Street Smarts

We Are All Game: venison is the streets. A carrion bird has been circling over Central Park. Expect it, goombah: everyone loves a good loser. When you leave home, say alound Today I'm gonna get rolled, ripped, sharked, gouged, gonged, japped, poached, taken off. Don't show surprise of indignation when it happens: if you do, you might get your tureen broken as well. An American city street is like the service entrance to Firebase Baker: all trip wire and pungee trap. At Parris Island, they give you life-experience credit for having walked along Broadway. Yet it can. God, exhilarate--rather the way putting your wango in a Suzy Homemaker oven would. Each sense is preamped; circulation goes through the spin cycle. You're alive. Things are heightened. Look at it from this angle: Fear has got to be cheaper than cocaine.

Pay attention, now, you there, with the radiopaque head. Since 1950 or so, I have bag-assed it down some pretty mean streets. Ol' Br'er Pedestrian, they doan kotch him, nossuh. The cement briar patch, that has been my turf. Gone fetch out five, six lessons in sidewalk bushcraft right here--keep even a half-steppin' do-rag like you skin-whole an' wise.

First: Learn to walk gas-fast. Book it, baby: Lay a big batch behind. Not in panic, mind you: never run. A powerpurposeful, elbow-out, crazy kind of stride. The way people moved in old silent films--you know, right before they fell into an open manhole. Wave one hand now and then, as if you'd just seen three armed friends and were about to hail a cab. Your attitude should be: "Busy signal, dit-dit-dit. Can't fit you in today fellas. Catch me tomorrow." In a real halfway-house neighborhood, walk dead street center: follow that white line; avoid ambush cover. Who's gonna mug you when he might get hit by a truck while doing it? Oh, you should see me squeeze out sneaker juice: I am Rapid City: I have no staying power, g'bye. A thug will get depressed by energy. He'd rather come down on someone wearing orthopedic pants. Also, if you can manage it, be tall.

Sing aloud. Mutter a lot. Preach Jesus. Interrogate yourself. Say things like: "Oh, the onion bagel won't come off. Oh, it hurts. Mmmmmm-huh. Mmmmm. Please, Ma, don't send me back to the nutria farm again. No. Oh, no. That three-foot roach is still swimming in my water bed. Ah. Oh. Ech." Muggers are superstitious. They don't like to attack loony people: Might be a cousin on the paternal side. Make sure your accent is very New York (or L. A. or Chicago or wherever). Tourists are considered tablegrade ment: heck, who'd miss his supersaver flight to attend a three-month trial? Most of all, eschew eye contact. If your vision says, "Uh-oh, this creep is after my wallet," this creep may feel a responsibility to yank you off. Keep both puplis straight ahead, in close-order drill. Do not flash a bank-and-turn indicator. Sure, you may walk past the place you're headed for, but, shees, no system is perfect.

Dress way down. Mom-and-pop candystore owners take their cash to deposit in an old brown Bohack bag. Me, I wear the bag. I won two basic outfits: One has the haute couture of some fourthhand algebra-textbook cover; my second best was cut using three dish drainers as a pattern. If stagflation were human, it'd look like me. No one messes with D.K.M.; they figure I'm messed up enough now. But when you gotta go in finery, turn your tux jacket inside out and put a basketball kneepad around one trouser leg. Peg your collar. Stitch a white shoelace through your patent-leather pump. Recall what Jesus said about excessive glad-ragging (Matthew, chapter six): "Consider the lilies of the field. . . even Solomon is all his glory was not arrayed as one of these--so, nu, what happens? They get picked, Dummkopf."

