(no subject)
I nearly had a heart attack a few minutes ago. No, not literally, but still, a near-miss figurative heart attack is a big deal.
So I'm standing outside, smoking a cigarette, and reading my new book. (Fluke, by Christopher Moore) It's dark outside, so I'm standing in glitch__'s parking lot, just a couple of yards from the sidewalk, because there's a street light there that provides a decent enough light source for me to read by, though I'm sure an optometrist would disagree with me on that point. A loud belch tears me away from the fabulous tropical location I'm reading about, and I look up just long enough to ascertain the source of the noise, which turns out to be a couple of guys across the street. Across the street is a good place for a couple of guys to be, as far as I'm concerned, so I go back to my book. Despite my best intentions to re-immerse myself in sun lotion and umbrella drinks, I remain acutely aware of them as they make their way closer to me, and then still closer as they cross the street. By this point I've already surmised that they are a pair of drunk, probably homeless older gentlemen, and I've decided that they post little to no threat to me, which is why I haven't abandoned my post in order to flee up the stairs to the relative safety of a locked door between me and the rest of the world.
You know how you can just tell when someone is about to approach you? Something in their body language, something in the way they breathe, something tips you off, and you know that they're trying to work up the nerve to talk to you. I couldn't always do this, and I know a lot of people never develop the skill, but I imagine that years of bus riding honed this skill in me, which has saved me from thousands of inane conversations with people who smelled funny.
I figure they're about to ask me for change or a spare cigarette, usually the homeless guys seem to respect that when a girl is outside alone at night smoking a cigarette and reading a novel, it's not a good time to ask her for money, but this is certainly an area of town where the practice of panhandling is not uncommon, so I decide what tack I should go with should my pose of absolute concentration fail to dissuade them from their mission, generally my decisions to give or withhold cigarettes and change depend on either my relative wealth at any given moment, or my perceived threat level, but while I was still fairly certain that these guys were perfectly harmless, the distance between us was getting increasingly smaller, and if it came down to it, I was fairly certain that I couldn't move fast enough to get the downstairs door to lock behind me before they could be pushing it open, so I decided that I'd just go ahead and give them whatever they asked for, and hope they moved along quickly. I'm just getting ready to breathe a sigh of relief as they change course, and instead of continuing into the parking lot, stay on the sidewalk, but then they stop, and one of them says "excluse me Miss."
"Yeah?" I ask
"We don't want no trouba Miss..."
This gives me pause for a moment, it's the sort of line you hear in a bank robbery, after all, but better lighting and further inspection reveal that they're just 2 old drunk guys who are standing, (and swaying, just a touch) at a respectful distance.
"Me and my frund here are just down on ourses luck, see, we're not gonna hurtcha..."
At this point I'm really just thinking to myself, "come on, Mr. Drunkypants, tell me what you want, so I can give it to you, and you can go away, and I can go back to my book..."
"Look, both hands up, I'm serious."
Which was when I nearly had the heart attack. His words registered just a half a second faster than his actions did, and in that half a second my heart skipped a beat, I got a ball in my stomach, and my mind raced with options, I probably couldn't get the downstairs door locked behind me in time, but I'm sure I could outrun them up the stairs. Do they have a gun? You only tell people to put their hands up when you have a gun, right? Should I put my hands up? Could I take them in a fight? If I screamed, would the fratish boys next door come to my aid?
You see, perhaps he had mistaken my look of impatience for one of fear, because as he's saying this, he's actually raising his arms. My original assessment was correct, though they wanted both change and cigarettes, which is a little impolite when you've just taken 4 years off a girls life. I gave them about a buck fifty, and two cigarettes.