While you were drinking and having fun Friday night, I was getting beaten and burglarized

I write this from the couch where the most exciting part of this story happened.  I’m an idiot five times before the end of this story, but rather than save my reputation, I’m going to be as honest as I know how: by telling the truth.

7 p.m. ((I’m making up all of these times, I never checked my watch))  There is a knock on door.  I answer.  Large, fat guy asks me if I know where “groening” street is.  I say no, I just moved here, sorry, bye.

8 p.m. Knock on door again.  I get my sword out of the closet and put it nearby before I answer.  Same large, fat guy says he’s lost and asks me if he could use my phone.  I go get my mobile and he steps inside.  I feel a bit uncomfortable with him in the house, but I don’t really know what to say.  He claims he’s been walking up and down the street for hours.  He tells me he is calling his mom, but calls his aunt, whom he calls ‘baby girl.’  She says she has errands to run with her daughter.  He asks if she could pick him up.  I don’t hear the response.

8:04 p.m. It is awkward.  I ask him if he wants something to drink.  I say I have juice, Mountain Dew, and beer.  He takes a beer.  I introduce myself.  He says his name is Brandon Lee “Friedman.”  He dislikes the beer.  I tell him it is my roommate’s and I usually don’t drink them.  He asks if I am gay, I tell him I am not.  He says,

“good, I don’t like gay people.  I mean, if you are, that’s okay, I just…  you don’t play around with them, do you?”

I inform him I do not.

8:06 p.m. It is still awkward.  He is smoking.  He is asking many questions about the house.  I start getting suspicious.  He says, “I’m not gonna rob you or anything, I’m not like that,” as if to reassure me.  It occurs to me that this is not a good sign.  I ask him if I could just drive him there.  We could find it, it’s not a problem.  He says no, he’s waiting for her to call back.

8:10 p.m. It is very awkward.  He starts talking about how sad his life is that he has nowhere to go and that nobody loves him.  I think he got the nub end of the stick of life.  I ask him if he wants to try using my phone again.  He fumbles with my phone, dialing the wrong number a couple of times before he comes over to where I am so that I can key it in for him with the area code.  The number is 919-430-2289.  The girl he speaks to says a few short words to him, then hangs up.  It is now probably 8:12 p.m.  I am sitting on the couch, he is standing over me.

8:12:05 p.m. He punches my face two or three times, throwing his weight on top of me.  He says “I’m gonna rob you.” ((Contradicting his earlier statement that he was not, in fact, going to rob me.))  I get angry.  I respond with rage I have never witnessed.  I am Indignant that this Fat Man would come into MY house and pummel me, I give a primal yell full of expletives and death threats and I punch him in the face.  My fist carries every iota of stress I have on my shoulders and– oh, it is a lot of stress.  I connect, we’re going blow for blow, neither of us is guarding, but I personally don’t care.  I want nothing else than to destroy him.  I taste blood, I realize my nose is bleeding and my glasses have been knocked off.  I kick him in the stomach and groin (it blends together), he tells me to stop.  He says he has a gun, I reply that I don’t care.  At least I think I replied, perhaps I just said it in my head.  In real life, perhaps I just kept punching and kicking him.  He reels.  Then he keeps coming at me, punching, but now he is crying.  I have æons to think as the blows fly, more in his direction now than my own.  It seems surreal, but I am still fighting.  It takes me seconds to notice that there are no more punches coming, that he is just holding my wrists as I struggle to kick him off, to bite, spit, and head butt my way out of there.

I tell him to let me go.

He is crying.

“I have nowhere to go.  My mom’s in jail.  I have nowhere to go,”

he keeps repeating, as if I care.  I tell him more forcefully to let me go, or that it will end up much worse for him.  He says, “No, you’ll hurt me, you’ll just hurt me.  Promise you won’t hurt me.”  I hesitate, realizing that a promise for me is more important than he realizes.  I think: if I promise, this situation ends, if not, it goes on and perhaps the tide will turn in his favor.  I promise.  He doesn’t believe me.  This is an insult to me.

“I have not broken a promise since I was fifteen,” I say snidely.  I promise not to hurt him iff he does not hurt me.  I need the conditional in there for my own inner code of bushido.  He slowly moves to let me up.  I tell him to get moving, quicker.  He is crying.

I go to where I left the sword.  He comes forward, as if I’d just betrayed him.  I consider kicking him out at sword-point, then realize that the added variable in the equation might just make the situation get a whole lot more messy than it should be.  I toss the sword in the closet and close the door.  He seems relieved.  I am still angry.