On the same stupid lily principle, never wash your car. Buy black-wall tires; stick an old plastic tampon tube on for the hood ornament. I keep this rescue-orange sign in my side window: For Sale, Handyman Special, Just 139,000 Miles. $129.50 Firm. And I drive a station wagon; I'd guess that one station wagon is stolen for every 12 sedans. Most men in the hot-wire scam don't have six children and a Saint Bernard. (Of course, last March--this is mother-nude truth--some bozo copped my entire tail gate, college decal and all. Copped, in fact, every tail gate for one entire block on Central Park West. Just two bolts and--heist!--the whole doofrangus will come off. Worth $300 apiece at a pound-by-night body shop; sold back to the owner for $600.) Furtherhow, remember that you are a dead mark, a perfect frozen fish, when approching your wheels. Never unlock the door. In a très punked-out slum, I carry my Rickel burglar kit and furtive looks. Use the coat-hanger trick: Pretend you're stealing your own car. No one'll stiff you then; professional courtesy, sort of.

Riddle: Why are most muggings like a six-car pile-up at Indianapolis? Think, Bleepwit, think. Answer: Because both occur more often on a curve than on a straightaway. Stepping off your bus. Just around that corner. Outside a boutique door. In the elevator. Points of transfer, where your attention--a semidetached thing at best--is on house key, parcel, bad footing, whatever. The New York subway system, I gotta believe, was built by Macheath--using my small intestine for a blueprint. Italian government turn left, right, left, right less frequently than the usual I.N.D. staircase. And at each bend, there is dead air: jeopardy and evil surprises. I lug this briefcase--big as a side of gnu--and let it swing, mountain-oyster high, around every corner: Lift, plow, wham! Anyone who offs my credit-card case is gonna need a kneeling bus to get home on.

Open every door fast and all the way. When you hear "Oof" in Spanish, vamoose: That is not José Feliciano behind there. Even red lights can behind there. Even red lights can be bad-ass trouble. Some bum'll flop across your windshield and sham wiping it with on old Pampers. Meanwhile, his buddy has been trying to hoick open your rear side door. Hit the wiper button quick. While bum number one is looking for his cuticles, gun her out in reverse. If you run over something soft and lumpy--a human thank you, ma'am, kind of--just call the Census Bureau and tell them they're off by one. Don't forget: You're prey. Quarry in a paved hunt course. They're after you like Pac-Man--gobble, gobble, slurp--all mouth. You might outblip Eddie Atari this time around, but he's got a lot of quarters and not much else to do.

The day or night must come: Accept it. Some squasho whose head was registered in Panama is gonna make a withdrawal from your discretionary fund. Be sure you have the cover charge--at least $20 (plus gratuities: loose change so that he can catch an exact-fare bus). Never travel broke. Mr. Mental Backspace may think you've got a whole credit union in your underwear. Trust me: it's unpleasant and cold having one's garment district rezoned on the uptown I.R.T. local. Also, seem afraid: Quiver all the time; slur your diction; say, "Aw, Gah, aw Gah, aw Gah." Mugging, remember, is an ego trek; Felix the Fingersmith wants to intimidate you. His wife has probably just finished hitting him with a taco roller at home. Be understanding. This is crisis therapy for him--your crisis. Don't stare at Felix as if you intended to find a distinguishing mark on his face; he might put one on yours. Do not demand a receipt; do not ask for his charitable-exemption number. Do not infrom the police; that'd be telling. Besides, they're busy: They've gotta tow your car away from a noparking zone. Which isn't easy, since all four tires and your youngest child have been removed.

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There are five basic kinds of assault. Learn to recognize them.

1. The professional mugger. This guy is so good, they ask him to tour military hospitals. You will know the professional. Be reminded: Although we throw that term around loosely, mugging is a very specific dance step, rather like un pas de bourrée. I quote Webster, who probably got offed in his day: "To assault a victim, esp. by attacking from the rear and locking the forearm around he neck in a throttling manner." Sometimes indistinguishable from chiropractic and may improve lower-back pain. The forearm-throttle pro deals in melodramatic language; a minute with him is worse than one month with Elisabeth Kübler-Rose. He'll say, "Gonna kill you, loser," or "Kiss your Keogh fund good bye." Don't let this morbid hyperbole depress you. It's merely a social interchange meant to establish that most intimate relationship: Thug and Thugged. An equivalent of "Hi, I'm Gemini rising" or "Can I get you something from the buffet?" Volume, turnover, margin: A pro uses generally accepted accounting principles. And he is conservative. He believes in supply-side theory: You are his supply.

