Different Slants

Robert M. Katzman’s Amazing Story:  http://www.differentslants.com/?p=355

First posted August 8, 2007

Second posting July 18, 2012

One morning some years ago, near Chicago, I was at a currency exchange where I would go to pay my utility bills. I suppose I could have mailed my payment, but it was faster for me to pay it in person. Besides, the dark-eyed girl working there behind the glass had a great rack on her and she always smiled at me, her blood-red lipstick gleaming on her soft, luscious lips. And when she walked over to punch my account numbers into her machine, I got a global view of all her–assets.

I didn’t mind, she didn’t mind, and the whole day was better for the experience.

So, on this particular day, I was waiting in line to see my favorite cutie. I was on the left side of the small room where she always worked behind the bullet-proof glass, and there was another young guy at the teller down the way from me paying a bill too, with about a four yards between us.

I am white. He was black. I think my sexy teller was Assyrian, but that wasn’t crucial to what followed next, on what seemed to be just another ordinary morning.

It was very quiet with the four us going about our business. Then, another young white guy, about twenty, blonde and thin, maybe five foot eight, walked in the exchange and stood silently behind me. I was almost ready to go, when the chime on the only door to the place clanged loudly as the door was suddenly shoved open and three adorable, very young black children scampered into the room, followed by a short, hesitant, and thin to the point of appearing to be nearly anorexic, man of about thirty or so. The kids were full of energy and called the petite man “Dad”.

Then, to my disbelieving eyes an enormous blob of a woman ended this little parade. She was close to six feet tall, and for lack of a more accurate description, the woman most closely resembled the evil Jabba, The Hut character from the Star Wars movie.

She was so huge, muttering to herself in an irritated voice, she could barely fit through the door to the exchange. Her clothes were layer upon layer upon layer and she moved like a snail–sliding forward a bit at a time. The young kids called her “Mom”. Her husband had a pained expression on his face and somehow managed to stay as far away from his obese wife, and the slabs of flesh hanging from her face and resting on her chest, as possible in the now rather cramped room. Her jowls quivered when she moved, like flabby wings. She was already angry and I sensed things were going to get worse.

So now the whole family of five was in the same small area of the currency exchange as I was along with the other still silent young men. For ease of identifying the players in my story, I will call the mountainous woman Ms. Jabba. Apologies to George Lucas.

As the lovely teller gave me my change and her sensuous smile, I could also see the concern in her eyes as they darted from me to the muttering woman a few feet behind me. I backed away from the window, but still facing the other people in the room, to make room for the white guy behind me to move up to the teller window.

I could have left.

Leaving would have been easy.

But I decided to stay and see what happened next. I knew something was going to happen next.

How did I know that?

Well, friend, if you waited on the public for over forty years, like I have in various businesses all over the Chicago area, since 1965, after a while a kind of sixth sense develops that signals a warning to my psyche when trouble was brewing. So I trusted that reliable instinct and decided that staying in that room might be the right thing to do, if not the more dangerous choice.

I wasn’t concerned about her color, ethnicity or whatever. As a person who grew up with violent anti-Semitism all around me, the last thing I would ever do is judge another person by their race, religion, nationality or any superficial aspect. I know how it feels to be someone whom other people single out to speculate about my “inherent” characteristics. But an irrational person of any background can be very dangerous to total strangers, children, animals and adults. I lived with that terror as a child and I wasn’t going to run away from another person possibly like that now.

As the quiet young man behind me waited for me to move away and advance the few steps to the teller, suddenly Ms. Jabba aggressively threw herself in front of the man, blocking his access to the teller and demanded the teller’s attention to get a money order for her. She was less than a yard from me. The young man recovered from his surprise quickly and planted himself right next to Ms. Jabba demanding that she return to her place in line behind him, and angrily saying to her,

“Who do you think you are, lady?”

I was surprised at the young man’s fast reaction and also his nerve in confronting the angry woman now facing him. Ms. Jabba’s children and husband were huddled in a corner far from her, evidently witnessing something all four of them had seen before. The young black man at the other window, now finished with his business, also appeared to me to be surprised by this confrontation, and seemed somewhat disconcerted about what to do next, just as I was. But he remained in the room, as I did. Our eyes met, briefly. We didnt speak.

Ms. Jabba responded to the white man’s demand by erupting into a volcanic rage of screams and accusations and began bumping her massive body into his slight one. She advanced upon him, snarling, sputtering and spitting, thrusting her jaw forward into his face, challenging him to hit her, over and over, backing him toward the wall across the room.

Whatever response I expected from the young man, he again surprised me, stopped retreating and stood his ground, a willow facing the gale. He yelled back at her with equal ferocity but at all times kept his arms rigidly down, pressed against his body, his fists clenched. He never moved them, as the other man and I stood frozen watching this tense scene unfold before us. It seemed that at any moment they would be at each others throats. And Ms. Jabba never stopped her taunt to the man to go ahead and punch her in her face, if he didn’t like what she was doing.

