wrath was only beginning.
Fortunately, I allowed myself to act calm and brought out a wad of bills from my front pocket. I had placed my wallet in the glove compartment earlier in the evening to avoid losing it during the drunken debauchery that was surely to come on a Saint Patrick’s Day evening. The bills, which only ended up being around forty dollars, were passed over and then the mugger casually walked away as if nothing happened. Casually. My anger exploded.
Over the protests of my car-mate, I got up out of the car and followed the dude. My intentions were known to me, I was going to go, take my money back, and beat the ever-loving shit out of the guy. I was pretty far along by the time he noticed that I was following him. I don’t know what he was thinking at that point, or if he even recognized me as the person he had just stolen money from, but he didn’t do anything overt, he just kept on walking.
Finally, the sidewalk we were both on ended and he ducked around a corner near a group of bushes. I slowed down and became a bit more cautious as I neared the turn. I peeked around the bushes and there was my mugger…standing there counting out the money he had just taken. There was no gun in his hand; it was lodged under his arm like he was cradling a loaf of bread. He looked up and we both connected for a brief second before I came fully around the bushes and the corner.
The gun was again pointed at me, but this time he wasn’t the one in power. I could visibly see the terror in his eyes. Things were not supposed to go this way. Either he was really high on something or very, very dumb; he didn’t know how to react. I took a threatening step towards him and it seemed to snap him out of whatever trance he was in.
“I want my money back…now” I said.
Suddenly, after saying that, I knew that I was doing it wrong. Muggings weren’t supposed to be like this, and I was suddenly as scared as the guy who I was facing. He lowered the gun and shot into the dirt near my feet.
Holy shit, if you’ve never been shot at, it does a lot of things to you all at once. You see stars, you jump, you get cold prickles, the hair on your nuts sticks straight up and your nuts turn three sizes too small. My body went through all those changes but my anger was still there. Stupidly, I felt my animal instinct take over and I actually advanced on the guy.
He fired at me again, this time I think he actually meant to hit me. The bullet zipped passed me about three feet from my side, I could actually feel the force of the thing as it moved the air near me. That was about when I finally calmed down enough to actually start thinking what I was doing was a bad idea.
Dimly and dumbly I remember both of us working ourselves back around the corner and I could see the car I had gotten out of just so recently. In the driver’s side of the windshield, my friend’s face was a white smudge of shock and horror. The mugger moved himself around me and actually advanced on the car, I don’t know what idea he had in his mind, but I wasn’t going to let him do anything further.
“Get the hell out of here!” I yelled at the idling car. My friend, to her credit, hauled ass like a truckload of hams.
Further up the road, another red light awaited her, but it was close enough that I could perhaps run to her and we could both escape this situation I had gotten us in. I sprinted like I haven’t run in probably twenty years and passed the young mugger who kind of just stood there with his arms drooping at his sides. When I re-entered the car, he poked a long and skinny arm into the air and fired off two more shots into the night, marking his territory or some such bullshit.
I turned to my friend in the car, still full of rage and now breathing heavily. “That’s about the stupidest thing I have ever seen anyone ever do.” She said.
