ericboy's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- \"My angel wings / are bruised and misshapen / my belly stinks\" - The Smashing Pumpkins What an odd day. I come in at five am this morning to discover that the floor by my bed is wet. Apparently there's some sort of leakage, seepage-type-phenomenon in my studio right now and pretty much my entire side of the box that I share with my roomie is wet and growing increasingly stinky. I shrug it off and go to work at Borders where I am semi-productive. I go to leave and find that the car that the roomie lets me use won't start because it's out of gas. So I remedy that and go home for a very brief amount of time before I have to pick the roomie up from work and have her drop me off at Dick's Last Resort, where I work for about six hours at a corporate buyout. ADT Security bought the entire block of Fifth Avenue from J to K Streets for a big party. Our involvement as waitstaff was minimal: just bring the accomodated guests whatever free drinks from the bar that they'd like and hope that they'll occasionally tip you. I ran my ass off and made a good deal of money, then left at a quarter to one and caught a bus that drops me off about ten blocks from my building. On the busride is a very loud man who chats it up with a woman that he recognized from the bus route who is sitting four seats away. The topic of the conversation was the pornographic theatre that he spends nights in when he misses the bus and needs to kill four to five hours until they start running again. Though he stated many times that he wasn't neccessarily condoning such establishments, he had a plethora of experiences within such to keep him talking for my entire ride. I stop by Ralph's on the way to my building to buy a Newcastle and a pack of cigarettes, hoping to relax a bit before sleeping. However, I was accosted and mugged before that lofty expectation came to fruition. I was heading westbound on University Avenue, a discreet brown paper bag containing beer and cigs in my left hand, a lit cigarette in my right hand, & my backpack slung over my right shoulder. As I'm nearing 9th & University, I see four young men carousing atop an electrical box, seemingly holding one another up from falling over in respective drunken stupors. As I get closer to them, they gather themselves and start walking eastbound. One of the men collides with me, chest to chest, immediately saying, "Hold up, man. What's going on?" I respond that he'd just bumped right into me and his friend chimes in that he didn't really mean to. Assuming that my initial conclusion that they were all drunk was true, I dropped my agitation and entertained the ensuing exchange. The guys wanted to know where they could "get some stuff", meaning of course that they were looking for a connection for drugs. I mentioned that no, I didn't have that kind of information; that I was on my way home to drink my beer after a long day's work and go to sleep. They asked what I was into and I replied "Beer & Cigarettes". They asked again if I didn't smoke anything else, thinking my answer was incredulous, then the man who was directly in front of me, our chests still touching, reached a hand around to my back left pocket to feel for a wallet asking, "Are you sure you haven't got anything?". I pushed him off of me and proferred my brown bag, saying, "Here take the beer and get the fuck away from me." One of the guys to my right took my backpack off my shoulder with one sweeping gesture and I bolted, running a short fifty feet or so to the entrance of my building, hearing my freshly purchased Newcastle crashing on the pavement behind me. Once inside, I asked the front desk clerk to phone the police and I was almost immediately talking to a well-tempered woman and telling her what had occurred. A police officer arrived very shortly afterward and told me that they had a certain number of suspects detained down the street. As he led me to his car, he mentioned that another gentleman who'd been mugged earlier in the evening would be accompanying us. Over the next hour and a half, I was to learn that: the suspects were armed, had robbed at least four people that night, and that the entire exchange that I had with them had been witnessed by two police officers. All of the "victims" positively identified the suspects and most of our personal belongings were found on their persons. After an initial assessment that our property would have to spend several days in police custody as evidence for the pending investigation, the police realized that they could take digital photos at the scene and return to us our stolen items. This especially pleased me since I'd agreed to pay a cell phone bill for a friend of mine and the unmailed envelope was in the bag, along with several items that I need when working at Dick's. All of my stuff was intact (I even went out to the street after I got off the phone with the cops and fished the new pack of cigarettes out of the glass fragments on the sidewalk where my beer met its untimely demise), the suspects were apprehended and will go to jail for some time, and I was completely uninjured throughout the entire ordeal. I am a bit shaken up, which is to be expected as this is my first mugging. So, right now I'm drinking a bottle of wine and wondering if I'll be up to going to work in two hours as my adrenaline has yet to surrender its grip upon my entire body and mind. For the most part, though, things are well. I have all of my stuff, I'll figure out something to do about the moisture in my room, and the rest of my life is going swimmingly. I just seem to have these occasional spurts of unpleasant, uncommon weirdness. It keeps me balanced, I suppose. 12:21 p.m. - 2006-09-27 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
||||||
|
||||||