Robbery

On Monday night, it came time to take one of my every-other-day walks. Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was about to come on, but I left the TiVo to do its job and figured I'd catch the show when I got back. I meant to take the garbage out, but forgot; remembered just after leaving the apartment and almost turned back, to take those extra couple minutes to get it done, but didn't.

But the crucial decision was this one: on Sunday, I bought myself a new iPod, one of the new 80 gig models, because I'd been working hard and I deserved a present. Monday night, about to leave for my walk, I thought "Hey, I never take my iPod when I go for these walks, wouldn't it be fun to have music?" Even as I thought this, that little voice in the back of my head was shouting as loudly as it could, "There's a reason why you don't do that! Remember? Late at night? Why you don't--ah, hell, there he goes."

I have always prided myself on having good street awareness. I've done these late-night walks for years and years--when they took me through Boston's Combat Zone, I had no problems. When I walked down a pre-cleanup 42nd Street at 1:00 a.m. wearing a tuxedo, still no problem. (There was a pool of silence that moved with me as not-quite-seen people stopped and stared, but no one bothered me.) This sense of street awareness has everything to do with paying attention to what's going on around me--and being seen to be paying attention to what's going on around me. I'm very tall, I move fast, and my eyes look everywhere.

But the iPod, that alone changed my profile. Suddenly, I wasn't the tall guy with his eyes open, I was the shlub strolling down the street listening to his tunes. That's what the little voice in the back of my head was hollering about. I wish I'd listened to it. I wish I'd taken out the trash so that the timing of my night would have changed. I wish a lot of things. Instead, this happened:

The police believe that the two young men, both Latino but without noticeable accents, were driving by looking for easy marks. They spotted me, with the distinctive white wires from the iPod headphones trailing down. They took the next left, parked in an open space on Westgate right next to University High School, and started heading north on foot. I was heading west on Texas, and we reached the intersection at the same time. They gave a little, allowing me to pass in front of them, and at this point I had a tiny alarm bell ringing because something about them was a little off. I kept my eyes on them, and once they were behind me, I saw them turn, accelerate and separate.

Fight or flight. Here's another wish: I wish I'd picked flight, because it might have worked. Instead I turned toward them, and I was shouting an expletive and now so were they. But faster than I could blink, one of them was in front of me, one was behind me, and they both had knives. "Gimme what you got," they said, with a few curse words tacked on at the end. I didn't bother trying to fight anymore once I saw the knives, so I dropped the iPod to the ground and reached for my wallet. My fingers wouldn't grip it. "Hurry it up," they hollered, and a few more curses; and for emphasis, the guy in front of me put the knifeblade in my mouth. Finally I got a grip on the wallet, pulled it out, and in the one smart thing I did all night, instead of handing it to them I tossed it away from me.

The wallet landed on the sidewalk to my left, and by pure dumb luck that happened to be exactly the direction in which their car was waiting. They scooped up the wallet, left the iPod where it had fallen on my right, and as they ran away I had an utterly mad impulse to shout "Hey, what about the iPod?" Because after all, I only had $8 in my wallet and it just seemed idiotic not to take my day-old $350 iPod. But I said nothing, and instead reached for the cellphone in my pants pocket (nope, they didn't get that either). Even as they drove off I was already dialing 911.

And no, I didn't get a look at the license plate. The car was just far enough away, and they didn't turn on their lights till they were well down the block. I'm guessing these guys have done this a time or two before.

With the danger gone, I could start thinking again. While waiting for the police to arrive I called Marc Rosenbush and had him immediately starting canceling the Zenmovie debit and credit cards that were in my wallet (since we just had the party, I happened to have a lot of cards on me), so within ten minutes those cards were already dead. After filling out the police report (we did it at the site, instead of going to the station) I hurried home and started calling my personal credit card providers, canceling all of those cards. Within ninety minutes of the robbery, every card was canceled, the debit cards were useless, a fraud alert was out with all three credit agencies, and I knew for sure that there had been no activity on those cards before I canceled them.

The robbers, they got squat. Eight bucks. In exchange, if they weren't armed felons before, they are now.

If only all those cop-show cliches weren't so damn true. "It was dark," I found myself saying to the officer. "It all happened pretty fast, I didn't really get a good look at them." I've heard those lines a million times on TV, and always said to myself "Ah, but I'm a writer, I'm observant. If it ever happens to me, I will give a terrific description." Turns out, not so much. Because the knife as a weapon of intimidation is obvious; but its other function is to serve as a distraction. As soon as the knives appeared, they were all I could see. Where were the knives? What were they about to do? Why was one of them in my mouth? During all of that, I could spare no brainpower at all for what my assailants looked like. Consequently, my description to the police was probably no better than anyone's would have been. So much for my keen powers of observation.

Every once in a while I try to think of the Jean Valjean defense: maybe these guys live in poverty and they have no choice but to steal. Families to support and nothing has ever worked but crime. But then I immediately think this: pulling a knife on someone is simply beyond the pale. Whatever desperate motivations might lie behind their actions, pulling a knife, pulling two knives, makes all those motivations meaningless. They went way over the line, and if given the opportunity to testify against them, to send those two rat-bastards to jail, you can be damn sure I'll do it.

In the meantime, I revel in the fact that they got nothing of value. And then there's this, too: the iPod survived unharmed. Go figure.