On Friday night at about 11 p.m. I woke up from my seat on the bus as my head bobbled to a stop—my stop. I hurried off the bus, put on my pack and checked the time on my phone. As always it is my instinct, even when half awake, to step away from others; to always and forever put distance between me and the diseased masses of human excretia. My paranoid mind wakes and nods off to sleep in a Hobbesian world, a rundown town that H. L. Mencken once describes as ‘the ruins of a once great medieval city.’

As the bus pulled off the boy I offloaded with was walking off up the street and two innocent unarmed black teens were eyeballing me from the shelter across the street. The first helpless child stood six five and went about 170. The second helpless child stood five six and went about 130, with a very muscular frame. I shall name them Stretch and Stout.

I decided not to connect with the bus that would be pulling up to that shelter in 10 minutes, and stepped of left, farther away from them and checked the time again, before crossing the street thirty feet to their right.

Stretch walked across the street toward me. When he saw me look at his feet and not look up, he asked as I pocketed my phone, “Excuse me sir. You have a light?”

These kids were probably just out having a good semi-adult time without much money as their mamma’s EBT cash and stamps ran out at least two weeks ago. They had probably bummed a cig and just wanted a light. But, I could have been being measured for a mugging.

I shook my head ‘no’ without looking up and walked across the street. Stretch was streetwise enough to know that I was streetwise, and that I was not the friendly type, so he just backed off, at all times maintaining a safe distance of about 10 feet. At night, on the street—and we literally were in the middle of a fairly busy street—a person with any survival sense has an expanded sense of his or her ‘personal space’.

As I walked across and Stretch back-walked parallel to me to the shelter without closing distance Stout began shouting—obviously with a few drinks under his adolescent belt:

“Yo got a ticket?”

“Yo, yo, yo got a ticket?”

“Yo, yo done wit yo ticket!?”

“Yo, I’m talkin’ ta yo muthafuca!”

“Whachyo disrospectin' fo yo?”

“Ged bag ‘ere when I talkin’ ta yo!”

I was now 20 feet beyond and 5 feet to my right from him, walking across a dark parking lot of a closed store, where some dude was sitting on a curb smoking pot. I could hear Stout coming around the corner from the stop over the gravel and dirt. I slid my right hand under my pack into the back pocket of my shorts and palmed the razor that was there and slid the hand back up into my front pocket. I never looked back as that is a fearful act that encourages pursuit.

I was now more concerned with whoever might be in the shadowed wall spaces of the lot. Stout was going to touch me and get his wrist slashed. In my mind he was already being taken care of by the autorazor. Stretch knew what the hell he was about. If he was part of this, he was the more dangerous of the two. And then there was the possibility that the pot smoker was with them, and what the shadows might hold as well.

Then, as Stout’s brand new athletic wear slapped the asphalt of the lot I heard Stretch say quietly, “Let him go.”

Stout continued to come on and Stretch raised his voice and said with more resolve, in a commanding tone, “Don’t follow that man.”

Stout obeyed, and screamed venomously into the night at my back, "Bitch!"

In my opinion Stretch and Stout were just two kids that had scraped together enough change to share a half pint of rum, had bummed a cigarette and were loathe to let their night of adventure go just yet and wanted to hangout some more. These innocent unarmed black teens were engaged in the venerable urban tradition of ‘doing stupid shit’.

I do not believe that these guys were trying to set me up. I think this was a case of escalated panhandling. Many bus patrons willingly give away their bus ticket at the end of the night. Indeed, it is such a common practice among people at this transfer point that these boys were well within reason if they had simply spent their bus money on booze and were counting on getting home through a charitable donation of a used bus ticket on the part of some other poor person who cared.

Unfortunately, there was no one present who cared.

I think that Stout just became emotionally hurt when I refused to ‘respect’ him. Apparently Stretch has seen enough to know that there is great risk to any lone man who shows too much respect to strangers in the night and had the presence of mind to talk Stout from his collision course with a stranger with a hand in a pocket in the dark.