Mugging: $1.00

So last Saturday, after the wedding reception, I head outside and have a cigarette with the photographer's assistant -- nice girl -- and get the valet guys to bring my car around.  I'm trying to meet up with the groom's undergrad friends.  They went back to the hotel to post-party.  The hotel is only a few blocks from the reception and I thought I'd be able to find it easily.  But I quickly get lost in an unfamiliar downtown, and I realize that I'm just not going to find this place.  I pull over in a parking lot. 

Then a good friend calls me -- or possibly I call him -- I can't remember.  He asks how the wedding was.  This being the first moment that I wasn't "on" as a member of the wedding party, my subconscious chooses this moment to have a complete meltdown.  The wedding was a beautiful, wonderful moment where two people I care about joined their lives together in a religious ceremony, and suddenly I find that I am screaming, sobbing into the phone, about exactly how angry I am that these two people believe in something that unites them, but it's all just a great big lie.

I, um, have issues with organized religion.

Also it was an open bar.

A black man walks up to my passenger side door.  He asks if I am all right.  I say yes, I'll be fine.  He asks where I'm headed.  I lie and say that I'm on the phone with my friend who is giving me directions to his place.  He asks if I have any money.  I tell the truth and say that I have no money because I just paid for valet parking at this wedding I was at.

Then he opens the passenger side door, puts his hand on my purse in the passenger seat, and says, "I'm just going to take this now."

I say, indignantly, "No, you're not!"  I actually was indignant.  As though I had any say in the matter.

He takes my wallet out of my purse.  He's having a hard time with the latch on the wallet.  I offer to help him open it, but he doesn't let me.  He gets the wallet open and takes out the cash.  I have all of one dollar.  He says, "Girl, you broke!"

I say, "Yeah, I told you so!"  Then I ask him to leave me my ID cards, at least.  After all, stuff is just stuff.  Replacing a driver's license and green card and social security card -- well, that is a pain in the ass.

It was about this point that a very small part in the back of my head got upset that this entire incident was perpetuating racism.  I wanted to say, "Don't you realize that I'm going to be more frightened of black men now?  Don't you think you have a responsibility to your race, and to our entire American culture?  How dare you perpetuate this stereotype?"

I do not, of course, say any of these thoughts.  My mother and I laugh, later, about how even while being robbed I cannot help but have a running social commentary.

He takes the dollar and says, "Girl, I'll be sweet to you."  He puts the wallet back in the purse and puts the purse back on the seat and closes the door.  Then he says, "Girl, you stop hanging out in parking lots with your doors unlocked, because some nigga's gonna mess you up."  And then he walks away.

My friend has heard all of this through the phone, which has been in my lap.  He, of course, has been freaking out.  As I drive back to where I'm staying, he stays on the phone with me while I have my own freak-out.  When I get there, I call my mother.  She points out that I was mugged by the nicest mugger in Houston.