Saturday night, and I was back home with a bunch of APO friends for conference. The university downtown is part of our section, and they were hosting. My own stomping ground, or at least twenty minutes from it, and I was having a blast being home with my friends. Right now we were at the university, though. It was 9:00 at night, and I planned on leaving for my own school at 11:30, taking three chapter-brothers with me, even though we wouldn't get back until one in the morning. But I didn't have enough gas to get home and hadn't remembered to get any beforehand. If I waited until 11:30, probably the gas stations would be closed. So, telling Krystal and Khristina where I was going, I ducked out of the second half of the banquet, intending to run down to the nearest gas station and come back.
"Sure you don't want anyone to come with you?" both of them had asked.
"No, that's all right, I'm fine," I'd said.
I was eager, actually, to do it myself. I was only a week removed from spring break and had spent it getting used to the highway system around the county, especially around the city, because I'd driven myself to appointments. I'd found out how to navigate and take alternate routes, and I liked the feeling. And as much as I love all my brothers from APO, an errand by myself, a little jaunt down and back, sounded like a nice change. I could put on Jars of Clay and go off on my own.
I looked pretty nice at that moment. The banquet was semi-formal, so I'd broken out my dress from the eleventh-grade choir banquet, long with flower print. I'd tried curling my hair, but it hadn't quite worked, so Khristina had wrangled it into a half-ponytail, a small one in the back with the rest of my hair hanging down under it. It looked really kind of good. And my shoes, semi-miraculously, weren't hurting me.
I wasn't wonderful with getting myself in and out of the university, despite the number of times in the past 24 hours that we'd been in and out of there, but I managed to get find my way out and down one of the long streets to a Sunoco station. Parked and got out, ready to pump gas.
That's where I started running into problems. There's a small door that you pop open, and from there you unscrew the gas cap and pump. Well, that door didn't open. I had a quarter-tank, so I could get myself back to the university and, if necessary, home, several times over--but it couldn't get me back to school.
You're not supposed to use cell phones right by the gas pumps, so I took mine to a corner of the parking lot, around the side of the convenience store part of the Sunoco, and called my mom. She'd had the same problem putting gas in my car not long ago (a fact she hadn't mentioned to me until just then) and told me to pull the lever some more, and to call back if it didn't work.
It didn't. I tried sticking things in there, too, and prying the door open, but it always caught, so I took my phone back to the corner and called her again.
While we were discussing the problem, this guy, obviously seedy and perhaps drunk or stoned, came up to me. "You seen my girlfriend, drunk, somewhere around here?" he asked.
"No," I said shortly, a little nervous.
He looked me up and down--me, in my dress, alone and wide-eyed, fresh out of a sports car--and said something that sent me into full-out panic. "Ooh, what's your name?"
"What's going on?" asked my mom, who could hear him talking but couldn't make out what he was saying.
"Guy just asked me my name..." He was still staring at me.
"Get out of there!" my mom said.
I walked quickly past the guy into the convenience store, where there were lights and people, telling my mom that's what I was doing, the guy calling after me, annoyed, that he didn't want me. "I don't like you there, get out of there now," my mom said.
The people inside the store--you ever had this happen, where the people inside the store don't look any better than the ones outside? This was inner city on a Saturday night, a side I'd never seen of it at baseball games. ...This street was far from the baseball games.
The guy came in, glanced at me, started paying for something. I took the opportunity to flash by him and make a break for my car. Told my mom I was by the pumps and had to hang up, but I'd call when I got back to the university. She said okay. I got in, locked my door, started the car, and made a break for it.
I must have turned the wrong way out of the station.
Went far down the street, nothing looked right. Kept to the street because it was the only name I recognized. Finally pulled into a health center. No one around, and I didn't want to go in, but there were cars, and the parking lot was well-lit. Stayed in my car to call my mom this time.
"You back at the school?"
"No," I said, "I can't find it. How do you get there from here?" I told her the street.
"You're
where?" And she went into mass panic and actually started crying. "I don't know how to get you back from there! What are you going to do?"
...She told me later that that's one of the worst streets in the city. It's not just the wards. It's also that area. And already I'd gotten hit on, and it was only 9:30ish.
But I didn't know that, which was actually good, because I didn't panic. Luckily, my dad was on the other line at the house, and also heard all this, so he and I talked. "Look," I said, "no matter where I am, if I go far enough, I'll hit one of the highways, and I can get home from there. I'll come home. I'll figure out from there what to do about the people who're supposed to come with me later. And if I'm not back by 10:15, I'll find a place to call again from and tell you where I am."
They agreed to this, so off I went, still playing Jars of Clay's
Much Afraid album, which I'd had in when I first left, to drown out the silence. Maybe it's because I've been listening to them since about the seventh grade, but it calmed me down.
...I skipped "Frail", though. That's the only one I couldn't stand to hear.
Somehow--I'm still not sure how--I ended up making a huge circle and coming back to the intersection I'd left from, around ten minutes after leaving the health center. I managed to get back to the school, back to the parking lot, and called my mom from there. I told her I'd be home by 11:30 with everyone with me who was coming, and we'd figure out the gas situation from there.
Adrenaline had finally spiked and run over, and I raced into the building, up the stairs, to the lobby where the banquet had ended, looked around desperately, found Krystal, and pretty much threw myself bodily into her arms. I explained what had happened and got hugged by half the chapter, several times.