Get out, I tell him.  He looks at me despondently, telling me he has nowhere to go.  I tell him I’ll give him money for a hotel, I just need him out of my house before I decide to provoke him into swinging at me again so that I can go back to hurting him.  He is crying.  I tell him I’ll take him to a damned hotel just so that he’d leave me alone.  He cries.  I look for my glasses and put on my hoodie.  My glasses are bent, I swear at him.  I consider going back on my word, but don’t.

I leave the house and tell him to get in my car.  He is afraid.  I tell him I am not about to hear that, to get in the car.  He asks me if I locked the door.  I say no.  He says, “aren’t you going to lock it?”  I consider what his angle is, but lock the door behind me.  I tell him to get in the car.  “No, you’re just going to take me to the police.”  I tell him forcefully to get in the car.  He gets in.

I start driving, skidding past stop signs and down 9th street.  He says to just drop him off wherever, worried I’m going to take him to the police.  I realize it may have been stupid to put a scared, fat man in my car.  I pull over in front of a popular diner, ((So he won’t try anything)), turn off my car ((So he can’t steal it)) and get out. ((So he has to be in public))  He comes around and I tell him to leave.

He says, “I just need $60 man, to get a hotel room and sandwich for the night.”  I reach for my wallet and take out a pair of twenties.  I hand them to him, thinking that he won’t come back if he gets money, hoping it’ll be enough that he won’t try anything.  But I speak forcefully and tell him that if I see him again, I will end him.  He walks away.

8:34 p.m.  I get in my car and drive as fast as I can to my friend Heather & Russ’ house: they live a block away from my house.  I get out of the car and knock on the door.  Russ answers, not saying anything.  I realize I should probably tell him what happened.  I start, but I’m so agitated I can’t get any words out.  My glasses are bent, my nose is bleeding, I have a cut on my cheek, and it hurts to smile.  ((This is bad.  I like smiling, it is my favorite facial expression.))  Russ looks shocked.  I start telling the story, Heather walks in, her mouth agape.  I finish the story.  Heather asks if I’ve called the police, I have not, my phone is still at my house where he dropped it when he punched me.  I call the police.

8:45 p.m. The police arrive, I tell them the story, including the description of the assailant.  He was a white, 300+ pound guy wearing a blue & white striped shirt, baggy shorts that his fat flowed over, plus he had a 6 pt. thick, 2-inch tall letters, green, display font tattoo of something that ended in “LL” going down vertically on his right forearm.  They seem amazed that I could have been so stupid about letting someone into my house, getting in a car with him, then still giving him money, but been intelligent enough to pay attention to details as I talked to him and remember that he’d said his name was Brandon “Friedman.”  Then, officer W.C. Andrews’ mind clicks.  “What did you say his name was?”  he asks.  I tell him.  He asks if the tattoo wasn’t a homemade tattoo-job of the word “BULL.”  I say it easily could have been.  He asks how old he was and whether he had a really bad drawl.  I say 20-ish, and that yeah.  Now that I think about it, maybe he was originally asking for “Green” Street.  He says he knows the guy, but his name is actually Brandon “Hawkins.”  He’s had problems with him before and his whole family is knows to the department.  He sends his partner to pull up a photo of the guy.

They never found a photo (I later did, but only of him as a kid), but they did show me a picture of his mother.  (Have you ever seen the movie “Monster?”  She looks just like that only three times the size.)  I identify him based on his INSANE resemblance to the woman.  (I take their word for the fact that she’s a woman.  From that picture, it’s a judgment call.  With a gun to my head, I’d still have to flip a coin.)  Then they tell me that they can’t do anything, but that if I go down to the magistrate, that I can file for a warrant and they could arrest him the very next time they see him on the street.  I decide to do that.

Heather and Russ accompany me.  We get lost, but ask some people and find our way there.  I go in, report what happened to a very skeptical lady, and walk out with a court date.

We decide to head back home to get some food, but I want to stop by my house just to turn off the lights and settle everything.  We arrive and I see that the lights are off.  I run in, scared…  and find my laptop and DVD player are missing.

I call the police again.  We wait outside in the cold.  Now, for the first time in the night, I am sad.  I’d been angry and scared, but now I just felt terrible.

…

This time it takes the cops an hour to arrive.  The police officer goes through the rooms of my house with me and lectures me on opening the door for strangers.  I realize that my backpack and iPod are also missing.  Then he goes to his car to type everything into the computer.