“Go on”, she kept saying, “Hit me! Hit me!!”

Just about at that point, police cars materialized from all directions with all their Mars lights flashing, as I could see through the currency exchange’s south and west windows. My sexy teller apparently pushed the silent alarm that rang in the nearby police station and in this little suburb, that immediately brought out the cavalry. Serious men in grey uniforms emerged from all those cars, some with their guns drawn.

When the alarm rang, they had no way of knowing the nature of what was happening, so they defensively assumed the worst.

They blocked off the street, poured into the room and quickly separated the thin screaming white man and the shreiking, hulking black woman, surrounding both of them, some watching the small children and their father, mostly ignoring the other black man in the room, and me. Except when I looked around, that other young black man had disappeared, perhaps wisely slipping out of the currency exchange in all the noise and confusion.

The police emptied the exchange swiftly, many men yelling and simultaneously herding. In seconds, all of us were on the street. No guns were in sight. The situation was not actually under control, but not necessarily deadly, either.

I’ve known a lot of cops in my life, some very well. As the years flowed by, I learned a bit about how cops think. I also learned to stay out of their way when they were converging on a combustible situation, like this one.

The black woman kept up her screaming even outside on the street. The white guy was now silent. I saw a cop tell him to shut up, and he did. Two sturdy cops held his arms firmly. He was going nowhere. I searched the many uniforms milling on the sidewalk for the man in charge. When I saw him, I decided to approach him, slowly. Cops do not like sudden movements in moments like this one.

When I was next to the Top Cop on the scene, I quietly spoke to him, saying that I owned a store in the area for a long time, to give myself what I hoped would be some quick credibility. I told him that the young white man had never touched the black woman at any time, that her hysteria seemed to be an act to provoke a reaction for whatever reason. Maybe to sue everyone in sight. The Top Cop, a fortyish white man, looked me over, not responding, his face revealing nothing. He was tense, the woman was screaming, the children were crying and her husband seemed to shrink further into the ground. Some young cops were hovering near him and his children.

I decided to be quiet, that I had contributed what I could to untangle this noisy mess and, somewhat frustrated, felt what I’d said to him hadn’t impressed the Top Cop. After all, I was white, so maybe he felt I was lying to save the white guy’s ass. That was certainly possible. I could see how that would appear to be the case. It wouldn’t be the first time that would have happened in a racial confrontation where uninvolved observers decide to choose sides. But that wasn’t the truth. Not this time. I felt helpless to do more, and I don’t like to feel helpless.

Then, unexpectedly, a southbound car slid up to the stop sign on the side street next to the currency exchange, a dozen feet away from me. It was that other young black guy from the exchange who was standing in line when I was at the other teller’s window. A large cop blocked his path. His driver’s window was open and he called out to the cop standing next to me, the Top Cop,

“Hey, officer!! That young white guy never touched that black woman. I think it was a set-up. You should let him go. That older white guy standing next to you, and I, saw the whole thing!”

The Top Cop turned his head around to look at me, closely. Then he looked back at the black guy sitting calmly in his car and nodded to him, acknowledging his words. He motioned to the big cop blocking his car to let him pass. The big cop moved away. But a moment before he drove off, my just-in-time fellow corroborating witness looked at me and smiled, and gave me a little wave. I did the same, and felt good about it, and about him, too.

The Top Cop turned to face the young white guy and told the two cops holding him to release his arms.

“Young man, you can go now. I suggest you get moving”

And the young man got moving, fast.

Ms. Jabba saw this and began shreiking hysterically. This whole thing was definately not going her way. The high-pitched decibels from her voice were ear-splitting. Then the Top Cop turned back to me, wincing at her screams now filling the air.

“Thanks for getting involved, mister. You can see why I couldn’t just accept your word against hers, can’t you?”

I nodded.

“But that other guy, that black guy, that’s a different story. Now I see the whole picture. That crazy lady and me–we gotta talk.”

I asked him if I could go. He smiled a wry and weary smile. We shook hands. As I was leaving, that Top Cop tore into Ms. Jabba, his forceful screaming surprisingly louder than hers, commanding her to:

“Shut up!! Shut up!! and Shut up!! Another word from you lady and we lock you up!”

But the Human Planet ignored him, screaming ever louder,

“CONSPIRACY!!  POLICE BRUTALITY!!  Dont you DARE hit me!!”

A policewoman was kneeling near and comforting Ms. Jabba’s three crying children.  There was a grimace on her face and she was slowly shaking her head side to side.

So, Justice wasn’t an orphan that day.

Sometimes, if you’re lucky, a complicated situation really can turn out to be as plain as…well, as simple as…black and white.

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