Mug me

 

Frank, my best friend, has a sign on his back that says, “mug me” and somebody is always willing to oblige – especially growing up near Paterson.

He was that foolish kid that decided to save bus fair to get downtown on weekends by walking down the back road from Haledon passed the Christopher Columbus Housing projects where the black and Latino gangs lived.

Nobody talked about 400 years of slavery when the black gangs greeted him, they just told him to pay up or get beat up, and he always complied, hanging over the money he’d saved up during the week so he could see a movie at the Fabian or the U.S. Theater. The Plaza on Union Avenue have been safer since he didn’t need to go passed the projects to get there, but the movies there sucked.

You would think that after the first mugging, Frank would have learned his lesson. He did not. He made that trip again and again, each time fully believing the gangs wouldn’t be there waiting when they always were.

The gangs mistook him for a rich kid since he came from the direction of wealthy Wayne on the hill, refusing to believe the white families living in Haledon were nearly as poor as the black families living in North Paterson.

The gang was always disappointed at the paltry amount of cash Frank handed over and roughed him up anyway, shaking out his pockets until they realized he didn’t have more than he said he had, and only then did they let him go.

When it finally occurred to Frank that the gangs would not go away, he decided to expend some of his previous funds on the No. 14 bus that went down West Broadway into Paterson only to find the Latino gangs waiting for him when he got off the bus, taking the rest of what he had, forcing him to walk back up the hill for lack of bus fair to get him there – pissing off the black gangs when they stopped him and found he had no money at all, beating him up for disappointing them.

Frank fared no better in Manhattan when he started to go there, always finding himself on the wrong street at the wrong time of night, confronted by black gangs, white gangs, as well as bikers, all of whom thought he was somehow better off and holding out on them, sometimes beating him up just to make up for the lack of cash he could give them out of the paltry pay he got working at the Little Falls Laundry.

He got beat up so often, he stopped reporting it to the police, who stopped believing anybody could be as unlucky as he was, they always encouraging him to move back home with his parents rather than chance the tough streets of New York.

He even got mugged on his own block near Avenue A and East 5th Street, once even when he was in the doorway to his building. He got mugged so much by so many people when he walked around the block to visit me on East 5th Street, his girlfriend convinced him to move back to New Jersey into some mostly white neighborhood where he stood out less, and to take a job at some mostly white factory here he might keep more of his paycheck than he would working higher paying jobs in Paterson.

He stopped taking the bus to New York City when a black gang cornered him in the Port Authority men’s room where he might have died had he not been wearing the watch the post office gave his father upon retirement, worth enough for them to let him keep the bus fare back to Jersey.