(Posting the beginning of stories I never came back to for a while)
I took one karate lesson when I was a kid. I quit because a boy kicked me in the butt and said that I looked like a horse. Grandma was not pleased. She taught me about a different kind of self-defense – charm and disarm. Make it so people don’t want to hurt you. Or if they do want to hurt you make it so you have two guys at your side named Low-blow and Lefty to teach them to regret that they ever thought about it. Or keep a gun in your purse like she did, one of those little ones that looks like a lighter that looks like a gun only hers actually was a gun.
Point being, I don’t know anything about fighting beyond what was covered in that first lesson thirty years ago and what I picked up during that unfortunate period of time right after college when I dated a semi-pro basketball player who was training for MMA. Besides chlamydia I mean. Seth Rogan is right, that shit is everywhere.
I don’t know how I got out there. But I did. Probably because a couple of radiology techs don’t have much experience with fighting either. However I did I did it, I got loose and ran into the waiting room where some very startled people saw me sprint past them wearing Acelitt Women’s Casual Wide Leg Dress Pants High Waist Button Down Trousers with Pockets below and a hospital gown up top. It wasn’t my best look. But it wasn’t my worst.
There was a part of my brain saying “stop, stop, slow down, don’t run, find a shirt, you look like a mental patient!” but it was being drowned out by the other part of my brain saying “AAAH! AHHH! Run away, run away!”
I don’t even know what I was running from, if I had some kind of rare infectious disease, I was doing the absolute worst thing I could do, running around spreading it everywhere. But when they grabbed me and tried to smash me into the corner (nobody puts Baby in a corner) some kind of flag went up in my head. Someone lays hands on me and things change.
I flew down the stairs holding the bottom of the gown with one arm at my side like a football. The one other person coming up the stairs was even more startled by me charging by than the people in the waiting room. I had no plan. My purse and my keys and phone were still up in the radiology suite, what was I going to do, where was I going to go? I was just running.
I had the poor fortune of rocketing out of the stairwell into the lobby at the same time the cops were coming in. They spotted the crazy woman in the gown top immediately. It’s funny, my brain suddenly shifted into freeze mode. Something about the uniform of the cops makes you, or me anyway, switch gears. A million episodes of a million cop shows have trained me that you can’t run from the cops, that’s BAD. They’re the LAW.
That might be the best indication of the existence of two Americas that there is. People like me who immediately obey and people whose instinct is the exact opposite, not the cops are here everything is okay, but rather the cops are here run for your life!
Social commentary over.
“Ma’am, ma’am, we need you to calm down” one of them said with their hands out flat like Chris Pratt training his dinosaurs “you may have been exposed to a dangerous pathogen and we need you to stop moving so we can help you.”
Different parts of my brain were asking different questions. If they wanted to help me why did they have their hands on their guns? Do the police even do diseases? They’re not in charge of diseases. And if they are why aren’t they wearing gloves or masks? How did they get here so fast?
None of that mattered though because of the main thing. I didn’t believe them. They didn’t want to help me. They were afraid of me. They were the ones with the guns and they were scared of me.
If anything that should have made me believe the virus theory more. But it didn’t.
They say women are better at multi-tasking than men. If that’s true I think it’s because women are always multi-tasking. As a woman whatever you’re doing you’re also scanning for threats. Who’s around? What are they doing? What’s their vibe? Does that guy have his hand down his pants? Is he staring at me? Is he taking his dick out? What’s going on? Who’s that? Where did those people come from? Does it seem like that new guy knows that first guy? Where did I park? Where are my keys? Can I get there before they make a move?
Some women call it creep radar, some call it a sixth sense, women’s intuition, gut instinct, whatever – it’s a thing. It’s not a great system obviously since eight trillion women are murdered or attacked each year but it’s something.
I knew. I just knew.
They were slowly coming towards me, I slammed back into the door, knocking it open and stumbled backwards into the stairwell. I waited a beat and then jumped out the other door – it was one of those stupid set ups in office buildings were two doors lead to almost exactly the same place. I went out that door as they came in the other and immediately ducked around the corner. My instinct was to try hiding in a closet or an exam room or something like that but I ignored that. I felt like I had to keep moving.
Somehow my stupid Bugs Bunny “which way did he go, which way did he go” routine worked and I was outside on the sidewalk. I was halfway expecting there to be more cops out there, but it was just people looking at the crazy lady standing around in a gown bare backing it out on the street.
