Mugged

We were casually walking through a back alley, to go to our friend's shop on Main Street. We were in a jovial mood, being as it was a beautiful day and we had just filled our stomachs with some shakes and onion rings. Thus, we were going to Call of the Wild with the intention to spend our money on useless but pretty baubles. However, a large group of violent, ill-bred teenagers had quite a different idea.

As we strolled down the stretch of worn pavement not more than twenty five feet in length, they approached with a sickening air of bravado. Surrounding me, they asked if I had a dollar. I knew this scam well enough to know they'd steal whatever was in my pockets if I even reached for my wallet. So I told them I was broke (which was true after spending my money on the aforementioned onion rings and milk shakes) and tried to be on my way. Still, they encroached further.

I wanted to hurt them. To lash out and destroy whatever parts of the gang were within my reach. Could I have? Not a chance in heaven or hell. It was eight against one, the odds certainly not stacked in my favor. I foolishly would have though. But I saw one of them libidinously eyeing Jen, my girlfriend, and didn't want them to harm a hair on her precious head. I'd rather suffer death than them to hurt her and I thought I was quite literally about to prove that.

Jen, hoping to appease them, hastily opened her patchwork wallet to offer them the dollar they craved. They instantly grabbed the wallet and removed the precious contents of two dollars from this innocent girl who asked only for her boyfriend to be safe.

As the saying goes, thieves have no honor. The ring-leader, who my mother had taught and I had know in middle school, commanded that his large acquaintance beat me, though he had been sufficiently appeased with money. His associate hit me twice on the side of the head with staggering force, causing me to fall full weight against the fence.

I don't recall exactly how I got out of the middle of the gang. Jen told me later she pushed them aside and pulled me away. While I do doubt this, she being a petite girl, it seems the most logical course of events in my mind. I certainly did not get out of their on my own accord for I definitely was in no shape. I only recall looking back because my sunglasses had fallen off. It's been said that victims of traumatic incidents are incapable of thinking about what has really happened; I certainly couldn't.

Where was my best friend Nick all this time I was being assaulted?? He had run like the coward he so obviously was. Could I blame him? Yes, though I probably shouldn't. I certainly would have tried to help him were the situation reversed. I know this in my heart as much as in my mind. However, self preservation is usually foremost in ones mind and it definitely was that day. He would have happily left me to be murdered and Jen to be raped, so long as he was safe at home.

Once we were safely on Main Street, Nick confided that I should feel lucky. In utter disbelief, I insisted he explain how. "Well," he said, "in the city they would have knifed you!" As though that made me feel at all better. He wanted so bad for me to forgive that he was a coward; that he would have easily left me to die. For months thereafter, he defended the gang above me, saying that they were the real victims.

He cited cartoons and pulp fiction novellas as though they could justify the pain. When the gang was arrested again for trying to kill a drug dealer a few weeks later, Nick waxed on how noble they truly were. He maintained that if it was Batman who had tried to kill a drug dealer, the public would have hailed him. My argument that Batman was fictional and there was a great difference between fighting crime and causing more didn't touch his fantasy.

Further, he claimed that this gang was a group of beautiful victims of society. That they was just like the teens in A Clockwork Orange. Again, he purposely ignored the truth that the characters in the novel were purposely despicable and the gang was more so, because they were real and had hurt me.

To say that Nick's defense of the scurrilous gang put strains on our friendship would be a great understatement. I grew to resent his incessant intellectualizing of this crime and its perpetrators. I grew to resent him.

I learned over those months who I could trust over those few months. Not the society that unleashed the criminals on me, not the so-called best friend who first physically left me to die, then emotionally. I could trust only myself.