I planned to join Ed a the gym last night, but due to a series of unexpected events on the homefront found that it had grown too late. So I changed back out of my gym clothes into street clothes and decided to walk the half mile there to meet him - it was a nice evening and the idea of getting in at least a little physical activity was appealing. I made it most of the way there when, on 20th Street between 10th and 11th Avenues, I saw something troubling.
Next to a loading dock, there was a shopping cart with a plastic bag of empty cans tied to it, and behind this barrier were two people lying on some pieces of cardboard. This is not an unusual sight on this block, where our posh neighborhood gives way to warehouses for a block or so. Instead, what caught my attention was the gruff, angry shouts of a man. I couldn't see much of his companion, but the thin leg and small shoe visible to me made me think it must be a woman. My first instinct was to keep the New York City blinders in place, and I kept walking for a few feet. But something didn't feel right, so I pulled off my headphones. By now, the woman was shrieking. The man did not seem like someone I wanted to tangle with, so from the safety of about 15 feet away, I fumbled for my cell phone. I was just dialing 911 when a new voice caused me to turn back to the scene.
A tall, fashionably dressed woman about my age was striding toward the cart. "Is everything alright?" she asked, in a firm tone that meant business. "Oh yeah, she's fine," the man behind the cart said. The tall woman pulled out her cell phone. "Are you calling the police?" I asked her as I approached. She said she was, so I put away my cell phone. The man began to protest. "You don't need to call the cops, come on," he pleaded. "She's fine." "She can tell the police she's fine," I fired back. Meanwhile, in the background, the tall woman was explaining that she'd come upon an assault and was describing our location. The man leapt up, pulled on both shoes and hurried away down the street, dragging his shopping cart along beside him with one practiced hand. He was about six feet tall, very tan, bald, and shirtless. He looked to be about 50.
As he fled, the woman shakily emerged. She was petite with curly black hair and rings of eye make-up that looked to be a few days old. She smelled like a combination of your run-of-the-mill homeless person and a brewery, and was dressed in jeans and a clean-ish, loose white t-shirt with a few holes in one sleeve. Her fingernails were stained with the remnants of red polish and had dirt caked under each. She was teary as she thanked us for stopping. Two other people, she said, had walked by the struggle and just kept going. I had intended to leave once the police were on the way, but realized immediately that I couldn't go until they arrived. The tall woman, who introduced herself to me as Abigail, asked the woman if she was alright, and the woman explained (in more vulgar terms than I will use here) that the man had been pressuring her for sex. She knew him, but "just as friends," and they'd "done a few cans," which I thought initially was a drug reference, though based on the alcohol reek eventually figured just meant that they'd been drinking. Then things had gotten ugly. She described her turbulent past interactions with the man and said that he always seemed to know where she was. She couldn't get away from him. She showed us a well-established bruise on her arm and a day-old scratch on her throat and said he'd done that to her just then. He'd also stolen her Medicaid card and her ID, and wept that she'd be arrested without identification. Her name, she said, was Lynn. Her story felt a little fishy, but there was no question that we came upon him being violent and that she was scared of him. And no matter how drunk or destitute someone is, they have the right not to be assaulted in my book.
We settled in to wait. Five minutes stretched into 20, and there was no sign of the police. Ed called me as he finished his swimming class and eventually joined us on the sidewalk. As I hung up the phone, Lynn looked at me, her eyes filling anew with tears. "Am I keeping you from something?" she asked, looking guilty and miserable. I assured her that she shouldn't worry. Lynn told us a bit more about herself, and it was hard to know what to believe (that she had a job, that her husband had passed away three months before, that she'd fallen once and woken up in the hospital only to learn years later that they'd put a plate in her head). Every few minutes, she'd exclaim "Thank God you ladies walked by!" and thank us profusely, apologizing for inconveniencing us and wiping her eyes. Abigail and I talked to her about finding a safe place to sleep for the night and helped her plan a route to her friend's uptown apartment that would prevent William, the bald man, from seeing her. We scanned the street, both looking for a cop car and hoping that William was not on his way back.
The police called Abigail back now and then as we waited. They were having trouble finding us, initially because they were looking for us in Brooklyn. They must have asked for another description of the man, because Abigail launched into it again. Then she paused and looked at me. "What race do you think he was?" she asked. He'd been dark complected, but it's hard to say with people living on the street who often earn dark tans. Lynn broke in. "Pardon my language, ladies, but he's a f*cking sp*c," she spat. "Uh, he's Hispanic," said Abigail carefully, turning back to the phone call.
About 25 minutes after Abigail made the first call, a sedan turned onto the street. "That looks like a cop car," said Ed. "That looks like a gray Ford," I said. To my surprise, it pulled up next to us and we saw two burly men in plainclothes in the front seats and an officer in uniform in the back. They asked for another description and inquired which way the man had gone, then one jerked his thumb behind him as they sped off. I was preparing to be irked that they'd abandoned us when I looked up and saw a police car pulling up from behind them. The officers in it did not look impressed as Lynn told a bit of the story and Abigail added that it had been an attempted rape. The cop nodded distractedly, then got out of the car. "You know who I am?" she asked Lynn, and Lynn nodded. "What did I tell you about drinking in the street?" she asked as she opened the back door. Lynn meekly got into the backseat, thanking us again, and we called goodbye to her as the car pulled back into the lane. Abigail and I shook hands and went our separate ways.
Mulling it all over in my head for the rest of the night and most of today has left me feeling confused. I'm annoyed with the police for being so cavalier, and I wonder whether Abigail's description of the man as shirtless and pushing a shopping cart had something to do with their slow response time. At the same time, I understand how frustrating it must be for them to intervene in the same situations over and over again. Lynn is clearly no saint, but that doesn't mean she has no right to protection from the authorities. But I wonder if they see it that way. I wonder whether she spent the night in jail. I don't wonder whether the police tried to direct her toward a program for recovery from substance abuse; I know they didn't. Is that their fault, or is it everyone's fault for not demanding that these resources be made available to our most vulnerable citizens? Did they find William? If so, what will happen to him? They certainly didn't take any statements from us, which leads me to assume that they did not plan to press charges. Will the two find each other again? What will happen next time? How would this scene have played out differently if Abigail and I had come upon a wealthy woman being assaulted by a wealthy man?
Just about the only thing I'm certain of is that intervening was the right thing to do, though if Abigail had not been there I don't think I would have been so aggressive; one never knows what someone is capable of, especially when that someone is clearly under the influence of an unknown substance. I want to live in the kind of world where people stop wrongdoing when they see it. Ed commented that it had probably been a long time since someone tried to help Lynn, and I hope she remembers this experience and our pep talk about how she has the right to have people respect her decisions. But how much did delivering her to the back of a cop car help her? And I know that my hope that we somehow impacted her life in a lasting way is wishful thinking. It's hard for people to change, especially when the deck is so stacked against them. Maybe eventually I will find the lesson in this that I'm searching for, or maybe I'll make peace with the fact that there isn't one.
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