Bat out of Hell

I used to think people were mostly good until I got mugged on a fluorescent lit street corner with three of my friends, by two men wearing face masks, one holding a shotgun with an orange tip.

I have never seen a gun before, let alone a shotgun, and it was one in the morning and I was sort of sleepy after smoking half of a Marlboro Red cigarette. I tried not to inhale, but the cigarette felt so good burning between my fingers. My friend wanted to stop for tacos and when I turned my head, the men were yelling at everyone to lie down.

If I had been thinking more clearly I would have given them my purse. Instead I turned and ran across the parking lot, clutching my purse to my side. This is what gives me a terrible feeling, like dark bile boiling in my stomach: that I turned my back and ran, which everyone knows is the dumbest thing to do in a mugging. In my half-baked delirium, I must have thought they were going to shoot us all, and that running was the safest thing. It turned out that everyone was okay, and that the men were most likely tweakers out after the rainstorm, desperate for money.

I ran all the way home in my vintage boots, knowing I could be dead. Thinking I could not be able to shave my legs, or eat or pee or put on makeup or drive around and buy canned tomatoes from the grocery store again. I could have bullets in my liver and my parents could be crying. I wonder if my students would give a shit.

I was talking to a dark-haired freshman on Friday about the story of her life, and she told me she used to mug people with her cousins downtown using weapons. The girl is fourteen. Darkness intersects with other darkness and things change, that is the way of the universe.

“This happens in East LA all the time,” my friend said, like it had happened to her, like she had run away from tweakers with a shotgun.

I have been prepared to run my whole life. I guess there are always more things to be afraid of, so why be afraid of anything at all?