zeptember

I am feeling badly because I refused a ride to an older man with a cane, simply because I’m a woman who was alone. This was in broad daylight but it didn’t matter - if I don’t know the person, especially a male, I’m too paranoid to give them a ride.

He said he lives close by (pointing around the block from me). He said he knows all the neighbors along that block. He told me he is a vet who has liver cancer and just had chemo this morning, and has to go up the road to pick up his car, but everyone’s acting all funny towards him and won’t give him a ride.

I asked if he knew the neighbors on the corner (cuz I do) and he said yeah. I was just about to go over and have them ID the guy as someone they know (to make me feel safer), when a man in a pickup truck rolled up. The guy with the cane said “nevermind, he’s a vet too, he’ll give me a ride.” I asked if he knew the guy and he said no, but the fact that the guy is a fellow Vietnam vet would mean that he’d give a ride.

I watched as he approached the truck and told the driver the same story he’d told me, starting off with, “you were in Vietnam, right?” and the driver said yep. The guy told his car story and the driver told him to hop in. With a “Thanks darlin”, the guy with the cane waved to me and off they went.

I’ve no idea how vets know each other like that. Not every single man in the U.S. between age 50 and 70 served in Vietnam, but I’ve seen it again and again that they seem to all know who they are.

I feel badly cuz it’s a trigger for me when strangers approach me, especially men. Unless the man is elderly and frail, I won’t help them if I’m alone, unless the man has fallen and injured himself.

My first experiences in life, along with social conditioning that men always carry the possibility of overpowering women, set me in this paranoid state of mind.

When I was about six or seven years old, my ma was dating a guy who was always too rough when he played around with my little brother, who was about four or five. My brother got hurt every time and would cry. My ma finally had enough of it and dumped the guy. Soon after, he showed up in the middle of the night, drunk or high, yelling and pounding on the front door. He somehow managed to get our door open - perhaps he still had a key or he picked the lock - but we also had a chain on the door so he could only force the door a little bit. He opened and shut the door several times, trying to force his way in, trying to break the chain. He yelled and cussed the entire time, and eventually pushed a bag of my ma’s clothes and belongings through the gap in the door and left. My ma stood frozen in the hallway the entire time, watching, while I stood next to her screaming, jumping up and down with panic, and crying.

When I was around eight or nine years old, I was outside playing with friends at the end of the block where we lived, when I spotted blood in the street. I was always playing cops and robbers back then, and my favourite shows were Cagney & Lacey, and CHiPs. I immediately went into the street to examine the blood and try to be a detective about what had happened. I saw that there were drops of blood - a long trail of it. Someone lost a lot of blood! My friends and I began following the blood trail. It led from the corner to about 3 houses down. The blood went all the way up the porch to the door. I boldly knocked on the door. A man who may have been in his twenties or thirties answered the door and I asked if he was alright, because we’d found blood leading to his house.
The man - my neighbor in the next block straight up the street from me - told us a story. Very late the night before, a man was driving and came to a stop on the corner, at the stop sign. A man walking in the street approached the driver and asked for a ride. The driver said sure and that’s when the man in the street took out a knife and ordered the driver out of his car. A struggle ensued, and the man in the street cut the driver’s thumb where it meets the palm, nearly severing his thumb. The guy took his car and sped off, leaving him in the street. The driver held his thumb to his shirt and, bleeding profusely, began to go door to door in the middle of the night asking for help until someone let him in. The man - my neighbor - was that person who let him in, and he said he gave the guy a towel to wrap his hand while he called the police. He said he still had the blood-soaked towel in the house. I thanked him for sharing his story with us and we all ran home to tell our parents of course.

Around that same time in my life, maybe give about a year, I was in the house playing Star Wars with my brother and our neighbor when several police cars screamed to our street, squealing to a stop and doors slamming. There was yelling. A gun fired very near to the house. My ma screamed for us to get down on the floor. We all dropped. When we didn’t hear more gunfire, we got back up and ran from my brother’s bedroom to the living room and began to poke our heads through the curtains. There were dozens of police cars out there and more showing up with men piling out of the cars. Officers ran up our next door neighbor’s driveway into their back yard. My ma screamed at us to get back down on the ground. I think we went back to my brother’s bedroom to try to see the action from there, since his bedroom was right next to the neighbor’s driveway. But the action was over.
We found out that a man had robbed a grocery store a few miles away and the police chased him all the way to our neighborhood. He crashed his car into bushes, a tree or a house - I can’t remember - around the block from us, then fled on foot, hopping fences through peoples’ yards. He was in the process of hopping the fence from our neighbor’s yard into ours when the police shot him. We were told he was shot in the shoulder.
The next day, we went into the neighbor’s back yard (they never had their gates drawn) and looked for evidence of the shooting. We found three streaks of blood on the top rail of the metal fence. The fences in all the yards in my neighborhood looked like this:

From early in life I’ve seen and read news stories of people posing as someone in need who then robbed or murdered their victim.

Later in life, I had just broken up with my first sexual partner. I was nineteen years old. He wanted to talk things over so I agreed to meet him. He was living in the basement of his friend’s parents house and was a year older than me. When I got there, I found him in his room cleaning a shotgun. He calmly told me that he was going to kill us both because I aborted his baby and broke up with him. He impregnated me without my consent - I was dumb and didn’t make him wear a condom, and he’d promised he’d pull out in time. I was so naive that I believed that he did pull out in time. He on the other hand fully intended to knock me up because he was afraid I might leave him for another man, and he was confident that once I found out I was pregnant that I would keep it and we’d be married and live happily ever after in a trailer park up the road where he’d scoped out a trailer already. I am dead serious. He admitted all this to me when we were at the clinic. He even joined in with the protesters outside of the clinic and said I was murdering our baby.
So now here we were in the basement and he was telling me he was going to kill us. I tried to talk him down. I tried to reason. Tried to plead. Finally I just bolted up the stairs. But instead of running out of the house, I still cared for him and didn’t want him to kill himself, so I grabbed the phone and dialed 911. As I began talking, he ran up the stairs behind me, pushed my head into the wall and grabbed the phone receiver from me. I screamed and hollered for help and so he began choking me. I got away only because he let me. I ran to my car in gasping tears and sped off. I went straight home to tell my ma all about it but she was already on the phone providing counseling to my boyfriend because he’d called her to say he was about to kill himself. She refused to talk to me as I stood there sobbing hysterically. She refused to come outside and console me after I ran outside and sat on the porch and sobbed. My next door neighbor came over and listened to me and consoled me.
Shortly after that, my now ex-boyfriend began driving past my house and stalking me at college. He’d be standing in the hallway when I came out of class on break. He talked to all three of my best friends that I’d known since high school and successfully turned them against me (for a time. I finally got to tell my side of the story and they got to see for themselves what a psycho he was and we all patched things up a YEAR later).
I never did pursue a restraining order but of course that was stupid of me, too.

I keep tabs on that motherfucker to this day.

So anyway, I learned from early on that boyfriends and strangers, especially men, are always potentially lethal.
That is one of my emotional triggers. I have so many.

But it’s not fair to this man who asked for my help today. He’s my father’s age - likely born between 1940 and 1950.

We used to be kind and helpful to strangers but so many of us have gotten so paranoid. The truly needful and nice ones get shit on because many of us are too paranoid to lend a hand.

I’m sorry, dear neighbor. I know what you look like and will still do a mini background check to make sure you’re good, and then next time I see you I’ll smile and wave and if you need assistance I will help.