COMMIE GIRL: ABOUT THE DUDE WHO TRIED TO STEAL A BIKE OFF MY PORCH
By Rebecca Schoenkopf
“Babe?” I called.
“What?” he answered.
“Can you come out here please?”
“I’m not dressed,” he said.
Fuck. This crazy person on my porch was probably going to kill me, and there was no way to let my boyfriend know he needed to put his clothes on and come save me without letting the crazy person know I was onto his me-murdering plans. How did I know he was going to murder me? Because he was meth-skinny, wearing spandex pants and a vest with no shirt, and when I caught him “moving” my boyfriend’s bike and opened the door and asked “Can I help you,” he’d asked (superlying) for “Kristen” and then said the yellow of the bike had vibed him out and so he’d come up on the porch. For the vibes, and the yellow, and something was wrong with his car so could he have a drink? I finally got my boyfriend dressed by suggesting in a carrying voice that he move his bike inside (we had a nice conversation later about my possible murder versus the possible theft of his bike, and he promised that if I’d screamed, he would have run out naked and brained the guy with the fireplace poker, so he is a very good boyfriend, and from now on, he’s going to treat a deceptively mild request for his presence with girlfriend-rescuing urgency, as is right and proper, and also we agreed he would have been super sad if I’d died, which I always like to think about, so I had fun) and as he kept an eye on Crazy on the Porch, I got him a plastic cup of water and told him firmly he could take it with him. He poured it on his car.
A few minutes later, unable to suss out whether we were dealing with bad drugs or bad mental illness, and whether or not the dude really was trying to steal the bike (how would he even have fit it in his car, which was right there?), we called the cops. Then we lurked at the French doors (which didn’t hide us at all) and watched the dude go a couple times to the gay guys’ house across the street until they stopped opening their door to him and then the cops finally got there and cuffed him. We stayed inside, and the gay guy across the street stayed inside (he’d probably called the cops too), but the black guy across the street came outside to watch with interest, probably because he hadn’t called the cops and thus was free to announce his presence instead of lurking at the windows, and Crazy, once cuffed, started to sound really normal and reasonable until the big fat bald cop finally pointed at my house and asked Crazy if he’d tried to steal our bike. Dude, Bald Cop, what the fuck?
Bald Cop came over and said Dude wasn’t playing with a full deck, he didn’t have any drugs in his vest pockets, he didn’t seem to be a danger to himself or others and thus was ineligible for a three-day hold, and we could have him arrested for trespass or they could just make him move on.
A move on was fine. I don’t usually have people arrested for stepping on my property. At least, not often.
And Dude drove off, and that’s when we saw the flattest tire on earth, and realized with horror that we’d just called the cops on someone for having a flat tire and daring to be stuck in our peaceful middle-class neighborhood, and of course he’d poured the water on the tire. That’s how you look for a leak.
God damn it! And so, with dread, I asked the cops if I had really just called them on someone for having a flat tire, and Bald Cop explained (really sympathetically, I thought, for a cop) that Dude was a homeless tranny prostitute who lived out of his car, which was filled with pink luggage, wigs, and the stench of perfume, and that since he was stuck with that flat, he’d probably been “borrowing” the bike as a way to go turn a trick and get some cash, and maybe he would have even returned it later (or sold it), and even though he never said whether he personally thought it was justified or not to call the cops on Crazy, it sounded sort of justified to me. But oh, poor Crazy! He clearly hadn’t eaten in three days or more, and I didn’t offer him any food, I just called the Man, and I am not a very good Jesus, and I felt genuinely terrible about it. But then my boyfriend said maybe if I’d given the guy some food, he would have thrown that on the car too, and then we laughed at the man for probably being mentally ill, even though the water on the tire was totally justified. So, we suck, but it was funny still, probably because of how we weren’t dead.
1 Comment
Rebecca, I always love reading your stuff! But don’t fret overmuch about whether or not you did the right thing. We can’t possibly know what we don’t know, all we can know is that we don’t know it.
You didn’t call the cops on a person for being poor. You called the cops on a person who was about to steal your bike. and the gay couple across the street called for equally legitimate reasons.
The person could well have been on PCP and quite capable of all sorts of psychotic violence or the person could well have more than met the criteria for a mental health hold. As I said, you can’t know what you don’t know.
For the most part, cops do the best they can given the circumstances they find at each call they handle. But in the future, if you need the cops again and you don’t want to be identified, be sure to say that when you call. Insist that you not be directly contacted or identified by the responding officers and that if it proves necessary to re-contact you, that they only do so by phone.
Cops understand the desire of some citizens to avoid potential retaliation…they deal with that, and so very much more, all the time.
Good call on the bat by the door. No matter how quickly you call the cops or how quickly they get to you, sometimes it’s just not quick enough.
Please keep writing!