Will Spins A Yarn
Here's a repost from the comments section. Will's recounting of our famed muggling:
OK, may as well elucidate this for y'all. Here's how it went down.Jamie Freedman was our hostess in D.C., and she lives right off of 14th just past Florida Ave. This is the U St. metro stop on the green line, for those of you that know the district. This area, the Adams-Morgan neighborhood, formerly a pretty uniform ghetto, is currently experiencing a very incremental urban renewal which is just now reaching Jamie's street. So in spite of the fact that one can walk four blocks from her house and be surrounded by overpriced boutiques, trendy wi-fi-ready coffee houses, and diners replete with velvet ropes (no joke), once can also walk in the other direction and find oneself planted firmly in slum territory. Her building is right on the threshold. Such is the nature of the gentrification process.
So as you may have already guessed, Jamie's metro stop, the U St. stop, is located on the slummy side of this divide. The three of us, Cary, Greg and I, had gone to a late movie (Garden State) in Georgetown, which is a long way from Adams-Morgan and which let out at around 1:00 AM. We had a perfectly safe walk down to Foggy Bottom (covering a relatively crime-free area around GWU), waited 15 minutes for the train, and jumped on. We got to U St. just before 2:00. Disembarking, we couldn't quite remember how to get back to Jamie's, and, foolishly, we were quite public about this. As if being three semi-affluent white tourist boys in a poor, 90% black neighborhood at 2 AM was not enough to make us a clear target for street crime, we were almost flaunting our vulnerability by making a spectacle of being lost (loudly: "is this the right way?" "I could have sworn we made a left coming from her house."). Real dumb.
So we slowly wended our way back to her street, Belmont, and walked about a quarter of the way up the block to her building. Reaching the gate, Cary mentioned he wanted to walk up a block to where our van was parked and quickly check on our gear. He made it clear he intended to do this with or without Greg and myself, and naturally, we agreed to join him. In the interest of safety, we've made a habit on this tour of walking together through unfamiliar cities at night when one of us has had an errand to run. We just had never before this night actually been rewarded for our streetwisdom with an actual life-threatening incident.
So we get about a hundred feet farther up the block, and I hear footsteps approaching behind us. Someone's moving fast. Then I hear "Lay down!" For a split-second, I had no idea what was happening. Being ordered to lay down by a very insistent-sounding stranger in the middle of the night is unusual, borderline surreal. The thought occured to me for a second that we were in danger, but I had falsely identified the source; I had imagined there was a drive-by or some such urban horror on the way, and this kindly local was directing us to safety. One second later he barked, "Lay the fuck down!," and that's when it dawned on me: we were in danger, and the danger was him."
Empty your pockets right now. Gimme everything you got. I will blow your head off. I want every fucking dime. If I find one penny on any one of you motherfuckers, you're all gonna die. I will kill every one of you." Greg and I both, after the fact, described experiencing the same kind of adrenaline-induced tunnelvision during all of this. This is distinct from fear; the fear didn't really catch up with me until long afterwards. In the moment, I was intently focused on giving the man with the gun what he wanted. I made it a point not to look at his face, although I did catch a glimpse of what was unmistakably a semiautomatic pistol. I rather calmly pulled out my wallet, hauled out all my bills, and slapped them into his hand. Then I divested my left pocket of the five dollars in quarters I was carrying from the metrocard machine, throwing them onto the pavement, and reassuming my prone position. Greg and Cary I could only assume were acting similarly in accord with the mugger's wishes, because I didn't hear any shots fired. He collected our money, and then ordered Greg and me on our feet and laid us down next to Cary. Then we got his concluding remarks: "I'm hungry, man. I need this more than you do. Count to fifty. If one of y'all moves before fifty, I'ma bust ten shots back here." "Fifty, OK," we agreed, hastily. "No, make it sixty." "OK, sixty, no problem." "Don't one of y'all move before sixty. It's not worth dying over."
And then he took off. We counted to sixty. Cary continued past sixty, in part for comic effect. We hung out on the pavement for about another minute. Greg told us that he hadn't had any cash on him, and he somehow had the presence of mind to just hand the mugger his entire wallet. That was pretty smart.
We started the walk back to Jamie's, pretty shaken up. It slowly started becoming clear to me how close we had come to dying. What if the mugger had been crazy and had killed us anyway? It's pretty nihilistic, but I'd be lying if I said it hadn't occured to me. What if he had never held a gun before and had no control over the firing mechanism? I was just starting to let these post-traumatic thoughts in when a cop car rolled up. Half-heartedly, we flagged them down, informed them of our situation, and were quickly, to our shock, herded into the backseat and asked for a description while the car revved up to pursue him. I understood their position (the longer you wait, the less chance you have), but we were deeply freaked out and urged them to take us home. They obliged. I don't suspect he'll be caught.
