Welcome Home P

My brother says he was just mugged at gunpoint downtown. "It was clear the guy was new to mugging." Which made me laugh because being told someone has just had a gun on them is hard to absorb. P complied and A did too, which amounted to an empty wallet and a cheap watch, until the mugger saw A's iphone. So he demanded that. At this my heart constricted a little. Because A is poor but he does own this one beautiful thing, his iphone, and he loves that iphone. And P says that to his panic A refused. And told the guy what he could do with himself. And at this point of the narrative I remembered Richard Price's Lush Life and this is the point where the inexperienced mugger shoots the victim in order not to loose face. But possibly because the mugger had no friend around to see how it all turned out, or possibly because it was cold, or possibly because he was genuinely overwhelmed with curiosity, instead of shooting somebody (and I remembered Brian Beutler's account of being shot) he asked what the boys were up to with all those photos and adhesive and made small talk for a minute and then walked away.

And this was on a street downtown. Not a bad part of town, my brother says, although the details seem fuzzy to him. Just one of those streets parallel to Main. I've heard people who live downtown talk this way; people living on twelfth say it doesn't get bad till nineteenth and so on. And the rule apparently is that the area you are used to navigating yourself never seems dangerous to you personally. I am guilty of this myself. Little Rock has been famous for its crime in the past, but most of it is in a few particularly bad areas, so that whole swathes of the city are largely untouched by it. Yet I mentor in one of those few bad spots and have never felt any qualms about being down there by myself, often after dark. It's familiar. Only in the abstract do I acknowledge the foolishness of that arrangement.