Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

How to begin, how to begin ... Well, let's get this out of the way: I was attacked again. But it wasn't a hate-crime this time. Rather, it was a stupidity-crime.

Last night's episode is brought to you by our sponsor, adrenaline, Home Invasion brand ...

Knowing how protective most of my friends feel, I'd better skip ahead to the results: I lost the cross my cousin gave me, my utility thumbnail, and a wee smidgen of skin even smaller than the one the would-be robber lost; a stack of disk drives got knocked to the floor and I have no idea yet whether any were damaged; and a Baltimore police officer probably started most of her conversations with, "Hey, wait'll you hear this one..." when her shift ended this morning. I'm angry, I'm a bit shaken (I do not pull a sword on somebody unless I'm scared), and I'm flabbergasted, but I'm basically unharmed (the utility thumbnail will grow back).

To set the scene: midnight -- I had just returned, exhausted, from grocery shopping on the way home from rehearsal, a bit annoyed at the parking shenanigans on my block (a bunch of orange barrels saying "no parking on this block, today ___, between 8AM and 4PM, with the day mysteriously changing, and blocking most of the parking spaces even when parking is still apparently permitted). I left the minivan half in the street with the flashers on, and started carrying groceries into the house, planning to move it to a parking space I could pull all the way into once I finished. A younger fellow wandered down the sidewalk, looking as though he were searching for an address. One one of my trips twixt house and van, I noticed that he changed direction. Coming out of the house for the next load, I found him standing at the bottom of my front steps.

I thought he was lost.

"Step aside," he said.

Now I thought he was confused.

"I think you're in the wrong place. This is my house."

"I know. Now get out of my way."

Now I was confused.

We went through a few more rounds of this, with him calmly insisting that I let him into my house and me calmly refusing and asking him if he was crazy. He said that if I would just do what he said, I wouldn't get hurt. He spoke as though I were the one being unreasonable. And every so often he'd ascend one more step to try to be more imposing, more threatening.

Unfortunately my cell phone was not within easy reach. And he was about my height, and about the build I had twenty years ago; it looked like probably a fair fight on straight physical terms, ignoring whatever skill advantage one of us might have. (I assume that the skill advantage goes to the other guy unless I know better for sure, as I know I'm not a good fighter.) Seeing no obvious physical advantage, I wondered whether his calm insistence that I should 'obviously' just give in to his demands meant that he had a handgun; but he never spoke of one.

He said, "I don't want to hurt you."

"Then there's an easy solution," I replied. "Simply don't hurt me, and then we'll both be happy."

But that wasn't enough to make him happy. He demanded money. "What? I don't have any money!"

"Of course you do. You have money inside the house."

"Dude, you picked the wrong neighbourhood if you expect people here to have money."

"No, I didn't. I used to live around here."

"I don't have any money. I have some groceries."

I don't want groceries. I know you have money."

He finally took a step too close and reached out to touch me. I stiff-armed him, then tried to fling him off the steps. Alas, I moved too slowly, and he was able to grab hold of me, so we both went down the steps and I got spun around and pinned against a parked car. We each had hold of the other, and I hooked a leg behind his knees to try to keep him at least a little off balance; no clear advantage to either of us. After a few more words, he pulled free and ran up the steps ahaid of me, into my house. I held back enough to be sure that he would have already gone past my sword, Letter Opener, tucked above the coat-hooks in the front hall.

I followed him in, and grabbed the sword. He turned, saw the sword before I could get it into position to swing (a bastard sword is really too long for indoor use), and grabbed the blade. Now we were wrestling over the sword, pretty much to a stalemate. So at this point I was pretty pissed off, as well as scared.

So what does he do? He resumes the argument over whether I have money, there in my front hallway. And starts looking at all the stuff I have stacked around there, asking what it was, and insisting that having all that stuff means I have money.

"No, man, I have a bunch of hand-me-doen stuff that friends gave me when it became obsolete. These are, like, old computers."

"Can I get any money for them?"

"They're old. I have them because other people didn't want them any more."

"Will they run Windows 2000?"

