Looking out for Number Two

I was talking to a friend (let's call him Paul) the other day about the perils of walking in San Francisco after dark.

San Francisco, but for a few parts of the city, is probably one of the safest American cities you can walk around alone in at night--that is, if you take out the pit bull maulings and the random crazy driver that ran over innocent pedestrians during rush hour. Maybe I'm a bit hardened, but living in Philadelphia has clearly increased the threshold for when my fight or flight response is triggered--and when I mean fight or flight, it almost always means running like a Haitian with a lunch ticket.

One summer that I was back home in Philadelphia from college, I was asked by a good friend (let's call him Sucker) to drop him off in the Kensington district of Philadelphia to volunteer at a summer camp for inner city kids. He'd never been there before, so naturally the director of the program gave him the 11:00 pm shift that would require him to navigate through parts of Philadelphia that look more like Beirut under the cover of complete darkness.

Mr. Director gave us these directions: "Take City Line, get off at the exit with the abandoned brick building that is falling in. Don't stop at the stop-light, or you'll probably get jacked."

"Jacked?" Sucker gulped.

"Yeah, but if you drive through the light, you'll be fine. They can't run faster than your car. Anyway, take this road all the way until you hit an empty parking lot, turn right and continue along the water until you hit our building. It's gray, and next to an empty loading dock."

So, with those paint by number directinons, we drove down City Line and, once we got to North Philly, every single exit had a building that looked like it either contained squatting crackwhores or snipers. We rolled the dice and got off by some empty building, ran through the red lights, and then ended up smack dab in the middle of what looked like filming for Boyz in the Hood: Part II. There were 40-50 people on the street with Cadillac lowriders, boomin' bass, and some girls with as much junk in their trunk as a Cadillacs they were sitting on.

When my friend and I pulled up into this soiree, we increased the "white people" headcount total to two.

Probably seeing our already white faces turn pail, some young man on the street noticed, looked in the car suspiciously and yelled, "Whitey!!!"

Once his friends turned around and started walking our way, using my finely honed "get the hell out of here" flight response, I threw my car in reverse and preceeded to run three red-lights--backwards--before getting pulled over by the police.

Sitting in the front seat still breathing hard, officer Philly soothingly walked up to my window and shouted, "What the f--k do you think your doing?"

"Um, I'm lost"

"No shit."

"Um, I was afraid they were going to ask me they could dance with my date. I would have had to turn over my friend."

"What are you doing here? Selling drugs."

"Nope, I'm dropping this guy," pointing to Sucker, "off at the youth center."

"Well, you's in the wrong neighborhood."

"Your confirmation is duly noted. I usually like to play a game called 'internal GPS,' where I use my five senses to try and figure out where I am. Using my sense of sight, I noticed the raging black men that were about to rip me limb from limb, which led me to conclude that we made a wrong turn."

What I actually said was, "Oh?"

Then he gave us further directions, none which either of us were paying attention to. We'd had enough of North Philly for the night and decided against helping children to go and do what all good suburban college kids do: drink beer.

Anyway, San Francisco doesn't quite have that kind of danger. There are plenty of homeless people, but while they might be batshit crazy, they don't exactly have the capability take you out in a fight, and if they had a gun they would have sold it for drugs faster than you can say PCP.

That doesn't mean there aren't perils to be aware of while walking the streets of San Francisco. "Paul" was walking from home a bar, and while he was looking into the window of a restaurant to see if some blond girl was looking back at him, he stepping in a massive pile of shit. The worst part is that it was wet and steamy, yet he still managed to hear a crunching sound when his foot found its way to the bottom of the pile.

Someone should contact the "Adopt-a-Landmine" folks, and tell them to add San Francisco to the list.

Anyway, if you are walking through the streets of San Francisco, make sure that you keep one eye on the ground, or you could very well end up with some very special, authentic "San Francisco Chocolate Mousse" on your shoes. I hope you had enough sense not to wear sandles.

Posted by 10 fingers 6 strings at September 15, 2006 04:05 PM | TrackBack