I haven’t gotten a lot of exercise since I got home from France a week ago, so this morning I decided to take a pre-dawn stroll in my fine North Phoenix neighborhood.
About five minutes into my walk, I heard a yell of “Move it!” loud enough to wake up the neighborhood — it was 5:10 am. I was crossing a driveway into an apartment complex when I heard the yell again and realized it was coming from an approaching minivan. I made eye contact with the backseat passenger who had partly rolled down his window and who apparently wasn’t particularly happy with how quickly I was walking. This time, he yelled directly at me, “I’ll fuck you up, bitch!” I was startled, for sure, but I shook my head and kept walking. As hard as it is to take a grown man seriously when his mom is driving him around, and especially when he appears to be as high as a kite, I did check my six for the next 100 yards or so. Not surprisingly, he was not a man of his word. He’d missed his best chance to fuck me up, and I’m guessing that once he got his next fix of whatever he was on, he probably forgot I existed.
That was the second weirdest encounter of my walk.
About ten minutes later, at 5:20 am, as I was rounding a corner and approaching the halfway point of my circuit, I noticed the front door of a house behind a six-foot block wall that usually has its gates shut. This morning, the gates were open, and in the doorway stood a man, perhaps in his sixties, who was completely naked. I don’t know if he forgot the gates were open, in which case two of us were in for an unpleasant surprise, or perhaps he was just an early morning exhibitionist that I hadn’t previously encountered. The antisocial behavior of the incident ten minutes earlier, while not expected any given morning, certainly isn’t unheard of, but seeing a naked man a while out for a stroll? That was a new one for me.
Around 5:40 am, when I was rounding the last corner back to the house, I also encountered a woman sleeping in a bus shelter who had lipstick smeared from her cheek to her temple, even though there didn’t appear to be any on her lips. Sadly, that didn’t even move the needle on this morning’s weird-o-meter.
At this rate, I’m going to start to miss the beggars on our street in Montpellier. They’re quiet, they’re polite, they go somewhere else after dark, and they’re always fully dressed.
