Late Night Encounter With An Idiot

Something just happened, and it's disturbed me enough that I feel I have to write this down, even though I really don't feel like writing just now.

But first, context. I've been going to the gym pretty regularly the last year or so, and over the summer I've gradually slid into doing things later and later. (Partially because I'm naturally a night person and partially because nocturnal living helps to beat the heat.) Anyway, today I went to the gym at 6PM, then went to Safeway to get some groceries and didn't come home until 11PM.

It's about three blocks from the bus stop to my house. It's an easy walk that I've made thousands of times before. It was pretty dark, but between the full moon and the streetlights there was enough illumination to see where I was going. Seeing anything further away was a bit difficult, though.

So I get off the bus and I'm walking home. There's some woman walking in the same direction about half a block ahead of me, but I'm not paying much attention to her. Mostly I'm thinking about having pizza for supper. Then we both get to the last block before home, and as she passes the alley there, she turns into it and disappears. Again, this doesn't make much of an impression on me.

Then some guy appears from out of the alley. He's yelling and waving something in the air and - I'm not kidding, an actual chill went down my spine when I realized it was a machete. He's standing there yelling and waving a machete in the air. Then the woman reappears from out of the alley and I realize he's yelling at her. He's calling her stupid and irresponsible, and what was she thinking walking out by herself this late at night. Meanwhile I stop walking and as these sensory impressions hit home I wonder if he's going to attack her with that thing. Is he a murderer? Can I stop him if he is? Do I have to jump a man with a fucking machete when I've got nothing but my backpack? I can't let him attack her, to say nothing of the possibility that he might go for me next. They're less than twenty feet away.

Then they start walking together, in the same direction that I'm going. And I realize from her manner that she knows him. She's acting more like a sullen teenager than a terrified victim. Then he says something about how she's going the wrong way, and she says "this is the way I walked down here." Then he interrupts her, saying "We walked past the wall, we have to go around it again to get to the other side." And I realize he's talking about the Yellowhead freeway. He tracked her from somewhere on the other side of the Yellowhead to here, apparently because she left the house without telling anyone where she was going. Meanwhile he puts the machete back in its sheath on his belt and I feel a little better. But they're walking slower and slower and there's no way to avoid passing them. Meanwhile he continues to berate her in an incredibly patronizing way, calling her stupid and foolish and so on.

So when they get to my corner, of course they stop. Or rather the man stops, then the woman does too. Then, feeling more than a little scared, I pass right by them. I was trying to pass on the man's other side, so if he drew the machete again he'd have to turn to face me. But he's already turned, and while he's still yelling at her the whole time, I feel his eyes on me as I go by. Then I turn onto my block, they start walking again and soon they're out of sight. But I can still hear the man's voice because he's really loud, as he says "You're so fucking irresponsible. What if you forced me to take a man's life? You don't think of these things."

Then I'm walking down my block under the moonlight, and I realize that he wanted me to hear that last part. He wasn't waving the machete in the air to threaten her, he was doing it to threaten me because he must have seen me behind her when he was waiting at the mouth of the alley. And when I realized that it scared me even more! I wondered if the woman would be okay, but it seemed like she knew him, and frankly I didn't want to approach them again and ask questions. I was glad for it to be over.

But as I though about it a bit more, I started to feel angry. What if I had been walking at a slightly faster pace and passed the woman in front of the alley? Would that fucker have attacked me with his big knife? I actually think he would have. The only reason I didn't get attacked by an idiot with a machete tonight is because I was lucky enough to be walking slowly.