A Mugger I Have Known

One of the things I miss about the Bay Area is the adrenaline rush of never knowing when you might get mugged by a guy with a fake gun.

This actually happened to me once, in Berkeley. (Just about anything can happen in Berkeley, and a lot usually does. It's that kind of place.)

I was out with a few friends, two guys and a girl. We went to a bar called the Albatross, which was located in a not-so-great area, but then again that accounts for vast tracts of Berkeley at night, I'd say. Anyway, the Albatross was pretty cool. They have games you can play, like Taboo. Taboo is especially fun if you play with someone who is drunk, I discovered. We paired off for teams, and I got stuck with the guy who'd been drinking. Oddly enough, we won.

Around 1am we'd had our fill of Taboo and drinks, so we headed out to the car, which we'd parked on the street behind the bar. As we walked to it, a guy literally came out of the shadows and demanded our money, just like in the movies. Well, the bad movies anyway.

At that point everything became surreal. He was waving a gun, and shouting. However, I think he was kind of new to the mugging game, because he actually let us take the money out of our wallets, rather than just snatching everything and running. That seemed a little amateurish to me, but I for one wasn't going to say anything.

I also wasn't going to say anything about the fact that the gun looked a little strange. For example, it seemed to have masking tape on it. When discussing the whole episode later, the others were agreed that it was probably a cap gun. But it wasn't the sort of thing we were going to bring up for clarification. "Excuse me, Mr Robber Man, but is that a real gun or a fake one? We'd just like to know for sure before we cooperate with your demands. Oh, you shot one of us! I guess it's real then. Here's my $25."

My friend Jen was the last one to get her money out, because she had one of those giant purses that you can fit a whole house in, and was having a little trouble locating her wallet. The guy waved the gun around and started cussing at her and yelling to her to hurry up. She looked him in the eye and said in her teacher's voice (the sort she reserved for her misbehaving first graders, I've no doubt), "Alright, I'm getting it." I had to hand it to her. Not everyone can pull off the cool and snotty attitude when a gun is being pointed at their head. Even if it's a fake gun, which we were still not entirely sure about at that point.

Finally he had all our money, and then came my favorite part. He told us to go running away, down the street away from him. Riiiight...we were going to go running down another dark street, to meet up with another potential robber in the shadows? Nice try. Instead, we sort of ambled away, or perhaps it was more like sauntering. Whatever the case, I wondered later if that made him mad, that we didn't run. Probably ruined the dramatic story he would tell to his fellow hoodlums later. "Yeah, and then I told them to run, and they just calmly walked off." Don't think that would earn him brownie points among the lords of the underworld, really.

Then the police got annoyed with us because we didn't call them right away. Oh, I'm sorry, officer...how could I have been so silly as to want to get away from the scene of the crime and back to the safety of my home as quickly as possible! Really thoughtless of me; if I had only known how much harder that would have made your job, I doubtless would have stuck around, waiting for Mugger #2 to come along, maybe with a real gun this time.

But in spite of the mugging, I think Berkeley is a great place. And I'd probably go back to the Albatross. I'll just take along some bigger, meaner guys next time.