some details about being threatened with a pistol

A few posts in the past I mentioned that we had been threatened, and I described this encounter as having been fun. I'd like to give a few more details now.

Ben and I were in Lafayette for four days and three nights. We didn't stay so long intentionally, but because southwest Louisiana is lousy for hitchhikers. On our third day in town we resigned ourselves to spending the money on bus tickets to Shreveport. After one of several unsuccessful attempts to buy a ticket at the Baton Rouge - Shreveport price instead of the more expensive Lafayette - Shreveport price ($30 more for 75 fewer miles on the same bus!) we wandered outside and to the corner where we griped about Greyhound and how they've not done well for me.

While we spoke a man poked his head between the spaces on the large picket fence surrounding the nearest house. He asked if we were doing alright, and we replied that we were. He then said something else that I didn't understand, but caused Ben to approach the fence. He and Ben quietly mumbled at each other for a few minutes during which I couldn't understand what was being said. Ben then stepped back and had that frustrated, "I've just had a stupid argument" look that became so familiar to those us of that lived or spent much time in the Arkansas House.

I looked from Ben to the other mumbler who then began making faces at me. For about one second each he held different variations on the classic top-lip-puffed-with-air funny face. I was laughing a little, but was confused because Ben's not one to get frustrated by funny faces. "What, you can't hear what I'm asking?" the man asked me. I stammered for a minute and wondered whether there existed some sort of ASL-like face language that had somehow avoided my attention. After another minute of confusion, during which I tried to explain that I didn't know what he was asking and he kept asking whether I understood, the man had had enough.

Once again he pushed his face between two fence posts and made another variation of the same funny face. When he let the air out of his lip he said "you'll probably understand if I ask you with my pistol, right". It wasn't a question. I told him that I didn't understand what he was asking me and that I wanted no trouble. He then stormed into the house, presumably to get his pistol. I don't know whether he returned, or if he even had a pistol to use as an instructional aid, because we left. Ben still wore that familiar, frustrated look.

It was then, as we walked down the block away from the Greyhound terminal and its crazy neighbor, that I understood what he was saying. Through those funny faces he was trying to communicate something like "look, man, I'm f-ing nutty and dangerous and it's in your best interest not to speak loudly around me". If Ben and I had been commiserating about our shared Greyhound frustration in quieter voices we would likely never have had any trouble.

Ben later told me that the man had asked us not to stand on the sidewalk, and that when he approached the fence it was to engage the man in a mumbled dialog about the rights of ordinary citizens to control their own stretches of sidewalk versus the rights of others to use however they liked those same narrow stretches of public property.

We saw the same man later that night when we were buying our Baton Rouge - Shreveport tickets from a more informed Greyhound worker who was more interested in the somewhat outdated business practice of looking out for consumers. This time our face-making antagonist was standing outside the station smoking pot with a nice, younger kid that we had met the night before and who Ben had used his cellular phone to record rapping. We got out of there before he recognized us and stole away to a public park for some urban camping.

That's what it is like to be in Lafayette.