One Extra Hour... for Drama!
I was awoken in the middle of the night last night to male voices yelling. I stumbled in the dark to the window to see what was going on. It was about 3:30am (4:30am by my watch, which I'd failed to set back before falling asleep). Five youths (late teens, early twenties) were staggering around in the street and on the sidewalk in front of the house. The drunkest kids were fighting and falling over while the more sober kids were trying to hold them back/hold them up. At one point they charged up onto my porch, yelling, pushing and shoving, falling all over themselves. I couldn't see what was happening once they did that but they did kinda scare the crap out of me being literally up at my front door (the way they were going it was easy to imagine them accidentally crashing through the windows into my living room) so I called the police. They told me they'd send someone as soon as they could.
I watched these boys as they tried to get control of their group. There was a lot of pushing and shoving. At some point one of the boys ended up laying in the middle of the street right at the corner. No one driving around the corner would have been able to see him there before they hit him. His friends got him up and they all congregated in the kiddie park for a while with one particularly aggressive boy yelling and cursing and threatening, hitting the boys who were worst off to try to keep them from passing out. One terribly bad off kid grabbed a stick and was acting like he might have been intending to hit someone with it but it was a tiny stick and he was so drunk he could barely stand. It was no real threat but the super-aggressive kid got very aggressive with him, pushed him down to the ground hard (where he may have hit his head on the concrete... if he didn't it was a miracle of inches) and lay there unconscious while the other kid beat and kicked him. Hard. I could hear the thud of the blows from my house.
I watched, seriously concerned that someone was going to wind up injured or dead instead of just drunk. I watched them behaving this way for more than half an hour, until they roused the drunkest of them to walk and staggered up the street and out of sight.
Five minutes later the phone rang. The police were calling, wanting to know if they boys were still here. I told them the direction they'd staggered off in.
I found it hard to fall back asleep for a few hours after that. It was not how I'd anticipated spending my extra hour this weekend.
I watched these boys as they tried to get control of their group. There was a lot of pushing and shoving. At some point one of the boys ended up laying in the middle of the street right at the corner. No one driving around the corner would have been able to see him there before they hit him. His friends got him up and they all congregated in the kiddie park for a while with one particularly aggressive boy yelling and cursing and threatening, hitting the boys who were worst off to try to keep them from passing out. One terribly bad off kid grabbed a stick and was acting like he might have been intending to hit someone with it but it was a tiny stick and he was so drunk he could barely stand. It was no real threat but the super-aggressive kid got very aggressive with him, pushed him down to the ground hard (where he may have hit his head on the concrete... if he didn't it was a miracle of inches) and lay there unconscious while the other kid beat and kicked him. Hard. I could hear the thud of the blows from my house.
I watched, seriously concerned that someone was going to wind up injured or dead instead of just drunk. I watched them behaving this way for more than half an hour, until they roused the drunkest of them to walk and staggered up the street and out of sight.
Five minutes later the phone rang. The police were calling, wanting to know if they boys were still here. I told them the direction they'd staggered off in.
I found it hard to fall back asleep for a few hours after that. It was not how I'd anticipated spending my extra hour this weekend.