Fathers always believe their sons

I was walking home with some napkins I had bought. They were in a plastic bag from the store. I was on 34th Ave, I think, and I turned onto 38th St, which is where I was mugged.

I passed a crowd of rough-looking teenagers. A whole pack of them. It made me a little nervous, because there aren’t usually whole packs of rough-looking teenagers around—the kind who size you up and laugh just when you pass them. But I passed them and they turned the corner and I felt better, until the little kid with the big puffy jacket popped out from behind a car with a handgun.

I started to back away slowly. “DON’T MOVE,” he yelled in a very bratty, presumptuous voice that I didn’t care for. “WHERE YA GOIN’ WITH THOSE NAPKINS?”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said, trying to strike the delicate balance of playing it cool and not making him want to shoot me.

“I am worried about it,” he said. “I am worried about it because I got kids who need their mouths wiped.”

Maybe the smart thing to do would have been to hand the napkins over. Being robbed for napkins was embarrassing, but I was certainly not prepared to be shot for them. But what was I going to do. Give him the napkins? Then go back to the store and buy another package of napkins? What would I say to the clerk? If the clerk said something like “hey, weren’t you just here buying a big ol’ pack of napkins not a few minutes ago,” how would I respond? That would be an embarrassment. I’d never be able to show my face in the store again! Even if I returned home without napkins and then went the next day to buy some more—even that would be too humiliating to face. So no, I couldn’t give him the napkins. Instead I jumped at him and grabbed for the gun in his hand.

After wrestling for the gun for a few seconds, I gained control of it. Both of us still held it, but I managed to point it at the road and pull the trigger. I didn’t know how many were in the clip, of course. I would just keep pulling the trigger until it started clicking, and then a few times after that to be safe. But there were no bullets at all, because the handgun was only a toy. Some pieces of metal at the barrel sparked each time the trigger was pulled.

The mugger immediately dropped the gun, leaving me to hold it. He might have run, but he just stood there, looking deeply embarrassed. I saw now that he was a chubby boy—big for his age, but no more than twelve years old. I almost felt bad enough to give him the napkins straight away, but I thought it would be wrong to reward antisocial behavior like mugging.

Now, I am a “progressive;” I am “in the know.” So I am sympathetic to the socioeconomic conditions that would lead to a boy to attempt mugging someone on the street with a fake gun. I was torn between a desire to see the boy punished and a desire to see him go free. Should I turn him over to the police? Give him his gun back and send him on his way, to possibly mug more people as soon as I turned the corner? There seemed to be no satisfactory answer to these questions, so I decided to do was to stop the first person who passed us on the street, explain the situation to him or her and let him or her deal with it. That the person I stopped would be a more conscientious person than me who would be more capable of 1) knowing what to do to balance the boy’s clear wrong-doing with an objective and fair understanding of the societal strains which had been placed upon him; 2) knowing how to best execute whatever course of action he or she decided was the fairest for all parties involved; 3) recognizing the importance of this issue, both on a personal level (for me and the boy) and on a larger societal level (if we might be an example to or at least a precedent for future generations) and 4) having the time, patience and wherewithal to carry all this out than I was I simply took for granted. As for me, I was busy, and I needed to get home with my napkins.

That the first man I stopped on the street was a policeman I could not have known until he turned around.

That that man also turned out to be the boy’s father I maybe could have known, since they did share a resemblance.

“What’s the problem here,” the boy’s father boomed.

“Your son tried to mug me,” I said. “He used this toy gun.”

“What? Son! What were you thinking!” The boy’s father was outraged. “Why are you carrying a gun around intimidating people and trying to steal their napkins?” (he had taken a peek into the bag.) He started to weep. “Don’t you know that if you ever need napkins—if you ever need one napkin or a hundred—all you have to do is ask me! You just have to ask me and I can get you all the napkins you need!”

“This is the man I was telling you about,” the boy said quietly. “Carlyle.” In all my life, I’ve never seen anyone lie as quietly as this boy did. I almost believed him myself.

“You’re Carlyle?” he asked me. “You’re the criminal who’s been running around this neighborhood intimidating the schoolchildren and selling drugs and committing crimes? That’s you? You’re Carlyle?” I could tell by the boy’s face that, buoyed by his father’s righteous anger, he was starting to believe his own Carlyle lie. So there were three of us, all almost believing it.

But “no,” I said. “No, of course not. I just came here to buy some napkins.” I showed him inside the bag. “Is buying napkins the kind of thing Carlyle would do?”

