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Why I chased a man with a whiskey bottle
The front porch is one of the great privately held public goods of city life. It provides the security of what Jane Jacobs calls "eyes on the street," and fosters community. But it can also bring unexpected Philly street life to your doorstep.
Why I chased a man with a whiskey bottle
Follow on Twitter @DanielDenvir
The front porch is one of the great privately-held public goods of city life. It provides the security of what Jane Jacobs calls “eyes on the street,” and fosters community. But the front porch, especially on hot summer nights, can also bring unexpected Philadelphia street life to your doorstep.
Such was the case on a recent evening, one of the last blazing-hot nights of summer. This reporter was enjoying a beverage on a friend’s West Philly porch, when a man appeared, wordlessly, and stood behind a young woman who lived at the house. Everyone in the group at first assumed he must have known someone there. But he just stood there. And his smile got weird. He looked high, or disturbed. Or like he was so far out that he had actually been kicked out of a Phish concert.
Upon being asked to leave, he started to laugh, and said something hard to understand, in an eerie voice. This reporter (in what seemed, at the time, like an appropriate response) grabbed a whiskey bottle ― which, in what turned out to be one friend’s greatest concern, was not yet empty ― and walked toward him. He darted out into the street. I followed, along with a friend and the whiskey bottle, and asked him, again, to leave. He kept hiding behind cars and then sprinting back toward the house.
Suddenly, a police car pulled up at the corner. I raised my hand to hail them and accidentally called out, “five-oh,” momentarily forgetting that this was how you warned people of the police's arrival ― and not how you greeted them.
A female, African-American officer got out of the passenger seat, opened the backseat door and yelled out, in a slow, patient singsong: “Joooshuuaaah.” The man, presumably named Joshua, froze in place. Then, he turned and quietly ran toward to the waiting car, and leaped into the backseat without another word. The door slammed. The car sped off. And the whiskey bottle was returned to the porch, where it was put to its intended purpose.
A shorter version of this story appeared in today's City Paper.
so... um... Where are you going with this?
After reading this "unabridged" version, I'm racking my brain figuring out what point you were trying to make.— dangerclose14
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