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| Found online, not footage of my incident. |
Day 350
A few years ago, I walked through the parking lot of a train station to find someone had purposely keyed (scraped a key across) my car.
It was no accident, I soon confirmed, once I realized the word FAGGOT had been scraped across the entire passenger side. My car has a rainbow sticker on the back, so the perpetrator knew I was proud to be gay. I never had the slur removed or the car repainted, because it's difficult to see from a distance anyway, but also because I want people to know some of what I've had to put up with.
Someone sold me a timeshare program once that cost me five-to-six hundred dollars. He told me I'd won it, that all I had to do was pay the small fee to get all the great bonus gifts and vacations. I lived, I lost it all, and I learned. On a separate occasion, I learned a life lesson about Time-Life videos too. I ordered one, not realizing I'd keep getting another one each month. Needless to say, I had at least nine months' worth of those things stacked up before I canceled.
And in high school, I was in Manhattan with two close friends one day when someone came up behind me and started trying to steal my coat. It was daytime in a very nice neighborhood on Park Avenue, as memory recalls, and much to my dismay, I soon watched my two friends run away once they saw what was happening.
I was left to fend off the mugger for myself. He was a little younger than I was, shorter, and didn't seem to have any weapon, so when he punched me under the chin and in my side several times, I kept fighting him off. In the end, I ran away--with my coat and all my belongings--and my attacker just cursed me out and went off in the other direction. I was very rattled nonetheless, disappointed in my friends too, but grateful he didn't hurt me more.
