I’m talking about crime, of course. But even as I start to type, I realize my first time as a crime victim, indirectly, was in Alexandria, Virginia, where someone broke into the car and stole the radio, while the family Scottish Terrier, Dreamy, kept barking to alert us, earning only a “Shut up!” for her efforts. (But what kind of car was it? The pale green Valiant, or the one before? Family cars, in order: Valiant. Red Ford station wagon. A dark green Triumph that was later painted taxi cab yellow. A white Renault that my father negotiated for at a Reisterstown Road dealership, cranky from recent dental surgery. A beautiful used Audi that had been meticulously maintained by its previous owner, a Secret Service agent. A yellow VW Rabbit, on which I learned to drive stick, making me part of a tiny American minority, an estimated 15 percent today. And, finally, a blue AMC Hornet, purchased new on the upper end of Route 40, whose radio literally began smoking as we drove it off the lot. What do these automotive choices reveal about my family? More than I’m willing to contemplate right now.)
But the crime on my mind took place in August 1967. Or, possibly, ’66. We had parked at Edmondson Village Shopping Center and purchased our back-to-school shoes at Hess, a local shoe store that had a children’s barbershop attached, with squirrel monkeys frolicking in the windows. The shoes were exquisite — brown Oxfords, with some kind of curious, two-toned thing going on, an effect created with a piece of transparent yellow plastic. Trust me, they were cool. Because I had an older sister, I didn’t get a lot of new clothes, so new shoes were especially exciting to me. Every fall, I picked out a pair that I believed would change my life, or at least my persona. I had high hopes for those shoes.
But they were stolen out of our unlocked car as we ran other errands. My mother called the police, who made it clear that we were simply too naive, too silly, to be at large in Baltimore. An unlocked car! Ha! Go back to Virginia, you silly hicks! (In hindsight, my mother’s gentle Georgia accent probably played into the cops’ attitudes.) I couldn’t get another pair of shoes like the ones that were lost, although I don’t remember why. And I never found a pair of shoes that changed my life, but I never stopped trying.
Meanwhile, if you don’t want to get your car stolen in Baltimore — drive a stick. Most of the car thieves can’t. “I really respect a woman who knows how to drive a stict,” a young valet at a suburban country club told me last fall after a book luncheon. When the alleged “Tadpole” trend comes to this part of the world, it is so over.
What does the alleged “Tadpole” trend mean?
Hi, McBetty. Good to see you here.
“Tadpole” was a film about an older woman/younger man that somehow got turned into a trend by some newspapers and magazines. Very silly, but then — as a former feature writer, I know that reporters are sometimes forced to do such things against their will.
Thinking of my “first time,” I hope it’s okay to post a story I first wrote for the Hardboiled board, and which is now on my website. It’s my best crime story. Apologies to anyone (like, um, Keith) who’s heard it before.
By the way, it’s true!
MUGGED
I was born and raised in New York City. Lived there the first thirty-one years of my life, and in all that time I was never mugged. Never robbed. Never accosted.
As I stepped out of my car just before dawn on East 86th Street, the empty rain-slicked asphalt gleaming in the streetlights, I saw the two men coming at me too fast. Before I could do more than take a step away they were too close. And then, as they slammed me back against my car, I realized that all those years of good luck and street smarts hadn’t granted me a lifetime pass from getting into deep trouble.
As they stood there, waiting a moment to see what I’d do next, I also knew that if any suburban rube deserved to get mugged, it was me. I’d driven here from my safe little town, parked on a deserted streetcorner, and gotten out of my car without even looking around. I might as well have been wearing a sign that said, “Doesn’t know squat about city life.” Next thing I knew, if I survived this, I’d find myself handing my money to the three-card-monte players and trying to figure out which shell the little red ball was under and why I never seemed to win.
One of the men was standing closer to me. He was pale, slender, and as soon as he knew I wasn’t going to fight, he started to talk, a stream of words that I could barely follow. “You got a wallet?” he said. “Sure you do. You got a wallet. Wonder if there’s anything in it. Sure there is. Nice guy like you, you got a wallet with something in it. Wonder what? Twenty? Fifty? A hundred. I’ll bet it’s a hundred. Sure, a hundred, easy. Wonder if I could get a look and see….”
