Keep Walking
When I lived in the Temescal neighborhood of Oakland in 1998, subsisting on the California minimum wage I earned from a newspaper internship, I would go out walking most evenings. Today, the neighborhood itself is thriving, but then it was an uninviting area after dusk. The brightest late-night venue, eight questionable blocks up grimy Telegraph Avenue, was the Walgreens. So the only direction to go was east, three-quarters of a mile or so across Oakland to nearby Piedmont Avenue, with its cafes (including one, Gaylord’s, where two successive housemates both worked) and restaurants and bars, and correspondingly well-lit and well-traveled sidewalks. Better yet, north and east of Piedmont Avenue, curving streets and unsigned public staircases provided opportunities for a map-less (and pre–smart phone) ambulator (even if this was pre-Ambulators!, too) to discover his own, satisfying ascents up into the nearby hills, and then back down again.
On one such evening walk, when I was just a few blocks from my apartment, a tallish man in a hooded, dark gray sweatshirt walking steadily toward me, instead of walking past, confronted me, held a gun directly in my face, and said “Give me your money, nigger.” I gave him the only thing I had (an expired credit card, actually — a thing I put in my pockets just to have when I didn’t want to carry my wallet, and always kind of laughed at myself for doing). He pushed me on the shoulder and said “Keep walking”, and, I assume, walked away. I didn’t turn around to look.
It was over before my brain even processed what had happened (which, phew, because I don’t know if I would have been able to stop myself from remarking on his rather exceptional expansion of the word “nigger” to encompass a white Jewish kid from New York). I waited until it seemed like he must have left the area, and eventually worked up the courage to retrace my steps (which also took me in the direction he had gone), go home, and call the Oakland police.
I remember, lying in bed that night, trying to work it out, seriously doubting it had happened. It was so brief, so incongruous, so bizarre. If I thought about what might have happened, it was incomprehensible, shocking, unsettling. Fucked up. Was that gun loaded? If I’d said or done the wrong thing, would I be dead? It was only because I remembered telling my housemates, and talking to the police — things that I did in the same context and frame as real, actual life, not some irreconcilable 15-second glitch that had no place in this universe — and because the credit card was gone that I was able to assure myself I hadn’t just imagined it.
