Jenny Matlock

So…this morning I went downtown. To the big city. With the tall buildings. And the one-way streets. And the horrendous traffic. And the light-rail and taxis and all kinds of chaos. I had promised someone I would go to Criminal Court with them to lend some moral support. So I went.

Criminal Court is in one of those great big buildings downtown and surprise, surprise… it is filled with well…lots of criminal types. Sure there are some regular middle-aged-frumpy-not-covered-in-tattoos women like me! But not too darned many.

As usual I set off the metal detector. What is up with that? I swear, it must be my magnetic personality or something but I can rarely go through one of those things without it going crazy.

And I think somehow my magnetic personality must also be responsible for some strange attraction I have to scary criminal types. They just like me. They do. I know this seems odd but whenever I am anyplace where there are …. Ummmm….. unsavory characters they just gravitate to me.

And today was no exception.

There I was sitting on my little hard bench waiting to do my “rah, rah, support” thing and a scary guy came up and sat beside me. Now there were empty benches elsewhere in the room but obviously the seat right next to me was the most desirable.

I had my purse sitting beside me and when this guy went to sit down I moved my purse.

And he glared at me! Yea. He was scary. Short, muscular, heavily tatooed, ummm…. OK.

Then he said “yea, lady, I’m not going to steal your purse.”

And I replied “I was just being polite.” And he squinched his eyes up really tight and glared at me.

It’s not like there was anything to steal in there. It was one of my ZippyRagBags in a cute autumn leaf pattern and contained three pennies, two bags of Halloween fruit bits, some wrinkled up kleenex, a broken crayon and one of those fat pencils that kindergartners use.

He glared some more. I got irritated.

“What is your problem,” I said, “I was just being polite.”

To which he replied “well, you’re bigger then me so you could probably beat me up if I took your purse.”

And I said, “well, obviously you are meaner then me so you would probably try.”

And then he tipped back his head and started laughing.

Hmmm…. I thought briefly of the fat yellow pencil and wondered if he might be able to kill me with it. I decided he probably could. I thought about moving. But I didn’t want to die. After all I hadn’t done my “rah, rah, support” thing yet. And a promise is a promise.

The scary woman he was with told him she was going downstairs and as soon as she was in the elevator he said “Women! there is no living with women! Yea, you look like you’d be hard to live with.”

WHAT???? OK, here is some felon gang-banger guy telling me I look hard to live with. What the heck.

I tell him “no way.” And he says “give me your number and I’ll call your husband and I’m sure he’ll tell me the truth.”

And all of sudden we are just chatting away.

He is telling me about gangs in LA and how he moved to Phoenix to get a new lifestyle and how he has a step-son in the military but he has another kid in jail and it was just old-home week. All we needed was a cup of tea and a crocheted aphgan. The clerical person at the desk called him up and my “rah, rah, support” person said “What are you doing, that guy is scary.”

But he really wasn’t. He was just a regular, old gang guy from LA up on drug possession charges.

Hmmmm…

It was a bit surreal.

He kept calling me “lady” and talking away and I learned about prison and tattoos and actually it was kind of interesting in a strange way. I told him I wondered sometimes if the people with those fancy tattoos actually just drew them on their arms with sharpie markers and did he think that might be true. He told me I was strange and that tattoos were more about who you knew then how much you paid. Good to know. Just in case.

And when they finally called him he waved goodbye to me in a funny way and my “rah, rah, support” person said “He just flashed you a gang symbol”.

I’m tellin’ ya, it’s just some weird magnetic attraction I have to people like this in these situations.

I once passed an hour waiting for another “rah, rah, support” thing by talking to an even scarier guy about how to make bread dough rise.

It’s a gift, I tell ya. Or a curse. Or maybe some combination of the two.

And after I came back home to my lovely suburban house from the big city I told my husband my tale. He didn’t even look surprised.

My husband thinks maybe the scary guy wanted to recruit me to be the gang Grandma.

To be honest I think I’d just be too tired to do the whole initiation thing, you know?

And I guess if I survived the initiation I would have to get a tattoo, right? But I really hate needles.

So I would at the very least have to buy one of those giant packs of cool colored sharpies so I could fit in with my “homies.” And I suspect the whole gang activity thing would interfere with my paper-crafting and blogging so…

I’m just gonna stick with being a middle-aged-frumpy-not-covered-in-tattoos woman and living my boring, old life.

Sigh…