The second man, standing a step further away, was bigger. His fleshy face was mottled from drink, but he kept his eyes steadily on me as his friend talked. His right hand was clenched at his side. His left grasped the top of an enormous, industrial-strength garbage bag, a bag that held something so large and heavy I couldn’t even imagine what it might be.
“Yeah,” the first man was saying. “A hundred, easy. You want to show us what you got in that fat wallet of yours?”
“No, I don’t think so,” I said. I raised my gaze for a moment, saw a man standing just outside the door of an all-night newsstand, just fifteen feet away. But as my eyes met his, he shook his head slightly, then stepped back inside. No help there. Further down the street, I could see the glimmery headlights of cars stopped at a light over on Madison…but they might as well have been on another planet for all the help they’d give me.
The talkative one frowned. “No? You’re not going to show us? Well, you got twenty in there, right? Sure you do. Big guy like you, you got twenty. You gonna give us twenty?”
As I hesitated, he seemed struck with an idea. Gesturing back toward the dead weight of the garbage bag, he said, “Tell you what. You give us twenty, and you can have that bag. Whattya think? We get the money, you get what’s in there. Good idea? Sure, good idea.”
I looked down at the bag, wondering if this was some kind of morbid joke. They get my money, I get the body they were dragging along in that bag. On the other hand, if I said no, they’d probably be dragging two bags along when they mugged the next guy.
“Okay,” I said. I reached down into my pocket, quickly pulled a bill from my wallet, and handed it over. The talkative one made the twenty disappear, and the other took a step forward, pulling the bag with great effort, then let go of it. “Hey,” the talkative one said, “see you around.” And then they were gone, out of the pool of streetlight and around the dark corner onto Second Avenue.
I stood still for a moment, gazing at the bag at my feet. Then I reached down and tried to lift it. It was as heavy as it looked, and something inside seemed to shift and roll with a metallic clinking sound.
Struggling with the knotted rope that tied it shut, I finally got it open and looked inside….
….and saw that it contained cans of Pepsi. Dozens of cans of Pepsi. More Pepsi than I could drink in a year.
I counted the cans as I tossed them into my trunk. The guys had sold me seventy-three cans of Pepsi for my twenty dollars. That came out to less than thirty cents a can.
I think it was a better deal than I ever got at my local ShopRite.
Actually… as of last week, the musical version of MUGGED is back up on the web:
<a href=”http://www.soundclick.com/bands/7/keithsnydermusic.htm”>http://www.soundclick.com/bands/7/keithsnydermusic.htm</a>
Cool!
Though “the musical version” has a “Springtime for Hitler” sound to it….
Fabulous stuff, Keith, and a great idea, Laura. I’m a long-time fan of Laura and her crime fiction cohorts, but I couldn’t have thought up a story this weird. My best B’more crime story is also my first crime story, but it is the peculiarly kitschy nature of the crime that will keep this one in my memory. I’m a local musician, and I was playing a gig with my trio We’re About 9 at the studio of the wonderful Haitian-imported painter Claes Gabriel over near Charles Center. Also on the bill were several other local singer-songwriter-types, among them recent Baltimore expat Eliot Bronson (now in Atlanta). After our set, I went down to carry gear to the car, parked on Lexington. I remember the sparkly green of broken glass on the sidewalk ahead and the, “Oh, crap, that’s probably somebody’s window” crossing through my thoughts as I approached my car.
Before I got to my car and noticed that, of course, it was my window, I noticed several sheets of looseleaf paper, written on in my handwriting, in the ample light from the midtown streetlamps: my Music History II notes. I sidled up to the windowless window and peered in to assess the damage. I keep an alarm on (with a blinky red light) in my 1994 Subaru Legacy station wagon, which was, I suppose, what deterred the burglar from helping him/herself to the huge, open bag of cd’s on the backseat, among other obvious stealables. What was taken was my school backpack. At the time, I was a junior at Towson University, and the bag contained every textbook and notebook I had for the fall semester of 2000. I went back upstairs to get a phone and call cops, my naive suburban self thinking cops can do something about a broken car window and a bag full of third-year music student stuff. Eliot Bronson ran back down with me to check his own car, which was further down the same block. In the doorway of the shop in front of Eliot’s undisturbed vehicle was more of my schoolwork. On a lark, Eliot handed me the papers, said “Wait here,” and tore off into the unlit Charles Center plaza.