And I couldn't let go. This story loses a lot in the telling, but I'd been terrified. By myself, downtown, no ability to get gas, hit on, had made my mother cry, hadn't been sure how to get back, had happened on it by accident, from the opposite side of the intersection as the side I'd left from. I'd never seen the city like that. I've always been so proud of where I'm from--to me I think baseball games, museums, restaurants, science centers when I think of downtown. Downtown--the good sections are so
cool. It never occurred to me that the university was in a bad part of town, because it itself is so awesome. We went there in twelfth grade to do research for English. We'd spent conference there.
But, as Mike later pointed out, the university was there before the slums were.
And, as I later realized, it wasn't just the wards that're a bad part of town. And for shootings to appear on the eleven o'clock news, they had to have happened at nine or ten at night.
It was a Saturday night in the city, and I'd gone alone in a dress and a sports car. Twice I'd been offered company and hadn't taken it. I'd gotten through the highways all right last week. I've been dying to learn how to navigate the city. It was supposed to be my little fifteen minutes on my own.
Not at night. Not on a Saturday. Not on that street. The third I didn't know, but the first two I could have, should have guessed.
But in my own defense, it would have been fine if the gas door had opened. I wouldn't have been on the phone, I wouldn't have been in such a frenzy to get out of there because I wouldn't have been there long enough to get hit on. I might have missed the turn anyway, but it would have been from the other direction, and that would've taken me into a different part of the city. It would have been better. But I didn't know. I didn't plan on the gas door sticking. I didn't plan on anything but baseball games on a Saturday night, downtown for the laser light show.
What did I know, such a wide-eyed china-pale suburbanite? Even in the soup kitchens, people downtown had been friendly.
So once I'd grabbed a hold of a familiar person, I couldn't get enough. Krystal to Tom to Tim to Khristina to Becky to Matt, and as soon as I let go I got scared again. Even the tiniest circle of free space around me felt like too much. Felt like I was alone and lost again.
Jess and Pascale and Mike came back with me. I begged Mike to come because the other two, I love them, but they're so quiet, and Jess is so wide-eyed like me. Mike is short and skinny and a little low-key and has no more sense of direction than I do, but he can lead anyway, and, to be blunt, he's a guy.
We got lost again, the four of us, but this time my car was full and I felt like it was okay. It was 10:45 or so now, and now the city streets were noticeably crowded and rowdy, and Mike was more unnerved than I was, but I had the three of them there and I felt okay. The music was off now. Mike had gotten lost nearby just the week before--had come down to the city for a swing-dance event--and said the same thing I did, that if we went far enough, we'd hit a highway. He didn't know how to navigate, either, but I felt like it was okay. We hit a highway that I'd never been on but he had. We managed to avoid the inner city that way, which made me happy. Went through another part of the city, slightly better, and got on the highway I wanted, but in the wrong direction--we knew it was the wrong direction but decided a familiar southbound was better than risking more of the unfamiliar city looking for northbound. It paid off--we hit westbound somehow and got home, right at 11:30, right on time.
My mom was so happy to see me that she didn't ask how our trip back had been, so we decided there'd been enough excitement for one night, and didn't tell her about getting so lost we'd almost hit the public market area (and that's pretty far-flung, from what I can tell). She held my hand for a long time. I didn't mind. Somewhere in there she told me what an awful place that street was. I hadn't known. In a way, I'm glad; in a way, I'm not.
My dad said we weren't going back to school that night, it was too late and I still needed gas, so we crashed at my house again, like the night before, though Friday was supposed to be the only night we stayed. It was fine with me. I slept in the basement with Jess and Pascale. I could've slept in my own bed, but I'dve been alone. In the dark. Everything in me rebelled against that.
In the morning we got up early. My dad had disconnected the part of the car that connected the lever and the door and had gotten both gas and doughnuts. The door swings open at will now; there's no way to close it. So I guess anyone could get to my gas tank, but to me that's infinitely better than the alternative. I drove everyone back, taking the familiar way to the highway, the way that avoids the city entirely. We were back here by 9:30 yesterday morning. I had lunch at eleven-something and then slept from noon to four.
Talking through it with Tom later that night--I had to interview him as part of the pledging process--it didn't sound so bad. It felt awful, though. I've got a lot of thinking to do about where I'm from and about my own naivete--how both things are good and how both are bad.
So, the public service announcement: don't go out alone in a city at night. Daytime,
maybe it'd be all right, and more so on a weekday. But don't be stupid, and being stupid is easier than it seems. It never crossed my mind, skipping out of the banquet, what an idiotic thing I was doing. Not until it got me hit on, not until it got me lost. I remembered not to use a cell phone by a gas tank, but I forgot about not going out alone.
This was one of those things that, you know, maybe it was partly divine, maybe it happened so something worse wouldn't. I won't go off alone there anymore, or anyplace similar; maybe someday that'll avert something worse. I still reserve the right to go skipping across my own campus at eleven at night on a Monday to go see Krystal or John. This's a tiny town, a small college, and a completely different set of people. I know there's a chance of trouble, but it's a much smaller one. There are more lights around here, and lots of those danger phones. But my own city--that's different. I know I can't let the fear paralyze me, but maybe I can let it check me.
A thousand points to the buddy system. Use it.
And I am
so getting rid of that piece-of-crap car over the summer.
-Laurel
