Safe Home

I never heard this before I moved to New York City.

There are any number of things I’d never heard before moving here in 2000.

For instance, I’d never heard of mothers giving their kids “mugger’s money” for their walk to school in the morning (clearly a topic for another essay!).

It’s different here.

When friends part after hanging out together, one or more of us will tell others: “Safe home”. It’s shorthand for “Get home safe”.

Who says that?

People who know people who haven’t gotten home safe.

One friend who, for the record, stands well over six feet tall scoffs at this habit (It’s something we say without thinking usually). I submit that this is a man who has never particularly noticed if someone has been following him for more than a block.

I’ll also admit that I don’t tend to worry a lot when someone does follow me. Or, at least, I didn’t. Much.

When I was in school, and trying to pay the rent in ways that didn’t conflict with school, I worked as a professional dominatrix at a dungeon attached to a strip club down by the Westside Highway.

It was one of those joints that didn’t sell alcohol which meant that the girls didn’t have to cover anything (another tangent; I need to keep track of these other essay ideas I’m uncovering here).

There were a couple of mildly disinterested big guys who sat in the doorway near the dungeon so I never worried about having trouble with clients but every night that I walked down Carmine towards the job I’d think: “Is this the night we get busted?”

We never did.

I worked there for a little over a year, made decent money and gathered some killer material for a lifetime of storytelling.

I’d get off at 2 am and take either the A or the 1 train back up to Inwood where I lived. I’d be sitting in semi-deserted train stations waiting for my subway and, know what? — I never worried. I never felt threatened. I felt very, very alert, but I didn’t feel unsafe.

Photo Credit — AleXander Hirka

I moved to Harlem in 2002 and lived here on my own for the most part until 2012 when my partner and I decided our two years plus bi-borough schlep between Harlem and Bed-Stuy had to end.

During those years I’d come in at any hour and, again, not worry. I’d pay attention. I wouldn’t engage with anyone. I always got home safely (maybe because the bouncers at the strip club would say “safe home” as I’d leave).

While I may not have worried or felt threatened or anxious, I also didn’t kid myself. I watched what was going on around me and moved with purpose and confidence.

I suppose it doesn’t hurt that I dress like a slightly punked-out dyke. I got nothing you want and you got nothing I want so just stay right over there on your corner and see to your business.

On April 4, 2018, I got a very welcome job offer from a prestigious organization after years of freelance hell and months of resume roulette.

I came home from the gym, psyched and happy.

It was raining and cold and there was a woman in the little locked vestibule of our building. She’d gotten past one locked door but not the second. This woman was one of the people we’d see smoking a little glass pipe or slumped over in a stupor on our stoop. Now she was bobbing her head, wishing me a nice day.

As soon as I turned the lock in the second door she began shoving to get in the building. I don’t know what possessed me to push back but I did. At one point I actually almost had her locked out in the vestibule again but she was bigger than me and wanted in.

It’s been thirty years or more since anyone hit me. It was absolutely surreal.

She wasn’t punching me and I think she must have been kind of out of it because all she was doing was a lot of slapping and hair pulling. I do remember screaming like a fire alarm.

There I was on the floor in the front hallway of the building with her leaning down with one hand holding me by the hair, slapping my head and face. I shrieked over and over for help.

Call the police! Over and over, screaming for help.

I like to think some of my neighbors who didn’t come out (and who could blame them?) were calling 911. It seemed to take an awfully long time but eventually, someone came out and tried to talk to my assailant. She finally backed off a little. I was shaking but tried to get a photo of her with my phone. My glasses were trashed and my face felt swollen.

She walked out of the building about five minutes before the police arrived.

The short of it was that she was apprehended (thanks to the quick thinking of my partner later that evening when that woman came back to hang out in the stairwell), got represented in court by an organization that I hope does more than just keep her out of jail and I got a five-year order of protection. I know her name and do have a decent enough photo to be able to identify her. I don’t look at it.

I haven’t seen her again.

Has that changed my sense of being ok coming home by myself? At first, it certainly did. I’m out late with friends on Monday nights and very much appreciated when someone could give me a ride home. I also took taxis a lot. I did not stop staying out with friends on Monday nights.

But it’s been a year.

Nothing like that has happened again. I did come home one night to see someone, a street person with his pants falling off, trying to get in our building. I kept walking and texted my partner to come down. One of our Senegalese neighbors came home in the meantime and I walked in with him as the street guy stood back and didn’t try to get into the building.

There is no real security out there.

Not in sleepy little towns where drunk drivers can wipe out entire families. Not out on farms where tornadoes can whip up out of nowhere and flatten everything in sight. Not even in suburban schools where kids with high-powered automatic weapons have become a nightmare for parents.

We’re all one step away from having a badly driven bus take us out. Why worry?

Safe home!

© Remington Write 2019. All Rights Reserved