I turn to face it and see three teenagers, three young black men.
“We’re gonna need five dollars from you,” says the voice. It belongs to the tallest one—taller than me but just as skinny, wearing blue jeans and a red leather flight jacket striated with glittering zippers. It’s a handsome jacket, but too short for his arms, leaving his wrists bare to the midnight chill.
“Excuse me?” I say.
The kid to his left—shorter, but stronger looking—steps in closer. The third hangs back, his eyes darting from me to the street to the sidewalks to the nearby buildings and then to me again. He seems not to want to be here, and his nervousness makes me nervous, snaps me partly out of my drunken overconfidence.
“Give us five dollars,” the short one answers, “is what the man said.”
His eyes are closed off, as impersonal and unwelcoming as Madison Square Garden looming beside us. He’s dressed in an Adidas tracksuit; his tennis shoes have no laces. All three of them are shivering, dressed for this morning’s warmer weather. They’re a ways from home, wherever that is—across the Harlem River, probably.
Five dollars. This, I remember, was exactly the request that prompted the Subway Vigilante’s act of violence, if the news coverage can be believed. I wonder whether these boys know this—whether they’re referencing it deliberately, or whether it’s just the standard protocol for muggings these days.
“You boys should be careful in this neighborhood,” I say. “It’s a dangerous area. And you don’t know what people are liable to do.”
The tall one and the short one exchange incredulous looks. “You’re not understanding what I’m saying,” the tall one says.
The nervous third steps closer to get a better look at me. He’s dark skinned and slight; his eyes—shrunken by the lenses of black-framed spectacles—are still frantically scanning our surroundings for any hint of danger, like those of a doughboy in no-man’s-land.
“Yo,” he says. “This is an old lady right here.”
“I know what it is,” the tall one says. “I got eyes.”
“We ain’t out here to fuck with old ladies, man,” the nervous one says. “Let’s go.”
It occurs to me that thanks to my height and my bearing, someone who spots me from a distance in bad light might easily take me as younger and maler than I am, and this seems to be what my three challengers have done. Two seem set on proceeding regardless, but I think I see a hint of anguish in the bespectacled face of the third. A fear of consequences, probably—but it could also be recognition of some kind: an echo of a grandmother or a great aunt. With the vodka encouraging presumptuousness and leaps of logic, I cannot help but feel a sudden rush of affection for this boy, my reluctant champion, my bridge to safety.
I raise a wobbly finger to point at him. “You,” I say, “look just like that young man in the Oreo cookie commercial.”
The three of them stare at me.
“Those glasses,” I explain.
“Bitch is drunk or crazy,” the short one mutters.
“We were just talking,” the tall one says, “about the five dollars you gonna give us. Remember that?”
“Oh yes,” I say. “I wish that I could.”
“I think you can,” says the tall one.
“I think you definitely can,” says his short friend.
He has something metal in his hand—a knife, maybe, though it doesn’t look like a knife. The men the Subway Vigilante shot were supposedly armed with sharpened screwdrivers, tools they planned to use to break into vending machines.
“Maybe you oughta just give us your wallet,” says the taller one.
The third is silent, drifting away again.
For the first time it occurs to me that these young men might kill me. Or they could knock me down, which at my age might amount to the same thing, depending on how I fall.
If they kill me, they kill me. Gian loses both his mothers in one night.
If they don’t, they don’t. And I don’t think they will. They seem like troublemakers, but not hard criminals. They’re not violent or strung out. If they wanted to hurt me they’d have done so by now.
“Are you sure you want my wallet?” I say. “If a police officer stops you, how will you explain where it came from?”
“Lady, what the fuck do you think this is, Let’s Make a Deal?” says the tall one, but his eyes hesitate in a way that his words do not.
“Look,” says the short one, “we ain’t discussing this. You can give us the cash, or maybe we just walk off with your bag. Right?”
“Yo, what the fuck, Keith?” the nervous one says, addressing his tall friend, who blanches to hear his name spoken aloud. “This ain’t what we come out here for, man. This ain’t the guy.”