Relax, babes--this is the efficiency suite. Be glad you're getting reaped by someone who still has a sense of vocation: Decent craftsmanship is hard to find nowadays. Most likely, the pro will let you keep your Visa card, Phi Beta Kappa key, I am a Methodist Diabetic card, Bic, tie clip, money clip, roach clip and that identi-bracelet your cheap wife said was 14-kt. gold. Aviso: Don't joke. Cops and crooks have this in common: They never laugh at your best shin slapper. And don't try to escape. First, his forearm was made by Krupp. Second, proforearm was made by Krupp. Second, pro has cased this spot: lonely, dark, with fewer exits than a kidney. In fact, (continued on page 110)Street Smarts(continued from page 98) you might want to bring your mistress here some night. Pro often has a running mate who can frisk better than the alteration tailor at Barney's Imperial Room. Enjoy it. You're not being done by an impulse robber; you're part of the planned economy. After such an urban hazing, you'll feel New York slick: chosen, fashionable, even sportif. Like having your TV adjusted by William Paley.

2. The snatcher. Young, small, just matriculated at theft. Can do the 100 in 9.7 with your girlfriend's Stanley Cupsize purse under one arm. (You, by contrast, have less wind than an Easter Seal child.) Snatcher works in daylight; otherwise, he'd miss Little House on the Prairie and wouldn't have time to recrochet his hair for school tomorrow. Can't hurt you, though; seldom weighs more than 90 pounds, all of it airfoil and blur. Worth a chase; your date might be impressed. The traditional shout is "Stop that thief! Stop that thief!" Of course, your lady may also yell, "Stop that thief!" In fact, count on it. At which point a vigilante squad will gang-tackle you and beat your sternum to anchovy paste with their elbows.

3. The thundermug bandit. Imagine: You're sitting, competent for once, on a pay-toilet seat. Suddenly, this skimasked face pops up above the stall partition. "Don't move," Ski Mask says--as though you could take more than one step in that position without kicking your underwear to death. "Slide that watch and the wallet over here, honkie. No smart stuff." And--zoom lens--a mean .38 is pointing down; it'd make the kibbutz-issue toilet paper seem soft. Mongo Maria, who'd wanna get shot that way? Rigor mortis sets in, they'll bury you in a straight-back chair. (And some comedian will say, "He looked just like himself, didn't he?") Worse, here you have a black belt in karate and right now it's lying useless around your feet. Mr. Lift the Seat (who terrorized Washington, D.C., last year) is full of Bowl Power. I mean, whaddya gonna do, chase him through Union Station in very wet pursuit? So you slide Seiko and Vuitton billfold over. Busted to the max again; you just aren't street-smart, friend.

Lesson: nine men out of 11 will choose the very last stall. Admit it; you do. You're shy, I know; don't care to play your woodwind for an audience. But way back there, any man is six times more vulnerable to the dump desperado. Sit up front; pretend you're in a burlesque house. Even if you sound like someone's flooded-out Evinrude.

4. The hophead, hypercat and general wacko. This scroogie doesn't care about style or structure, just content--yours. His cue ball was scratched a long time ago. You may have to help him. Please do. Old Chromo is dangerous because uncoordinated. His veins are singing "Aloha, Honolulu"; he has got to score a powder transfusion quick. Also, there may be some kind of knife. He won't stab you fatally with it; he's too unwrapped for that. But you might die of tetanus. Dialog goes something like: "Man. Hey, man. Man, oh, man. Gotta do it, man. Man, man and man." He'll rob you and bore you to death at the same time. Moreover, his breath would warp a window sill. God did not release this donk into his own custody at birth. Calm him down. Show how your digital watch works. Help him put your L. L. Bean trail vest on. Call him a cab. Be thankful if you're still anatomically correct afterward.

