Here’s a post I wrote 3 years ago after almost having my phone stolen on BART at the Oakland Coliseum stop (I think?).
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He couldn’t have been older than fourteen. I didn’t get a good look at his friends, but they may have been a tad older. In retrospect, that’s probably the case.
I had spent the morning at a social justice conference for educators. It was a unique means of priming a 28-year old Chicano for a brush with some “hoodrats” as I sometimes think them to be– minority children making trouble– reflections of myself.
I was finally working on the train home, having left early. Enjoying the fruits of my irresponsible spending, I entered scores into my online gradebook on the newest and latest model of iPhone. It was decked out with completely unnecessary features, and I’m not sure why I elected to spend the money for things I didn’t need. Perhaps it was the half a year of having a phone that barely functioned at all. Maybe it was the need to fill that invisible hole in my chest that’s always plagued me.
In any event, one second, I was giving Terrance full-credit for his quick write. In the next, I was watching my phone float out of my hand as it resolved into a firm grasp of the empty air left behind. I didn’t think before leaping from my seat. It was only as I began to round the corner to the exit, five or so meters from my seat, did my thoughts return to the bag I had left behind, full of student notebooks and a Mac Book Pro that was even more expensive than my phone.
A moment of hesitation resolved into continued action: “Worry about it later. Get the phone.”
Sure enough, as I rounded the corner to the train doors, which were no more than five meters from my seat, I saw him. A fresh face, almost smiling, looking at me from the ground. He was lying down and the phone was there in front of him with the screen facing down. I walked over and picked it up. Looking at his face, I spoke, “Fucking idiot.”
I turned with ire, disgust and more than a little confusion back into the train and to my seat. A woman leaned in to the exit farther down the train to ask if they had tried to rob me. I confirmed to some capacity and the woman sitting in front of me asked if I was going to get off to report them. By then the train was preparing to leave, and I made an excuse of the laptop in the bag I had left waiting for me on the train to walk away.
I knew I couldn’t report them. His face was my own after a car chase. It was the face I made after hopping fences and scrambling away from police. It was my face after feeling alive in a sea of dead wishes. They were simply discovering the thrill of epinephrine and flight with its absence of the scars and bruises of the fight. I almost laughed.
Young, dumb kids.
But, how will it play for them next time? What lessons had they learned? I can only hope they learned the right ones. I didn’t give myself time to teach them.