Close Call

What do you do when you leave the club late at night and have nothing else to do? Before you go grab something to eat with ya peeps you get someone arrested. Whuh? Ya’ll didn’t do that? Oh, so it was just me and my friends? Well, here’s what happened anyway.

A group of five of us decided to go out. We chose this mixed crowd club in downtown. The thing I liked about this spot was it wasn’t as hot as the sweatboxes that we usually go to were and you didn’t have to worry quite as much about bouncers/popos coming through the party cause somebody done started some ish. If you don’t know, and I’m not generalizing this is a fact, white girls love to dance on a pole, especially if they’re drunk. Talk about laughing and having a good time watching them drunk white girls make their best attempts at twerking. You could find a couple of nice ones who have some melanin too. Good times to be had by all.

Anyway after we left the spot this particular night we were driving around downtown because were started to hit one more club before we called it and got something to eat. You know how downtown they have those one way streets and stuff and you have to go over a block or two and loop back up to get where you’re going? I mean, it’s like that in a lot of the cities that I’ve vistited. So yeah we were navigating and saw this white boy in the middle of the street. From what I remember he was about 5’9” 150 lbs with some matted brown hair. Nothing that really stands out. Twan was driving and said casually, “I’m bout to act like I’ma hit ‘em.” Although he said it casually everybody knew, well at least I knew, that he was definitely going to make good on his statement.

He accelerated and slowed down when he got close to the guy. I think he waited a little long to start decelerating but I guess that was to make the ‘scare’ more real. The white guy—let’s call him Scott, doesn’t flinch. He stands there in an altered state of consciousness and then begins to verbally assault us. He let’s loose a string of expletives and like a tree planted by the rivers of waters lets us know that he shall not be moved. This of course pisses Twan off so he backs up and says this time he’s not gonna stop. I’m like oh hell. What in the world? I hope Twan doesn’t hit this dude. I don’t remember what we were saying in the car to Twan but everybody was kinda indignant that Scott didn’t move from in front of the speeding vehicle since he was after all standing in the middle of the street. I mean it was late at night like 2 a.m. and even though there’s very little traffic, when you see cars you need to Ludacris.

Twan puts the car in drive and picks up speed towards Scott. Even though it wasn’t that long of an amount of time it seemed like a while because we continued to get closer to him and I didn’t feel the car slowing down. Eventually I was like slow down man don’t hit him or something like that. Twan was like no this ma phucka needs to move. Twan slams on brakes when it’s almost too late and the car appeared that it was still gonna tap Scott. In a fit of desperation and seeing that his life was probably about to take a turn for the worse, Scott jumped in the air and landed on the hood of Nesi (Twan’s nickname for his Nissan Sentra), ran up the windshield onto the roof of the car and made a dismount once he reached the trunk. When he stepped on the roof of the car the roof caved in near my head. I felt like I was in danger because he could have stepped on top of my head and hurt my neck or something. It was at this point that I felt Scott had gone too far.

It was clear to us that Scott used his spare time to partake of some of the sniffable organic stuff that the plants on God’s green earth provide. This dude was stoned—I mean so high it didn’t make any sense. Twan was silent. Not a good sign. He and I are alike in that regard. As long as I’m still bitching at talking to you, I still care and you still have a chance to win me over. If I stop talking leave it alone. All hell could potentially break lose cause at this point I no longer give a phuck. Twan broke his silence and was like oh phuck no. This ma phucka done walked on Nesi. He put the car in reverse so that he could get out the middle of the street. Meanwhile Scott is kinda meandering in the street all the while shouting more curse words and pretending that we were trying to hit him. Clearly stoned.

Twan exits stage right from the driver’s door to go to his trunk. Still on stage (inside the car) we’re all discussing what just happened and how wrong Scott was for jumping on the car yada yada. Twan is loading his gun. Right about this time a police officer drives by. I beat on the back window to alert Twan and he slowly closes the trunk. Mike gets out of the car to flag the officer down, who I’m sure was gonna come over anyway to see why these black dudes and a white dude were in the street with the white dude shouting at the group of black dudes. Twan approaches the officer and tells him how the guy just ran up on the hood of the car.

Scott is standing near too so he’s trying to over talk Twan and keeps telling this ridiculous story about us trying to hit him and all this nonsense. By this time I’m out of the vehicle too because I feel like a victim cause he stepped near my head. I suggest to the officer that I think the guy is high and needs to be tested. I mean I don’t know much about drugs but I wanted to plant the seed if it wasn’t clear to the officer that this dude is on something. The officer didn’t respond to what I said. I don’t know if it was because it was already obvious to him or if he didn’t agree with me. The officer is trying to get the whole story and Scott gets so loud and obnoxious that the officer has to cuff him and put him in the back of the police car.