5. The freaked-out mob of teen wahoos. Sign off, brother. Put a tourniquet on your head and get extremely prone. Sadism is group practice: competitive, full of grisly free-market ideas. "Hey, look--José hit the gringo with a big beer bottle and just his nose come off. Watch me make both eyeballs fall out." When you pick up this kind of highvoltage pack dementia, try to evanesce. Crawl under your Volkswagen. Or step in front of an oncoming D train; that'll fool 'em. Any youth riot is frightful: short-lived and as vicious as an epileptic clench. I have been near three or four; they are a foul human weather. Time for the sermonette, and good night; an Aztec virgin has better prospects. Money and high rhetoric will not appease. You're the entree in a male initiation rite. Some feeb is gonna boost himself up to mad adulthood on your ripped body. Life starts unfolding in the past-perfect tense. Play dead, amigo, and hope it isn't a dress rehearsal.

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On the virtues of resisting. There are no virtues to resisting. Let me play back one example. Brooklyn, Friday night. Eric, the foreman at my cement factory, steps off his bus. Point of transfer, huggg! Eric has a sudden cervical collar on; very bracing. His take-home is taken to another home; no resistance. Next scene: same Brooklyn, same Friday night. (Friday, you catch, is sack-and-pillage time; land pirates hold a huntclub breakfast each Friday morning. Why d' ya suppose Jesus was crucified on Friday? They thought he had his pay envelope with him.) Now Miguel, my assistant foreman, is getting the expensive neck truss. But Miguel resists; in fact, he comes on like el capitán Marvel. "First I hit the guy behind with an elbow. Then I punch the guy in front with my right. Knock him on his behind. Boy, they both run. Then, wow, I see this knife sticking out of my stomach. I was so excited beating them up, I didn't even know I got stabbed." Was it worth resisting? Not for what I pay him, it wasn't.

Should you buy a Doberman shepherd? Only if the stabilizer bar in your brain is gone. Think, and then multiply by 365: What mugger could eat four cans of Alpo each day? Meanwhile, there you'll be, right behind this humongous German pinscher, repackaging dog hockey like it was the blackboard special at Café Très Cher. In mid-December. And then how d' you know, at crisis-management time, whether or not Fat Fido is gonna hit his chicken switch or turn out to be a secret Puerto Rican?

Your date and you. The street-smart man runs with street-smart women. Not someone, for instance, who'd wear a gold waist chain outside her overcoat. Not someone who'd make the old panty hose go swish-swish-swish in front of six smoked-off motorcycle geeks. Dress down together. Women are obviously more likely to be raped or robbed when in shorts or skirts. A lissome bare calf is saying, "Hi, there, Big Fella--come on up and fire some shots from my grassy knoll." Your date should wear what Chiang Ch'ing wore on the Long March: material as thick and shapeless as those pads you see around a moving van. Enough Ace bandage can make D cup into teacup; paper-clip earrings will never inspire Mr. Heist to tear a lobe off. Avoid anything at all provocative: blue eyes, say, or real teeth. You want a hijacker to feel compassion: Remind him of his own C-minus wife. I don't suggest that you date ugly on purpose, but facial hair is not necessarily unwanted. Or a hump. Remember, she will be much safer walking with you. Conversely, you are a double mark, a mugger's Dutch treat, with her. The big question is: Do you really want to be heterosexual? How about going out with a 6'5" leather-and-metal-studded gay?

