Violent Dreams

This was keeping me up the other night so I figured I may as well write about it as long as I’m not sleeping.

Last Saturday I was robbed violently.

That last word is a significant one. While the economic effects of having things stolen from you remain the same regardless of how the stealing was done, a violent robbery messes with your head in very different ways than just being pick-pocketed would. Those of you who know me probably know that I’m a pretty peaceful dude most of the time. And yet I was kept up by very vivid fantasies about visiting terrible violence upon a kid probably only a little older than my brother.

It happened like this. I met an Argentinean girl who’s a film student at the film school here in Buenos Aires and she invited me to come see a movie with her at a theatre that I’d never been to before. Immediately prior I had been having dinner with a friend of mine from the program and since the theatre looked to be in the same direction as where she lived, we figured we’d take the same bus and I would just get off a few stops later. So we took the bus, she got off at her stop and I sat down staring at my pocket city map following (or thought I was following) the bus and trying to figure out what would be the best time for me to get off.

As it turned out I guessed wrong as to where would be the best place to get off. It’s difficult because the bus will go one way and then turn and go the other way for a while so you kind of have to bet as to whether staying on the bus will eventually get you closer or if you’re better off getting off now and walking the rest of the way. In the end I get off on the right street about thirty blocks away. I was already late and was furiously texting this girl when I realized that we were at the end of the line in Retiro.

I had been to Retiro before and I’m relatively comfortable with the place, during the day. But Retiro is one of the train stations in Buenos Aires, and as we were warned during orientation the train stations can be dangerous at night. It’s odd because it isn’t abandoned or dark and while not full of people there’s always lots of people around, so it’s not really the place you’d expect to get robbed. But you do get the sense that it’s sort of the edge of the city and in Buenos Aires, in contrast to most cities in the U.S. it’s the suburbs that are the most dodgy while the center of town is safest.

All of these things which, of course, I knew, did not occur to me at the time because I was more worried about how I had ended up so far from the train station, and how I was possibly going to get there in time to meet this girl—would the movie start without me, would she wait for me, would this be a deal breaker for future dates with this woman etc. I was standing on a corner looking up at the street signs and staring at my city map when a couple of youths accosted me.

After it happened and I was explaining the bruises on my face to my host family, my host mom’s son told me “listen, you need to just give them what they want and don’t resist. Better that you lose your watch or your phone than your life.” This makes lots of sense in the case of a robbery “alright this is a stickup, give me all the money in your wallet now!” The thing was I just didn’t feel like I was being robbed.

I should explain something before I get any further. There are a lot of people in this city who come up to you and make odd requests. Every street corner is filled with someone handing out slips of paper with information about titty bars, tarot readers or restaurants. I met the above mentioned girl because while we were waiting for the bus and I suggested we walk home because a drunk was rather aggressively hassling me for some change to buy booze. I even had a kid ask me, as I was walking to class sipping on a red bull, if he could take a swig of my drink. Finally there was a kid with a group of his friends at the subway station who was rather aggressively asking for my ipod; I didn’t understand him really well, but he was grabbing at it and he and his friends were laughing when I got defensive about it. Somehow I was made to feel that I was the uptight one in not wanting him to get his hands on my possessions.

So it was into this context that I heard these two youths asking me for my cell phone. I figured that the best response given my past experiences, was to hold onto my possessions lest they inadvertently be grabbed, and pretend like I hadn’t heard them—the way you ignore people offering to sell you things on the subway. This didn’t work very well and they started to get upset with me when I didn’t respond, and started to grab at my pockets. At this point things become a little unclear to me, but what I do remember is that I was very concerned that these boys would make off with my ipod, the way the kid on the subway nearly did and so was attempting to cover that and make it either not visible or difficult to snatch quickly. To my surprise they persisted, wouldn’t let me go and start to fight with me, alternating between demanding my phone, hitting me and grabbing at my pockets where they figured it was.

After a little bit of this I found myself on the ground getting hit or kicked (not sure which) in the face (I suppose it was closer down there) after I’d gotten a few hits at one of their heads as well. It was at about this time that I remember thinking “wow this is really happening, I’m being robbed” much like it felt in the hospital room when Dad died. Believe it or not, this is it. It occurred to me that it wouldn’t matter to them that my dad had died a few months ago, and that I wouldn’t have time to make that ridiculous plea anyway. Suddenly they left me and started to run and for one fraction of a second I made the decision whether to run after them or not. I’m not sure if this happened before or after I checked my belongings to see what was missing, but I decided not to run, reasoning that they had a bit of head start so I wouldn’t catch them anyway.

