I was very nearly mistaken as a sex offender

On a day indistinguishable from so many others during my summer of sweeping depletion, I plopped myself on park bench on Plaza Street and awaited the menagerie of local homecomers.

Yuppies, with their smug smiles as they returned from self-imagined victories on the battlefield of white collar chicanery. (Ok, I may have seen them through a lens of alcoholism and self-loathing.) The endless parade of West Indian nannies returning white children to their castles. A slew of slow-moving vagabonds who never really came or went anywhere; they just shuffled back and forth in a familiar narcotic haze, drawn to their next fixes like moths to flame.

Of course, there was also the kids. The kids, clad in pressed slacks (skirts for the girls) and green cardigans, were the lifeline of a Roman Catholic parochial school system that had long since fallen out of favor with its Irish and Italian contingents. Plucked from black neighborhoods to fill empty seats in white neighborhoods, the kids seemed joyful to skip through a marginally good neighborhood on their sojourn back to the hood.

At the time, I was painfully unaware that I was probably some persistent visual outtake for the generally affluent Prospect Heighters to set their gaze upon. Maybe they looked at me and noticed I was rarely without a nearly phallic glass container, nestled in a brown bag and filled with my daily bread: malt liquor produced by a variety of labels but always with a patently crude taste. Or maybe they noticed my lack of sartorial variance. (My dress code only changed as often as my state of inebriation emboldened me to shoplift new duds from the Atlantic Center Mall.) Always believing the best in people, I have to imagine most passersby looked at me with a sense of pity for a pretty common looking fellow with hollow eyes and an empty stare.

On this particular day, I had company riding the pine. There was Shante, the subterranean sage who suffered from a crippling neuromuscular condition that claimed him to gyrate oddly and often as he sat on the bench; he'd blamed the condition on bad chicken he had received 5 years prior in a local soup kitchen, but I always suspected the true culprit was something less than culinary in nature: the weather. Next to Shante sat Juice, a local crackhead who derived his nickname from a sobriquet for his beloved amphetamine. I guess you are what you eat--or smoke. And at the very end of the bench sat Simba, a formerly homeless lesbian who often stopped by to swap stories with us. Simba often bought us food and never chided us for having made some painfully bad choices in life. She was often gone for weeks at a time, tending to her successful career as a freelance journalist--a career that took her to war-torn countries whose inhabitants were having a far worse go at it than some addicts on a park bench.

As Juice caught a nap in between an almost full-time schedule of hustling and smoking, a group of kids descended on the block, heading toward Grand Army Plaza subway station. We all sat, talking about nothing and noticing nothing--a moment of relaxation in a cauldron of discontent. One boy, who I surmised was pack leader based on how far ahead he was of the rest of the boys (and also the fact that he was holding a giant stick), approached Juice on the bench with a look that suggested imminent mischief. Without any warning, the boy jabbed Juice in the ribs, a maneuver that caused the assailant and his cronies to chuckle wildly and without a sense of guilt. Juice's eyes almost immediately popped open and bulged outward in a way you might only think capable of cartoon druggies. As Juice retaliated with some obscenities, his attackers, possibly bored with their victim, moved toward down the line and took aim at Shante.

A gentle soul if there ever was one, Shante simply sat and moved his body in that familiar 360-degree motion. Situated just below his tangled dreadlocks and above scruffy salt and pepper beard was a pair of eyes that longed for nothing more than tranquility. And on this day, Shante had met a bevy of uncaring eyes that refused to abide by his unwavering yearning for peace and quiet. The pack leader moved within inches of Shante and began to mock his debilitated body.

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" he shouted at Shante. "Why the fuck are you like that?" Shante looked up and shook his head at the boy with a combination of disapproval and sadness. In a final display of utter heartlessness, the pack leader began to once again mock Shante's involuntary movements, only this time goading his minions to follow suit in the perverted mimicry.

At this point, I'd seen my fair share of abuse at the hands of this misguided little pieces of shit. I rose from the bench and approached the pack leader. I was beyond considering the repercussions of striking down what was probably a middle-school-aged child, a probable result of my rage and intoxication. Standing within inches of the pack leader's face, I chided him for his actions.

"You need to learn some manners," I scolded, "and you need to apologize to my friend."

As we stared at each other in what was hardly, in my eyes, an epic showdown, the pack leader turned his head a few degrees to the left. Then, without any warning, he cocked his fist back and swung his at my jaw. A veteran at getting pummeled, I simply gritted my teeth immediately and absorbed the impact.
Yes, I'd just socked in the face by a child who was probably rapidly approaching his bedtime.

As my fermented brain tried to process what had just transpired, the pack leader likely used this brief passage of time to celebrate with his cronies. I turned toward the pack leader and ran at him, and he and his followers took off running. As I picked up the pace, I was painfully unaware that the jeans I was wearing were no longer braced to my emaciated hips. While trying to keep up the pace, my pants had slowly worked their way down to just above my knees. Far too full of adrenaline to notice the increasingly southern locale of my pants, I continued to pursue the pack leader with fierce determination. Right as the pack leader began to descend the subway steps, I made one last lunge for the boy who had already ruined a really shitty day. As my body thrusted forward, my pants finally fell down to my ankles, causing me to crash to the floor in a broken pile of indignity. It was over.

Shante and Simba both helped me up off the gravel in a show of respect for a wounded, albeit drunk, warrior. "Bro, I gotta thank you for standing up for me," Shante said as I finally got to my feet. He took a wad of cash out of his pocket and clumsily peeled off 3 singles. "Take this and get yourself a beer." 

At the corner store, I chose my beer and didn't wait to open it before leaving the store. On this day, I felt I had earned the ride to not hide in shame. Exiting the store, I massaged the knot that was forming on my face.  I started to imbibe my salvation and felt the despair and rage leave my body and evaporate into the humid summer night.