Friday, September 14, 2012

Crime Tip for the Kingsport Police

Recently I stayed rather late at a friend's house in Kingsport, Tennessee, and so found myself walking home around 10 p.m. I don't particularly recommend this choice to other residents of Gate City, because for most of us it means getting home too late to get enough sleep, but in any case I made it.

So I walked to the top of the hill on the Tennessee side of Lynn Garden Drive, past the Higher Ground Baptist Church, and as I passed the storage barn two young men--the voices sounded like teenagers', and the bodies looked short and thin--emerged from the bushes above the storage barn. Instead of going directly to a car parked beside the road, they followed me away from the parked cars. One of them called out, "Have you got cigarettes?"

I don't have cigarettes. I wouldn't sell cigarettes if I owned a convenience store, which I don't. I didn't turn around to share that information with these guys, because I didn't want anyone to think I was talking to young men who stand around smoking on street corners. I am related to about half of Gate City. My relatives aren't obligated to be my chauffeurs, but usually, in the course of a nine-mile walk, someone or other will share a car for at least part of the way.

The guys followed me for one full city block. I decided to cross the street at the intersection above the Carters Valley Road, so that, in case anyone who knew me was driving to Gate City at that hour, the person would feel free to offer me a lift without thinking s/he had to make room for the two guys as well. But I was also starting to feel concerned about these fellows' intentions.

It's rare for young men to feel much personal interest in women old enough to be their mother, which I am. Sometimes young men tell me I don't look my age...but when young men are trying to approach women they believe to be their own age, for personal reasons, they don't do it in teams.

It's not so rare for drug addicts to mug, rob, or granny-bash in teams. And there is a drug treatment clinic on that section of Lynn Garden Drive.

So I waited for an eighteen-wheeler to pass before crossing the street, and as I stepped off the sidewalk a smaller truck swung around and, sure enough, a relative stopped to offer me a lift. This is an older relative, a friend of my father's. And all the way home I had to put up with a kind of I-told-you-so attitude, the tolerance for hatecrimes against women that was so endemic to their generation, and so annoying. Women, even old grey-haired grandmas, are just helpless rape bait who shouldn't endanger ourselves by using the public streets, although women pay taxes to maintain those streets, etc., etc., etc.

Or maybe this older relative's thinking was that, since he's somewhere in the neighborhood of eighty years old, he's entitled to see people in their forties as children, and everybody else sees us that way too. I don't know. Like most well-brought-up Southerners my age I seldom argue with people of that vintage; when I was fifteen and they were fifty I might have, but now, unless I know personally that they are still my mental equals and want to be treated as such, I write off their tiresome behavior as a sign of possible senility. And it could be more annoying; he could have been one of the older folks who still think socialism is a good idea.

However, I don't think hatecrimes against women had anything to do with what we were dealing with as I climbed into the relative's truck and one of the twerps called out, "We didn't mean to scare you, Ma'am, we just wanted to bum a cigarette." I think I was seeing something my husband and I encountered once in a nice suburb of Washington, D.C.

We had exactly two serious disagreements, neither of which was involved in his hypertensive moods, during our years together. This was the serious disagreement we were trying very very hard to resolve without anger, and we did. So to discuss the issue without anger we decided to take a soothing walk in a soothing park. We went into the park, and every time we'd sit down on a bench to bask and talk, one or more teenyboppers would pop up, stand or sit closer to us than seemed polite, and start calling to friends, either out loud or on a cell phone. We kept moving along in order to conduct our conversation away from these pushy brats, and determined that the kids were deliberately following us, herding us out of the park. And a few weeks later, local police rounded up seven teenagers in connection with illegal drug activity in that park.

When the twerps pushed up to my big, burly, grizzled relative too, I was convinced that that was what I was seeing. These kids weren't looking for real trouble...they were just trying to scare adults away from the area so they could make money by undermining the work of the drug treatment clinic.

Attention Kingsport police. I will be back on Lynn Garden Drive, some evening soon.

Attention drug-dealing scum. I don't know whether I could deliberately kill a fellow human, but I do believe in marking violent criminals for easy identification. If I lead with a cell phone in my left hand, guess what's in my right hand. And I have a lot of relatives, some as big as the one you saw, only younger, and we are clannish, and we hate drug dealers. I don't particularly want a rumble, but if you insist on one I think I can guarantee that you'll know you've been rumbled.

I would, of course, prefer for the Kingsport police to find you before the relatives and I do. They can afford to be humane. They would merely be doing their jobs.

No comments:

Post a Comment