No big deal

OK, so there are some disadvantages to living in the inner city. One thing I do not like is getting harassed on the street. This doesn’t happen to me every day, but once every month or two, something odd occurs…

1. Woman approaches on foot. “Excuse me,” she says, “let me walk with you a minute.” She then launches into a long story about how that’s her car right over there, the brown one, the station wagon, and she came out and saw she was out of gas, and it wouldn’t start, and she called the police because she figured that seeing as how she was a county employee they would give her a bus pass to get back to Torrance, but they wouldn’t, the jerks, and… Eventually it registered in my brain that this was an attempted con in progress, and I interrupted with, “Oh, money? Oh no, I don’t have any money” (trying hard to put on my best innocent face, since I was actually carrying a $2500 laptop in my backpack). She stomped away angrily, got into the car, started it up just fine, and drove off.
2. As I was about to cross the street to get to my house, I noticed a man on a riding toward me on a bike. He was riding slowly and weaving a bit, which I thought was suspicious. I sped up, crossed against the light, and immediately turned right away from the biker. He stopped, looked to see where I was, saw that I had turned, and started to make a U-turn to come back in my direction. I ran towards my house and let myself in very quickly.
3. Last week, while walking into the parking lot of the grocery store, a man was standing outside on the sidewalk. “Hey sweetie, what’s your name?” he asked me, maneuvering himself into my walking path. I smiled faintly and tried to ignore him. “What’s your name?” he repeated, and then, when I had successfully gotten past him, called out “what’s the matter. Haven’t you ever had a black man?” As it happened, there was a policeman right in front of the grocery store, standing in front of a man who appeared to be passed out on the lawn. I told him there was a guy over in the corner of the parking lot who was giving me a hard time, and repeated the jist of the conversation. “OK, so just verbal?” asked the policeman. “Uh, yeah,” I said. “No big deal. Just thought I’d let you know.”

I thought about that a lot later– “no big deal.” What did I mean? Was I proud of myself that day, that unlike incident #2, I didn’t run away, but kept walking calmly while smiling? Was I trying to be oh-so-deferential to the policeman, as in, “yeah, I know you have, like, murders, to deal with, plus that drunk guy on the lawn, so maybe dealing with something that probably does not even qualify as a crime (since, unfortunately, I have reason to know the definition of criminal harassment, at least in the state of Massachusetts, and this is not it) might not be at the top of your priority list”? Or “hey, I’m used to living in a city and am not some naive suburban kid who freaks out the first time they get talked to by a drugged/drunken stranger, even though I might have been 15 years ago, because I am oh so much older and wiser now, and besides, took a very practical, street-fighting form of jiu jitsu for a year and a half so could punch someone if I had to?”

I think all of those things were probably going through my mind.

Even if this stuff is a “normal” feature of life in the city, it still stinks when it happens. “No big deal” doesn’t really capture that feeling.