“Listen, you Carlyle,” said the officer. “I don’t want to see you around my neighborhood anymore, and I don’t want to hear my son telling me that criminal Carlyle is out here selling drugs and committing crimes. Got that, Carlyle?” I did not live far from that spot, and I realized that if this Carlyle was real, and he continued committing crimes, and then if the officer saw me again, I would be in real trouble. Every time I wanted to buy napkins, I would have to ride the subway to the Upper East Side! Where napkins are notoriously overpriced!

“But I’m not Carlyle,” I said. “A simple check of my identification would confirm it.” It was true—I had a driver’s license, credit cards, debit cards, library cards, health insurance cards, CPR certification cards, lifeguard certification cards, birthday cards, business cars, in my name and in a veritable CORNUCOPIA of other names that were not Carlyle.

But the officer would have none of it. “Keep away from my son and from the other kids in this neighborhood, you criminal Carlyle,” said the officer. I realized that if I continued standing around, I would be in worse trouble than I already was, so I turned back for 34th Ave (I had only made it a few steps onto 38th St before the mugging) and then turned the corner twice and headed towards 30th Ave via Steinway.

Steinway was deserted by this time. All the stores were dark and closed. As I walked away, I heard the policeman speak into his radio: “Yeah, I think I’ve got a lead on that Carlyle guy,” and then he proceeded to give my physical description into the radio. I wondered if I would be arrested tonight, on my way home. I started walking faster. I wanted to get the napkins safely back home. They could come find me after that—they could knock on my door and bring me back to the station and interrogate me for hours and lock me up overnight if they wanted to (I was not Carlyle; I had nothing to fear) and I didn’t care, just so long as I got those napkins back safely, so I didn’t have to worry about them anymore—that was the key thing, that I didn’t have to worry about them anymore.

------

It reminded me of the last time I was in trouble with the law. I was with some friends from work—about twelve of us—at one of the continent’s thousands of Ripley’s Believe-It-Or-Not Museums. This one was either in Toronto or one of the outer boroughs of New York—I don’t remember (I have been to many Ripley’s Believe-It-Or-Not Museums). Or San Diego? It was a small one—just one small shopfront near some wharfs or piers or something in a quiet upscale outskirty part of whichever city this was. It was a long way from the door to the back of the museum, but it was it was essentially two-dimensional—the exhibits were only on your left or right.

The big exhibit at the back of the museum was a small model of a gas station under a glass case. On top of the glass case there was a sign that read: “A GAS STATION! CAN YOU BELIEVE IT?” There were “Do Not Touch” signs all over the place, even on the glass case, which we could see was hooked up to a heavy-duty security system. My friend and co-worker J. wanted to see how long it would take the security system to activate, so he leaned his face and two hands against the glass case and held himself there. It took a few seconds—apparently the security system had some kind of safety timer so that it wouldn’t go off every time someone rubbed up against the glass—but then it happened, and all kinds of sirens went off and lights started flashing and whatnot. The guy at the register looked up and looked like he wasn’t going to do anything about it if we were just going to sit there, but J. ran for the door and everyone else followed him, and at first I was going to pretend like I didn’t know them and continue to enjoy the museum, but after a second I put the old book I had been flipping through on a table and got up from the comfortable chair I had been sitting there and ran out after all the rest of them, and then the man at the register half-heartedly chased us out of the museum and out into the street.

It was a beautiful day outside—bright and sunny and just the right temperature. What water we could see (to the right of us and up ahead of us—we were at the end of a sort of tiny peninsula, kind of) was bright and blue and calm. There were no cars on the streets; the sidewalks were big and wide and people sat at tables at outdoor cafes in comfortable summer clothes and ate sandwiches and drank coffee. We ran to get away, at first, but then we were just running for the hell of it, the twelve of us co-workers, who all miraculously quite liked each other, with no conflicts or secret resentments or anything like that that I was aware of, anyway. We started to sort of spontaneously leapfrog over each other (by this point the man behind the register had given up his pursuit, presumably to get back to tending his store) and then we broke into what was kind of a dance, and we broke into song.

“GOD ISN’T REAL / HE’S JUST AN ILLUSION / AN INVENTION TO KEEP THE MASSES IN LINE / SO WHAT’S THE CONFUSION? / SO IF IT SEEMS LIKE I’M AS CALM AND COOL AS ICE COLD FUSION / IT’S ‘CAUSE NOTHIN’S TROUBLIN’ ME! / ‘CAUSE I’M ABSOLUTELY, TOTALLY FREE! / I’M ETERNALLY, HORRIBLY FREE!”