In five minutes or so, he returned with all my missing stuff in his arms, piled up to his chin. My hero. The books and notes were spread willy-nilly in doorways and trash cans over three or four blocks. Alas, though, the bag remained lost. On the bright side, I think the story is worth the cost of a backpack and the lesson about keeping stuff in your car downtown.
Ok. This is working. That wasn’t my first crime story. I hadn’t thought about the first in forever. My first happened in 1993, I think, when I was 13. My bike was stolen from the garage at my parents’ house in Pikesville’s Sudbrook park neighborhood. I remember the crowbar marks on the old wood garage door and thinking how easy it must have been to remove that lock. The police found the bike in a week or so when it was left in the garage of a family two blocks away during another break-in. I was told a girl’s bike was stolen and mine was left in its place. The next year, as a freshman at Calvert Hall, I was at a dance when a friend introduced me to a girl I was told lived down the street from me. Long story short, after a couple minutes of chat, the girl and I figured out that we had an interesting story in common. I don’t think she ever got her bike back, though.
I grew up three blocks from the Hess shoe store! The monkeys in the window always made a huge impression on me but they also had mirrors across from one another that made you feel like you were falling into affinity. There was a little ice cream place there and the library was on the corner across from the high school. They used to wrap the trees in tiny white lights that were lit on Thanksgiving evening. Being a few short blocks away our family walked up the hill past the aging and dilapidated tennis courts and down the stair way. A man rushed out of the darkness next to the stairwell with a 2×4 in full attack mode and seeing a group and probablly figuring anyone with a family wasn’t rolling in the dough rushed off again. My fondest dream at 5 was to be a garbage man. I used to mine the dumpsters behind the shopping center. Some of my best finds were a huge box of jelly beans, frequently I’d find pornography that I’d sell for a nickle a page. There used to be what I called big trash days when you could put out larger items to be disposed of. I hauled home a pedal sewing machine. We ordered a belt for from the Sears catalog and it worked fine. The Sears catalog was a bright spot in the year providing hours of entertaimant and hours and hours of dreaming and wishful thinking. But the brightest memories are of the alleys between the rowhouses and the bigger older homes that had once housed “society” on what had been the outskirts of the city. Places that had formerly had maids residing on the the upper floors. Alleys where we played cowboys and Indians, dodgeball and war which involved alot of purloined bandages. Where the “Good Humor” man accepted our mostly stolen dimes. Where the produce man sold his product calling out his offerings in a sing song fashion. The milkman that left the days orders including milk in glass bottles and picked up the note for the next delivery. The garbagemen that so fascinated me plied those alleys. The tiny parking bays across from the houses outlined by shrubs some which had tiny tart edible berries the name escapes me at the moment. Carpeted with natural outcroppings of slate. Sledding down the middle of our hilly street during the big snow of “64″. A storm that kept the heating fuel truck away from our home though the power stayed on and we all 6 of us collected in my parents bed with the electric blanket. The bed actually collapsed under the weight of us. This after my father’s desperate, smoky attempt to break up up and burn furniture in the old, never used fireplaces. We’d take waxed produce boxes from the grocery store and ” sled” down the hill behind the shopping center in the summer months stopping just short of the fence mainly because we were so light. When my Mother passed away I came across a photo taken with a brownie camera, on the back I’d written “me and my firends” My sisters and I were the only white faces in the group. The great white flight towards the suburbs was changing the character of our neighborhood. The postwar families were abandoning their rowhouses for the burbs’ The soundtrack of “American Bandstand” and the Beatles was being replaced by Motown and Soul Train. These changes occured between the time I was five years old and eleven years old. Years that were punctuated by the death of President Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcom X. I remember hearing about the KKK on my little radio and seeing fires burning when I looked out my third story window during the rioting that happened after the deaths of MLK and Malcom X. I vaguely remember that we had national guardmen posted at the shopping center up the hill. My Dad could travel between Baltimore and D.C. because he worked for a newspaper.