Here’s how it went down

A friend dropped me off last night, and I make it my habit not to make my friends deal with the small maze of one-way streets that they have to deal with if they actu­al­ly turn on to my street. Instead he dropped me off in the bus stop on Mis­sion Street and I went around the cor­ner to my apart­ment entrance.

Com­ing up my to the door, there was a guy, lati­no, with fucked up hair in every direc­tion, all in bag­gy clothes, cross­ing the street toward me. He asked me some­thing and I said, «what?»

«Are you fron­tin’ me?»

«No, what do you want?» I thought of the time it would take to get me inside the gate, in which time I’d have to have my back to the guy. I did­n’t like those odds, so I turned back.

Two more behind me. OK, I real­ly did­n’t like those odds. The first guy rushed me and I tried to go past him. He land­ed a cou­ple of hits on me. I remem­ber think­ing, «OK, he can’t punch for shit. If I can just get across the street to where there are peo­ple, I could be OK.»

I tried to hit a cou­ple of them, but they took me down and spent a lit­tle time kick­ing me around on the pave­ment, right on the cor­ner under my liv­ing room win­dow. I was wear­ing a heavy coat, which must have padded the blows to my body, because I’m pret­ty well unharmed except for the shin­er and a skinned knee, which I’m sure is from the pave­ment. My nose got blood­ied but not bro­ken, but I remem­ber look­ing down at the pave­ment an real­iz­ing that that was my blood there.

I was on the ground and one of the guys said, «give it up, what you got?» I think I said some­thing like, «Fuck you. What do you want?» I remem­ber think­ing, «take what you want, but if you think I’m going to help you steal from me, wrong.» And no, that’s not what I said. I was too busy being kicked on the ground and bleed­ing to be a ter­ri­bly coop­er­a­tive victim.

There were hands on me pat­ting me down, and I felt hands in my back pock­ets. I heard one ask anoth­er about my wal­let. I did­n’t vol­un­teer the infor­ma­tion that it was in my front pock­et. I did­n’t vol­un­teer any infor­ma­tion about any of the oth­er stuff I was car­ry­ing. The guys start­ed away, and I felt a tug at my shoul­der bag. I start­ed to get up, pulling the strap back with the weight of my body, and he gave up and walked off.

The own­ers of the liquor store across the street, who have seen me near­ly every day for the last two years, to whom I pay inflat­ed prices for my Diet Cokes and frozen meals, and who always greet me as «my friend!» and some­times as «San Fran­cis­co!» because of my tat­too, closed and locked the doors when they saw me get­ting beat up and did­n’t both­er call­ing the cops.

I guess I can’t blame them for lock­ing up at the first sign of trou­ble, but a call to the gend’armes would have been appre­ci­at­ed. A cop car drove by about two min­utes after the inci­dent and I failed to effec­tive­ly flag it down. A call made ear­li­er would have got­ten the cops to me about 30 min­utes soon­er than the actu­al arrival time.

OK, so these ass­holes did­n’t real­ly do a very good job of mug­ging me. They gave up with­out actu­al­ly tak­ing any­thing. They want­ed my wal­let but when it was­n’t in one of my back pock­ets or my coat pock­ets, they gave up, miss­ing out on the trea­sure trove of valu­ables I had with me:

• Polar heartrate mon­i­tor watch
• 40GB iPod
• Palm Tung­sten T and a keyboard
• Nokia 6310i cell­phone and blue­tooth wire­less headset
• Brand new $180 Ray-Ban sunglasses

I can’t real­ly know, but I think that even as inef­fec­tive­ly as I tried to fight back, I made myself more trou­ble than I was worth. With­out a wal­let (and if they’d got­ten my wal­let, I would have lost the four dol­lars in cash I was car­ry­ing and would’ve had to can­cel my deb­it card and get a new dri­vers license) pre­sent­ing itself, I was not worth spend­ing time on. I think they weren’t real­ly pre­pared to actu­al­ly fight, think­ing that a cou­ple of punch­es would intim­i­date me and that I’d start hand­ing things out. Which might have been smarter if I had, but that’s not how I’m wired.

Maybe it’s time I went back to those Aiki­do classes.

…or maybe a mar­tial art that involves break­ing peo­ple’s bones a lit­tle more.

In the end, I’m OK. A lit­tle shak­en up and all, but noth­ing broken.