Afterwards I was able to get home because a pair of onlookers gave me some money to take a taxi home, which is I was very grateful for as I had no money and still didn’t entirely know how to get where I was going (this was after it had become to clear me that I had definitely missed my date). It also reminded me of something about Buenos Aires that I’d known already: that the people here are really quite friendly (most of them).

But it’s the image of those two hooligans running away that keeps me up at night, they running and my decision not to run after them. It keeps me up, much the way you might be kept up with thoughts and images running through your mind about making love to a beautiful woman. Only instead of sex, the daydreams (are they still daydreams if they’re at night?) were about violence, about if I’d run after them and I caught up to the second kid and grabbed him by the leg causing him to trip, the other kid keeps running but turns back twenty feet away or so, in time to see me grab the fallen one and punch him in the head repeatedly, until his face starts to bleed all over the cement, and the people waiting outside the train station start to look concernedly on at the scene. The kid in front runs back to confront me, but he’s alone now as the fallen one is in no place to help him. We stare at each other for a while and as other people start to come closer to see what’s going on he decides it’s best that he leaves and continues to run away while he still has something to show for the evening’s adventure.

It might be interesting to note that nowhere in this fantasy does my wallet get returned to me because that isn’t the point for my animal brain. It’s like Vincent says in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction “What I wouldn’t give to catch the guy who did it [keyed his car]. You know, it would be worth him doing it, just to catch him at it.” Ownership in this case is about more than possession, it’s about pride, and it’s about power, about who’s on the ground and who’s standing.

Women don’t think like this. A female friend of mine was recently robbed violently as well; a woman was waiting for her in the doorway of an apartment building and without warning or saying anything started punching her in the chest, repeatedly, until my friend threw her purse at her yelling to stop. I’m sure she was affected by the event powerfully, but I doubt she has quite these kinds of dreams. In some ways at least women are more rational than men.

I was happy and sort of amused when I stood up, a little bit dizzy and searched through my right pocket to assess the damage to find that my cellphone, my ipod shuffle and my brother’s swiss army knife were all still there. Though my wallet was gone, it gave me satisfaction at least to know that I hadn’t been robbed clean of everything, and that my assailants hadn’t got what they wanted (although they were no doubt quite pleased with the hundred or so pesos that were in my wallet). I also attained great satisfaction from finding a hat discarded on the ground, which had fallen from one of the boys in the fight. I picked this up and kept it, I brought it home as a sort of trophy, as if to say “here is proof that I didn’t go down without a fight”.

It also amused me later, that my first coherent thoughts after the event were “shit, now how am I gonna get to the movie” followed by “this transaction constitutes an economic deadweight loss for society as there are numerous costs borne by me that are not equally compensated by gains for my aggressors, i.e. physical damage, the wallet which will likely be discarded, the debit card which I will cancel and will thus be useless to the thieves. This is a prime example of why crime is costly for society in ways that constitute more than simply transfers between parties”. You know you’re a huge economics dork when…

The question of the movie was resolved by calling the girl, since I fortunately still had my phone. I really wanted to see her, or someone that I knew well, but she didn’t know how to get to where I was so, upon hearing that I’d found a way to get home, she told me we could get together another time. It was only afterwards that I realized the significance of still having my phone. I didn’t have her number written anywhere, or memorized or anything. I had gotten her number from her the night I’d met her at the bus stop and the only place it was stored was in my phone. Had I given the phone away as the thieves had wanted I would never see her again, as I didn’t have an email address, last name (for facebook), or any other way of contacting her. She would have thought I stood her up and never called again, and would probably think I was a jerk for never returning her calls and eventually write me off or wonder what had went wrong that she hadn’t seen coming. And that almost happened, but for my vigilance in holding on to my ipod (which was attached to the same pocket that contained my phone).

Finally, on the way home in the taxi, too late I thought of the cross that I was wearing at the time of the assault, threaded on a thin chain that had broken during the fight and now remained abandoned on that street corner. I had purchased the cross while I was in Santiago, at the shrine to our Lady of the Immaculate Conception. It depicted Jesus on the cross with God behind him with his arms outspread and a dove at his head. I had planned to send it to my brother Marco along with the following message: “A good Catholic when he sees this cross would see the holy trinity. But I’m not a good Catholic—I see an image of a son whose going through a very difficult time in his life, and whether he knows it or not his father is watching over him from heaven. So I want you to have it.” It wasn’t until I realized that Marco will never get the cross and that there’s no way of getting it back (it’s doubtless been picked up by now) that I first started to tear up a little bit in the taxi.