Don't date any woman who admires courage, forthrightness or strength. (concluded on page 220)Street Smarts(continued from page 110) Those are kinky people: They still wear seamed hose. Resist telling women about the gook platoon you took out with one grenade at Hoi Polloi. Instead, mention that awful bypass operation you hope to postpone until a six-volume collection of poetry has been written. Never lift her off the floor when dancing. Never manage to screw open a pickle jar that's frozen as stiff as some Gemini-space-capsule air lock. Be sensitive and neurasthenic. Under pressure, no streetwise man wants to hear his dumb consort say, "You won't just stand there, will you? You won't just let him do this to us, will you?" The answer is: Of course; be my guest. No sense getting your cruet smashed to remember her by; odds are this relationship is over, anyway. Next time you and Ms. Macho have sex--if there should be one--you'll need a shrimp-cocktail fork to get it out.

(Pause. Change style. There is no smart-lip response if three or four men try to rape her. Make a move and you may both get killed. Do nothing and you'll want to kill yourself. Some of the things I've said in this essay have been, oh, glib. I run short on glib right here. The tissue of civilization has ripped, and in that particular place--for her, for you--it will never completely heal again.)

An impulsive, snap-decision assault can be bluffed out, though. Say you and she are boogieing past eight raucous Dominicans on some spine-broken front stoop. They're soaked right through; been drinking mucho beverage. ("Beverage," by the way, is street legalese. Means your bottle of cheap, acid-froming 16-proof plonk has a straw in it--also brown paper all around. Police insist on the small cosmetic effort: They do not harass the beverage drinker.) Anyhow, say that King Dominica makes a negative, if rather accurate, remark about your girl: about her chin and nose, the way they seem to be attacking each other. Don't argue; laugh and agree. If the king should pursue his theme with an ominous reference to your very low-profile manhood, don't run. Dominicans are fast; how d' you think they got into this country? Instead, begin a loud dispute with your lady. That'll confuse them--violent people don't expect to be topped. They like bringing the wild forest canopy down on quiet, respectable folk. Start to shout, "You stupid broad. First you give me clap, then you give me herpes. And now I see a crab in your eyebrow." As far as rape goes, that should be sufficient carnal knowledge--ought to put their lust into a very slack season. Yell and gesticulate right on down the street. They'll probably be too interested for mayhem. In plain fact--this is a solid truth--most casual hooligans don't want money or blood. They just want some entertainment. That's why they left Part Time, Alabama, for New York or Chicago or wherever their crumbling front stoop may be.

And you, too. That's why you're living, wet with acid rain, in Greater Metropolitan Dread. Entertainment. Action. Wild possibility. Expensive cheap thrills. Be a prince, Filbert. Anything I hate, it's stinginess. You're gonna bitch about getting safecracked now and then in a town where the sales tax is eight and one quarter percent? Come on; leave us not be finicky. Not when a hamburger deluxe costs $5.95--$6.50 with the bun. When mass transit is six bits per turnstile click; when it'll run you 90 cents just to sit down in a cab, never mind the machine should move. For 40 years, President after President has been redistributing our income, and still we pull the Hit Me Again, Please lever on election day. At least a mugger is aboveboard about it. And he offers curb service, a relationship, some quick intimacy. Not to mention excitement in that piece of patio furniture you call life.

For my envoy, I quote an urbane urban sage, Lewis H. Lapham: "It is in the nature of great cities to be filthy, loud and dangerous (cf. Elizabethan London and the Paris of the Enlightenment), but the freedom of mind allows the inhabitants to ignore or make light of their circumstances. They take for granted the pervasiveness of corruption, recognizing it as the leaf mold of civilizations." That isn't dog doo you've got on your foot; it's leaf mold. Culture will grow from it. Would you rather live in Wing Collar, Vermont, where the only stimulation or risk comes from getting hit by a low-hung bird feeder? As Jesus said (again): "Where your treasure is, there will some mugger be also." And intelligent conversation and art and human diversity. They had three-card monte on the Appian Way, I'm sure. And in Babylon, con men sold stolen sundials that broke down at dawn. Street smart is the first kind of smart. You never heard about anyone who was R.F.D. smart, did you?

"I don't suggest you date ugly on purpose, but facial hair is not necessarily unwanted. Or a hump."

"In plain fact, most casual hooligans don't want money or blood. They just want some entertainment."