So I pointed him at the heaviest server there, a huge, rack-mount monster that I haven't installed yet because I need to clear a path to wheel a hand-truck over to the rack. I figured if he was going to try to carry something out, let it be the thing he couldn't carry. "That one. That's a computer. Under that cardboard box there."

"Where? What?"

So now he was trying to make sense of this thing that didn't look like what he thought computers looked like, asking me what he'd need to hook it up and how much he could get at a pawn shop for it, and he kind of lost track of the sword. And of me. I got around behind him, up a couple of steps on the stair, with the sword held in a much more useful position this time. Importantly, I now had him between me and the front door, so that if he moved away from me he'd be moving toward the exit. When he realized what I'd done, he still wanted to try to talk me into letting him take something he could pawn. He was still looking around trying to identify stuff that he apparently couldn't recognize.

At some point in all of this he started explaining that, "I'm not a bad guy, really." To which I reponded, "Good guys don't try to rob people!" He said something about how when you have a family to feed you do what you gotta do ... but earlier he'd said he didn't want my groceries, so somehow I doubt that was really his motive.

He grabbed a Konica SLR hanging from the coat-pegs, and said, "Is this camera worth anything?"

"It's old. Which one is that? Oh, I think that one's broken." (I think it's really my other Konica that has a problem, but absolute honesty was not, I think, called for here.) "The meter's busted."

"What's the meter?"

"It's what tells you how to set the controls."

"But I could still get something for it, right?"

"Maybe, but not enough to be worth the jail time."

"Oh, I ain't gonna get caught." He fiddled with the film-advance lever. "Is this how you make it take a picture?"

"No, that's how you advance the film."

"Film‽"

"Yeah, you know anybody who still uses film?"

"Oh man, I can't sell this." He hung it back on its peg. Then he noticed a guitar case (empty, though I'd forgotten that at the time). "What's this?"

"A guitar. You're not taking that. I need that to earn my grocery money."

"Oh, you're right, I can't take a man's livelihood from him." He picked up an empty alto recorder case, "What's this?"

"It's the case for a musical instrument, but it's empty."

He grabbed the camera again, and turned to leave. I advanced with the sword. "What, you're going to hit me with a sword as I'm leaving?"

"I think you need to give me back that camera and get the fuck out of my house."

"Aw, man, don't swear, you didn't have to start cursing, man. Don't do that."

"What, you force your way into my house and I'm not allowed to get angry enough to use cursewords‽"

And that, I think, was when he started asking me for a Band-Aid for the cut on his hand from when we were grappling over the sword. (He might have already asked earlier; I don't remember for sure. But if so, at this point he asked again.)

"You don't have a Band-Aid? You gotta have a Band-Aid upstairs!"

"Not for you!" Note that his wound was a wee nick slightly worse than a paper cut, bleeding slightly, but in a kind of annoying place: on the web between his thumb and index finger. (I got a slightly smaller cut just far enough up my thumb that I don't even notice it unless I look at it.)

The whole way out of the house he was asking me for a Band-Aid, asking what kind of horrible person would refuse someone a Band-Aid, asking for pity because he was hurt. (And that's the point at which, during my retelling of this to the police officer who showed up after I called 911, the oficer started having trouble not-laughing. Just one absurdity too many.)

When he left, I went and grabbed my phone to call 911, sword still in hand, and followed him a short distance in the hope that I could direct the police to him. Alas, he managed to get around a corner and out of my sight while I was talking to the 911 operator. A short time later, while I was getting the last of my groceries in from the van, police cars started going past -- as was later explained to me, they wanted to see whether they could spot him in the direction I'd said he was headed, before talking to me, just in case he was still where they could spot him.

So in the aftermath, I'm disappointed that someone would do this in my neighbourhood, angry that he forced his way into my house, annoyed at the dropped disk drives, upset about the missing cross, but essentially unharmed; and this makes the second time I've had to draw a sword on somebody. The utility thumbnail will grow back. I'll find out shortly whether the disk drives still work.

I'm going to go have another look for the cross in case it wound up on the sidewalk ir in the gutter when it got torn off my neck.