Neil and I went on a little walk the other night. We weren't doing anything particularly interesting or unusual when a large truckish SUV-type-thing drove up, at a slightly faster-than-usual speed, and parked in a space near where we stood. Now, even though Neil and I weren't doing anything wrong, and even though I've got a million and a half excuses if we HAD been doing something wrong, I got kind of nervous about the truck. So did Neil. We gave each other a glance, and then stopped in the shadows of a dumpster to watch the driver get out.
So, this guy gets out. He's maybe my age, give or take, and I didn't see much of him because Neil was obscuring my view. But I did see that he was moving quite rapidly. And that he was either VERY fucked up, or had some kind of a hip deformity.
I whispered to Neil, as quietly as I could: "Is that dude REALLY fucked up, or did he have a hip deformity?"
Neil frowned, thinking. "I don't know," he said. He moved out of the shadow a little bit, and we both watched as the guy walked up to an apartment.
...And didn't knock.
...And appeared, at least from where I was standing, to be attempting to look in the windows.
...And stood there, kind of wavering from foot to foot. Dude's body language was unmistakably weird at this point. Obviously, this wasn't a hip deformity. He was kind of swaying a little bit, but there was also something about his profile that looked really very threatening. I'm not a hundred percent sure what it was. Maybe I saw him balling up his fists. Maybe it was just his stance. But dude was obviously up to something menacing. At any moment, I expected him to strongarm the door. Actually, it kind of looked, from where I stood, like dude was contemplating doing just that.
But then he moved away from the front of the apartment, and stalked off around to the back of the building.
"This is trouble, isn't it?" I asked Neil. If anybody knows trouble, it's Neil.
"Um, YEAH," replied Neil.
"Let's go see what he's doing..." But Neil was already following, slowly, across the lot after the guy. I followed too, but changed my mind and sneaked back toward the truckish-thing. This was trouble. I didn't know what kind, but I knew something was up. And, when there's trouble, the guy who gets the license plate number always gets top billing when the bad guy gets caught. I could see part of it, but most of it was obscured by bushes. And I didn't dare get any closer, because all of a sudden Neil decided to give up being sneaky.
"May I HELP you?" he asked the dude.
"Uh... uh... I'm here looking for a friend," said the dude.
Neil said something to the effect of: "I see... I just thought it was kinda strange to see somebody go around back of the building to look for their friend..."
"Well, I was just seeing if my friend is home," said the kid. Yeah, he was probably about my age. I didn't bother looking very closely at him. Neil would get that description. I was listening to his words. "I didn't wanna knock if my friend was asleep."
"I don't know anybody in that building," said Neil. What THAT had to do with anything, I have no idea. But the kid was getting more and more edgy. And it kind of appeared like he'd sobered up a little bit, the way people do when they're forced to look like they're not drunk and doing something fucked up.
"Well, I do," said the kid. Now he sounded half defensive, and half terrified. For the first time, he gave me a solid glance, and that seemed to worry him even more.
Now, granted, if I were going to visit a friend in the middle of the night (and it was about one-thirty in the morning, give or take...), and two strange people walked up to me and asked what I was doing, I'd be nervous, too. But this dude was just TOO nervous. Furthermore, there was almost no way he hadn't seen us before Neil spoke to him. It wasn't like we'd jumped out at him from behind the bushes or something. We'd been standing smack in the center of the open lot for a good minute or so, openly making noise, before Neil had said anything. This wasn't the nervousness of somebody who'd been surprised. And besides, I can understand being kind of jittery around Neil, who almost always walks with an ass-kicking stride and who honestly sounds like he's a little Brooklyn thug-boy when provoked by something of a "trouble" nature. But this kid was scared of me, too. He wasn't scared that I'd kick his ass; for gahd's sake, I'm eight and a half months pregnant and was standing in the parking lot kind of twirling myself around like an air-headed hippie girl. He wasn't scared of getting his ass beat; he was scared that we'd seen something. That we knew something.
Neil let the kid go. Didn't give him a warning or anything, just something like, "yeah, take care," or something.
Uh-huh... SOMETHING was up.
"Shit, I was trying to get the dude's license number when you said something to him," I told Neil.
"I'm sorry... Did you get it?"
"A couple of letters. I dunno. It's okay. I just figure that if somebody gets robbed or raped or something tonight, I'd be able to give a better description."
"Oh, I'm not waiting for somebody to get robbed or raped," said Neil. "When we get back, I'm calling the police."
"Really?"
I couldn't decide if I was relieved or appalled. I trust cops only slightly more than I trust social workers. I trust social workers about as much as I would trust a fiending meth-head to take care of a thousand-dollar bank account. Besides, what if the weird feeling I'd gotten wasn't really anything? I mean, shit, you don't call the cops on somebody for being creepy.