He tells me that they’re going to come in the morning to dust for fingerprints and that I should stay at Heather & Russ’ house.  He leaves and Heather, Russ, and I go home.  Russ and I go out to get some food, then we come back and we all spend the rest of the night watching Home Movies and eating pizza.

—

Day 2

9:30 a.m. I barely sleep, and don’t sleep too comfortably.  I’d been woken up by my roommate Gordon at 2 a.m. and my worried friend Jessy at 3:30.  I hear Heather and Russ.  I get up to go talk to them.  They’re leaving for the day, as they’d told me the night before, but we talk for a while before they have to leave for good.  They leave me a key to the deadbolt.

I spend the next few hours waiting to hear from the forensics team, but get desperate and dial 911 a few times, just to check on where they are.  It turns out that there is one forensics person on call for the entire town.

11:30 a.m. My friend Susanne calls me, asks me if I want company.  She and her husband and son decide to head over.  They buy me a Quizno’s sub (for which I am STILL grateful).  We hang around Heather & Russ’ place for a while before their son gets antsy and we decide to go to the mall to keep him entertained.  Susanne offers for me to stay at her place for the night.  I accept, thinking company will prevent me from wallowing in how I should have punched him longer and harder.

4:30 p.m. Hours and hours pass before the forensics lady finally calls me.  We are eating, but rush over to meet her anyway.  She goes in, dusts for prints, and leaves.  I decide to head back to Heather & Russ’ house to get my stuff.  I go inside to collect my stuff, then call the landlord and fill them in on what happened.  I sit down to write this story while waiting to hear back from the landlord (he says they’ll work on it tomorrow), then head over to Susanne’s to stay the night.

8:10 p.m. Officer T.A. Stanlope calls me, tells me he found my iPod and that he wants to meet with me so that I can identify it.  I rush out of Susanne’s house and speed over to where Stanlope said he’d meet me.  On the way, I have a thousand thoughts go through my head, each wittier than the last.  As I pull in, I see Brandon (the fat guy that punched me) handcuffed in front of the police car.  And every ounce of hatred and fear just fades away.  All of a sudden, I realize I don’t hate this kid.  I don’t even feel sad for him.  I just find it really funny.  So I get this big shit-eating grin on my face as I walk past him.  I don’t even say anything.  He doesn’t seem to be making eye contact, but it also doesn’t seem on purpose.  I wonder if maybe he’s on medication or drugs.  I go inside and identify my iPod for the police.  He’s cracked it, but I’m okay with that.  As I’m leaving, the cops ask me not to talk to him, just to go to my car.  So I do, but on the way, Brandon yells out to me, “Did you tell them that I ain’t had a place to go to last night and that you helped me out?  Did you tell them?”

I’m half tempted to diagram that sentence for him, but just smile and make eye contact with him, which, I’m sure, is much scarier in the context.

I go back to my office to grab some stuff and hang out while I wait for officer Stanlope to update me.  Eventually, he calls me to get the whole story, which I give him.  Before I finish, though, he tells me he thinks he’s going to get my stuff and to wait for him.  An hour later, he calls me back and tells me he’s gotten everything back and he’ll give it to me as soon as they finish their paperwork at the jail.  I decide to go to a local pub with my friends Bre, Pete, John, Linnea, and Jeff to celebrate.  At about 1, three squad cars show up at the pub to give me my stuff.  I sign for it and put it in my car for safe keeping.

Total time elapsed: 30 hours.

Positive Things that came from this story: I now get to use all my fat jokes with abandon.  I didn’t really lose anything other than a $50 mouse, a broken iPod, some pencils, and a weekend of studying. I now know I can take a punch and, if the mood calls for it, can respond with a few of my own.  Lots of friends showed they cared by offering me places to stay and sticking with me through some pretty bad points.

Negative Things that came from this story: My door is broken down and I might have to move.  A teenager is behind bars and I jump like a squirrel any time I hear a knock on my door.  It was probably the fourth or fifth worst day of the second half of 2008 for me.

Analysis: Do not open the door after five.  It is better to be punched while sitting on a couch for many reasons.  Sometimes you can call people’s bluffs when they say they have a gun.  If you have to punch someone, fat people are the way to go.  Giving $40 to a guy who just tried to rob you so that he’ll have a place to stay the night is not stupid: it’s extortion in a fear condition.  You can decide whether you’re the victim or the assailant based on how you act.  Don’t give information to people if you doubt their motives.

I write this from the couch where the most exciting part of this story happened.  I’m an idiot five times before the end of this story, but rather than save my reputation, I’m going to be as honest as I know how: by telling the truth. 7 p.m. ((I’m making up all of these times,…