I Ended Up in the Middle of a Street Fight Yesterday. Here's What Happened

Have you ever accidentally ended up in the middle of a fight by sheer virtue of your location and inability to remove yourself from said location. Like say you’re stuck on a ferris wheel cart that sits six people and on the way up, three of the people sharing the cart with you end up in a physical altercation while you’re 50 feet off the ground. I’m not saying that’s ever happened to me but I’m also not saying it hasn’t happened to me either. Hypothetically, I’m a magnet for fuckery.

Such brings us to yesterday’s sojourn where I found myself caught smack dab into the middle of some shenanigans. Normally, I wouldn’t care a whole lot. I’d just shrug my shoulders and eat some metaphorical popcorn while a bad black movie plot played out before my eyes. But yesterday, I had my son in the car with me, which changes everything. And also, I almost ended up taking a loss that would have raised my “the pressure.”

I’mma rub your ass in the moonshine, let’s take it back to ’79 (really to another day...like yesterday, actually yesterday). I picked my son up from school and we headed back to the hiznayee on our regular route. I made a right turn off a main thoroughfare up a hill that leads directly into my neighborhood. As I was driving up the hill, I saw what looked like two women laughing, as they ran to and fro in and out of the street. There was a gentleman there as well, doing a sort of smirk that I’m familiar with; it is the smirk of the shenanigans.

Anyway, as I’m inching along up the road, slightly amused at these adults playing in the street reliving their childhood, one of the women—and I have no clue where this shit came from, like, right now I’m still wondering if she’s a magician—pulled a motherfucking Louisville Slugger (an actual one) metal baseball bat and with a form that even Ken Griffey Jr. would appreciate, swung the bat at the other woman. She missed though, so maybe she’s more Bo Jackson because if she connected, it would have been a homerun.

At this point, because of traffic ahead of me that has managed to get past the bullshit, I’m pretty much parallel to the action and because my window was rolled down I could hear everything. The “victim” in this case just kept saying, “fight with my your hands, mo!!! fight me with your hands, mo!” The dude was trying to stay in the middle of them but he wasn’t a fool either and was trying not to get mollywhopped by the mollywhopper with a bat. So at this point, we have three people involved. And I’m moseying along. My urgency meter to get the fuck out of there is heightened because my son is in the car but it seems like I might be out of the woods very shortly, hence my sojourn.

But then the van in front of me comes to a complete stop in the middle of the road, blocking me from going anywhere, and cars on the other side of the road also stopped trying to avoid the fight unfolding in the street. So now I’m stuck, there’s a woman swinging a metal baseball bat at another woman as they run around in the street while a dude “attempts” to break it up while a van carrying one of the participants has stopped and the driver has gotten out of the car and in her worst, “Hey guys, stop the violence” voice attempts to quell the potential bloodshed that’s about to happen if even one of these bat swings connects.

At this point, my car is literally the backdrop for this shit. They can’t get around my car because, well I’m not sure anybody was thinking about that. The baseball bat is still being swung around and the other woman is running. At this point, one of the cars coming from the opposite direction just decided to gun it and risk running over no less than three black people in the middle of the road. In theory it sounds like a terrible plan, but after seeing the skillful execution, I give them a 10 for agility and a 10 for “get the fuck out of here”-ness. I start making a move to get around the bullshit, which brings me closer to the action. You can probably see where this is going.

In attempts to dodge the bat swanger, the other chick ends up jumping up against my car. Like full scale bounce-off-my-shit action. So now I’m involved and start yelling for them “to take that shit to the other side of the road.” They do not heed my sage advice and instead the girl with the bat starts swinging the bat towards my car at the girl who, for some reason, seems to think my car is home base. As she’s running, she ended up hitting my side-view mirror while trying to duck the girl who is swinging the bat, AT THIS POINT, at my car while trying to hit this woman, who really needs to get the fuck up off my car because if she had hit my car, well, we were all going to get shot because I was calling the police.

Again, my son is in the car witnessing all of this, though fortunately, he was on the other side of the car, so I’m not only worried about my car but I’m worried that this bat is going to connect with my car or worse, my window and shattered glass will scratch him up, at which point, somebody was gon’ have to die. I decided at that point that gunning it into the street and risking running over a foot or leg was worth it. I hit the gas and the Red Sea parted and I was able to gun it out of there. In my rear view, I saw a book bag look like it exploded in mid air as papers and clothes flew all over the place. I don’t know what happened. I mentioned to my son that crazy people were out in the street and now he won’t stop talking about the crazy people that almost hit my car.

I try to find life lessons in everything that happens.

Ain’t none here, bih. Get your cousins.