At some point during this whole information gathering session T took Scott’s shoe and dropped it down a storm drain. The shoe came off when he ran on top of the car. Scott saw T drop the shoe down the drain and became even more loud and belligerent and told the officer that T dropped the shoe down the drain. When the officer shifted his focus to the car to see if there was any truth to Scott’s assertion, T acted indignant. He was like what shoe? What are you talking about? That sent Scott over the edge. He started hollering even more and eventually kicked the window out the back of the police car with his shoeless foot. Only a stoned out fool would do some ish like that.

The realism is that that’s just what we needed to convince the officers that Scott’s story was bogus about the attempted hitting and to believe that he was high. That could have went either way because from the officer's point of view there were five black dudes and one white dude. It could have appeared that we were doing something wrong. The officer was like he’s definitely going downtown now for destruction of property. The officer dismissed us and said he’d handle it from there. We drove off relieved that everything went our way and grinning because we definitely were culpable in what happened. What did we do next? Waffle House foo! Nothing like some omelets, orange juice and laughs to end the night. Especially since none of us left the club with anyone.

Adolecent Ignorance--Actually, We Were In College

We were bored so we decided to get off campus and see what we could get into. Although we were all 20+ we decided to go (word we buried)-knocking. In case you’re not familiar with this, you just run up to people’s homes, knock on the door or beat on the window really hard, run off somewhere where you can see them and they can’t see you and laugh when they come to the door looking for whomever they thought was at the door. Sounds right foolish when you put it on paper, but for us it was amusing. So that was the plan this particular Thursday night, which is college night at one of the local haunts, but we decided we weren’t in the mood for that.

We headed to Teon’s house since he was a native and parked. We chose to walk a few streets over from where he lived so we’d be somewhere we people in the neighborhood might not know who he was and tell his mom. We began knocking on doors and running. It was all good until this one dude didn’t think it was funny and he fired a gun in the air. It was just a warning shot, but it scared the hell out of me. The sight of the spark that the gun made in the still of that crisp autumn night is forever indelibly etched in my mind. Think I didn’t show Carl Lewis up that night? I ran like it was no tomorrow. All three of us did. When we stopped running we huddled on a street near a wooded area to catch our breath and to each express how frightening it was to hear and see the flicker of that gun. This is not the first time we had engaged in behavior like this, but this was the first time someone fired a shot. The most someone had ever done up until this day was throw something through their window. That particular night when we walked off, we were laughing like, that’s their dumb azz cause they gotta fix that window.

Anyway, that night after we caught our breath we still hadn’t had enough, but we decided to table the (word we buried)-knocking for the night. At the time not too far from the wooded area where we huddled the land was being prepared for construction. You know how they push that dirt around for like 2 months before you actually see any pipes in the ground or concrete blocks? Yeah, that’s what it looked like. Behind that was an old folks home that had already been built. There was one of those big dump trucksout there. Antwan decided to get in the truck (at me and Teon’s behest) and start it up and run it into the old folks’ home. Someone had left the keys in the truck so that’s how he was gonna be able to start it. He tried to turn the engine over like three times but he couldn’t get it to come on. It would make the sound like it was going to crank, but it wouldn’t completely fire. Apparently, the people in the old folks home were watching us because we saw the blinds flutter and soon heard sirens.

We ran like hell across the dirt that was there for the grocery store and into the wooded area that we huddled at earlier. There were like three cop cars because we saw the blue lights as we were dipping off in the woods. Of course I think I’m smarter than the police so I was like we need to run in the water so in case they have dogs they will lose our scent. Let a joker watch one episode of Matlock. Anyway, we heard footsteps that were not our own. We figured the police were on foot trying to scare us. There weren’t probably really gonna traipse through the woods to find us but they were definitely gonna try to rattle us. But me, I’m not gonna be rattled—even when I’m in the wrong. To a fault I can be wrong and strong and think nothing of it. We were navigating the woods but being ever so careful as not to make too much noise. We were signally each other and all trying to make sure that we all made it out of this thing safely. Eventually we no longer heard the additional footsteps so we figured the coast was clear. We ran up out of the woods and got back on the main street. (Ladynaynay this happened on the corner of Rock Quary and Raleigh Blvd just as a point of reference.)

Me still over analyzing things and thinking that I was “on the run” suggested that we all switch shirts and try to make ourselves look different in case the po-po rolled past looking for three black guys who fit our description. The realism is that if they did roll past they still would have known that it was us, but in my mind I thought I was one-upping the man. We just needed take our azzes home and do some studying.

Once we got back to T’s house we did ride back up to the scene of the crime and the police were still there. There was only one car now, but we really felt like we had beaten the man. We rolled on the Waffle House, (by the way if you don’t know bout the Waffle House shame one you) got a bite to eat and tripped about the events of the day.