OK, may as well elucidate this for y'all. Here's how it went down.Jamie Freedman was our hostess in D.C., and she lives right off of 14th just past Florida Ave. This is the U St. metro stop on the green line, for those of you that know the district. This area, the Adams-Morgan neighborhood, formerly a pretty uniform ghetto, is currently experiencing a very incremental urban renewal which is just now reaching Jamie's street. So in spite of the fact that one can walk four blocks from her house and be surrounded by overpriced boutiques, trendy wi-fi-ready coffee houses, and diners replete with velvet ropes (no joke), once can also walk in the other direction and find oneself planted firmly in slum territory. Her building is right on the threshold. Such is the nature of the gentrification process.
So as you may have already guessed, Jamie's metro stop, the U St. stop, is located on the slummy side of this divide. The three of us, Cary, Greg and I, had gone to a late movie (Garden State) in Georgetown, which is a long way from Adams-Morgan and which let out at around 1:00 AM. We had a perfectly safe walk down to Foggy Bottom (covering a relatively crime-free area around GWU), waited 15 minutes for the train, and jumped on. We got to U St. just before 2:00. Disembarking, we couldn't quite remember how to get back to Jamie's, and, foolishly, we were quite public about this. As if being three semi-affluent white tourist boys in a poor, 90% black neighborhood at 2 AM was not enough to make us a clear target for street crime, we were almost flaunting our vulnerability by making a spectacle of being lost (loudly: "is this the right way?" "I could have sworn we made a left coming from her house."). Real dumb.
So we slowly wended our way back to her street, Belmont, and walked about a quarter of the way up the block to her building. Reaching the gate, Cary mentioned he wanted to walk up a block to where our van was parked and quickly check on our gear. He made it clear he intended to do this with or without Greg and myself, and naturally, we agreed to join him. In the interest of safety, we've made a habit on this tour of walking together through unfamiliar cities at night when one of us has had an errand to run. We just had never before this night actually been rewarded for our streetwisdom with an actual life-threatening incident.
So we get about a hundred feet farther up the block, and I hear footsteps approaching behind us. Someone's moving fast. Then I hear "Lay down!" For a split-second, I had no idea what was happening. Being ordered to lay down by a very insistent-sounding stranger in the middle of the night is unusual, borderline surreal. The thought occured to me for a second that we were in danger, but I had falsely identified the source; I had imagined there was a drive-by or some such urban horror on the way, and this kindly local was directing us to safety. One second later he barked, "Lay the fuck down!," and that's when it dawned on me: we were in danger, and the danger was him."
Empty your pockets right now. Gimme everything you got. I will blow your head off. I want every fucking dime. If I find one penny on any one of you motherfuckers, you're all gonna die. I will kill every one of you." Greg and I both, after the fact, described experiencing the same kind of adrenaline-induced tunnelvision during all of this. This is distinct from fear; the fear didn't really catch up with me until long afterwards. In the moment, I was intently focused on giving the man with the gun what he wanted. I made it a point not to look at his face, although I did catch a glimpse of what was unmistakably a semiautomatic pistol. I rather calmly pulled out my wallet, hauled out all my bills, and slapped them into his hand. Then I divested my left pocket of the five dollars in quarters I was carrying from the metrocard machine, throwing them onto the pavement, and reassuming my prone position. Greg and Cary I could only assume were acting similarly in accord with the mugger's wishes, because I didn't hear any shots fired. He collected our money, and then ordered Greg and me on our feet and laid us down next to Cary. Then we got his concluding remarks: "I'm hungry, man. I need this more than you do. Count to fifty. If one of y'all moves before fifty, I'ma bust ten shots back here." "Fifty, OK," we agreed, hastily. "No, make it sixty." "OK, sixty, no problem." "Don't one of y'all move before sixty. It's not worth dying over."
And then he took off. We counted to sixty. Cary continued past sixty, in part for comic effect. We hung out on the pavement for about another minute. Greg told us that he hadn't had any cash on him, and he somehow had the presence of mind to just hand the mugger his entire wallet. That was pretty smart.
We started the walk back to Jamie's, pretty shaken up. It slowly started becoming clear to me how close we had come to dying. What if the mugger had been crazy and had killed us anyway? It's pretty nihilistic, but I'd be lying if I said it hadn't occured to me. What if he had never held a gun before and had no control over the firing mechanism? I was just starting to let these post-traumatic thoughts in when a cop car rolled up. Half-heartedly, we flagged them down, informed them of our situation, and were quickly, to our shock, herded into the backseat and asked for a description while the car revved up to pursue him. I understood their position (the longer you wait, the less chance you have), but we were deeply freaked out and urged them to take us home. They obliged. I don't suspect he'll be caught.
1 Comments:
Whoa. Glad you guys are all right.
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