This is an account phoned in from out of state by Joe Junior, a close friend.
“I was going into the Krogers, on the supermarket parking lot. My survival habits from coming of age in an urban area have carried over into this rural space. I’m one of the few guys who came up in my parent’s neighborhood who has not been mugged.
“So as I’m getting out of the car I scan the lot and I see this tall skinny white guy. I’ll call him 'Stretch'. He is obviously stalking this older woman. He lets her go, does not seem to notice me. I don’t know if he was considering panhandling or what. It was broad daylight so might have been innocuous.
“But, there was something about this guy that I did not like. As I headed to the entrance I notice him coming around this woman’s car with his eye on me, and he was doing the most curious thing, and I think it was that thing that really put me on edge. He was dragging two fingers—index and middle—around the car.
“So now he is coming for me. I’m not turning and looking but counting his steps. I can sense him. My anti-mugging radar is locked in. Three more steps and he’s on me—a lot taller longer stride than me.
“He follows me for another step and I say to myself, one more step and you turn and throw him down—whatever is at hand. Just as I tense my shoulders and begin the turn he veers off like a fighter plane abandoning station when the flak starts coming up. I’ve been here before, was not confused, kind of felt electric reading this guy. I went on about my way. But since then I have been haunted by his cues leading up this stalk. I knew what he was up to—my subconscious, my street smarts did. But that thing with the fingers, that has been bothering me.
“You have a lot more experience with this kind of thing than I do and you still live that street life. So what is your ‘Harm City’ take on this? What is the secret of the two finger drag?”
What follows is my answer, to Joe's query, which I fortunately possess in my jumbled chemical retrieval database, but have unfortunately, during the course of authoring a dozen books on violence, failed to address in writing until now.
“The two fingers dragging behind, sometimes up by the shoulder when turning a corner of a building, or more parallel and low when walking around a fence, car or other obstacle, are a childhood behavior, which I have seen in many children including recently my grandson, and earlier this year a runner for a drug gang who was all of eight years old.”
“I’m sure some kind of behavioral anthropologist or shrink could explain the why of this habit but I can give you the context. Children from toddler to a year or two shy of puberty do this when spying on newly arrived adults in their parent’s household. I see it as a desire to hold back and stay connected to something solid, and have most often observed it being done on interior corners while ‘peeking’ at the guest, with it often terminating in a thinking posture with the two fingers to the lips or chin halfway between a child’s version of a thinking man pose and a ‘shushing’ of the lips.
“In older children I have seen it as a prelude to approaching a strange adult to ask a question, or to shoplifting, or in the case of more than one drug set lookout, as the peek around the corner of a brownstone house fearfully regarding the hunting matrix that is the ghetto.
“In a man this becomes an intense considering gaze, like when Oliver recently approached me at the school as I mopped the mats. He was considering asking me a question about my boxing past that was going to be uncomfortable for me as it concerned my not being able to make the pro cut in boxing, a cut he has the goods to make.
“In adult women I have noticed this behavior only when drunk or in the case of compulsive women, and only when they are looking at a man who they have suddenly decided to approach for sex. This still being a vestigial taboo act for a woman in our society, brings out the subconscious body language of the curious yet hesitant child approaching the adult human unknown. As a gentleman and humanitarian, when I notice such body language directed at myself I take the heavy burden upon my selfless shoulders and make it easy on the lady.
“Needless to say, seeing this body language on the part of Oliver as I cleaned the mats would have had me leaping for the nearest machine gun position!"
So Joe, my considered interpretation of this man who was stalking both you and the old lady and acted on neither impulse, based also on my decades of supermarket parking lot experience and the fact that you look like a Neanderthal on steroids who would require Oliver’s level of physicality to waylay unarmed, comes down to a probability option list:
1. 80%: He was an emotionally unfit panhandler, perhaps autistic, perhaps not yet morally debased enough, who was using a level of politeness and inappropriate skulking that will either result in him starving or getting stomped by some redneck.
2. 19%: He may have been an armed mugger or carjacker, with carjacker more likely in this environment, and the only explanation for his continual breathing being his choice of your hayseed town to ply his trade, for the Harm City environment would surely exceed his aggressor survivability rating.
3. 1%: He is a metrosexual prostitute trying to earn enough money for a sex change who suddenly grew fearful and panicked when he got close enough to see the ape hair on your overdeveloped hump of neck muscle!
Take care Joe, and thanks for dredging up that bit of two-fingered behavioral trivia from the pit of my damaged brain.