But we cut our walk short, and Neil made a grab for the telephone.
I do not like cops.
I like calling cops for things that obviously require cop-assistance. I called them once when I saw a lady smash her car into a light pole. I called them another time when I saw a wreck that had just happened on Interstate 5. Once, I was with Neil when he called because we heard what sounded like some guy beating the ever-loving shit out of some woman in a parking lot. (As a matter of fact, I'd bet next month's rent that that's exactly what it was; some dude beating some woman... This was NOT the sound of a kinky couple in a backseat...) I like calling the cops for things like that. When there's either a clear emergency -- somebody's pretty obviously injured by the looks of things -- or when there's pretty clearly a bad guy doing something bad.
But generally, I'm afraid to interfere.
I mean, what if I see somebody looking all sneaky, and I call the cops, and it turns out the "bad guy" is a dumpster diver who happens to have a weed pipe in his pocket? Well, then I'd be responsible for the arrest of somebody who wasn't doing ANYBODY a bit of harm. I would hate myself for it.
Part of this is a general distrust of law enforcement officers, and skepticism about a number of laws that are, in my eyes, pretty damned stupid.
Most of it, though, comes from being berated, for nearly a year and a half, for being a stupid, hysterical, hormonal cuntrag when I called the police on my ex. He contended that one should solve one's problems for him or herself. In other words, if a very small person is cowering in a corner while a very large and strong person is threatening to kill her, she should magically be able to intuit the exact amount of danger she is in, magically know that the other individual won't actually harm her, and solve the dilemma by calmly telling the other individual to calm down. If said large individual is blacked-out drunk, and chases her down the hallway, all the MORE reason not to call the police, because the individual is not rational at the time. And a person who isn't capable of rational thought obviously isn't capable of harming somebody. Right?
Yeah, REAL fucking good logic. But it got burned into my brain that if I EVER called the cops, for anything, it had better have a fucking GOOD reason. Somebody had better be dead, dying, or pretty fucking close to one of the above. Otherwise, I was just being a tattle-tale, a coward, a hysterical little cuntrag. Real men don't call the cops, see. Real men, if they saw some lady getting the shit kicked out of her in a parking lot, would solve the problem with their fists, not a telephone. Presumably only stupid, cowardly, histrionic women call the police for any reason other than imminent death.
Now, most of me knows, logically speaking, when to call the cops... That is, when there's a bad situation going on and I can't fix it alone or with the help of whomever is around me. And I know what a bad situation is. A bad situation is when somebody's in danger. I know not to call the cops for dumpster divers and potheads. Hell, for a year I lived a few doors down from a drug dealer (crack, I think, but who knows...), and never called the cops on that dude. I CAN differentiate between asking for help and being hysterical.
But when one is told -- at least one or twice a week -- that one is a stupid, histrionic bitch who is responsible for the utter ruin of a perfectly happy life, one tends to question even things like calling the cops when somebody is clearly getting the shit kicked out of her. I underwent a sort of brainwashing in that department. I was taunted, teased, humiliated, forced into public apologies, and physically hurt when I dared to say I'd have done the same thing over again if I had to relive it. And so when, once again, my life and the life of my child were threatened, I didn't call the cops. Why? Because after a year and a half of being outright HATED for the first time, I couldn't bring myself to call again.
I would not have called the cops on the kid sneaking around the damned apartment building. I would have sat there listening to the sound of a door breaking in. I would have watched him shatter a window. I would have given that kid every benefit of the doubt -- "my friend said it was okay to break in..." -- and I wouldn't have called the cops unless I heard screams.
Because now I've been trained not to be "histrionic" and "overreact."
I watched as Neil dialed. He gave a description of the kid and told the dispatcher that the kid was sneaking around peeking into windows and seemed suspicious. He also mentioned that the kid was drunk enough so that, several feet away, Neil could smell his breath.
The cops called back a couple of minutes later for more specific directions to the location where we'd seen the kid.
And then Neil and I never found out what happened.
"What kind of trouble do you think that kid was up to?" I asked Neil.
Neil said he'd thought up two possibilities. One, the kid was going to rob the place. Or two, the kid was at his buddy's house trying to see if the buddy was schtupping the kid's girlfriend. (Gahd, it's been years since I heard the word "schtupping"...)
"Hm..." I said.
"What do you think?"
Well, I'd come up with two entirely different scenarios. "Okay, first, MAYBE the kid was telling the truth. He was there to see a buddy. He didn't want to knock on the door and wake up his friend if the friend was sleeping. So, he checked in the windows to see if he could see anybody. He was nervous because you scared him. Were you wearing the Yankees hat?" (People seem to have great fear of Neil when he dares to wear a New York hat in Mariners' country...)
Neil said he had been wearing the Yankees hat. But he shook his head at my scenario. I went on.
"Or two... he was there to start shit with somebody. Maybe there was a barfight or something. Dude came up here to see his buddy, yeah, only he's REALLY pissed at his buddy, and that was why he stood there on the porch, kinda hesitating. He was debating about whether or not he should really try to kick the guy's ass, or whether he's going to get into trouble for it, or what exactly he ought to do, or something..."
And then I thought.
This was what I knew:
1.) The kid had driven up in a hurry, indicating two things. One, that he knew the area well enough to know where he was going, and to know exactly which apartment he was heading for. And two, that he was maybe kind of pissed off.
2.) The kid was drunk. Like, really blatantly.
3.) The kid LOOKED pissed off, and did look like he was considering breaking in.
4.) The kid peered in the front windows and then went around back to peer in the back windows. Only... the back windows don't go to a bedroom. The back windows of those apartments lead to bathrooms. Now, if the kid knew exactly where his acquaintance lived, even being as drunk as he was, he had surely been INSIDE the apartment, right? And so, hence, he would obviously know that by looking into the back window, he could only hope to get a glance of either a dark room, or his friend taking a whiz...
It was starting to make sense. "He really was going to break in, wasn't he?" I asked Neil. Neil nodded. And as I said, if anybody knows trouble when he sees it, it's Neil.
Neil said as much. He said you didn't spend such a good portion of your life making trouble without learning to recognize it.
"Yeah, but... you don't make THAT kind of trouble."
"No, I don't."
I thought some more. The scenario was becoming more and more clear.
The kid was pissed at somebody he knew. Somebody he knew fairly well -- a friend, or former friend, or something similar. The kid was drunk. The kid was contemplating breaking in, when he was accosted by Neil and myself. He probably wasn't thinking of breaking in to steal things. You don't get sloppy drunk and race around in your truck all pissed-off-like if you're just planning on taking your buddy's computer or something. He was going to break in, and he was either going to trash the place, or try to hurt somebody.
I got a chill. There was something else.
"It's a girlfriend," I said to Neil. "The person who lives in that apartment isn't just a friend, it's a girlfriend or an ex-girlfriend, or something." Neil regarded me quizzically. I thought about it. And it struck me... The kid had never once used a gender-specific pronoun. That means different things in different contexts, but it almost always means that the speaker is trying to hide something. For example, if somebody's talking to you about a date they've got, and keeps referring to the date as "my date" instead of "him" or "her," it means that, most likely, the person talking to you is trying not to let you know that he or she is actually gay and the "date" was actually a person of the same gender. Generally, people aren't aware enough to realize that, the more ambiguous they are, the more it stands out. This guy didn't say, "I didn't want to wake him up," but "I didn't want to wake MY FRIEND up."
It dawned on me... Drunk dude, pissed off at his girlfriend, driving fast and staggering angrily toward her place, peeking in the windows, looking at the bathroom windows to see how easy it would be to break in...
It dawned on me... This is what happened to me a couple of years ago... My then-boyfriend got staggering-around, hip-deformity drunk, got inexplicably pissed off at me, drove all the way to my place, talked my neighbors into letting him into the building, and then freaked out on me and threatened to kill me.
I was very, very quiet for a couple of minutes.
I thought about Neil calling the police on the weird kid in the parking lot.
And I thought one last time, "what if he was just doing something weird but harmless...?"
But he wasn't. I knew from the instant I saw the truck drive up that something was wrong with the situation. There was a bad vibe in the air. I wasn't just projecting my own past situation onto this one; there WAS something wrong, and I'd still bet a months' rent that my scenario was pretty damned close. There was just something wrong, something fundamentally BAD about the whole thing.
I said to Neil: "Thank you for calling the police."
I'm not sure he understood, exactly.
I couldn't really explain.
Nobody gave a damn when my ex went freaking psycho. Nobody came to my apartment to see if I was okay. Nobody helped me out. Nobody even stopped to wonder, even when the screaming became so loud that the other side of the building could hear it through closed windows. Just... nobody gave a damn. And when *I* called the police, everybody just sort of shrugged, as if it weren't really so bad, as if it were just my way of trying to end the relationship or something... Nobody cared. And if I HADN'T called the police that night, and if I'd actually been seriously hurt, nobody would have cared then, either.
I think I was thanking Neil for recognizing an injustice in the making, and stopping it before it could happen.
I think I was thanking him for giving a shit when he really didn't have to.
Very few people really do.
I don't think I want to know what the hell was going on. Maybe curiosity will get the better of me and I'll read a police blotter somewhere to see if they actually arrested the dude, or if anything really happened... But most of me doesn't really want to know...
I'm tired. I'm going to bed.
Goodnight.
~Helena*